"Balmoral Park" farm garden

My garden has been quite neglected this summer, partly because of the weather, lots of rain, lots of garden pests and partly because there has been a lot of other things going on. All in all I am pleasantly surprised at how much it continues to provide for us. My latest forage found; The first cucumbers of the summer  Loads of little Cherry Roma tomatoes, these have done really well and have not been affected bu the fruit fly at all. the vines look pretty ragged but the tomatoes are still lovely. There are also these larger yellow tomatoes, I'm not sure what variety they are but will grow them again as they have also done well and been quite fruit fly resistant. The second crop of zucchini are doing quite well despite the ravages of the 28 spotted ladybird. The beans have bean amazing, mostly from one self sown climbing bean and they have been reproducing heavily for months now. There are also are few bush beans that are now producing.   The Raspberries continue to ...

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.    

There is beauty everywhere you look in my garden at the moment. Of course it is a matter of where you choose to focus as there is also a fair bit of disorder, lots of weeds and much work that needs to be done. However the amount of plants that we have grown in the time we have been here and their success delights me. The garden is full of stories, every plant has a story and we have thousands of plants. Take the catmint at the back door. Originally planted for Mitsi the old cat who died not long after we moved here and maintained in an effort to inject some charm and character into our rather dilapidated back area. It was then whipper snipped into almost non existence by an over zealous house sitter and has now recovered beautifully. It lifts my spirits every time I come out the back door. And the weeping Robinia. This was purchased just before we moved here and i dug it up and transplanted it here. That was before I knew about the suckering tendencies of Robinia's. Once I le...

I apologise for the pun but I am very excited about my Berries this year. We try to be self sufficient in fruit and this year we are succeeding beyond our wildest dreams. In fact we still have a store of summer fruits in the freezer and in bottles. Last year we had no citrus fruit to speak of and were hanging out for the summer fruits. The Mulberries were the first to ripen and we had a magnificent crop. We seemed to be picking Mulberries for months. Berries are such a treat and impossible to buy decent quality except for strawberries in my opinion. When there is a glut of strawberries the ones in the supermarket are often quite nice. However who knows what chemicals and pesticides are on them, so best to steer clear of them I think. There was one sad old Mulberry tree here when we came, not in the yard but out near the back shed. We have pruned it a bit and I have put the ducks pond underneath it so it gets a bit of food and water from that, otherwise it is on its own. It has respo...

At last I have enough coriander to pick and make a difference in flavour to something I am cooking. In celebration of this I made my standby pantry thai style fish cakes for dinner.  These are easy to make and taste pretty good. Of course if you have fresh salmon you could use that instead. Ingredients 2 200 g cans of red salmon 2 eggs 2 small chillis (or to taste) 4 tablespoons of fresh coriander 4 tablespoons shredded coconut 1 tsp five spice powder 2 kaffir lime leaves 1 tablespoon fish sauce 4 spring onions oil for frying What you do simply put it all in the food processor and give it a quick whiz until it is a chunky sort of paste refrigerate for about half an hour then form into small balls and fry I served these with a  rice vermicelli salad consisiting of soaked vermicelli, lots of julienned radishes fresh from the garden, a few turnip tops, a julienned capsicum, mint, and more coriander, tossed with a sauce made of caster sugar, water, lemon juice...

Undoubtedly one of our winter stars in the garden are the China Bells as we call them or Chinese Lanterns as they are commonly called. (botanical name is Abutilon x hybridum). My sister gave me four of the orange ones a few years ago in the middle of the drought. I thought they might not be frost hardy but they are and they have been a huge success. I'm not sure how many we have now but they are planted right along the back fence. They are very easy to propagate, just stick them in a pot with some soil and away they go.  I now have a bit of a collection of these as I have found apricot ones. Yellow ones. And most recently a white one. I am going to inter plant the fence plantings with all the different colours and make a little garden just of China Bells. They flower most of the year but are at their best in the winter. On a recent garden excursions I cam across an orange one that had a dark, reddish calyx, very attractive and I thought a different plant. I begged a cut...

I'm trying to build a garden and raise a puppy, a Border Collie puppy at that, known for their energy and curiosity as well as their intelligence and loyaltyt. Cant say I don't enjoy a challenge. I have invested a lot of time in training the lovely Elle and is most ways she has been very quick and responsive. She is also, I hate to say it, very naughty! She has already had two brushes with death caused by her curiosity,  http://balmoralparkgarden.blogspot.com/2011/04/cautionary-tale.html    the rat poison episode and then the undoing of her stitches. No doubt she is a precious girl and I love her to bits but she is very naughty! When Zoe was here she decided Zoe was another puppy and persistently jumped all over her, a habit I had thought she had got out of and then yesterday she was back to her old gardening habits. My back was sore so we didn't go for our usual long walk. Every time I looked outside Elle appeared to be asleep. Well no wonder she must have been ver...

After the disappointment of my Very Large Pumpkin turning to mush I decided I should start picking some of the other pumpkins in the garden. I am never quite sure when to start to pick them as the folk lore is to wait until the first frost, but we may not get a frost until late June and some of these look pretty much ready now. I decided to pick the one that seemed the most vulnerable to rotting because of its situation in the garden. It is a beauty. I don't know what the warty looking things on it are but think they look OK. I had carefully marked all my pumpkins so i would know what was what, but the markers have disappeared and the pumpkins are all intertwined so I don't know what variety this is. One of the heritage ones for sure. When I cut it open it looked fine. It has beautiful seeds that I am going to dry and roast as well. Normally I throw away pumpkin seeds and then buy some to put in bread etc. The Pumpkin was very nice in a red curry with beans and tofu. The gr...

I was feeling quite overwhelmed by this monster of a garden on Saturday. I have been away three days a week for the last few weeks and things are quite out of control again. The tomatoes are in urgent need of attention as are the pumpkins. Zucchini vines and pumpkins are covered in mildew and my giant pumpkin has dissolved into a rotting mess. Not to mention the lawns need mowing, the edges need trimming, the cat heads are flourishing. I had hoped for a tidy, orderly garden by the time Katie and Jemima arrived but it is not to be. At least it is a productive mess. I was considerably cheered up by the very first decent eggplants I have ever grown. Aren't they just beautiful. I don't know why they have failed to fruit in the past but this variety in particular is doing very well this year. The eggplants inspired me to make a sort of tasting plate for our dinner fresh from the garden. The beans have come good again so there were: beans with olive oil, garlic and preserved lemon...

It is still such a pleasant surprise to me to wake up to grey cloudy skies and a real rainy day. In the first four years we were here we did not have one rainy day. The thing is though that I don't factor rainy days into my thinking anymore. The idea of putting off things to do on a rainy day had become obsolete. So today I had planned to spend the afternoon in the garden, after I finished off some work. As I had a big day at work yesterday and was away from dawn to dark there would be many things that needed picking, pruning, weeding or otherwise attending to. However it is cool and very damp so a gardening day is not to be although I will need to venture out and pick the tomatoes and Zucchinis as they are in full swing and  really need to be picked every day. Last year my neighbour brought over a magnificent tomato that one of his mates had grown. It was huge and delicious. I saved the seeds and grew some. It has grown true to type and is producing amazing tomatoes. I thin...

I have had a run of entertaining over the last few days. A friend came over for lunch on Friday and then we had houseguests for the weekend. I've always enjoyed cooking for friends and family but the enjoyment is significantly magnified when I am cooking and serving almost all of our own produce. Friday lunch was a zucchini quiche, made with the little rond de Nice zucchinis that I sliced and fried with their flowers attached before adding them to the quiche, of course I used our own fresh eggs. The finished product, pretty and delicious, served with a potato salad, homemade mayonnaise and tomatoes. Saturday morning we went to the Orange Farmers Market and derived considerable pleasure from the things we no longer need to buy, fruit, preserves, bread and vegetables. It was interesting to see that there are now two stalls selling organic garlic, maybe I will have to think about if  growing this on a large scale is still a good idea, perhaps I was too slow! We really only needed t...

I have to admit I am not a very scientific gardener. I tend to absorb huge amounts of information, then apply things a bit randomly while building on what works. I like the idea of companion planting and I have some charts somewhere but what I really like is when I can actually see the companion relationship working. I read once that the Native American people used to plant beans, pumpkins and corn together. The corn provided some support for the pumpkin and beans and they all shaded and sheltered each other. In our  very hot and usually dry summers I thought this was an idea that might actually work. In the heat of the summer our vegetables quite often "cook" on the vines. I planted climbing  beans on the trellis on two sides, rows of corn in between and pumpkins in the corner. It has become a veritable jungle. A happy and productive jungle. The corn is over two metres tall and loaded with yummy cobs, the beans have grown up the sides and over the top of the trellis, shading...

During the past few years gardening here has been very labour intensive. Building a garden in a paddock is hard work and we are organic in principle so no spraying of weeds allowed. I feel like I am always getting things back in order and it is very hard work. This is exacerbated by the fact that for the last three years I have been away at least two weeks every month  working and Peter has been working and renovating so the garden has always lacked regular consistent attention. Well that is going to change, I am not going to be away working nearly as much, in fact I am not going to work nearly as much at all so i will have much more time for the garden. I really want to get on top of some of the hard jobs in the garden in a more permanent way. Not least because I am getting older and although I think the hard work is good for me it does at times sap my motivation and get in the way of my enjoyment of the whole process. I want to have more time to plan and to potter and improve t...

I spent most of the weekend in the garden despite the hot weather. We had a thunder storm on Saturday night and got over an inch of rain so that has renewed my gardening energy. Prior to that storm it had been dry all January and now it is getting very hot. 42 degrees forecast for Australia day on Wednesday. Other than fruit and vegetable maintenance my plan for the weekend was to get the rose gardens back in order. There are three main rose gardens and the climbers. In some ways they have had a very tough summer. Initially it was mild, wet and humid so for the first time we have black spot in the roses. Then it has been hot and dry, usually that is fine but I think all the plants are a bit soft after the cool start to summer. they need to toughen up. In the meantime the weeds have got away a bit and the mulch needs redoing. So the first and most laborious task was the weeding. Three big barrows of weeds later and I was ready to mulch. I got the Jemima garden all completed but then t...

I picked the first tomatoes of the season yesterday. Following l Peter Cundall 's advice I have picked them when they started to colour and have them sitting in a cool spot in the kitchen. On the wood stove actually, as it is not lit at the moment. They grew on a volunteer bush in the Jemima rose garden. We ate one the other morning and it was a bit disappointing, you could tell its origins were a supermarket tomato not one of our nice heritage ones. Never mind the ones I planted are almost ripe, the Christmas Grape Tomatoes will be first I think followed by some Tigerilla's. The volunteer has a lot of tomatoes on it though so i think i will use it to make an early batch of Green tomato chutney which we usually cant get enough of.