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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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 »

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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

Read the rest of this entry »

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A NEW START

A successful business has three essential components.

• A good product
• Good financial management
• Good marketing

A good financial manager and a good marketer are never found in the same person. My husband, Eberhard, is a work motivated Introverted, Sensing, Thinking and Judgmental personality/temperament type – an ISTJ. This type are the salt of the earth and make great middle managers, school inspectors or hospital matrons.

I am an Introverted, Intuitive, Feeling and Perceptive type – an INFP – a spirit motivated person. Although rare in number this type are to be found in nurturing positions as teachers, nurses and missionaries, but they also have a capacity for creativity and drama as actors or writers.

There are values that Eberhard and I have in common like we are scrupulously honest, but apart from the Introversion of preferring small groups of people over large crowds, we are opposites in many ways. My reading of psychology helped me greatly to understand the motivation of my husband, especially his work related values and how to partner him in a joint business. We developed a clear demarcation of duties, recognizing the strengths and weaknesses that each possessed.

Eberhard managed our finances and the nitt gritty matters of keeping everything functioning smoothly.  I am the holistic thinker looking to the future and planning our marketing – a visionary. I chose to call our Bed and Breakfast home Das Helwig Haus B&B - The Helwig House; to provide a German decor, German music and German food. Thus I differentiated it from every Honeysuckle Cottage, Apple Blossom Inn or Camellia Cabin in the district.

Das Helwig Haus B&B

After moving to the Granite Belt my personality began to bloom. Here no one knew my father, my former husband or my children. For the first time I was not seen as a daughter, wife or mother, but as an intelligent, hard working woman to be valued as a person. Already in his sixties, Eberhard had achieved most of his goals in life and was willing to support me while I followed my dreams. In 1995 I was asked to contribute to the tourism community by standing for election as a Director of the Southern Downs Tourism Board. Read the rest of this entry »

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A FIGHT FOR SURVIVAL

From the very beginning of writing this Travels in Life series my focus as been on my desire to read, write and speak eloquently.  I have written about my country childhood deprived of music and books. I’ve have written about my twenty-five year marriage when I was kept so busy that I found it almost impossible to read or study.

When my marriage ended I began a two year fight to avoid bankruptcy, selling my home, the factory and attempting to sell my farm in an endeavour to pay the debts which had been incurred in my name. Just as joint assets may be divided for a divorce settlement, the Family Law Court also considers such as debts as were in my name, joint debts of the marriage. In addition, my husband had signed a guarantee to meet any shortfall when purchasing the factory.  His wealth of more than a million dollars was tied up in family trusts within the transport company controlled by his father, uncle and brother. This meant that I wasn’t fighting for my rights against one runaway husband, but against four ruthless men determined to protect their family assets. 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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AN IMPORTANT DAY 11NOVEMBER.

As experienced by Fay’s Granddaughter.

I was only 22months of age when I helped my Gran with her duties last year on 11th November and my mother took these photographs to record the event.

Gran was serving breakfast to her guests at Das Helwig Haus B&B when I burst into the room with my usual shout of glee, throwing myself into her arms and giving her a kiss. This caused much laughter amongst Gran’s guests, one of whom said, “She’s a little pink blossom!”

Gran had work to do in preparation for the crowd about to arrive and at all times I tried to assist. I’m getting good at going on to the buses with Gran to welcome the visitors. Then the two of us stand at the entrance to hand out sprigs of peppermint for the guests to use as fly swats.

Welcome

After I had given the last sprigs away to the visitors, I has to fight my way through their legs to keep up with Gran who was telling them all about her garden. Read the rest of this entry »

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IMPRESSIONIST VIEWS

Sue Webber was the first journalist who, when writing about my garden in 1996 for the Australian Country Style magazine, said that it was like a living Monet painting with the pastel blue and mauve dotted by splashes of crimson from the poppies. At no time is the similarity to impressionist painting truer than on a misty morning. In the view below you see the winding brick path leading to the front door of Das Helwig Haus B&B. Perfume from the white star jasmine sprawling over an old stump pervades the damp air. Dark blue cornflowers mingle with lighter blue ‘Love in the Mist’ and pink snapdragons demand to be noticed, while further away red poppies dot the greenery and spears from red hot pokers thrust upward against the rounded foliage of shrubs.

Star jasmine beside brick path.

During this season of the year I sometimes wake to find my view enclosed by a misty ground fog. It is magical to wander in my garden at that time, because I can imagine myself anywhere in the northern Hemisphere or New Zealand due to the plants that I have established here at Glen Aplin on the Granite Belt. Over the years so many of my guests have told me, “This garden  reminds me of my mother’s garden in England or New Zealand or Holland.” What they are saying, it that particular plants growing together give them this feeling of nostalgia. It is the plants like foxgloves and forget-me-nots that they don’t see in most Queensland gardens. Read the rest of this entry »

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FUN OVER FIFTIES

On Sunday 2 November it was my pleasure to escort through my garden the first of three tours this season brought to me by Toni Brennan of Fun Over Fifties Tours. Toni has been bringing tour groups to my garden and to enjoy all the other attractions of Glen Aplin on the Granite Belt in November, for several years.

http://www.funoverfifty.com.au

As with every tour group I positioned these thirty visitors on the veranda of the apartments at Das Helwig Haus B&B where they could overlook the garden while I answered their questions.

Veranda of Das Helwig Haus apartments.

Toni’s tours are punctual and never hurried which means the visitors are happily laughing and have the time to question me in detail as we proceed down through the vegetable and herb gardens. Read the rest of this entry »

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