AN ABUNDANCE OF PERSIMMONS

This photo of persimmons hanging ripe on our tree at Das Helwig Haus B&B was taken in the autumn of 2006 when Maude, a French girl, was here for six weeks as a Wwoofer. She is shown cuddling Patches, the black and white feral female cat who arrived at our home in 2005 and adopted us.

Maude, Patches and persimmons

Since then Patches has featured in many of my photographs. Since then the tree has grown and the Satin Bower Birds have multiplied, so that it is no longer possible to allow the persimmons to remain hanging on the tree until the end of May. Read the rest of this entry »

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AN ABUNDANCE OF TOMATOES 2

I wrote an earlier post about what I did with an abundance of red tomatoes, one of the summer crops grown by the farmers of the Granite Belt, who generously give me boxes of ripe fruit. I also commented that I usually only grow cherry tomatoes in my organic garden. About fifteen years ago I purchased a packet of golden ripple cherry tomato seed from the Diggers Seed Club and since then I’ve never needed to purchase more seed, nor do I save the seed. Every autumn at Das Helwig Haus B&B, about a month before the frosts arrive, a flock of Satin Bower birds return from the rain forests to overwinter in our garden. They are a fruit eating bird and quickly turn their attention to the fruits of my garden, clearing any remaining figs, picking at the half ripe persimmons and enjoying the cherry tomatoes. The fertile seed of the tomatoes pass through the bird and is deposited throughout the garden. Thus it is that these tomatoes have now become one of my most prevalent weeds. They are easily recognized and transplanted or pulled if found in inappropriate positions. This particular tomato has a tendency to climb or ramble, and would be useful grown in hanging baskets on patios. The photo below shows how one tomato bush has rambled over the tops of roses and up the trellis of the gazebo railing.

Cherry tomato bush in the rose garden.

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AN ABUNDANCE OF ZUCCHINIS 2

I promised one of my readers a recipe for Zucchini Pickles. As I wrote in An Abundance of Zucchinis 1, zucchinis didn’t feature highly in the diet of Australians until after the migration of many Mediterranean people to Australia in the past fifty years. I planted my first packet of zucchini seed in the 1980’s and was amazed at the abundance of zucchinis this packet produced. A friend, Margaret Arnott from Canada, sent me her recipe for Pickled Zucchinis.

When we moved to live on the Granite Belt of southern Queensland to establish Das Helwig Haus B&B we found ourselves blessed with Italian born neighbours who grew fields of Mediterranean vegetables every year. On her welcoming visit to our home, Nerrina brought us a box of zucchinis. She said, “Just climb through the fence and help yourself any time you want more.” Thus, I have not bothered to grow zucchinis in recent years.

Basket of freshly picked zucchini

Every year I make up jars of Margaret’s zucchini pickle recipe, often serving it like a bread & butter cucumber pickle. Read the rest of this entry »

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AN ABUNDANCE OF FIGS

Two years ago when Barbara Buchannan offered to become my companion for five months and assist me like a member of the WWOOF organization, it was her tales of sun-ripened figs that made her European friends envious. She told them of her pleasure in standing under the tree shown below, choosing sun warmed fruit that almost melted in her mouth.

Sun ripened figs

When I established our garden at Das Helwig Haus B&B I planted four fig trees of different varieties. Ian Robertson, CEO of the Australian Open Garden Scheme, congratulated me in 1997 for choosing to use a fig tree as a specimen tree to add texture and color within our floral garden. During our cold winter months on the Granite Belt the bare branches give a surrealistic view on a foggy morning and emphasis the Japanese influence in the design of this portion of my garden.

Fig tree amongst flowers

Every year this particular tree yields buckets of small, dark skinned, red fleshed, sweet figs. Every year we eat fresh figs, I make fig jam, I dry figs and I preserve figs in syrup as a dessert. This small fig variety is not readily available from plant nurseries. I was given a sucker to grow by one of the Italian born farmers on the Granite Belt. The sucker flourished and grew into a decorative and productive tree. Read the rest of this entry »

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AN ABUNDANCE OF TOMATOES

Although I grow organic tomatoes in my garden they are mostly for salad use. I find that the cherry tomatoes have less insect problems than the commercial varieties. My garden at Das Helwig Haus B&B on the Granite Belt of southern Queensland is surrounded by commercial fruit orchards and vegetable farms. The down side of this is that all the insect pests manage to find breeding spots every year, hence the need for farmers to use insecticides and those pests are happy to move on to my unprotected crops. The plus side is that the farmers will kindly give me their excess produce.

Cherry tomatoes and hot red chilies.

Last year I was allowed to pick tomatoes from fields that had been abandoned. It is commercial practice to only pick tomatoes while they are green. When the price drops, or the farmer thinks the plants are past their prime, the crop will be abandoned as uneconomical. When time permits the farmer will clear his land for a different crop in his rotation plan. Thus, each year I witness the waste of many vegetables as they rot in the field.

Sun ripened Roma tomatoes

The good thing is that as the crop was still green when the farmer abandoned it, these tomatoes had several weeks to ripen naturally in the sun, free of insecticides. . Read the rest of this entry »

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AN ABUNDANCE OF POTATOES.

With a bit of luck I can manage to grow several crops of potatoes each year, planting the first seed potatoes in  October with a further planting after Christmas. Potatoes will handle quite rough soil so are a good crop to put into new ground. They are not a deep rooted plant like carrots, which will push down into the soil. Instead, the tubers grow out from the original seed potato. It is necessary to hill them as the plants grow to cover the young tubers. If you keep building up the soil around the stem of the plant they will continue to make fresh tubers in ever increasing layers. This may also be done by creating a support for the soil with rubber tires mounted on rubber tires.  This is a great way of cropping for people with limited gardening space. Using this method it is also possible to grow potatoes in the milder winter climates, providing the tops are covered each night against frost.

Potatoes are well suited to growing in furrows which can be flooded with a garden hose and is the way I prefer to grow mine. To get an early start this year I planted two rows of seed potatoes in October amongst the red Flanders poppies in my Remembrance Field at Das Helwig Haus B&B at Glen Aplin on the Granite Belt of southern Queensland.

Potato rows

Three young Koreans came in November to work for me as WWOOFers – Willing Workers on Organic Farms and as the poppies finished flowering they removed them and hilled the potatoes. Read the rest of this entry »

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AN ABUNDANCE OF BEETROOT

I only grow one crop of beetroot each year in my garden at Das Helwig Haus B&B and usually one packet of seeds will germinate enough seedlings to meet my requirements. Some seed suppliers now provide seed on tape, perfectly spaced for planting and all that is required is that you lay out the tape in rows, cover with soil, press down and keep moist until the seedlings appear. As beetroot have rather a large, rough seed I don’t have any difficulty spacing mine in a shallow furrow. Australians enjoy eating beetroot as a pickled salad vegetable and it is said that Australia is the only country where McDonalds have been obliged to add a slice of pickled beetroot to their hamburgers.

Every spring I plant a crop in my garden at Glen Aplin, harvest that crop in the summer and then spend a couple of days preserving the crop as pickled beetroot.

Boiled Beetroot

The tops are removed from the beetroot, they are placed in a large pot, covered in water and boiled until tender. The time will depend on the size of the beetroot. My crop will provide beetroot of different sizes, so I grade them prior to boiling. When a skewer easily penetrates the beet, it is cooked. Drain and cool. Read the rest of this entry »

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AN ABUNDANCE OF SWEET CORN

As a child the only corn I knew was maize. My father always planted a plot of this corn, much of which was fed to the pigs. If it was picked young while the kernels were still milky with juice it could be boiled and served for a dinner vegetable, but my favorite treat was to roll the young cobs across the hot metal top of our wood burning stove until some of the kernels blackened. Then I would sprinkle the cob with salt, slather it with butter and go outside to chew every last kernel off the cob while butter ran down my chin.

Back about 1983 I spent a week holidaying in Fiji at one of the expensive beach side resorts. I had slept  too late to take any of the Saturday morning excursions organized for tourists, but found the Fijian entertainment manager in the lobby trying to put together a trip for his own amusement. With nothing else to do I accepted his invitation to join him and a few other stragglers, to attend a football match in Sigatoka. We all piled into a little bus, then made a side trip to collect the children of his family, before taking the road through sugar plantations over the hills to Sigatoka. The football field was a bare area of grass surrounded by a high ring of corrugated iron sheeting. Young lads perched, seated on their rubber flip-flop sandals on this sharp edge. Men had climbed trees and were sitting on all roofs  that offered a view. We were led by our guide through a muddy area where forty-four gallon former fuel drums, set over fires, were boiling water with corn cobs still in their husks. The Fijian locals were buying this corn on the cob, pulling off the husks, dropping these on the ground, munching off the corn kernels and then dropping the chewed cob to join the other refuse under foot. I reminded me of my father’s muddy pig pens.

By the time I had my own garden at Das Helwig Haus B&B and began growing vegetables the seed of sweet corn was readily available. Now there are many seed varieties from which you can choose.  While seed packets give instructions about the distance apart and the depth to plant seed it is important to note that corn is wind pollinated and should be planted in squares, not long lines.

Sweet Corn growing at Das Helwig Haus B&B

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AN ABUNDANCE OF ZUCCHINIS 1

Every year when I was a child my father cleared a piece of scrub land on our farm at the foot of the Bunya Mountains and burnt off the felled scrub, before planting pumpkins, watermelons and other vegetables in the ashes. Years later he asked me if I knew why these crops flourished? By then I had become the gardening guru in the family. Dad said, that if he merely added ash to a vegetable garden he couldn’t get the same healthy result. I explained that not only was he using fertile soil for the first time, but the heat of the fire had killed all the nasty pathogens in the soil which might have inhibited the growth of his vegetables. This is a method of growing vegetable gardens in tropical countries like Papua New Guinea.

When I was a child we never ate baby vegetables like button squash and zucchini. The Acorn Squash and Marrow, as we called zucchini, were rather despised and tasteless vegetables, best hollowed out and stuffed with a savoury meat mixture. It was only after Eberhard and I moved to live on the Granite Belt of southern Queensland in 1992 that I came to have an appreciation of Mediterranean vegetables like zucchini, eggplant and capsicums. The Granite Belt has a cool mountain climate and many of the farmers here are descendants of earlier Italian immigrants. Each year this district supplies a huge volume of vegetables and fruit to the Brisbane and Sydney markets.

Disaster struck the Granite Belt community on Christmas Day with a huge hail storm that destroyed or damaged many of the vegetable crops as the farmers were about to commence the seasonal picking.

Hail storm over the Granite Belt on Christmas Day 2008

The farmers had two choices. They could slash their damaged plants to the ground, plough the soil and replant, or they could pay workers to strip from the plants and throw away all the damaged vegetables, in the expectation that the bushes and vines would recover and begin bearing produce again. Read the rest of this entry »

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