Fruity passions

Our passionfruit vines have gone bananas this year.  They keep flowering over and over again, the honey eater birds are all over the vines pollinating the flowers and huge round fruits just keep growing.

For lunch I've been having passionfruit straight off the vine over cold Greek yoghurt.  Yum!

My fingers and hands smell like passionfruit juice, my mouth feels tangy and those little black seeds go crunch between my teeth.

We also finally harvested the olives from our front yard, enough was enough of the over ripe ones falling from the tree and rolling down the driveway to be inevitably squashed under the car tyres.  I'm up to my elbows in pickling olives in salt water - its not as romantic as it sounds.  More on that later!

New

A new camera body and lenses have come to live at our house.  A lovely macro lense is rocking my world, I have a whole new way of photographing the world around me up close.

The curls of my baby's hair.

The seedlings I've been planting in my garden.

And I've been playing around with exactly how close up I can take a picture of a piece of fabric.
Just because.  Look at the weave on that chicken!

Much fun.

What's new for you?

Olive picking

 

We recently found out that our house has a name in the street for being "the house with the olive trees". We do indeed have six olive trees in the front garden - this year four of them flowered and produced olives.  After watching and wondering how big they should get and what colour they should be before we picked them we came to the conclusion that some of the trees were green olive trees (so we would be waiting for ever for them to change colour!) and some were black olive trees. Seeing as most of black olives had turned black we decided this weekend it was time to pick.

Of course you can't enjoy olives straight off the tree, you have to cure them.  After a little research we went with a 10% salt solution, to be changed every week for 5-6 weeks.  We've also put a little cut down the side of each olive to help the process along.

Two glass jars of olives in salt water are certainly looking handsome on my kitchen bench right now.  We are really hoping this works and we get some edible olives around the end of March.  I'll keep you posted.

A bowl of beans

This summer we grew beans, purple beans, they grew well on a tripod in the garden, nothing seemed to bother them except for a small nibble by some grasshoppers and we have just picked a whole bowl full.

Some of them are handsome and straight, others are twisted and kind of ugly.

I cooked some up for dinner, steamed them in with the potatoes and pumpkin.  Funnily enough when I opened the steamer the beans had turned green, a regular green bean colour.  I noticed later that the steamer water had gone a pinkish, purpley colour.  They were delicious, quite sweet tasting actually, but we left some of the beans on the plant too long as some were too stringy to eat, so now we know to pick them before they start to look too lumpy in their skins.  Now as an added bit of fun we are going to experiment with the mature beans, we've left a lot on the plant on purpose to see how much further they develop and in the mean time I have to go and discover what we can do with them...

Babies

This summer we are again experimenting with a few edibles in our garden.  This year we are wiser and have a more elaborate possum proofing enclosure over the plants they like to eat (and the ones we suspect they would enjoy a nibble at) and are elbow deep in an ongoing battle with orange stink bugs on our citrus trees.  So far we have (prepare yourselves for some scintillating pictures folks...):

Baby limes

Baby lemons

Baby avocados

And baby olives!  Aren't they cute?  We are very excited that some of the olive trees in the front garden are fruiting this year.

In the ground we have baby radishes

and baby tomatoes...

 ...and some purple beans, a blueberry plant, two passionfruit vines, a rosella plant, some sweet corn and a thriving patch of herbs.

We don't expect to get success with everything we have planted, but its lots of fun trying and learning as we go. 

 

It pretty much came to this

Our first experiment with food growing this year has had only small results, but satisfying none the less.  Three types of tomatoes bore fruit and the green ones are slowly ripening on the kitchen bench.  One type was called "Black Russian" and these are turning a kind of unattractive purple colour - yet to find out how these will taste.  The little cherry tomatoes were definitely the most prolific, and the plant went nuts and grew upwards and sideways and all over the other plants.

The basil, mint, lemon balm, sage and thyme all continue to grow, but the possums are partial to the parsley and dill and regularly nibble them back to their stalks.  The capsicums never grew at all, zucchinis grew beautifully and flowered mostly male flowers and then died, the butter beans gave out one lot of beans and then turned their toes up and died and the rockmelon flowered a lot, made a few melons and then also just suddenly died. It seems we have a lot more experimenting to do before we are successful at a crop of anything other than tomatoes!  In the meantime home grown tomatoes on pizza is on the menu tonight.

My creative space: citrus

Today I am loving all things citrus.

On the tree, lemons slowly ripening in the colder weather.  We have lost a few lemons lately due to some creature that loves eating lemon peel - possums? rats?  I'm hoping I don't lose all my meagre crop.

In the fruit bowl - mandarins, lemons and grapefruits.

 

I didn't want this beautiful grapefruit from the market to go to waste so I juiced it this morning - I prefer orange juice, but I'm sure a dose of sour citrus juice was good for me somehow!

In the sewing room, its all been about yellow this week too.

For more juicy creative spaces, click on over to here.

Ripe

I picked a lime off our tree.

I had my doubts about ripeness - but it was beautifully juicy and fragrant.

Only one thing to use it for really.

Disclaimer: in my current state, I unfortunately was not able to partake.

Thanks to Nic for THE INFORMATION.

How does your garden grow?

In February we cleared and dug.

Then we planted.

We watched...

...and waited.

In March we are discovering...

...bunches of tiny tomatoes that already smell so good...

...butter beans almost ready for picking...

...that rockmelon plants really do want to take over your garden...

...that zucchini plants are huge and you really should space them about 60cm apart...

...that rosemary has purple flowers...

 

...and that we have no idea how to tell if a lime is ripe.