Tag Archives: bloody butcher

Late October Promises a Change in the Weather

October 26, 2021 Irihapeti Leave a comment

Warmer Weather

Entry to the vegetable garden is through the hidden gate in the stick fence.

Time has scooted by. I last wrote in June and since then, South Head has experienced days, weeks and months of disappointing weather. Strong winds that have swept branches off trees. Downpours so heavy that gutters have overflowed, whole sections of the garden borders have been submerged, and fragile seedlings have been battered. We’ve had numerous power cuts and the gravel road outside our property has been chewed up by logging and stock trucks, or on the rainless days (I hesitate to use the word ‘sunny’), clouds of dust have drifted onto the solar panels, propelled by any car that takes the slope down past our place a little too fast.

While I can’t do anything about the vehicles going past, November is in the air, and perhaps the weather will finally settle.

The garden, overall

The easterly gales of the past few days have done their dash, allowing the sun to finally slip out from under her korowai of clouds. After lunch today, the temperature climbed from 17 to 24 in the space of 30 minutes. I was intending to study, but instead of once again putting blogging on the back burner, I chose instead to defer my study . 🙂

Of course the gardens don’t care about the miserable weather, they’ve just carried on doing their stuff. In fact everything is horrifically lush, and it’s nearly impossible to keep up with the weeds and the lawn mowing. Nothing holds the natural world back; last time I posted we were still collecting feijoa and now they’re back in bloom for the next season of fruit.

It’s the same with the avocados. We’re still harvesting the crop from last year’s flowering, while alongside them on the tree, the new baby fruit are starting to set. I guess this at least shows we had some windless days. It’s difficult for bees to pollinate flowers when its blowing a gale.

Fruiting cherries don’t do so well this far north, they like a hard frost, but our two struggling trees still manage to produce some blossom. The same can’t be said for limes. The two lime trees are smothered with flowers, despite being afflicted badly by citrus borer. And there’s nothing nicer than seeing the first plump buds on the pear tree.

This year I was determined to raise all our flowers and vegetables from seed. I’ve had some disappointments – baby plants being dug up by blackbirds, or chewed by beetles, slugs and snails. Some have failed to germinate, but I haven’t give up. Some I clearly put out too early, even though we don’t experience frosts this far north. My earliest gherkins, zucchinis and squashes just sat in the ground looking sorry for themselves before finally curling up and dying. But, I’ve had many more successes than disappointments.

Things we can eat

Broad beans

The broad bean plants were only a few centimetres tall in June, but now we’re consuming their crop. I like to nuke the beans into a paste with a little butter and miso. The plants themselves have grown far taller than we expected. The seed packet suggested staking them at one metre, but they’ve kept on growing, and now reach to over two metres. Every time a wind has howled in from a new direction, we’ve had to scurry outside to re-tie them.

Tomatoes

Some of our 25 tomato plants. To the left is our first ‘baby’ bloody butcher.

Our tomatoes are many. I think I counted 25 out there. The three varieties I chose to sow this year are Black Krim (a delicious heirloom variety), Bloody Butcher (a good all-rounder) and the cherry tomato, Indigo Blue Berries. The first fruits are forming and I can’t wait to have fresh outdoor tomatoes again. Proper tomatoes. Through most of winter I’ve resisted buying store tomatoes as they just aren’t the same. Tomatoes are just about my favourite plant to grow. They’re so easy, and so versatile, and after having lived in Dunedin for 25 years, I still haven’t quite gotten used to growing them outdoors.

Garlic and Egyptian walking onions

The garlic and onions are going well. This was one of the patches we completely covered during winter.

It was April when we put down the groundcover on a complete length of the vegetable garden. This activity certainly paid off and the patch is now home for garlic, onions, lettuces and tomatoes. We’ve mulched them with compost a couple of times already, but it’s already difficult to see where it was. Compost mulches will be critical as the days grow warmer. They protect and feed the plants, and keep the moisture down in the soil when the summer sun is doing its best to evaporate it off.

Grapes

This grapevine has been slow to get established, unlike the white variety that grows rampantly on the northern side of the barn. The grape is Albany Surprise and in my opinion is far superior to the white grape, due to the sweet and spicy flavour of its juicy bunches. The vine is looking really good this year, with numerous clusters of fruit.

Gardens new and gardens relocated

The new melon bed, with our first seedlings, a dozen rock melon plants.

Ben has dug me a brand new garden – a bed for melons. We’ve tried to grow these before and we just put the plants in the back paddock and left them, assuming they’d survive. Well, they didn’t. Or actually, they did, but I think all they produced was a couple of tiny, tiny fruit. This year we have a dedicated bed filled with compost and in sunlight for most of the day. I’ve raised seedlings of rock and watermelon, and am hoping for the best!

The bed is in the middle of the lawn close to the house so we can easily keep an eye on it, but already the sparrows have been in and have tossed the compost around. Fingers crossed the plants will get their roots going and dig in before they, too, are evicted. Only the rock melons are planted for now; I need twice as much space to fit the watermelons in as well.

Strawberries

Another task we achieved since June was to dig up our congested bed of strawberries. We selected a few strong plants, and replanted them beneath the lemon verbena. We’re hoping that they’ll do better there, especially with the netting cover. Usually our strawberries get picked to pieces by the blackbirds who nest in the trees near the vegetable garden.

Beehive update

The olive trees are covered in flowers. Bees collect pollen and nectar.

One of our three hives failed over winter. We lost the queen, and think that she most likely died of natural causes; she was never a strong queen. We weren’t completely surprised, as even before we confirmed the loss, the hive had very little brood. So we cleaned up the hive and surrounding area and last weekend added the honey boxes to the brood boxes.

The two remaining hives are buzzing! And on days like this the bees are out and about collecting pollen and nectar. There are so many plants in flower this time of year that there’s nothing to hold them back. Standing beneath one of the olive trees, earlier today, all I could hear was the satisfying hum of the bees.

Plants of the flowering kind

We cleared out the garden by the pathway using our own compost. Lettuces are sprouting everywhere amongst the dahlias and poppies.

My new project has been to clean up and tidy the strip of garden alongside the pathway in front of our kitchen window. It has always been a problem due to a nasty weed (a bulb) that I haven’t been able to eliminate. I’ve been trying for years.

Ben became so fed up at the hours I’ve spent in this small area, that he suggested digging out and removing all of the soil, and replacing it with compost and new soil. It was the best thing we could have done.

I love this new garden and even though it’s still early days and there’s not much flowering there yet, I can see it from the kitchen window and it always cheers me up. An amusing extra is that the compost was filled with seeds from the vegetable garden. Lettuces, dill, coriander, even a couple of tomatoes have sprouted. I doubt that the dill can stay there for long, but I might leave a couple.

I’ve planted the majority of my basil seedlings there, as well as pinks, dahlia, zinnias, poppies, bellis, and viola, so it will be a cottage-cum-kitchen garden. I’m looking forward to posting some photos once the seedlings begin to mature.

A trio of flowers: Bird of paradise, aquilegia and Emma’s rose.

Despite the shambles in my various flower beds, it’s still lovely to see the spring flowers. Every flower gives me a good feeling.

Whether it’s the poppies I’ve raised from seed, or the blossom on the fruit trees. Each flower is a promise of something… a pure splash of colour, a beautiful aroma, or a juicy piece of fruit.

Native Garden

I thought I should mention our small native garden. This is situated in an area that was just weeds and junk when we first bought the property. It’s got to the stage now that trees self-sow, and our original specimens are reaching up to the sky.

Not bad for less than ten years of growth!

Garden reality and reminiscing

View of the garden looking north-west. Kumara mounds in the foreground.

The garden is still untidy and there’s always more to be done. Sometimes it feels that for every step forward, there are two steps backwards. Once the weather begins to warm, which it’s doing now, everything just takes off.

This time last year I was staying at Mt Maunganui with Dad, and regularly visiting Mum in the rest home. While I was there, I was yearning for my garden, so I can’t complain about the work now.

My love of gardening and of having a garden began when I was a small child. In the early years Dad kept a vegetable garden, and we had fruit trees. From Mum I picked up a love of the beauty of flowers and trees. I regret that Dad never made it back to my garden. I’d always imagined a time when he would see out his last few years here, pottering around doing the outside things he liked to do.

On a garden rake
Dad tows me between the rows.
Moist earth, a bird cries.

(26/10/2021)

Writing

The Mysterious Mr Montague

October 15, 2015 Irihapeti 1 Comment

Bloodlines, edited by Amanda Pillar — Bloodlines edited by Amanda Pillar

My short story, The Mysterious Mr Montague has been published in the Ticonderoga Press publication Bloodlines.

Bloodlines hasn’t yet been launched officially, but a pre-launch party was held at the recent Conflux 11 speculative fiction convention in Canberra, Australia. It would have been wonderful to have been able to attend in person!

The great news is that Bloodlines is now available for purchase either from Amazon or directly from Ticonderoga Press (the latter in either soft or hard cover). click here

Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway!) I’m very excited to have my story published in an actual book (rather than an e-copy) and grateful to Ticonderoga Press for accepting The Mysterious Mr Montague for their anthology of stories about blood.

The tale itself is set in Kilbirnie (Wellington, NZ) in the 1970s. At various times back then I lived in the nearby suburbs of Hataitai and Lyall Bay. I walked the streets of Kilbirnie and Evans Bay, frequently. My identical twin uncles owned a butcher shop in Kilbirnie.

It was fun to write and I particularly liked adding reference to ‘The Larch’. Back in the 70s in Wellington, you would see ‘The Larch’ scrawled as graffiti on many walls and previously blank spaces. It was in reference to the Monty Python’s sketch of the same name. The Larch

My story, of course, is complete fiction, but I did enjoy drawing from my memories of the area and the time.

Last month, editor Amanda Pillar, invited the various authors to write a guest post on her blog site about their tales. Here’s a link to mine… Bloodlines Guest Post Jane Percival.

Garden Notes, South Head

Summer to Autumn

March 5, 2015 Irihapeti Leave a comment

March

I started this post over a month ago but recent circumstances got the better of me and I didn’t get it finished. Today I’ve made the commitment to at least get something posted – after all, the whole point of a blog is keeping up with it.

We’ve had a little rain – just enough to prevent it being declared a drought in our area, unlike some other parts of NZ – but it’s getting very dry now. As I write a large truck has come scuttling down the hill and along the gravel road beyond our gate. Huge clouds of dust drift and settle on our property.

I think of the solar panels and how they will most likely need to be cleaned manually if we don’t get a decent rainfall soon. You’d be surprised how much dust settles up there! Or perhaps you wouldn’t.

As I write it’s around 1.30 pm and 27 C outside in the shade. By the time the sun comes around it will get very hot where I’m sitting, even with all the windows open. It’s much too warm and humid for me outside at this time of day. The sun just bears down relentlessly – hence the garden is quite neglected. I’m hanging out for cooler mornings and evenings now that it’s Autumn.

Garden

The garden has still been remarkably productive, considering that until last week (when I put in a row of broccoli and rocket) I hadn’t sowed anything new since December. We are still producing enough vegetables not to have to purchase anything other than the occasional bag of potatoes.

The basket above shows some of the vegetables we’ve been harvesting since I last wrote, but the green beans are finished now. As are the peas and we just didn’t eat any of the lettuces I diligently sowed in Spring and early Summer – they kept going to seed as we were eating other vegetables, so I stopped sowing them.

Vegetables

The vegetables we’ve been consuming the most of, lately, have been tomatoes, turnips and zucchinis.

Golden Turnip and Zucchini - summer staples — Turnip ‘Golden Ball’ and Zucchini ‘Costasta Romanesco’ – summer staples

The heirloom golden ball turnip is a delicious little vegetable and easy to prepare.

A simple recipe I use is to peel them, then cut them into cubes and blanch in boiling water. Drain the water off and saute the cubes in a little oil of your choice until they start to brown in patches, add 1 tbsp butter, 1 tsp brown sugar and 2 tsp apple cider vinegar. Stir through to form a light glaze. Season with salt and pepper and they are ready to eat.

Tomatoes: Bloody Butcher, Black Krim, Mortgage Lifter — Tomatoes (Left to Right): Bloody Butcher, Black Krim, Mortgage Lifter

The three varieties of tomato that I grew this year are ‘Black Krim’, ‘Mortgage Lifter’ and ‘Bloody Butcher’. Of the three, I definitely prefer Black Krim and Mortgage Lifter.

Tomatoes (Left to Right): Bloody Butcher, Black Krim, Mortgage Lifter

While Bloody Butcher has a nice flavour, I much prefer the texture and size of the other two. As a matter of interest, I collected one of each and cut them in half to show how different they are from each other, inside. (Hence, the images above.)

Garlic drying on our back fence and a plate of newly-pulled beetroot. — Garlic drying on our back fence and a plate of newly-pulled beetroot ‘Crosbys Egyptian Flat’.

We’ve had enough cucumbers to keep us going, but not too many, and of course the usual carrots, rocket, basil… silver beet, beetroot, that we usually have on an ongoing basis.

I’ve lifted our almost all the garlic (yes, I know, it’s very late in the season not to have completed this task) and all the Egyptian Walking Onions. We had amazing crops of each of these. The onions are great and we have strung them up to dry out, and the garlic bulbs are very fat this year.

We do have a large section of our garden devoted to main crop potatoes but I have a bad feeling about them. We didn’t really realise how much water they require and should have been watering the plants as they developed. We poked around beneath the soil of a couple of plants a few weeks back and they really had nothing much under there, just some tiny, tiny potatoes.

Oh well, there’s always next year, I guess. At least we did have a decent amount of ‘earlies’ prior to Christmas.

Fruit

Passion fruit and Plums

Fruit-wise we’ve had a glut of Passion fruit and are making sure that we each consume several per day so that they don’t go to waste. They are lovely big Passion fruit and are extremely juicy and flavoursome. We still have pulp from last season that we froze a year ago as it was so precious (haha!). I’m definitely not going to freeze any this year.

I did manage to process some of our plums in January. We had so many, all ready at the same time, so we halved and froze some for later, ate a great deal and used the rest for jam and plum wine.

Plum Wine

The left-hand image above shows this year’s batch of plum wine directly after the first racking off. Prior to that I’d fast-fermented the must on the skins for the first few days, to bring through a little of the red colour – the plums themselves are yellow-fleshed.

We also opened a bottle of our plum wine from 2010 – we tend to forget that we have bottles of fruit wine in our cellar. It was actually not bad!

Fiery Plum and Habanero Jam

The jam was basically just plums, sugar and habanero pepper. I had to keep tasting the jam as I went along to ensure it was hot enough (but not too hot!); I added more habanero as it cooked. It turned out really well.

It’s very rich in flavour and ideal either just as jam, or added to casseroles or curries to give them an extra zing. It’s also good with cold meats and cheeses. Nice and spicy! I love the taste of habanero.

Molly

Well, there’s a sad tale to tell about Molly (it has a happy ending, though). I’ll have to write up what happened in a separate blog or I’ll never get this posted.

I’ll finish with a photo of a couple of my dahlias. They are very pretty… this photo was taken a week or two ago, they don’t look so perky today, due to the lack of rain.

Dahlias ' ' and 'Apache blue'. — Dahlias ‘Taratahi Lilac ‘ and ‘Apache blue’.

Garden Notes, South Head

End of February

February 27, 2014 Irihapeti Leave a comment

Garden Update

The maize in the paddock next door is dry

It seems ages since I’ve posted anything. February has been so busy and now that it’s almost over, I can’t think where the days went to. The sun is rising noticeably later and setting noticeably earlier. The temperature range is still in the high 20s to low 30s Celsius, but there is the ‘smell’ of Autumn in the air. It has been extremely humid, and almost unbearable for sleeping at night. During the hottest parts of the day I still stay inside where it’s shady and much cooler.

The maize in the paddock next door has dried to a pale golden colour and rattles in the wind. The days are loud with the clicking of cicadas, and the nights with the more musical chirping of black field crickets.

Much has been happening in the garden, including our banana flowering for the first time, tomatoes, tomatoes and more tomatoes, and a very good crop of garlic. It’s been extremely dry, and sadly, I fear that some of the newer small shrubs may have been lost – many are looking very dry and shriveled up and it’s just about impossible to water them as the earth has become so dry and hard. Large cracks are spreading in some places, and there are many patches where the grass has completely dried off. The pumpkins and squashes are dying back and we’ve given up on our zucchinis. There have been just too many of them.

In the vegetable garden, our best crops at the moment are basil, peas, silver beet, the last tomatoes, beetroot and chilli peppers. We have a new batch of scarlet runners that look pretty healthy and the passion fruit are dropping from the vine. I am always amazed at how lushly basil grows, even when it’s so dry.

Banana ‘Mons Mari’

The most exciting development has been our banana ‘Mons Mari‘ flowering for the very first time. I observed the very first spike of purple (which was the beginning of the flower stalk) on Monday 03 February.

This plant has been in our garden since April 2011 – I realise now that we didn’t plant it in a very good place – it’s exposed to the wind from the North and is also in very poor soil.

The flower stalk appears out of the centre once the plant is fully grown, hanging down as the flower develops. The male flower develops at the end of the flower stalk creating a bell, with the female flowers spiralling around the stem.

Nevertheless, it has produced an amazing flower stalk of small bananas with more still forming. We counted 170 the last time we checked – and remarkably this is only 3 weeks or so since the flower first appeared.

Tomatoes

We’ve had so many tomatoes that I couldn’t keep up with picking them. The most successful have been the heirloom varieties, ‘Cherokee Purple‘, ‘Black Krim‘ and ‘Black from Tula‘, and the cherry tomato, ‘Suncherry’.

The latter have been dropping to the ground like berries and to be honest, we haven’t kept up with them. I also grew ‘Bloody Butcher‘ and this was a very nice, smaller tomato, but nothing really beats the taste of the big beauties. Some of the tomatoes were tunneled into by caterpillars, but not too badly. And this year all have ripened, so I won’t be making any Green Tomato Chutney.

Left to Right: Spicy tomato sauces, Greek tomato paste, Tomato sauce — Left to Right: Spicy tomato sauce, Greek tomato paste, Tomato sauce

I’ve ended up turning just about all the excess tomatoes (and there have been kilos of them!) into tomato concentrate and tomato sauces. I’m really pleased with a couple of recipes, so will post these in the near future.

This year is the first time I’ve tired making tomato concentrate. I tried two recipes – a plain one and a Greek version. The taste of both, compared with the tomato paste you can purchase commercially, is far superior. Sweet, tangy, fragrant and rich with the flavour of tomatoes that have been ripening in the sun.

Garlic

Garden bulbs hanging on the fence to ripen

I’ve grown garlic for three years now at South Head and this is the best crop I’ve harvested. There are more than 30 bulbs, a few of which I’ve left in the ground to mature a little longer.

I’ve read that garlic grows to its own conditions, which means that each year, if you use cloves from your own crop, the results will be better. I love it that I can grow enough garlic to last an entire year. We were literally turning the last of our 2013 garlic cloves into paste on the same day as we lifted the first bulb for 2014.