CHRISTMAS DAY 2009

Here on Christmas morning at Das Helwig Haus B&B we have the Christmas decorations in place and the aroma of fresh pine needles and a baking ham pervades the house. The Christmas cake, cookies and things to nibble wait beside fresh bowls of peaches, apricots, plums and cherries – the summer harvest fruits of this cool mountain climate, the Granite Belt of southern Queensland. I picked our fresh fruit from the trees of our garden

December cherries

It is a pleasantly cool day with an overcast sky and there is a weather front coming through which should bring soaking rain to the drought stricken western regions of New South Wales and Queensland. This would be a remarkable Christmas present. Read the rest of this entry »

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TEA FOR TWO, OR MORE

As a child I was only allowed to drink milk or water until the age of twelve, with a soft drink as a special treat during an occasional visit to town. My parents drank Bushell’s tea with their meals.

Nowadays there are multiple drink choices available for adults and children alike. One has only to walk into a supermarket to see rows of bottles and cans stacked high containing cordials, fruit juices and carbonated drinks. At the dairy counter there will be different sized containers of milk, in plastic or cardboard, offering a variety of flavours.

Move to the racks of tea and coffee and you will have a choice of roast coffee beans from all over the world. You can buy beans or ground coffee, some of it decaf. Usually in the same aisle it is possible to select dried teas in surgical dressings, as one of my friends once described the sachets commonly called tea bags. You will be confronted with brands and varieties from many countries.

It was on a trip to the USA in 1981 that I first encountered the powdered concoctions mixed with water which the local people called iced tea. Later, when I visited my German in-laws in 1990 I was offered a choice of herbal teas with the evening meal. These were always served as a hot tea.

In 1992 we moved to the Granite Belt to establish Das Helwig Haus B&B. Amongst our first visitors were Meg and Peter Stevenson with their children Darren and Belinda. During an excursion they discovered a herb farm and returned with several pots for my garden. One of these little plants grew into a Lemon Verbena bush.

Lemon verbena

Read the rest of this entry »

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SPRING FOLIAGE

I began planting the trees that provide the foliage structure of our garden at Das Helwig Haus B&B in 1994. Although it was then a young garden, reliant largely on annuals for colour, we were asked to open our garden in November 1997 for the Australian Open Garden Scheme as the selectors said it was inspirational. The gardens selected by the AOGS are not competition gardens. The purpose of the AOGS is to inspire more people to take up gardening. There is a misconception amongst many people that a garden should be well established  with mature trees before it can be placed on display. Yes, such gardens are wonderful places and give great pleasure, but often they daunt the new gardener who believes they will never achieve equal splendour.

Now this year, 7/8 November 2009, we will once more open our garden under the auspices of Australian Open Garden Scheme. Only the Radiata Pine trees I positioned at the northern end of the Remembrance Field of Flanders poppies have grown into tall trees. Other trees and shrubs are well grown and well spaced to continue their purpose of providing structure to the garden in the years ahead. As of yesterday, the first two red Flanders poppies appeared in the Remembrance Field. They will continue to double in number until the field is a blaze of red.

First poppies

The work of thinning the poppies has been completed. They will now bush up and grow past knee height within the month. Meanwhile the flowering perennials planted along the edges of pathways in the main garden have begun to bloom. Note the perennial Petticoat acquilegias beside this path. Also note the manner in which the Radiata Pine trees add depth to this view.

Garden path

Guests enter here at the front gate and proceed up the brick pathway to the office to immediately be confronted by the massed blooms of the Apple Blossom Hawthorn. There are over 1000 varieties of the crataegus plant, which are mostly thorny with red berries and much loved by birds.

Apple Blossom Hawthorn

I have two forms of this shrub in my garden. The other one has small white flowers. In common both plants are without thorns and have dark purple berries which are eaten throughout winter by the Satin Bower Birds who deposit their droppings throughout my garden. Lots of the plainer white flowering Hawthorn appear as seedlings and are easily transplanted, but it appears that the Apple Blossom Hawthorn doesn’t grow readily from seed.

White Hawthorn & Snowball bush

Between the white flowering, compact growing Hawthorn bush and the winter deciduous Snowball bush viburnum opulus which will reach its peak with huge white flowers by the third week of October, is one of the five Camellia Japonica trees I planted along the front of our house to provide evergreen winter foliage. When we bought this property there was one small green conifer, an extremely hardy specimen which self-seeds. Although I’ve never identified this particular conifer I took the opportunity to transplant several seedlings to other places with my garden. Not only do they provide evergreen colour throughout the year, the seed cones are much sought after by Australian parrots. As I was photographing my garden this morning a Red Wing parrot alighted beside me on one of these conifers.

Red Wing Parrot

Foliage for contrast

Close to the northern eastern corner of our house I’ve established low growing conifers behind which you can see the glossy green leaves of a Holly bush one of about 400 varieties of Ilex. Although this bush does set berries I’m never able to bring them indoors for Christmas decorations. In the December they are still green and by the time they redden up prior to winter the Satin Bower Birds arrive and enjoy a feast.

Contrasting foliage

This rocky portion of our garden beside the northern veranda was unsuitable for anything other than ivy type ground covers and shrubs which could get their roots down amongst the rocks. As the double glass doors of our lounge room and dining room look out onto this area, I terraced it so that the ground and veranda are at the same level. It has the effect of bringing the garden into the house. It is my favourite place to relax in an easy chair.

Northern veranda

Das Helwig Haus B&B owned by Eberhard and Fay Helwig is situated at Glen Aplin, near Stanthorpe on the Granite Belt of southern Queensland, Australia.

This is a region noted for Australian wildflowers, four wilderness National Parks and sixty wineries. In 1997 Eberhard and Fay established the Remembrance Field of red Flanders poppies, a European wildflower.

Book Cover

To obtain Fay’s book Wildflowers, wilderness and wine email Fay on helwig@halenet.com.au

Internationally it is available on the Amazon.com website.  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002ACXQ0M/sr=8-1/qid=1244294755/ref=olp_product_details?ie=UTF8&me=&qid=1244294755&sr=8-1&seller=

http://stores.lulu.com/strictlyliterary

http://books.google.co.uk/

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CHRISTMAS AT DAS HELWIG HAUS B&B

I have been blessed by the arrival of a useful young Korean man called Jerry, who majored at a Korean University in tourism. When he returns to Korea he plans to work for an Uncle who has a resort on the hills overlooking the eastern sea towards Japan. Jerry told me that I was the ‘busiest’ grandmother he had ever seen. I think he was referring to the amount of work I do. I have found him helpful at cleaning bathrooms, hanging out washing and pressing sheets. He is excellent with meal service too, cleaning up the kitchen and packing the dishwasher after meals. He is a Wwoofer - a Willing Worker on Organic Farms and came to me expecting to undertake garden work. www.wwoof.com.au There will be plenty of that! Now he says he is delighted to be here as he has found himself gaining experience in a tourism business. The photo below shows Jerry emptying compost onto a garden patch where I’ll plant potatoes and sweet-corn next spring.

Korean Jerry

I’ve had an exhausting time since my brief days of rest and recreation in Hong Kong as I’ve been preparing for our winter season when every Saturday night I serve a German style, roast goose Christmas dinner to our in-house guests. This is our 17th year of providing Bed and Breakfast, plus a Saturday night dinner for our guests at Das Helwig Haus B&B who come to visit the sixty wineries of the Granite Belt. Read the rest of this entry »

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EBERHARD’S BLACK FOREST CAKE

Eberhard's Black Forest Cake

One of Eberhard’s Black Forest cakes famously appeared on TV eleven years ago when SBS TV sent a production crew to Das Helwig Haus B&B on the Granite Belt to film him preparing and serving a German Christmas Feast. The feature film has repeatedly been shown on the SBS TV Food Lovers Guide to Australia. Eberhard will be 83 years of age in July and my daughters and daughter-in-law decided that it was time for him to pass on his secrets to them. Thus I was able to capture in film the process. One of the girls wrote down the recipe. Read the rest of this entry »

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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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AN ABUNDANCE OF CHERRIES

For me, cherries have always been associated with Christmas mornings. As a child I left a pillowslip at the end of my bed on Christmas Eve as I recited, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Waking in excitement at the first light of dawn I would peer into the depths of the pillowslip to find the small brown paper packet containing apricots, plums and cherries. Stone fruit were scarce and expensive, but always a Christmas treat.

I knew nothing of Morello cherries, the sour kirsche of Europe, until I married Eberhard. Almost thirty years ago he established one of the first coffee shop restaurants in Toowoomba, which became rightly famous due to his skill as a baker of Continental cakes. In those days it was nothing for him to bake and assemble two large Black Forest Torte every day. In those days he was able to buy 5kg tins of sour kirsche imported from Yugoslavia.

When we moved to the cool mountain climate of the Granite Belt in 1992 and established Das Helwig Haus B&B, one of the first trees I planted was a Morello Cherry tree to enable us to harvest and preserve our own cherries. Like many other Australian fruit eating birds, the Eastern Rosella parrots have flourished since fruit orchards were established on the Granite Belt and now every year farmers set up scare guns to startle the parrots away from their orchards and vineyards, or they shoot hundreds. These birds are not an endangered species and the alternative is costly – to net the crops.

Grape vines covered in bird netting

I did not want my cat,  Patches, hunting the parrots and bringing them to me like trophies. Read the rest of this entry »

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