This year, the new type I’ve grown, Silvery Fir Tree, has proven to be an early variety. I picked the first one in the final week of last year and they’ve been coming thick and fast since then. I’ve picked 3 kg so far. The taste is not too bad. I’ll definitely be growing these again next year, if not for taste then for their early ripening.

Black Russian have been the next to ripen, but the plants have had a problem with leaves browning and dying. Normally I get a bit of early blight, but this browning off is something I’ve never seen before. The other varieties haven’t been affected as badly. It’s probably a fungal thing.

The cherry tomatoes are starting to ripen, too. This year I grew Black Cherry after a couple of years break and the one I always grow, Red Pear Cherry. All the cherry tomatoes are being dried. I’m really appreciating the Excalibur dryer this year, because although we’ve had a few good sun drying days, I find I’m often having to finish them off in the dryer to avoid them going mouldy.

I’m picking them all slightly under-ripe and letting them ripen inside. I’ve never had any real problems with birds, but you can’t be too careful, not where tomatoes are concerned!

The first Green Zebra. These are nice fried:

Still to come are Burnley, Grosse Lisse, Cherokee Purple and San Marzano.

It’s always sad when tomato season is over for another year, but there will be plenty in the freezer for cooking with over the winter and jars of pasta sauce (Thermomix style now!) in the fridge to keep me going.

It was  the first time I’d heard of the window pane test (think what I’ve been missing all these years!).

I made bread rolls yesterday and can proudly report (for Fiona) that the dough passed the test!

I couldn’t take photos because I had too many things happening at once, had doughy fingers and couldn’t find the camera (it turned out it was in the car).

But I found this site with good photos of the technique.

The dough was so strong, I had to really pull on it to break it into roll-sized pieces. I’m surprised because the recipe calls for only 1 min and 30 sec of kneading. Doesn’t seem like a lot when I think of standing at the bench for 15 min or so, doing it the old way.

It makes me wonder how hand-kneaded and machine-kneaded dough stacks up. One day I might do a loaf by hand again, but wouldn’t ever bother to use a bread machine again.

A real ‘aw…gee’ moment!

And here they are. My best picture of them so far. They love sitting on their pile of logs. Cheeky on the left (small comb & wattles), Lady in the middle (medium comb & wattles), Molly on the right (large comb & wattles):

Cheeky has become the boss chook. She will gently nudge the others away from the food containers with a tap on their head. If I’m working inside the run or doing something to the coop, she’s always right up front checking out what I’m up to. If I’m putting a treat into their food bowl, she’s grabbing at it while I’m still trying to scrape it in.

She turns egg laying into an Academy Award performance. She’ll sit on the nest for an hour, then get up and leave. I’ll go in and…no egg! Ten minutes later, she’ll be back in there. The grunts and groans would shame a female tennis pro. “Push, Cheeky!”, I’ll yell. “Push!”.

Even without the bonus of eggs and fertiliser, chooks are laugh-a-minute.

Okay, some non-chook stuff.

This is amaranth:

It self-seeds everywhere now. It can get to 2 meters tall, with huge, terminal purple flower spikes. There’s a flower spike just forming on the plant at left. I use the tender tip leaves in salads and stir fries and collect the tiny black seeds. I never have enough to grind into flour, but put them into bread as is. I buy amaranth flour to add to my bread. It has a nutty flavour. I use 1 part amaranth flour to 4 parts wheat flour.

This came up where I’d put the compost from the worm farm:

It looked for all the world like a zucchini, but I didn’t see how it could be, as they get picked and eaten well before the seeds are mature. Finally it flowered and down under all the leaves I found this:

It’s a pumpkin! It looks like one I grew a couple of years ago, called Violina (shaped like a violin).

Not only that, but another plant appeared next to it:

Another pumpkin, a different sort. Gardens never cease to surprise!

She’s coming to Australia to give her well-known series of talks on peak oil and the financial crisis, “A Century of Challenges”. I’d love to hear her, although I’ve watched videos and listened to her so many times I just about know it all off by heart.

I’ve copied the following info from the Running on Empty OZ discussion group where it was posted today:

A decades-long credit expansion based on a credit bubble grounded in “Ponzi dynamics,” is ending. As a consequence, we are in the grip of a serious deflationary financial crisis. The challenges of peak oil among other energy shortages occurring at the same time as climate change, population growth, food insecurity and political unrest are forming a “perfect storm” and lead many to think that the world they are familiar with is on the  verge of disappearing, with no proposals that will help to develop strategies to secure their future.

Nicole Foss is a polymath who ties together observations of economics, society and the environment so we can better understand our present financial predicament. She is academically well qualified, with a degree in biology, neuroscience and psychology and a later degree in international law. Nicole is co-editor of The Automatic Earth, writing under the name Stoneleigh.

Nicole’s formidable powers of analysis gives us the background we need to make plans at an individual, business and community level to deal with the period of transition we are now entering, where the old policies being promoted by our leaders are no longer working and we need to re-vision our future.

Nicole is visiting Australia from her home in Canada and is a very clear speaker. You may be interested in checking the following links if you have not come across her:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=FqRGVNUK5x0

about 10 minutes duration, and

http://sheffield.indymedia.org.uk/2010/06/453356.html

a much longer audio talk.

I can’t recommend the second link highly enough. I’ve downloaded it and saved it to my PC. Unfortunately it’s not a video, so you don’t see the slides she’s talking about, but worth a listen all the same.

A layer of sticks for the base:

Over that, a layer of mulched-up green stuff, mainly lemon balm which needed a good cut back:

Then a layer of leaf litter, raked from the walking tracks in the bush:

I’ll keep building it up in this way. If I don’t have green mulched material, I’ll use the grass clippings I get every 2 weeks from a friend’s garden. I’ll water the bed with the liquid from the composting toilet. This will add extra nitrogen to help the breakdown of the woody material.

A view of the wicking box line. Butter beans in the front, followed by beetroot, bread wheat, lettuce and capsicums:

Close-up of the lettuce. This was self-sown. Lettuce seed is so easy to collect and I have lots of it. Bread wheat in the background. I’ve grown ordinary wheat successfully before, so thought I’d try the high-protein wheat I bought for the bread. Every 100 g I can grow means an extra batch of bread. (I still have to buy the bread flour from the supermarket for the other 400 g flour in the batch):

Lemon Verbena is my favourite choice for herb tea in the morning. It has an attractive terminal flower head. I’m drying the leaves for use over winter when the plants have died back:

This is the first time I’ve tried basil in a wicking box. That’s a silver beet in the centre, trying to muscle its way in. It was only a tiny seedling when I planted the basil and wasn’t growing at all. Now it’s taken off. I wonder if it likes the basil as company:

Purple Loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria), a local native plant. It likes water and has established itself around the pool edges. It flowers in summer and the bees love it:

This is the only apple on this particular tree. I’m very excited about it because it’s a seedling from my Red Delicious tree. Apples don’t come true from seed, so I have no idea what it’s going to taste like. I’m hoping it will be good, because the tree itself is huge and will be a bonus for the garden:

Green Zebra tomatoes, close to ripening:

This is ordinary wheat, planted in a wire circle. I last grew it in 2007 and found a jar of it in the cupboard. Now that I have the Thermomix and can grind my own wheat into flour, I thought I’d start growing wheat again. This is probably a low-protein variety so will be good to make wholemeal flour for baking things other than bread:

Butterfly Bush (Buddleia sp.). I was given this plant by the Mornington Community Garden Group after I gave them a talk on permaculture. Very pretty:

These are Silvery Fir Tree tomatoes. There are 8 fruits on this truss and many more trusses on the plant. It’s the first time I’ve grown this variety. Hope they’re tasty:

I offered to sow a pot of coriander seed for a friend. I just pushed the large seeds into the soil and noticed that in every spot two seedlings appeared where one seed had been sown. This is like silver beet where each seed is actually a composite of many seeds and more than one seedling will appear. I checked it out and coriander ‘seed’ is actually a fruit containing two seeds. You learn something new every day!:

Remember those tomato cuttings I took? This is one of them, planted in a pot beside the chook run. It’s almost as tall as the plant the cutting was taken from:

This self-sown pumpkin has appeared in one of the compost bins. It’s probably come from pumpkins my neighbour gave me, in which case it’ll probably take over the garden. Hers was an immense vine and they got about 30 huge pumpkins from it. I’ll let it go and see what happens. It’ll have to be gently trained to go where I want it, so that I can still access the garden!:

I made a half-hearted attempt to make a hugelkultur bed some time ago, using litter (leaves and small sticks), raked from the walking tracks in the bush area. I did it on contour and started to dig a swale beside it. I threw grass clippings, which I get from a friend’s property, on top and actually planted some potatoes and asparagus seedlings.

The potatoes grew well but I didn’t bother harvesting them because I had so many coming from other areas. The rabbits ate the asparagus down. I expect they’ll re-appear eventually (the asparagus, not the rabbits). The potatoes will re-shoot, too.

The problem was, the bed was right down at the rear of the property, in a spot where I don’t go much. I was just interested to see what I could grow there on natural rainfall, because there’s no way I was going to connect up a dozen hoses to get water there.

I won’t abandon this first attempt, but after reading this latest article, I want to have another go, this time in an area closer to the house and the food forest and intensive vegetable gardens. In permaculture terms, it would probably be Zone 2.

I’ve chosen an area alongside the main pathway that goes from the house down to the food forest and the rear of the property. I track up and down this path several times a day, so I’d be able to check on plant growth regularly. The hose from the water tank to the original vegetable growing area, located within the food forest, runs right beside the path, so I’d be able to water if necessary. I want a permanent mound garden to grow pumpkin, zucchini and cucumber and this would be an ideal spot. There’s dappled shade from the eucalypts above. What’s growing there now is just some native grasses and mat-rushes and there are so many of them in other parts of the property that they won’t be missed.

Firewood is valuable here (the only form of heating), so I won’t be using big logs, but I have a mountain of small sticks and kindling wood and plenty of twigs, leaves and dead bracken (the green bracken gets chipped for mulch). The small stuff will break down more quickly, too.

So…a new project…a proper hugelkultur bed. I like new projects!

The location…on the left of the path

The idea was to rotate pots of greenery in their run, to save me picking greens for them every day. I figured a pot would last several days, at least.

Wrong! Never underestimate the power of chook!

I put the first pot in there this morning. It took them less than half an hour to completely demolish it. The pot on the left, outside the run, is what it looked like. The one on the right, inside the run is…well… :

At this rate I’m going to need 365 pots in rotation.

No waaay!

I’ve been feeding the wild ducks ever since we moved here, with rolled oats in a dish of water (they gobble it down, the oats get filtered out and down and the excess water gets siphoned out the sides of the beak—effective, but messy). They make the trek from the pool at the front of the property opposite to the pools at the rear of our property, checking out the feed dish on the way.

Mother D came this morning, I fed her and all of them went down to the pools. Later I came back to the house and they’d returned. She had her head stuck through the wire of the Girl’s playground snaffling up some seeds. The little duckles milled around her feet.

The chooks were fascinated by these tiny, furry, peeping balls. I wish I could have managed a photo to show the expressions on their faces, but there was no time to get the camera. As soon as Mother D saw me she rushed over to beg for more oats. I put them in the dish and bolted indoors for the camera:

I wonder if the sight of the ducklings stirred some deep-hidden motherly feelings in the Girl’s genes. I’d love to have enough room to build a huge chook run (well away from gum trees that fall over and drop branches), and get a rooster for the Girls. I’d like to see them with their own flock of fluffy chickles to fuss over.

******************

I really like the way the Thermomix handles bread baking.

I’ve made my own bread for many years now, briefly tried a bread machine and then, preferring the flavour of my own bread, went back to hand kneading.

The major benefit of the Thermomix is that it will grind grain, so the flour is as fresh as it can be. It takes longer to get the ingredients together than it does to get to a lump of finished dough.

1 minute to grind the grain
5 seconds to mix the ingredients
1 minute 30 seconds to knead the dough

The dough is tight and elastic, just the way it would be after hand kneading for 15 minutes or more, and not sticky. I roll it into a thick sausage and put it in a tin, or free-form it (or divide it into rolls), then let it double in size.

And here’s the good bit. It goes into a cold oven. Saving power. As the oven heats, the dough rises just that little bit more, then the increasing heat kills the yeast and rising stops:

There have been 21 eggs so far; I’ve eaten 1, given 6 away and have 10 in the fridge.

There were 4 ‘bummers’. One was laid out in the open and had a small peck hole in it (nobody owned up, but Cheeky was the closest and clucking and looking guilty).

Two had no shell and the remaining one I found early one morning, broken, under the night roost. It must have dropped out of someone’s rear end during the night. I figured whoever it was wouldn’t lay that day, but they all did, so someone actually managed 2 in 24 hours.

The largest was 48 g and the average is around 42 g. I assume their egg production systems are still getting into gear and will eventually settle down.

They’ve refused to go into the nests built into the side of the coop (looks like I wasted my money on a pre-made coop) and seem to like digging a hole in the sand on the floor of the coop and arranging the shredded paper around the hole.

So that I don’t have to scrabble on hands and knees, I bought a dog pooper-scooper with a long handle which makes collecting the eggs easy.

I finally finished the last of the bought eggs, so from now on it’s all my own produce.  A really good feeling, to provide yet another food item for myself.