Great excitement here!

Next week I’m having a 4 kW PV solar system installed!

Weather permitting, of course. Twenty PV panels will just about cover my small roof. For those of you who know your solar, I haven’t got that wrong. These are new, 195 watt panels instead of the usual 250 watt panels. So, 20 x 195 = 3.9 kW. Not quite 4 kW but enough to brag about! As I said, weather permitting. The forecast is for rain. Fingers and toes are crossed.

I’ll be blogging more about it after the installation, but in the meantime, here’s a tour of the garden.

It’s a beautiful day today. Sunny. No wind. These tomato seedlings are having a day in the open to start the hardening off process:

These ones are slightly larger and have been out permanently for a few days. The big boys get to stay out overnight! :

A really nice-looking wicking box, with oak-leaf lettuce, red russian kale, and mizuna:

There are dozens of oak-leaf lettuces coming up in the food forest. The rabbits aren’t touching them, but to be on the safe side, I’m potting them up for planting into wicking boxes. Rabbits are perverse creatures; they will leave a plant alone for ages and just when you think they maybe don’t like it, they will totally destroy it:

These are red-veined sorrel seedlings.  I’ve never grown this variety before. They’re very attractive. I wonder how it would go as an indoor plant:

I suddenly realised this quince was in flower. And how. It has never had so many flowers before. In past years it’s only set a few fruits which dropped off before they reached any size. Last year one fruit got to be a mature size and then disappeared. It was hanging low to the ground, but I didn’t bother protecting it. Rabbits? Possums? Who’d want to eat something so hard and sour? :

Lovely display of quince flowers:

Tonight’s dinner. They grow so quickly. They can be a few inches tall one day and 2 feet the next. I’m checking the patch twice a day now:

And finally, because no post would be complete without the star attractions:

They’re right back into full laying now and suddenly there’s a dozen eggs in the fridge. And the friend who usually gets half a dozen a week is swanning around somewhere in Central Australia at the moment. So it looks like the solar panel installers (who are really nice blokes—I’ve already met them) might be taking home half a dozen each.

Wild edibles

I make a point of always reading blogs and blogposts about edible wild plants (what most Aussie gardeners would call ‘weeds’), because even though the blogs might emanate from the northern hemisphere, that’s where most of our garden weeds come from, too.

Here’s a recent post that gives a recipe for dock curry. If I can find any dock plants growing down the back, I’ll give it a go, if not I might try nettles, of which I have a huge patch, or maybe a combination of nettles and sorrel which also has a lemony flavour.

This would be an ideal recipe to do in the Thermomix.

I really must try to develop a patch of edible wild ‘weeds’ somewhere down the back of the property in amongst the native grasses. I’m already growing sorrel, nettles, chickweed and dandelions, but the real problem is the rabbits. They seem to love all these (well, maybe not the nettles), and every plant I grow has to be protected with wire. I think I’ll have to encircle a large area with wire (several square metres), so that I can leave the ‘weeds’ to self-seed and multiply.

Two good buys

I scored two good buys at my local Sunday market today:

The pot contains French Sorrel (Rumex scutatus). I was introduced to sorrel when I did my permaculture design course and it was growing in the garden where I did the course.  I sent away for seed and what came back (as it appeared later) was ordinary Garden Sorrel (Rumex acetosa). I didn’t know at the time that there are two species, French and Garden, and that French is considered the best for flavour.

Most of the seed suppliers I looked at just call it Sorrel and give the botanical name as R. acetosa. I’ve been on the lookout for R. scutatus for a while so was pleased to see the herb lady at the market had the real thing. I know it’s the real thing because the specific name ‘scutatus’ means ‘shield-shaped’ and you can see that the little leaves are indeed that. It’s also smaller in habit than Garden Sorrel.

Here’s my plant of Garden Sorrel. The clump is 30 cm high, 50 cm wide and still spreading:

On to the second purchase. The three fruits are tamarillos—the yellow form. I’ve never seen this form for sale anywhere. I’ll eat one, to see if it’s different in flavour to the red form and I’ll keep the other two for seed. It’ll be nice to have the two colour forms growing side by side. I wonder if they’ll cross-pollinate and produce hybrids, or remain true to form? Better do some Googling.