DISASTROUS FROST

The sun rises now about 5.30am and I didn’t stir from my bed until 6.30am so I never witnessed the white sheet of frost that others say they saw this morning. Frost is always one of the big problems faced by gardeners who live in areas where sub-zero temperatures are experienced. Here in the cool mountain climate of the Granite Belt we can usually expect our winter frosts to begin by the end of April and finish by mid-September, but great variability is shown when comparing the seasons of different years. In 2008 we had our first frost on 30th March and our last frost in mid-August.

My photos will tell the story.

Hang down your head frosted poppy and cry.

It is a well known fact that many plants only become susceptible to frost damage as they begin to bloom and their hormones change from growth to flowering. Although all the Flanders poppies blooming in the field this morning were cut by the frost, and several leaves will show burnt tips, the field will quickly recover, as the poppies are a weed of the wheat fields of Europe and like all weeds are hardier than most garden flowering plants. They germinate in the freezing cold weather of winter and begin blooming by mid-spring. Read the rest of this entry »

SALAD DAYS

In this cool mountain climate of the Granite Belt of southern Queensland frosts sometimes continue to torment gardeners into the second month of Spring, which they have done this year. Thus, I’ve had to wait patiently before planting the seed of many of my summer vegetable crops like sweet-corn, melons and cucumbers.

When we open our garden at Das Helwig Haus B&B on 7/8th November this year for the Australian Open Garden Scheme we will have something special to show our garden visitors. I began planning these raised garden beds in February as a way of recycling three round sheets of a rusty corrugated iron, rain water tank. Now look at the result!

Loose leaf lettuce

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FIRST SPRING FLOWERS

When I established the garden surrounding our home Das Helwig Haus B&B it was to ensure that there was something of interest in the garden at all times of the year for our visiting guests. My secondary desire was to be able to walk out into the garden at all seasons with a basket and secateurs to enable me to bring cut flowers into the house. My third goal was achieved thanks to the cool mountain climate of the Granite Belt which enabled me to grow northern Hemisphere flowers, seldom seen in Queensland gardens. It was only in later years that we began opening our garden in November, as we will do again this year for the Australian Open Garden Scheme on 7/8th November, and growing a Remembrance Field of red Flanders poppies to bloom for 11th November. This morning I was able to go into my garden and gather the red foliage of an early flowering ornamental plum tree, the yellow flowers of forsythia and sprigs of of pussy willow. I displayed these on the unlit combustion wood stove in our dining room.

Early spring foliage

This has been an unusually warm spring and I no longer need to heat the house. Read the rest of this entry »

BOOK LAUNCH

My book, Wildflowers, wilderness and wine has been selling Internationally since February. Now the first consignment of printed books is ready for an Australian book launch.  Wildflowers, wilderness and wine will be presented by our local member of State Parliament, Lawrence Springborg, at the Stanthorpe Art Gallery on Tuesday night 28th July. Eberhard and I are putting on a typical Granite Belt party. We have hired the art gallery as our venue, arranged for the serving of wines from Harrington Glen Wines and for Claudia from Thunderbolt Farm to provide her quality hor d’eouvres.

Front cover

What are my hopes, what are my dreams, what will this book do for my community? Read the rest of this entry »

MY BOOK IS PUBLISHED

On the 26th February, 2009 I became a published author. My book Wildflowers, wilderness and wine was released on this site http://stores.lulu.com/strictlyliterary

My literary agent had presented my manuscript to a number of big name publishers in Australia only to be told they regretted that they were not publishing any books of this genre. Amazingly, it proved relatively easy to have the book published  in the USA. We are now in a global society and people are increasingly using the internet, so rather than have many books printed and on display in stores, we have taken the option of having my book printed on demand.

This is the photo used on the cover, where the dedication reads:To Eberhard, my dear husband and supportive partner in Das Helwig Haus B&B.

The cover of Wildflowers, wilderness and wine.

This photo was taken by freelance photographer David Martinelli when he was preparing a feature of the Sunday-Mail newspaper about our Remembrance Field and 11th November observance of the signing of the Armistice Treaty at Versailles in France at the end of World War One.

Eberhard and Fay

The publishers have called Wildflowers, wilderness and wine a Travel Memoir – a genre I would never have considered, yet I hope it will do much to attract travelers to visit the region. Read the rest of this entry »

SUCCESS BREEDS SUCCESS

It can be said that nothing succeeds like success. Once a successful outcome has been achieved more successes will automatically follow. Das Helwig Haus B&B on the Granite Belt near Stanthorpe in southern Queensland was named by the journalists of The Courier-Mail newspaper in 1998 as the Best B&B in the Sunshine State. As our fame spread every journalist who visited the Granite Belt chose to write about our Bed and Breakfast home or my garden.

Back in the 1980s when I had lived at Dalby, I had begun a course called Writing for the Media from the TAFE College in Adelaide. The knowledge I gained was to assist me enormously. I could write advertisements and by 1998 had I designed our website layout for http://www.webstation.com.au/accom/helwig

When contacted by SBS TV The Food Lovers Guide to Australia asking for details of our  German style Christmas in July dinners I wrote a TV script of how we spent our days. The presenter arrived carrying my script in her hand and proceeded to follow it during their two day stay.

Eberhard is filmed preparing a goose.

Eberhard joked with the crew, “What is the difference between a cook and a chef? A cook does his own washing up. I do my washing up!” Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

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 »

AN ABUNDANCE OF BERRIES

As November came to an end and December arrived in this cool mountain climate of the Granite Belt, I have dealt with an abundance of mulberries, strawberries and currants, converting these to fruit compotes in Vacola bottling jars, jams and jellies. There is such a huge abundance of Boysenberries each year from my three vines in the garden at Das Helwig Haus that I can’t keep up with the processing and I have learned to save for another day the fruits that I can’t use today by temporarily freezing them.

Frozen Boysenberries

One begins by picking the berries from the vines, which are thorny, and then removing any green husk that comes away with the fruit. When they are harvested and cleaned you must make the decision of what to do next. Freezing is easy, just fill boxes like shown above and place in the freezer. Read the rest of this entry »