tasty kale

I had my first major kale harvest last week.  As you can see I got a nice big bunch of leaves.  There are still plenty more on the plant but they're smaller.  I quickly realised that even at full length, the younger leaves are very narrow, leaving a lot of stem and not a lot of leaf.  So I left them on the plant for later.

In any case, this was plenty for one go!  I carefully washed them (only a few aphids, no caterpillars) and cut out the stems before chopping them up.  It went into one of my favourite winter soups - minestrone with white beans.  I don't really follow a recipe anymore but here's what I did, more or less.

Chop up an onion, carrot, and clove of garlic.  Cook until carrot starts to soften, then add a can of chopped tomatoes, bay leaf, about 4 cups of water or stock and the rind from a wedge of Parmesan.  That's the single most important ingredient to minestrone - you must have a Parmesan rind.  It adds an amazing depth of flavour.

Bring to a simmer and add a bit of pepper (no salt though, the Parmesan takes care of that).  I add a few handfuls of red lentils, not authentic but it adds a richness to the soup.  Then add the kale (it takes longer to cook than you might think).  After 15 minutes, add the white beans and continue to cook until the kale is tender and beans are heated through.  If you want more vegetables, add them after the kale depending on how long they take to cook.  Serve with more grated Parmesan and crusty bread.  Yum!

i finally decided

I finally decided what to plant in place of the old hebe.  It was quite the odyssey in the end - first digging out the stump, then digging up piles of rubble and a few large stones.  And today I had a disgusting shock.  There were autumn leaves in the hole and when I went to pull them out, thought I saw wet fur.  I tried to dig whatever it was out with a shovel, and what I believe was a dead rat split in half to reveal a bed of maggots.  EW EW EW EW EW EW.  So I dumped some dirt on it and dug some more to one side.  It's well below the ground now, I suppose that even decomposed rats are good for the soil.  EW.

OK now for a nicer image.  I decided to plant a kaffir lime in the spot.  It's a type of lime grown for its leaves and used in Thai dishes.  It makes wrinkled little fruits but they're not really used.  I do occasionally cook with kaffir lime leaves so it'll be useful to me, but because the fruits aren't important I'm not as worried about it being in a spot that's shaded all winter.

It's just a wee little seedling at the moment but it's still big enough for me to pick a few leaves as I need them.  I decided to be clever and put an agricultural pipe in the planting hole, so I can water it down to the roots when I need to.

The striking thing about kaffir limes, if you're not familiar with them, is that they have double-leaves.  Look closely and you can see they're in a sort of figure-8 shape.  Nifty, huh?  I'll have to plan for a few Thai dishes next week.

And whilst I was walking along the path I noticed that my transplanted camellias are starting to bloom.  They've taken their move well; they didn't drop their buds and the first one is now sweetly blooming.  I'll leave you with this lovely picture.

broccoletti harvest and brassica planting

The broccoletti is ready to harvest!  The main head has formed and the buds are swelling.  A few are actually looking whitish which means if I'd left it another day or two it probably would be in bloom.

I wasn't sure what to expect because I knew it wasn't going to be the same as the store-bought broccolini.  Sure enough, rather than a long thin stalk with a hint of a head it's more a fat stalk with a small head and some side-shoots.  I'm leaving the base of the plant in place to see if it puts out any more side shoots over the next few weeks.

Tonight I'll cut it up, including some of the smaller leaves, and try it lightly poached in an Asian-flavoured broth with some store-bought greens.  I hope it's tasty!

The kale is powering along nicely too.  I've had a few leaves so far but haven't yet made a nice big pot of winter minestrone - so yummy!

In the meantime I also pulled out one of the pots of gai lan that had gone to seed, and re-planted some more.  Hopefully this batch will grow more slowly and not go to seed so quickly, oh and not be eaten by caterpillars and drilled by leaf miners too.  I also planted a red arrow broccoli in the pot that the designer twig used to be in, I hope it's not too late in the season!

My snow peas and broad beans are slowly growing away but they're certainly not in a hurry.  I think they'd both like more sunlight than they get in my yard in winter.  The sun's just too low and the buildings around it too high.  Oh well that's what you get from a little urban yard!

sunshine bread

This is a whimsical flatbread with sun-dried tomato, Parmesan and pepper and shaped into a happy sun.  It's missing two rays which were eaten before I remembered to take a photo!

Sunshine, or maybe octopus?

vitex agnus-castus

I've been thinking for a long time about what to put in the former goldfish pond.  I finally settled on vitex agnus-castus, or Texas Lilac.  In the long term I'm hoping it'll be a spreading, umbrella-shape shrub, shading that part of the garden in summer and losing its leaves to let in sunlight over winter.  But as you can see, it'll be a few years before it reaches that height!  You can't even see it from this photo.

Vitex is a popular herbal supplement, but it's not easy to find the actual plant to grow.  The best I could find was a mail order over ebay, and although it was only $4, it's this little teeny baby.  Definitely a long-term investment but I can still imagine how lovely it'll look when it's full sized.

twiggy gets a move

I kept going back and forth about what to do with the designer twig.  I thought I'd move it to where I dug out the hebe stump, but I realised that in the winter it doesn't get any direct sun.  That's not a good thing for citrus, which ripens up their fruit in the winter!  So I finally decided it needed a bigger pot.  Which meant going for the full half wine barrel!

It takes a LOT of potting soil to fill one of these suckers.  I mixed some sand into the soil for the bottom third to make sure it didn't get boggy, then in it went.

It does look a lot happier in its new home.  It wasn't actually very root-bound in the old pot which means it will be years before it fills out this pot.  And the bloody thing is so heavy, it's not going anywhere.  In maybe 3 or 4 years I'll pull it out just to trim the roots and the leaves to keep it to a small size.

I can't wait until it gets its next flush of flowers, this is definitely the year for it to fruit!

autumn, continued

What was that I was just saying about spring appearing before autumn ends?  No picture but the day after making that post I found the first of my snowdrops blooming under the fig tree.  A spring flower coming up before autumn has ended.  Although to be fair, that's a good two weeks later than last year when the first snowdrop appeared May 10th.

In any case, here are another few shots of autumn colour.  This is the oakleaf hydrangea that doesn't turn bright red, it turns this dark burgundy colour but the leaves stay on almost all winter long.

My poor little Japanese maple has more colour on it this year than last, when it was almost dead by autumn, but once again it's lost a fair few leaves and some more of the stems are dead.  I think it got some of the powdery mildew going around this corner but it's obvious that even in a good year it's not happy in this spot.  I think I may move it this winter once it's fully dormant.

But look at that shade of yellow-orange!  I hope I can find it a happy home so those colours can really shine next year.

italian bread

This is my first attempt at a "free-form loaf", recorded for posterity.  It's an Italian bread with olive oil.  The dough was so sticky that I couldn't shape it properly and I don't think it rose as much as it was meant to.  But like the baguettes, it's a learning process!  And it still tasted great.

autumn in melbourne

Autumn in Melbourne confuses me.  I'm used to autumn and winter being distinct seasons.  The leaves are meant to turn around September/October (March/April in this hemisphere) and by December (June here) it's officially winter and then the winter solstice.  But because it's warmer in Melbourne than anywhere else I've lived, everything's just a bit off.  Sure you get some "cold" days in March and April, but it's the end of May and the leaves are only now reaching their peak of colour because we've only just had a few weeks of nights around 8 or 10 degrees.  So to me it only now properly feels like autumn, but it's almost winter.  It won't get much colder than this all winter long, and in a month it'll be the solstice and the days will start to get long again.  And I kid you not, in a month or two we'll get the first spring flowers.  When there are still some autumn leaves.  So in one way proper "winter" feels very short because autumn and spring crowd it out ... but on the other hand it feels very long because the temperatures stay in the range of 8ish to 17ish quite steadily for 4 or 5 months. 

That's enough waxing philosophical.  Now for some autumn colour!  Sadly no grape vine this year, I had to cut back the neighbour's vine because it was making the fence lean.  But the birch trees this year are lovely.  The last few years they were stressed and looked more dead than autumnal, I really thought they were going to die.  This year they just look amazing.

Under the birch trees are quite a few mushrooms.  No idea what kind they are but I thought they looked pretty autumnal.

And though I'd never think of the fig tree as being a very autumnal tree, it does look pretty nice whilst it loses its leaves.  It doesn't really turn and then drop them, it's more like the ones on the inside turn yellow and fall, then the middle ones, before the last outside ones take their turn.

I'll post more pictures as a few more plants in the garden take their turns.  In the meantime, autumn also means changing over the flowers by the front door to my favourite winter flowers: violas!

And autumn also means it's time to tidy up some summer-flowering plants.  I had a go at the front corner bed near the bird bath.  I thought I had a "before" photo of this corner but only now realise my last photo was from back in January! 

So use your imagination.  The African blue basil in front of the bird bath was covered with spent flower spikes and overgrowing the path it was so lush.  The blue saliva on either side of the bath was doing exactly what I'd hoped - it had grown nice and tall (almost twice as tall as it is now) and has been covered in blue flowers the entire summer. But they both needed a good haircut so that they can spring back again in ... well, spring.  Oh and I also got a bit over-zealous and lopped off the top of the magnolia there on the left.  It never got watered before I moved in and was quite leggy and the middle bits didn't have any leaves at all.  So I chopped off the top two branches to encourage it to get more bushy. It just might take a few years to reach that same height again ... ah well, I'm thinking long-term here!

the gall that wasn't

The other day I was having a look at my lemon tree and noticed a citrus gall I had missed.  I got my pruning shears, came back, grabbed the gall and was shocked to find that it wasn't actually attached to the drunk.  Because it wasn't a gall.  It was a chrysalis!  It's the chrysalis of the dingy swallowtail butterfly, the caterpillars of which I've seen on my cumquats but hadn't seen on my lemon tree.  But obviously they're there.  Thankfully I didn't know the chrysalis off, just moved it a bit, so hopefully it will still emerge as a gorgeous butterfly.

It just occurred to me that I never posted a picture of these caterpillars.  Normally caterpillars are a pest that munch away at my veggies and require a dose of dipel.  But these caterpillars only eat citrus leaves and so far only much on my cumquats and lemons so I really don't mind.  And in adult form they're just stunning.  Even as caterpillars they're great fun to look at.  Those orange antennae are a defense they only shoot out if they're disturbed.  They release a smell like rotting oranges to deter predators.  Chemical warfare, amazing mimicry and stunning adulthood - they definitely deserve to live!