Carrot Love and Eating a Rainbow

Thinning the carrots, a job that is necessary for good yields, yet goes against my instincts to love and nurture the plants until fully grown.  At least they are getting to edible size, so will not be wasted. We only have been without home-grown carrots for two weeks since December last year.  The supermarket ones taste so bland after eating our own. 

 Carrot Love

 Broken hearted

 Carrot demolisher. Note the summer hat - it is the middle of winter and we are indoors, but the little one feels under-dressed without a hat.

Eating a Rainbow

1. Purple mash, from a medley of potatoes that included Purple Congos. Photo is a bit overexposed and doesn't really do the cool colour of this mash justice.  I made a lazy mash which included the skins - I really can't be bothered peeling potatoes and saw Jamie Oliver do this once. Tasted delicious. I am a huge fan of the purple congos, such good looks, and I am finding they are storing really well.
2. Yellow and red tomatoes, the last few from the garden. Just a few yellow cherry tomatoes are holding on.
3. Green and red garden leaves - rocket, freckle lettuce, beetroot leaves, sorrel
4. Watermelon radish, white with a terrific red blush in the centre
5. Green and yellow pickled zuchinni
6. Home made tomato relish
7. Brown lentil salad with parsley, balsamic vinegar and olive oil. Variations of this salad come out a couple of times a week in our house.
8. Free Range Chicken Sausages

Love how much we can fill our plates with our own produce, and how beautiful the different heirloom varieties are. We discussed how it was healthy to eat a rainbow with the kids last year and it really resonated with the little one.  Now she looks at her plate and quickly comments if it is lacking in colour. We have to rush and find her a carrot to brighten up her dish if it is looking a little bland.

Some unexpected excitement here at bed time tonight.  I was reading our littlest a book when the house started shaking beneath us. There was rattling and rumbling and the feeling of a very large train going past our house. I called out to the bigger kids so they knew what was happening and the middle one had a bit of a nasty fright, it is a surreal feeling. So glad that an earthquake is unlikely to amount to much in this part of the world. That 20 seconds felt incredibly long. Makes you think about how little we know of what is happening beneath our feet and the power of nature. Those poor New Zealanders who are feeling tremors on a regular basis, it would be so unnerving.

Muffins, Zuchinni, Seeds, Love, Wisteria

Spicy Zuchinni and Apple Muffins

(makes 24)

3 cups of self raising flour

pinch salt

3 tspns of mixed spices that you like - nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon, ground cloves etc

11/2 cups raw sugar

2 eggs

1/2 cup grapeseed oil

1 cup grated apple

2 cups grated zuchinni

1/2 cup chopped pecans, walnuts (also fine without when baking for lunch boxes)

Heat oven to 180 c

Grease muffin tins

Mix all dry ingredients in bowl

Mix wet ingredients in separate bowl

Make well and incorporate ingredients together

Bake until golden brown

 approx 20mins

Romance is not huge in our house.  Occasionally I like to surprise Mr Bowerbird with one out of the box. Or in this case out of the zuchinni. I was up late, grating and freezing zuchinni,  making zuchinni muffins, and saving zuchinni seeds. Suddenly I was inspired to leave a seedy message.

And this is his reply.

 I was quite taken with the creative use of oats.

The declarations of love didn't photograph so well early in the morning so I've given them a little glamour courtesy of the new photo effects in Picasas 3. I've been resisting this sort of photo filtering on my blog and have been keeping it real (I also don't have an iPhone, so don't have ready access to the likes of Instagram). However, sometimes life is a little boring, or the hues in a photograph just don't do the occasion justice. Actually the more I played with the photo editor, the more I thought that photos looked better in the 70s. I wonder if, in the future, we'll look back at all the heavily altered pictures of this decade and roll our eyes, so 2012. Are you a filterer?

It has been great gardening weather.

We've been pruning back our rampant wisteria.  I  mistakenly said to my partner to go hard, as the darn thing needs constant control.  Without any discussion, he decided to cut the thick vines at waist height, killing masses of the plant in all directions. Not quite what I had in mind. Then he left this dead material for me to stare at in dismay for weeks. I said I hated looking at it, as it's right at the front door. Oh well, he said, we don't get many visitors. No zuchinni seeds tonight! 

After a huge day of pruning and hauling wisteria to the burn pile we discovered our verandah was seriously rotten underneath, so perhaps the hard prune was fortuitous and may save us being struck from a falling beam.

While the clippers were out I got a little snip happy and gave some other plants a prune. The little Bowerbird decided the balls looked like a critter and gave them a face.

This mock orange is another unweildy member of the plant kingdomm constantly sending out shoots all over the path and into the meter box.  A hard prune for it too. Some plants should come with warnings!

There has been lots of weeding.

And some stopping to smell the flowers.  The first pink Boronia of Autumn, I adore the smell of Boronias, especially the finicky Brown Boronia. I love how paper daisies close their flowers when there is no sunshine, it's as if they're saying brrrrr.

The corn without cobs also faced the wrath of the secateurs, I think we will pick the last of it this week. 

Some new visitors to our garden that I am quite chuffed about. Choughs. They're searching for bugs to eat amongst the fruit tree mulch. I have seen them frequently in our area, but never in the backyard.  These are wonderfully communal birds that hang out in groups of 7-10, they all pitch in and help to raise the young together. I planted some snow peas beside the Apricot today.

They are actually unimaginatively named White-winged Choughs, because they have white visible on their wings when in flight. A great site to find more about birds is Birds in Backyards, here is their link about Choughs -  http://www.birdsinbackyards.net/species/Corcorax-melanorhamphos

The epic sawdust paths mission is nearing completion. Mr Bowerbird has also been fixing some of the beds with reclaimed red gum sleepers. Our neighbours cat thought we had built a giant kitty litter for it, and left us an unwelcome surprise.

The garlic is racing upwards, I keep finding last years forgotten garlic in new places, these are all transplanted garlic. The potatoes from the last crop keep trying to re-emerge amongst the garlic, I can pick the purple congo potatoes before digging them up, as their leaves have purple veins.

 Would you cut these beautiful old twisted vines?

Sisterly love in the 70s

My sister and I are around the age of my youngest two in this photo.  Mum sent it to me today.

I remember: 

the prickly blue blanket,

endlessly reading golden books,
determined I would teach my sister to read,

smooth floral sheets, 

evil pink Ted with the scary blue eyes,

and most of all,
cuddling my little sister,

she always liked to hop in my bed for company,

and I never minded.

I wonder what my children will remember,I'll have to try and get some shots of them in bed, you spend so much of your life there but its not usually a photo moment.