Picking and preserving organic cherries

There is an organic cherry orchard just down the road. The season started late due to the cold and rainy spring/start to summer. So there are still cherries to be picked for the next 2 weeks. The place is on the Cherry Trail and called Old Coralinga. Do give them a go, they are organic and it's great fun to pick your own.

We love preserved cherries in winter. So this was a great opportunity to get some preserving done.

Wash cherries.
Wash preserving jars, lids, rings.Pip cherries. You can preserve them unpipped, of course. Put cherries in jars, top up with water, add sugar. (1 tbsp for No. 20 jars, or 1/2 tbsp of honey.) Or you can add sugar syrup.
Put in preserver, process according to your preserver's instructions.

Gloat.I've got 22 jars lined up in the pantry. Feels good. :)

Red currant jelly

This must be one of the easiest things to make!

The basic recipe from Stephanie Alexander:

500g red currants
2 1/4 cups sugar (I used 1 3/4 cups and will reduce it even further next time)

Bung washed red currants (stalks and all) and sugar into a pot. Bring to a hard boil. Then boil for 8 minutes. Strain through sieve. Pour into clean, sterilised jars.

It is as easy as that. Mind you, my first batch didn't set and I have no idea what went wrong. Made another batch and it set beautifully.

Anyway, here is my batch. I added dried orange peel, black pepper corns, dried chilli and cinnamon sticks to the berries and sugar.
Bring to a boil, then boil for 8 minutes.
Strain through sieve.Pour into clean, sterilised jars. There was a smidgen left and that ended up in a cup.
Set beautifully, as you can see.I am already looking forward to pork spareribs, etc. as this is great for marinating anything porky.

Elephant garlic?

I harvested some 'fat garlic' last year. They were single fat bulbs. I suspected they were the result of some elephant garlic that I had planted the previous year. (I always have labels in my veggie beds, but birds sometimes pull them up and they get lost. Hence this query.)

Last autumn I planted these 'fat garlic' bulbs and look what the result is.
Good sized bulbs, with several fat cloves. Plus bulbils surrounding the bulb. I read up on elephant garlic, and this fits the bill. In autumn I shall plant those little bulbs, and probably some of the fat cloves, too.

But if anyone could confirm that this really is elephant garlic, I'd be very thankful. :)

Edited on 4 January: confirmation has come in - it is indeed elephant garlic. Thank you!

Harvesting potatoes

We plant and harvest potatoes all year round. There are always some potatoes chitting somewhere, to be planted next. Or the next lot is ready for harvesting. This ensures a good supply of fresh, very tasty, organically grown potatoes.

Berry Gnome does not only enjoy growing berries, but also a variety of potatoes. Here is the 'miscellaneous' bed. Mainly Kennebec and some Pontiac.The chooks are eagerly watching - there might be a tasty treat for them somewhere.
The containers are overflowing with big potatoes.
A very happy Berry Gnome bandicooting underneath a potato plant that is still producing heavily.That should keep us going for a while. :)

Red currants

They are late this year (as is nearly everything in the garden and orchard).
But we've already picked a heap of red currants and made 3 jars of jelly (with chilli and cinnamon). I might make another batch, then we should be right for the next year or three.

Berry season!

The strawberries, raspberries, silvanberries and tayberries are starting to ripen up. We are now getting quite a haul every day.
Any berry that does not make it into our breakfast bowl or is otherwise eaten during the day, goes straight into the freezer.
We put one layer of berries on a tray, freeze them, then store them in containers. This way they don't clump together and it is easy to take out the required amount of berries in winter.

Home-made ice-cream ...

...with rapadura sugar. The rapadura gives a lovely caramel flavour.

The best thing about home-made ice-cream - it is super delicious, very easy to make and you determine which ingredients go into the mixture.
So, freshly laid eggs from our free-ranging chooks. Raw cream from a place just around the corner. Plus the not so local, but organic rapadura sugar.

No need for anything else, really.

3 whole eggs
2 egg yolks (next time I will use 4 whole eggs and no extra yolks)
3/4 cup rapadura sugar (or 1 cup, if you like it sweeter)
420 ml cream

Put eggs and sugar into a heatproof bowl and place over a saucepan with simmering water.
Whisk eggs until the mixture is heated through.
Take off the saucepan, then whisk until the mixture is very frothy and thick-ish.

Whip cream until soft peaks form.
Fold the egg/sugar mixture gently into cream.
Pour into a container of your choice. Lick spoon. Lick bowl.
Cover container. Freeze. Eat.

Kiwi flowers

This is the first year that my female kiwi plant is flowering. They are absolutely gorgeous flowers!
The flower buds are rather intriguing, too.Unfortunately, the male kiwi plant is not flowering. It is still rather small and not doing much. So, unless kiwis can experience an immaculate conception, we won't get any kiwi fruit.

I shall go out and have a word with the male kiwi plant. Maybe next year?

Harvesting garlic...

... must be one of the most satisfying jobs this time of the year.

The weeding, sowing, planting, pruning, shredding and mulching seems to be never-ending. There is still so much more to do. Luckily, there is the garlic we planted in March, and the foliage is finally starting to dry up a bit.

Ahhh... not even half-way through the first garlic bed and it is looking very good.
Lovely! Let's dry them a little bit - while you have a cup of tea, or so.

All bundled up and drying on a rack.

There are some real rippers in the bunches!

These will be stored in a safe spot, to be planted next season. It does seem a shame to plant out the biggest heads (and not eat them!), but you will be rewarded with tons of big cloves.
There are a few small heads of garlic (Not taking a picture of them!), as I planted them a bit close together at one end of the bed. Lesson learned! Space them apart, so that all of them can grow big and fat.

The secret to a bumper crop? Good soil (I usually plant into a garden bed where we had potatoes the previous season), plant the fattest cloves of garlic you can find, space them well apart, water them well the first few weeks after planting. Then sit back and relax. :)

Long lingering local lamb lunch...

...in Lenswood.

Take a bunch of lovely gardeners and sit them down at a table for a long lingering local lunch. What do you get? Not a lot of pictures!
But lots of laughter, good conversation, good food, good cheer.

The theme was local. Preferably from the garden or just around the corner.

The leg of lamb came from a friend's place (just around the corner), so did the shiraz (same place). Herbs, garlic, potatoes, berries from our garden.

For starters we had a selection of savoury bits & pieces - home-made, local, etc.
This is the last picture of the whole lingering lunch. After that we were too busy eating, chatting, laughing, drinking, eating...

I won't torture you by mentioning the rest of the menu. Everything was a hit! :)

Everyone contributed to the lunch by bringing something from the garden, local, home-made....

Thanks, folks! We had a wonderful time. Thank you for your company and your contribution to the lunch. :)

Elderflower wine

Last year's elder flower wine. Hard to describe. Dry, but fruity, fragrant, delicious. Very drinkable. Goes very well with Asian food. Or just by itself. :)

Elderflowers

This is one of my favourite trees. Our variegated elder tree.
One of our sheep seems to like it, too.The flowers are beautiful, abundant and very fragrant. We made elderflower wine last year for the first time and it was an absolute hit.
We have already started a new batch, but will probably do several. I will also dry some flowers for teas - as it is supposed to be very good for when you have a cold or flu. Also good to fight hay fever.

Maybe after all that wine making and drying for teas, we still have some flowers left on the tree and they can mature to berries? I have never tasted anything made from elderberries, so would be keen to experiment. Jam? Wine? Drying for medicinal purposes?

Poppy!

This one popped up unexpectedly in an empty pot. Not really sure how the seed got into it. A very enjoyable surprise!

Jersey milk rocks!

I have made another cheese with milk from our favourite jersey cow, Chocolate. This time a Caerphilly. Instead of the 'miserable' 500g - 600g of resulting cheese, the jersey milk yielded a cheese of a whopping 1.3kg!

Here it is. Air drying a few days, before it goes into the cheese fridge for at least 3 weeks.

New potato bed

Growing potatoes is very rewarding. Apart from the fact that home-grown potatoes are very tasty and totally organic - it is also a great way of starting a new bed, as you have to pile up the soil to hill the potatoes. Once Berry Gnome has harvested the taties, I take over and plant garlic or onions.
Here we have a new bed. It has to be netted as the chooks constantly break into our backyard (3 acres of land is apparently not enough for them!). This netting is also fantastic for a brassica bed (cabbages, caulies, broccoli, etc.). The white caterpillars (actually they are moths, but who wants to be picky?) cannot get through the netting, hence no annoying caterpillars on the plants later on.