Author: Lisa

A happy traveller through life! Right now living in NW Tasmania with a gorgeous Nurse-Husband, a fool of a Siamese Cat and several chickens. We love our fairly simple lifestyle of growing a lot of what we eat and enjoying the stunning surrounds of our little patch.

Fresh on the plate

The best time of the year is when you rarely need to stock up from the supermarket and instead just step out into the backyard and pick or dig what goes on your plate. Its not too hard to build up a basic garden for summer salads, even if you don’t want to go all out with a massive enterprise! It really lightens the load on the budget

Tonight was one of our scrappy dinners, as is usual when the hard working husband comes off a night shift. I just grabbed some fresh salad items – lettuce, tomato, cucumber, heirloom capsicum with a bit of basil to make it more exciting…

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Most of this was growing 10 minutes ago! (er – not the cheese)

We had a good corn harvest from the garden this year. We have been scoffing down corn like it was going out of fashion! Nothing better than biting into a fresh juicy cob of corn!!

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Corn stalks
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Freshly picked

I have frozen several cobs and also cut the kernels off the not so perfect cobs to save space in the already bulging freezers!

This made it easy to add a chicken sweet corn soup to the dinner menu, toast up a bit of home made bread and we’re done.

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Parsley garnish sinking slowly

Drowning in Food

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February is a month of plenty!

 

When it comes to this time of the year I think I start going just a little bit doo-lally! Just when you get several kilo’s of tomatoes made into sauce, relish or dinner, followed by several more kilo’s chopped and frozen – its time to put more apples into the dehydrator, pick more tomatoes, hunt for runaway zucchini’s and figure out what you want to do with the next armful of cucumbers!

Its kind of a race to try to waste as little as possible as you are wondering if you really did need 25 tomato plants this season (of COURSE you did!!) What doesn’t get eaten, cooked or frozen, often gets sold or given away. When things really get out of control there is a bunch of greedy chickens to peck up the rest.

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Seems like there is always relish bubbling away
Russian Black
Black Russian

This season I only bought three tomato plants – the rest were self seeded or grown from the laterals of the more advanced plants.  I have enjoyed trying the heirloom variety “Black Russian” – Such a gorgeous huge tasty tomato!

I also tried one called “Tigerella” simply because the name took my fancy! Its a bit bigger than the usual cherry tomato, lovely tiger stripes and a great taste, although the skin is a little thicker than I expected for the size.

 

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Tigerella – various stages of ripeness!

One year I am going to manage my tomato plants properly. I tell myself I am going to snip back laterals and keep them tidily tied up etc etc. It would take a bit of the fun out of finding all the hiding ripe ones and the self imposed game of twister I have to play to reach out, down, around and through to get to all the fruit!! To be honest I do like my semi-jungle approach.

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raised garden bed of tomatoes before they went mad
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Mid season in the hothouse

After a very dry season we are now getting gloom and rain. Hopefully the sun will be back tomorrow so I can happily fill up a few more baskets and boxes with tomatoes.

Lap up all you can from your gardens in autumn!

Cheers, Lisa.