"Balmoral Park" farm garden

Its hard to believe that just a week ago I was congratulating myself that I had all the lawns mowed to the same level. No mean feat in this garden and I think the first time it had ever happened. I was very excited about this and my intention was to keep it that way. Well the best laid plans and all of that! Firstly I had to get the first Eugowra News out for the year so that cut into my gardening time considerably but still Peter was away for the weekend and i planned to do it all then. Instead it rained and rained, we have had 50 ml in the past few days, not much to you Northerners I know but for here it is heaps and it has been very Humid. consequently my Park is a jungle again. I hope it will be dry enough to mow before we go away on Saturday. While I was taking these photos couldn't resist some snaps of the little guinea Fowl, aren't they too cute And the ring in.

Despite some sever losses in the fruit department,  thanks to fruit fly and coddling moth, we still have not purchased any meaningful amount of fruit for over twelve months. We don't have any late stone fruit or early pome fruit but we have a mattering of early passionfruits. The Strawberries are bearing well thanks to the mild and wet conditions. And there are enough delicious raspberries to have a pick each day. I must admit to eating them in situ don't usually make it inside. What a treat to have succulent Raspberries in Eugowra. The Rhubarb is always abundant for stewed fruit and we still have quite a lot preserved in the freezer and in the cupboards. Not a bad result for a less than good season. I think having such a large variety is the key.

I've been playing around with my bread making a bit this week. I read a thing about maintaining the starter and it made sense to me so I've done that. Basically you just grow a very small starter and then keep it in the fridge and build it up when you need it. Already my starter is much more active. Last weekend I tried to make some pide, it didn't turn out so well, just like white bread really. I love pide and want to be able to make if for Katie when she is here as its one of the things she misses in the UK. I couldn't find a recipe for a sourdough pide so i adapted the recipe I had, pretty much just letting every step take longer. i took half a cup of nice fresh starter and added a cup of water and a cup of bread flour, plus half a teaspoon of sugar. I stirred this until it was smooth, covered it with glad wrap and left it on the bench for a few hours and then put it in the fridge overnight. this morning I added 270 mls of warm water, 31/2 cups of flour and 1/4 cu...

In my meat and three veg upbringing it would have been unheard of to eat Zucchini flowers, or any flowers for that matter. I remember when my mother started to grow Zucchini, they were like the new wonder vegetable and she took pride in growing them as big as she could! We then ate these monsters. Soon enough I learned to eat them when they were small but it was quite some time before I discovered the joys of eating Zucchini flowers. They are now one of my favourite things about summer. This year I am growing the Costa Romenesca variety and although they promised a good supply of flowers that has not really been the case. The past few mornings however I have seen some beauties so this morning decided to pick these two for our dinner tonight. Look at the size in comparison to an every day tea cup. You would never see flowers like this at a market. They are not very sturdy and I have already managed to tear one but it doesn't matter, I am just going to dip these in egg, breadcrum...

I've had quite a few incompatible aims in my life, family and career, garden and travel etc, usually its a juggling act and part of the richness of life. At the moment the biggest challenge is to grow a productive and attractive garden and raise a Border Collie pup. We've had Border Collies for many years, Angus is over thirteen now and I don't remember his puppy years but Zoe was home to play with him as well. Last year we got Elle Macpherson and she is just beautiful. It has been a joy to have her and also time of great anxiety as we have almost lost her twice! She is just a bit over one now and coming along nicely, a lovely nature and great fun. I thought that the worst of her puppy behaviour was behind us and then I discovered her new game! Our pome trees have been struck by coddling moth again and in an effort to save at least some of the fruit, especially the quinces, I put little sokcettes on the fruit. All was going well until I began to find the fruit in the socke...

I have been making sourdough bread for quite a few years now. Initially it was a struggle but then I seemed to have a good method and it all went well. I bake a delicous loaf every week or so and that is pretty much enough bread for us. When I returned from England at the beginning of December my starter had been quite neglected and I have been unhappy with my bread making results ever since. Yesterday I decided that I really needed to remedy this. There are no artisan bakeries near us and I do not like the commercial breads available at the supermarket. Initially I was blaming the flour as I have run out of the nice fresh Furney's flour and am not prepared to drive all the way to Dubbo just to get it. On reflection though I used the Wallaby flour from the supermarket for years and was happy with the results. So I think the starter and my method are the problems. I started to refresh the starter every day and i made a bigger sponge when I was ready to bake. Straight away I could s...

Sometimes, well really a lot of the time, I garden more with hope than with science. I have a vision that I can keep us supplied pretty much with all the fruit and vegetables that we need. I think i probably can, the problem is I don't really want to be limited by what will grow well here. So i keep trying things, putting them in different places, creating little micro climates and so on. I've had some successes, cant believe how well the asparagus and raspberries have done. And lots of failures. Last year I tried in vain to grow ginger and turmeric, the ginger grew but produced nothing! However I thought I would give the turmeric another shot as I really want to have this fresh. The ones I planted before I bought from an Asian green grocers so this time I ordered some from Greenharvest. I have also been trying to grow sweet potatoes with a similar result so also ordered a purple sweet potato. I figure if I get these things going I will have them for ever. Well i planted th...

I don't think i do know very much about onions. Like most of you I am sure I was bought up on white onions and brown onions. more recently I discovered red onions and have also come to enjoy leeks and shallots. I have grown leeks, shallots and garlic with some success but have not bothered much with onions. For some reason I have always found growing root vegetables more challenging that the above the ground varieties, however here I find they grow quite easily. I think it is the sandy soil. In any case last year I grew a few onions from seed. Cant remember the varieties but they have done quite well and are a bit of a revelation. I don't know why I am surprised really, everything that you grow and eat fresh from the garden tastes so much better than things purchased from the supermarket. Goodness knows how old the onions you usually buy are.  I grew a few cute, sort of flat white onions that were delicious raw in salads and these lovely big brown ones. They are just so juicy, ...

Life is strange sometimes. About twenty years ago I worked with a very unpleasant man, I still think about him quite often as he was responsible for introducing me to real Vietnamese food. One staff meeting day he suggested we all go to Lunch at a restaurant called Mina's and that we try the Special Chicken Vermicelli. What a revelation, i don't think I had ever eaten anything like this, full of fresh herbs, mint, coriander, fish sauce, crisp vegetables, delicious chicken and vermicelli noodles. I've eaten this dish at Vietnamese restaurants all over the place now, including Cabramatta, Vietnam and London and    I still think that Mina's in Campbelltown has the best version! Every now and again if I happen to be back in that area I pop in to try it. As I don't live in the city however I have been experimenting with how to make this salad for many years now. What I have found works is to soak the noodles in boiling water for about ten minutes, pile on a variety of ...

Summer has well and truly arrived at last but it is still much milder than usual. The hottest day was yesterday and reached about 38 degrees before a late cool change. The humidity has gone and the hot dry days are perfect for the roses. The Joey's in Jemima and Eli's gardens are particularly beautiful at the moment, they also smell divine.  I find they don't last long as cut flowers so prefer to leave them in the garden.   While i have been focused on weeding the vegetable gardens Peter has been working on the decorative gardens so they are starting to look pretty nice.   I cant believe how fast Eli's garden is growing, almost as fast as him.   The great thing this summer is that we have plenty of water in the dam and in the tanks. Our big dam is almost full.   My neighbour was telling me that his dams are full of yabbies so will have to put our traps in ours and see if we have any on the weekend.    

Peter must be feeling pleased with the results of his recent gardening. He took some lovely photos yesterday evening. They really show how far the garden has come and will form a nice point of reference for the future. These are my favourites. The bank and the rose arch starting to take shape!  There used to be nothing in this area except catheads. The Gate to nowhere

Every morning I have been getting up very early, before it becomes too hot to do hard work. My first priority, and the hardest work has been getting the vegetable gardens back in order. They were full of weeds and the ever present Kikuyu had really invaded them. I think it has taken eight days of about two hours hard slog every day but they are back to the way i like them, almost anyway. I'm going to start again tomorrow and mulch with newspaper and lucerne as I go. I think it will be a whole lot quicker to get around this time and that is the plan, to stay on top of it so it is not a big job again. This will free up lots of time to do other things in the rest of the garden. It has finally become quite hot today, a real summers day and while I dont relish the heat I think the hot dry conditions are good for lots of things in the garden so I'm happy to have some summer weather. I will just plan on doing my gardening early in the morning and late in the afternoon for a ...

Peter has built a Bush house for the garden. Somewhere to propagate,grow seedlings and most importantly keep plants out of the reach of Elle. Although to be fair she doesn't often take the plants anymore. We bought the frame for the Bush house at a garage sale, I think it was the top half of a trailer crate or some such thing, anyway Peter saw the potential for it to become the Bush House and now a couple of months later here it is. Very neat and tidy And it has allowed us to clean up all the mess of propagation and dog proofing plants that I had behind the shed. This in turn allows us to easily mow and whipper snip around the shed. There is even a tap inside the Bush House. We really have so much in the garden these days that we will rarely need to buy plants and we both enjoy propagation and I find I have much greater success with vegetables that I have grown from seeds so it is great to have a purpose built environment to do all this in.

I love the start of the year, it is a line in the sand, a time for new beginnings and building on the old. We have been working very hard in our garden over the holidays. It has been superb gardening weather. Today is the first day it has been quite hot, hence I am inside in the middle of the day. Our efforts in garden have been largely about restoirng and reclaiming, getting things back in order after my absence and Peters illness. So we have been mowing, weeding, pruning and digging out the never ending Kikuyu. Hard work most of it. If we are to sustain our gardening over time we will have to get smarter and be more consistent. Thanks to two years of mild temperatures and reasonable rainfall, most of our garden is now pretty well established. We don't need to be planting a whole lot of new plants, maybe just the occasional specimen that takes our fancy. We also don't need to be watering a lot. So my New Years resolution for the garden is to be consistent in maintaining wh...