"Balmoral Park" farm garden

I have a savoury palate and enjoy sour and bitter flavours much more than sweet. I was reminded of this the other week when I absent mindedly ordered Jam on some Turkish toast at a cafe. It was OK but not to my taste which got me thinking about Marmalade. I do enjoy a good bitter marmalade, especially on Turkish or sour dough toast. We have a lot of citrus at the moment and for the first time a really good quantity of limes. Ttoday i have been making lime marmalade,  using this recipe http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/recipes/8219778/Lime-marmalade-recipe. and it worked beautifully. Sour bitter and tangy!  Well worth the effort. Cant wait for breakfast!

Part of my weekend is devoted to organising and cooking food for the week. As I have a pretty long work day now and don't get home until dinner time I find it well worth the time to get things in place on the weekend. At the moment as it is winter I am making a big batch of soup for lunches. Some sort of casserole for Sunday dinner and a midweek dinner and maybe cooking up a few staples, like rice or chick peas so I can quickly make something after work. Yesterday I made a nice slow cooked duck ragu to eat with fresh homemade pappardelle. A lovely Lentil, tomato and capsicum soup and a batch of rhubarb poached with orange juice and cinnamon, this is delicious on porridge for breakfast.   Dinner and lunch all sorted for the week.

I am hoping that being a weekend gardener for a while is going to be sufficient to keep things on track. Fortunately things are quite well established now and the season is quite good at the moment, plenty of rain and some good hard frosts. I think that these winter months will provide the greatest challenge as i am really barely here in the daylight hours, but I can feel the days starting to lengthen so hopefully in a couple of weeks there will be time to do a bit in the garden on some mornings and perhaps take Elle for a walk on the others. In the meantime Peter is doing lots of things in the garden, just not really into the food growing side of things but I am hoping that he will get into that soon. It is citrus time again and, despite the bumper of crop of mandarins that we were picking for months  last year, there is still a small crop of delicious mandarins, plenty for the two two of us. There are also lots of Oranges and the lemon tree has its usual bumpe...

Well it has been quite along absence and my life has changed considerably since my last post. I have had to return to full time work so am working Monday to Friday, 9-5 plus driving a bit over an hour each way. Not a lot of time left for anything else, especially in these short winter days. There are many things that I am not prepared to give up and perhaps this blog is one of them. This weekend is the first time I have felt like there is a bit of rhythm in my life and the first opportunity to pay a bit of attention to things around here. So perhaps I will become a weekend blogger for a while! The vegetable garden is a bit neglected but will come good in the spring. Peter is home full time so different things are getting done on the farm that will hopefully move us towards sustainability and our little farm stay. In the meantime I am still trying to keep up with cooking lots of good, slow cooked food on the weekend to get us through the week. I read an idea about baking pumpkin hal...

There has been a gang of workers clearing the trees from underneath the power lines near us for the past week or so. The other day one of them came to our place to see if we would like some mulch. Would we ever! They delivered three big truckloads of lovely mulch. It needs to sit for a while so we probably wont spread it until the spring. What a boost for our garden. They came to our place because you can see our garden from the road and it is looking quite nice at the moment.

Things are very busy here at the farm with our visitors but in the midst of it all we have finally got our sheep. Six lovely wiltipol ewes and a ram. They have settled in very nicely.

It has been a busy few weeks here. Katie, Andy and the children arrived from England on the 3rd and the number in our household steadily increased until Easter Sunday. From the Thursday night the numbers for dinner were too big to fit inside so we moved to the veranda and made a long table, the table just had to grow a little every night. 16 for Thursday night, 20 for Friday night and 22 for Saturday night. there was an extra ten for Sunday but we abandoned the tale then and just had a buffet. Lots of cooking and food preparation shared with loved ones made for a great time. One of the highlights was seeing my little granddaughter getting stuck into her Mussels!