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That Old Chestnut- how to grow new Water Chestnuts from old

Posted by gardenpathfood on August 23, 2013
Posted in: Food, Spring foods, The plants in my garden, Winter Jobs. Tagged: , , , . Leave a comment

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Yep, I know, I haven’t put anything on here for quite a while but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy.

What you see above is the progression of the Water Chestnuts.

  1. When the tall reed like plants die off in winter (that’s about mid-June here), you put a tarpaulin out on the ground and bring over your tub of dead plants.
  2. Tip them out on to the tarp so the pile is upside down then start sorting through it. Rubber gloves are good here.
  3. Then pop the dirt back in the tub as you sort, and some of the small chestnuts you missed will probably go back in. You will be left with a lovely pile of the larger chestnuts. See that pile of lovely chestnuts in the middle photo.
  4. Pick out a couple of the smaller chestnuts and push them back in to the soil in the pot.
  5. Put a little of the old reeds on top for a little bit of protection, fill the tub with water and keep it topped up about an inch deep until the new shoots appear in about September (although as you see from the photos below, my chestnuts in the horse trough in the full sun shot a lot earlier.  That is all there is to it.  I got about 3 kilos from 2 of these  small tubs and I store them in a lunchbox in the crisper of the fridge checking every time I use some in case there are rotting ones. So far so good.  What I have will probably last us until Christmas for stir fries.

The photograph on the right shows the emerging spikes in mid-August.

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Beanie Babies escape Jack Frost

Posted by gardenpathfood on June 8, 2013
Posted in: Background Information, Eating Seasons, Food, The plants in my garden, Winter Foods. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

It’s been a very warm winter so far and that is the only way I can account for the fact that I still have bulk tomatoes and that there are bean babies coming up in the garden.  You might have noticed that we have been eating butter beans for about 5 months now and in spite of it theoretically being winter, we are still getting a small crop. Beanie BabiesWhen the crop was very heavy, I must have let a few stay on the vine and during a recent dry spell, I found a lot of dried pods with great seeds in them so I have stored them for next summer but….some must have escaped my eagle eye and…we have babies under the frost covers.

For those who didn’t notice that we have been eating butter beans, I am starting some new pages which will record what we are eating/harvesting and what major activities I am undertaking for that month. Look for the page ‘This Month’s Harvest’.

So, the photo below shows the foods which I have been harvesting in this month, although I have forgotten the lemons and limes.  I’ll put them in next months’s photos just so you know.   

June Harvest

The Great Pumpkin (*Charlie Brown)

Posted by gardenpathfood on March 3, 2013
Posted in: Autumn foods, Eating Seasons, Recipes, Soil, Spring Jobs, Summer Jobs, The plants in my garden, Winter Foods, Work Season. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . 6 Comments

Linus would be delighted that ‘The Great Pumpkin(s) ‘ are rising from the pumpkin patch but he might not be so happy if he knew that I IMG_0015fully intend to eat every one of them using the multitude of culinary variations available to me. Pumpkin is the most sensual of vegetables.  You can roast it and have that crisp, rich exterior surrounding smooth, creamy, comforting, sweet and deep flavoured flesh. This is wonderful with meat and vegetables and spectacular in a cold or warm salad, especially with grilled or pan-fried haloumi.

Pumpkin is an amazing colour and half the pleasure of pumpkin soup is the satisfying burnt orange fire colour on a  cold evening. Pumpkin can be sweet, it can be savoury, used for dessert or used for a main.

And here, they are so easy to grow.  Basically I live on a sand hill, admittedly red sand, and the pumpkins love it. They come up in places I have never planted them and colonise the back paddock. This morning I traded with a friend for eggs, so I hope her chooks keep on laying because my pumpkins just keep on producing.

I found out the other day that you can eat pumpkins at just about any stage of growth, even when they are quite young and small. If you had a large patch and planted as soon as the frosts are over, you could have a very long season, as pumpkins will also keep for a long time after they are picked, provided they are in good condition when you pick them, preferably on a dry day and you cut it so a small part of the stalk is attached.  I have kept them for months this way.IMG_0014

Yes, pumpkins take up a lot of room, but they have such a long season, great storage and can be used in so many ways that they are well worth sacrificing a bit of space in return for the assurance of great, home grown produce for a many months of the year.

Every year, I make pumpkin soup and one of the best recipes ever is the Moroccan Pumpkin soup recipe I have included on my new recipe page.

Enjoy!

One Tough Capsicum

Posted by gardenpathfood on February 13, 2013
Posted in: Autumn foods, Eating Seasons, Food, Health, Links to other sites, Spring foods, Spring Jobs, Summer foods, The plants in my garden, Winter Foods, Winter Jobs, Work Season. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment

‘I had a little capsicum’,  and I still do.

This little capsicum has been in the garden for almost two years and spent most of last winter hibernating beneath a refrigerator box, but even then, it still produced the odd fruit. It has continued to fruit all through summer, just as it did all last summer.  It produces just enough to keep us going and since we eat them on salads and in stir fry and in casseroles, that it not a bad effort for the one little plant.Capsicum

And, it has produced babies with a little help.  I talked about that at http://wp.me/p2tNt0-32

The Gardening Australia website http://www.abc.net.au/gardening/stories/s1866669.htm suggests that capsicums are indeed perennial, but usually we treat them as an annual. I sometimes wonder how much of what we assume as home gardeners comes from commercial agricultural practices and how much we need to relearn to be really effective home vegetable producers.  The garden is really your best teacher for this so just get in there and give it a go.

The capsicum is also an attractive little plant, so given that it is actually a perennial and that it has lovely glossy green leaves and can have bright green, red, yellow or orange fruit, it is a plant that you could easily use as an ornamental in a spot in which you can protect it  in winter.  That is, if you get frost as we do.They grow easily in a pot and this probably ideal as the plant can moved in and out of shelter in winter for an all year round boost to both your food dishes and your immune system.

Raw capsicum  contains high levels of Vitamin C and also  beta carotene which converts to Vitamin A, a great immune system boost.

Awesome Asparagus

Posted by gardenpathfood on February 1, 2013
Posted in: Eating Seasons, Food, Health, Links to other sites, Spring foods, Spring Jobs, Summer foods, The plants in my garden, Work Season. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

No, my asparagus does not normally look like this when I pick it.  Usually in the six to eight weeks in Spring  (here Spring is September to November) that we are picking asparagus, it usually looks like a bed of mulch with spikes sticking out of it. The trick is to eat enough so that you stay ahead of the spikes and it doesn’t get bushy like this.

Asparagus in January

Asparagus in January

This is December to August bush and it stays this way until I get out the weed eater (brushcutter) and cut it back to ground level in August.

From December to August it doesn’t get watered, it doesn’t get anything but a few weeds pulled.  In August we cut it back, throw a pile of compost, horse manure and mulch on top, water it heavily and wait for results.  Very, very tasty results whether it is eaten raw and fresh, chopped in a salad or cooked as a vegetable.

Asparagus is dead easy to grow, very hard to kill and the quickest and easiest vegetable to prepare for a meal.  What more could you want as the backbone for your garden?

Climate-wise, I grew it in sub-tropical inland Queensland as well as down here near the border with New south Wales.

The people at http://www.nutrition-and-you.com/asparagus.html list the many benefits of asparagus including ‘Asparagus is a very low calorie vegetable. 100 g fresh spears give only 20 calories. More calories will be burnt to digest than gained, the fact, which fits into the category of low calorie or negative-calorie vegetables,’ but to me asparagus is also one of the best and most satisfying vegetables you can grow.

And Double bonus!!!  We have just had floods, although my house remained high and dry, but the drenching rain has kick started the asparagus again and we have eaten it every night for the last two weeks.  Asparagus in January!!

Strawberry slaughter

Posted by gardenpathfood on January 26, 2013
Posted in: Autumn jobs, Eating Seasons, Food, Spring foods, Summer foods, Summer Jobs, The plants in my garden, Work Season. Tagged: , , . Leave a comment
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Discarded plants waiting for a new home

Strawberries are tough old things.  It has been over 40 degrees a lot of days here but I decided to thin my strawberry patch and plant the discarded runners somewhere else.  To tell the truth, I wasn’t too concerned if they lived or not, I was more interested in rejuvenating my strawberry bed and getting rid of as many cooch runners as I could.  Once I’ve finished thinning, I will behead what’s left.  It’s gruesome but my strawberry patch will love me for it.

Well, I forgot to water the ones I planted out but luckily a week or so later, we had our own personal town flood with 140 ml overnight just for us and no one else outside a ten kilometer radius.  Gotta love this weather.

Those poor little transplanted strawberries which had brown crunchy leaves, started to produce new leaves in their centres  et viola, I have a new strawberry patch in the outer garden.  How good is that!

So now, instead of the punnet or two punnets of strawberries we have been getting every morning for the last couple of years from August to Christmas, we can look forward to lots, lots more.

Strawberries are magic!

Dog drool and water chestnuts

Posted by gardenpathfood on December 2, 2012
Posted in: Eating Seasons, Food, Spring foods, The plants in my garden, Winter Foods, Winter Jobs, Work Season. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

I love the look of water chestnuts in the garden.

There is a period of a couple of weeks in May when the spikes start to die off that they look a little bit untidy, but the exciting thing then is that they are almost ready to harvest, so it doesn’t matter.

Water Chestnuts in December

Water Chestnuts in December

I completely forgot to blog when I harvested the bulbs in June but the year goes something like this:

In June/July you plonk some soil/sand/compost in a couple of tubs and then put in some bulbs which you can buy commercially, but this year I replanted from the bulbs I had harvested. Unlike garlic, you can replant the small bulbs and expect to get reasonable chestnuts.

For these two tubs I only need about 6 bulbs total, but somehow this year I must have left a few in the soil because I definitely have more than 6 plants.

Then, put about a 2 cm covering of soil on top and fill the tubs with water to cover the surface by a couple of centimeters. I keep the tubs topped up, which is not hard in winter, until the shoots start to come through as soon as it starts to warm up in September or October. (This is more difficult than it sounds as both the cat and dog prefer the water in the water chestnuts to their own nice clean bucket.)

After that, I keep them moist and let the rain top them up, and although I never really let them dry out ,  they don’t mind a little bit of exposure.  I am very careful in extremely hot weather not to let them dry out completely.

They look wonderful for 8 months of the year, as you see and I will hope to harvest several kilos of lovely, crisp,  fresh bulbs in early June. I keep these in a container in the crisper and use them as I need them.

The taste and texture of fresh water chestnut is as different from the tinned variety, as fresh asparagus is from tinned. They are a completely different food experience.

It’s all in the eyes

Posted by gardenpathfood on August 3, 2012
Posted in: Food, The plants in my garden, Winter Jobs, Work Season. Tagged: , , , . Leave a comment

There was a douzy of a frost this morning and for the third morning in a row, no hot water, since our solar hot water system had frozen up again.  The gentleman of the house went off to work smelly and not particularly happy.

Potatoes and chokos getting ready for spring

This is the reason I don’t plant out potatoes early in the year in this place. Further north I could get two crops in by planting in March and September but here, I buy the seed potato when I can get it and leave it in a basket in the shed, along with the sprouting chokos until the frosts are almost gone.

I should be able to plant soon though, as a good layer of hay and soil over the sprouting potatoes will protect them until the frost is gone.

In fact, each year I do have a little crop which sprouts from volunteers left in the ground from the year before so I spend the winter anxiously covering them with mulch every time it looks like the frosty mornings are back but it is worth the effort, as I love those little baby potatoes that you get with your own crop and which are never the same when you buy them.  They are like tasty little soft nuts and are wonderful in a stew or casserole, or served with butter and herbs.

Take a leek

Posted by gardenpathfood on July 30, 2012
Posted in: Autumn jobs, Eating Seasons, Food, Health, Spring foods, The plants in my garden, Winter Foods. Tagged: , , , . Leave a comment

I think the leek is a seriously underestimated vegetable.! Seriously! Underestimated!

A retooned leek

Everyone I speak to about leeks says ‘They’re supposed to be good in a stew or something aren’t they?’  Yes they are good in a casserole, or a warm vegetable salad, but they are even better as a simple steamed vegetable with a little bit of pepper for extra taste.

Leeks make wonderful soups, whether they are part of a potato and leek soup for example or as a clear soup on their own.

They have the distinction of being a great diuretic, so if you do have a bit of bloating, a bowl or two of leek soup or leeks for dinner at night regularly will probably help. This is definitely a tastier way to go than taking pills, unless you really have to, of course.

In the garden, the leek is easy to grow and always looks good, nice and tidy.  I usually plant them in mid-year as seedlings, and they take 6 months or so to really produce. The good thing about them is that they can stay in the ground for ages, and you can pick them off one at a time.  The other good thing, is that sometimes you can get a retoon.  I don’t pull them up, I cut them off at the base and as you see in the photo, they will reshoot.  The ready-to-eat leek in the photo, is one that reshot from last year.

A previously cut leek

If you don’t get around to picking them, then they will usually seed in the second year, and the result can be seen in the third photo- from the crop that I planted two years ago.

Not everyone loves the randomness of leaving things to grow where they seed themselves, so you may want to transplant these little opportunity babies.

Self seeded leeks

Babies in the garden

Posted by gardenpathfood on July 2, 2012
Posted in: The plants in my garden. Tagged: , . 2 Comments

My daughter bought some little mesh bags of garlic at the markets a while ago and gave me a few.  I’ll have to say it was more garlic than even we were likely to use before it went off, but ..it didn’t rot or at least most of it didn’t.

Quite a bit of it put out little shoots, so I did what the KitchenGardenInternational  video http://www.youtube.com/user/kitchengardeners?feature=watch  said and just kept the biggest of the cloves for planting, and put them in the garden pointy end up, about 2cm into the soil. This was about 2 weeks ago.

A couple of days ago I noticed little shoots in the spot where I planted the cloves and I have lovely little garlic plants coming along beautifully.  There is a new one or two every day and the remaining garlic on the bench in the kitchen is still shooting. It’s a case of one for the pot, one for the garden at the moment so I am hoping for a great crop of garlic next year.