garden share collective: july

Zzz.

 

That is the sound of a vegetable garden sleeping. Of not much happening. Because it is winter in Hobart; the days are dark and cold, as is the soil. At this time of the year, I only see my garden on the weekends; after work is out of the question unless I’m carrying a torch! And honestly, I’d rather be inside with the heater and my colourful woolly socks on.

 

Actively growing in my garden right now are three established silverbeet plants, and the row of ten I planted last month, now about a ‘hand’ high (see pic at very bottom). The newer plants need to be watered about twice a week, because we are not getting much rain on my side of the river; nor have there been heavy dews (STOP PRESS: I drafted this during the week, and while it generally holds true, last night we had a massive 35 mls of heavy rain, and it continues on and off today. Bliss! Tanks, buckets, bird baths and puddles are full and everything washed clean). So out comes my pink watering can (and mid-week, the torch) if I want my little forest of kale to flourish:

 

 

The garlic in the growbags continues nicely. I’m taking the healthy condition of the elegantly tapered greenery as a sign of good things happening below the soil.

 

The most significant recent work has been to dig over the beds. I know there are arguments against digging — damaging soil structure the main one — but I like to do it just once a year, to loosen the ground that has been compacted after the summer growing season and to dig in nutritious goodies. And oh what goodies! Dad provided bags of humid, pinkish mushroom compost; dry and finely pulverised chook manure that somehow smelt sweet and chocolately; ash from their recent burn off; and some sheep manure obviously procured straight from the shearing sheds, as evidenced by the occasional tuft of wool. Surely digging these riches right into the soil is beneficial? Especially when we get so little rain, not enough to drive the nutrients down.

 

My friend J came over for a couple of hours one Sunday, bringing with him his mattock, various spades and shovels — and most importantly, his all-male muscles. It took him a mere hour to lift the grass from an area about two metres square and turn over the soil. That would have taken me all day! He also made light work of loosening the existing beds as I distributed the manures and compost. J, thank you so much for doing the heavy work (despite the cold air, dear readers, he worked up a sweat) and bringing my new garden bed dreams a step closer to reality! Summer tomatoes and corn, here we come (J has been promised the first tomatoes).

 

What J uncovered in the new bed — or rather, didn’t uncover — has also cheered me immensely. I was expecting to find a web of roots left from the bay tree we removed recently. I mean, look at what’s in another adjacent bed:



 

I will be lifting this stuff out for months. How could anything else grow in such a tangle? It certainly explains why some of my peas failed miserably last summer.

 

In other areas reclaimed from the lawn, I’ve battled with old building fill — loose rubble, large concrete lumps and other rubbish that is not uncommon beneath suburban lawns (according to J, who shocked me with horror tales from other jobs he’s done). But he hit only one large concrete slab, right near the edge of the new plot. Quite manageable! So I’m off to a promising start, and will probably be able to use this bed this summer rather than spend a season rehabilitating it.

 

Now I just need dad to frame up the new bed and install some raised gangplanks or duckboards between the rows (as dreamt about in a previous Garden Share post), and I’ll be set for spring planting!

 

But until then, the garden will be a quiet. I’m looking forward to being made envious by the other gardeners in our Garden Share Collective this month — all in much warmer, sunnier, more northern, greener, more productive and colourful places! So join me by clicking on the logo in the column at right to see more green thumbs.

oaty crumble

This was exactly the crumble topping I had been craving: crisp, loose and light in texture. Crumbly! Warm with brown sugar and cinnamon that filled the kitchen with a heady sweetness, but essentially not much more than toasty, crunchy rolled oats. Oats with little nuggets of macadamia and sweet ribbons of shredded coconut. And no flour; barely a skerrick of almond meal.

This crumble is probably a close cousin to toasted muesli or granola — and I’m half tempted to bake it on a cookie tray next time, without the fruit underneath. Because I find myself having a warmed bowl of dessert, with a dollop of thick cream, then going back to the fridge and stealing another spoonful of the oaty mix, cold. Perfect.

Oaty crumble
Adapted from an Anneka Manning recipe for the GI news website. Use your favourite seasonal fruit for this dessert — I’m leaving that up to you; this recipe is about the crumble!

• Preheat your oven to 180 and prepare enough fruit to almost fill a lightly buttered 6-cup capacity baking dish.
• Combine ½ cup rolled oats, ½ cup shredded coconut, 1/3 cup of chopped macadamia nuts, ¼ cup light brown sugar, 2 tbsp almond meal, 1 tspn cinnamon and ½ tspn mixed spice.
• In a separate bowl or jug, combine ¼ cup sunflower or very light olive oil with a generous ½ tspn of vanilla.
• Dribble the oil mix evenly over the dry ingredients and combine using a fork.
• Layer this over your fruit. Bake for 35–40 minutes until fruit is cooked and crumble topping nicely crisped. Serve with your favourite dairy product.

the big burn off

 

Almost 18 months on, and one of the final reminders of the January 2013 bushfires is gone. Fittingy, it has been burnt.

The large pile of fire-damaged trees, shrubs and other vegetation from mum and dad’s garden and orchard stretched across the bottom of my parents’ block. And by large, I mean roughly 45 metres long, 5 high and wide (and 900 cubic metres, dad calculated; the equivalent of 90 big blue tip trucks). The pile was a shape-shifter: it grew longer over those 18 months as progressively more trees were cut down and bushes pulled out by dad, mum, professional tree cutters, me, and even the occasional volunteer group, then ferried down the back in dad’s truck or ride-on mower pulling a trailer; even wheelbarrows. But it also shrank, as branches settled, or large limbs weighted down lighter, leafier masses. But it was always impressive, and became a familiar part of mum and dad’s landscape.

Over time, the pile also accepted non-bushfire stuff: rose prunings, agapanthus that survived the fire but became dominant weeds in the barren aftermath; and even my unwanted bay and apple trees.

 

Finally the local firies came to take care of the pile — it was always going to be too large for dad to be responsible for; we didn’t want to take any risks. I told my parents I wanted to be there to witness this strange milestone; after all, I had helped them in the months immediately after the fire, clearing their garden. I had warned my manager that if the firies said ‘now!’, I’d be leaving work. You may not be able to understand that, and there is no logic in it beyond wishing to watch this, the end of one of life’s chapters.

 

So one crisp, clear and fairly still Saturday afternoon, it began. Three firies from the local volunteer brigade and a couple of trucks trundled down the driveway. There is something about fire trucks that brings out the kid in us all (or maybe just me). Look mum, a fire engine — in our driveway! Mum, dad and I, and a couple of neighbours — some hovering near the fenceline, others closer, brandishing a bag of celebratory marshmallows. The joke of course being that you’d need a 20 foot stick for toasting them, so big would the fire be.

 

What I remember: the intense heat in the cool autumn air, drying my skin. The hypnotic, sparkling orange flames licking the blue sky; the falling ash. The crackle, the roaring whoosh as the flames created their own energy. Mum saying solemnly, I don’t like that sound. The men adopting that wide-legged stance, appraising what was happening; sharing a laugh but also tending the flames with their metal rakes and eagle eyes. One of the firies murmuring approvingly of their controlled work, that’s a beautiful burn. Four little field mice running helter-skelter from the flames, and us all giving a cheer. Boomer Bay is experiencing something of mini-mice plague at the moment, so the only good rodent it would seem is a burnt one. These were the ones that got away.

 

The embers glowed in the dark, safely, for hours. We have bagged up some of the ash (unfortunately damp from rain and rather like quicksand) and it is sitting in small mounds in my vegie garden, ready to dig in, because I’d read potash is good for the soil.

 

And dad has begun the pile again, because trees and roses and shrubs continue to be pruned; no longer fire-ravaged, just the normal cycle of a garden’s life. But I don’t think we’ll be letting the pile get quite that big again before the next burn.

 

blog hop: why i write

Recently I’ve been flapping about, floundering as the winter dark closes in, wondering where my energy and passion and commitment lies. Where’s my creative outlet? My intellectual challenge? Somehow, flopping on the couch after work with the latest Vogue doesn’t quite count. Should I take up drawing, or knitting, or learning Spanish, or learning about — what? Or who?

While I was half-heartedly trying to pin something down, Bec at Think Big Live Wisely invited me to take part in a blog hop on writing, and everything I’d been tossing around crystallised into this:

Where was my commitment to my writing?

(In detail: Wow, I’ve been invited to write about my writing! Someone likes my writing — someone thinks of me as a writer! But — what am I actually writing? How can I write about my writing when I’m not writing? I need to commit to my writing.)

So I took Bec’s invitation as a big nudge to reinvigorate the one way I creatively express and intellectually challenge myself: not through paint or wool or spoken works, but thru pen and paper. I used the blog hop’s questions to return my focus to my writing, on why I write — and then, to start writing again, regularly.

So here goes. Perhaps you’ll find out a little more about me, and not think this too narcissistic.

What am I working on?

Right. Um. This is the question that hit the nail on the head for me. I think by now you get the idea I am not working on … enough. There is Dig In, but there should be more ‘behind the scenes’ writing, every day, that never even appears beneath my spoon-and-trowel header. Practice, as they say, makes perfect, and I’m not practising enough if I want to consider myself a writer.

How does my writing differ from others in its genre?

Perhaps a certain ‘signature’ is that I share my failures. I will never be offered a paid writing gig when I write so often about the cake that burnt, the crumble that didn’t cook, and the cupcakes that exploded. Or the capsicum the snails ate!

But I like doing that, because I think there’s a myth that if you write/blog about food, you must be good at it, all the time. 

I am not a subject expert; I’m a subject explorer. I’m waving the flag for anyone who has a dud day in the kitchen. I’m the honest one admitting it.

Why do I write what I do?

I started to write about sowing kale seeds, sweeping autumn leaves, or simmering pasta sauce to get away from my day job, which is writing and editing for a government department. That work is ‘translating’ — converting legalistic or bureaucratic stuff into plain English stuff that hopefully anyone can understand and follow. Some days I get enormous satisfaction deciphering complex information for people, hoping it may help them.

But as challenging as it is, I can’t play with alliteration or adjectives or patterns in structure or other colourful parts of the English language. I can’t play. So with Dig In, I take off my editor’s hat for a bit, maybe even break the rules, and see where the words take me.

The kind of food I like to cook and eat is ‘from scratch’, made with fresh, seasonal ingredients. And I’m not a fancy cook (I like to bake quite old-fashioned cakes) and as much as possible I want to celebrate wonderful homegrown fruit and vegies in my kitchen — and in my writing. I am lucky to have attracted readers and other bloggers who share my love of real food.

I also like exploring ideas related to this domestic sphere — doing the dishes was a fun one — just to test what I can write about that.

Oh, and I should also add, I write because I can't take photos. As regular Dig In visitors may have noticed, this is a word-focussed blog, not a photo-driven one.

How does my writing process work?

Before I pick up pen and paper, writing starts in my head. While I’m pouring a cake batter into a tin, or weeding the parsley from around the silverbeet, or just going for a walk, I’m working out an angle, composing sentences, playing with words, rearranging phrases. It’s talking to myself, I guess!  (Hey, I do live alone.) In her book ‘Writing down the bones’, Natalie Goldberg said this was an important part of the writing process. She calls it ‘composting’: turning events and words over and over before writing about them. I cannot write immediately about anything, be it a successful pudding or a failed bean crop. I need to compost it first.

But when I pick up my pen and paper, after a few false starts (where my internal editor is stronger than my writer), I can astound myself where the words will go. Even if I have mentally rehearsed it a dozen times over! Sometimes I know how to start a piece but that’s all; soon my hand flies across the page, possessed, faster than my thoughts, which tumble out, the words and phrases surprising me. Where did that come from? When writing is like that, it is magical. Even if I am just writing about toast.

I hope you don't think this was too self-indulgent! Because writing can be a selfish thrill — and writing about one’s writing, even more so. But putting my words out into the blogosphere - it' s taking the internal and making it public, and I’m always touched and happily amazed when someone tells me they’ve enjoyed a post I’ve written (the sense of community from blogging was something I never expected, but I enjoy immensely). So thank you.

Part of this blog hop was to tap other writers on the shoulder to participate. If Bec hadn’t invited me, she would gave been on my list, as she has written some thought-provoking stuff, so please do go to her blog. And someone else beat me to Carla, who at My Yellow Heart has written about her experiences being transplanted from one extreme part of the country to another.

 

Let me introduce you to:

Sarah at The Garden Deli: Sarah writes thoughtfully about the vegies and flowers in her garden and kitchen. I always come away with something to think about or to try out. And as she is on the other side of the world to me (UK), we often compare the contrast between our seasons!

Rachel at The Food Sage: Rachel is a proper-really-truly food writer — it’s what she does as a living! I’m always interested in the topics Rachel explores in her clear writing style, be it a book review or an insight into the food industry.

Jo at All the BlueDay: Jo is a fellow Tasmanian (actually, I’m a ring-in) writing truthfully and humourously about her family life. I love Jo’s voice; it’s so vivid and sharp. She often makes me laugh — and wish I’d written that.

country style apple cakes

Let’s talk apples, because it is apple season. Or more precisely, let’s bake with apples and then eat the tender, sweet goodness. Because I would much rather eat an apple cake than eat a fresh apple.

I have a small stash of granny smiths in my laundry cupboard at the moment, from dad’s trees. You may think that is a strange place to store apples, until I tell you that it is the coolest part of the house right now; now that it is winter in Hobart and on some days the temperature doesn’t even reach double figures, so the heating is on to stay. Besides, it is nice opening the cupboard door for the peg basket or a new roll of toilet paper and seeing the bright green orbs of appleness, and inhaling their tangy sharpness.

I haven’t yet made a pie, or its rustic, more forgiving cousin, a free-form galette. But I have made an apple bread and butter pudding. Would you ever think to tuck tart slices of granny smith apples into your B&B pudding? I hadn’t either until I tried it at mum’s. I came home and made it myself, with fragrant, sultana-studded slices of panettone (squirreled away into the freezer at Christmas time) and a smear or two of apricot jam. The contrast between rich, squidgy custard and the apple, still a little firm to the bite, and still a little tart, was morish. Good thing I had made a generous dish–full. And while I’ve certainly been creative with B&B puddings in the past, adding lots of jam or liqueur or roasted fruit, I’d never thought to use fresh apples. It’s good to learn a new trick.

But it’s also good to make an old favourite, and this country-style apple cake appears at least once every apple season. I usually make one single round cake, which can be fairly impressive to behold, but this time I wanted to share some with my friend C, so cupcakes it was (plus, wasn’t one of my culinary resolutions this year to use up my stash of cupcake papers?)

Apart from the apple slices on top, the cake itself is fairly plain, just a smidgeon of spice to round out the flavour; barely there. I especially like these when they are warm, with a little curve of vanilla ice cream adorning the partially-submerged apple slices; or perhaps a pillowy spoonful of thick cream. Gosh, why would I want to eat an apple au naturale when it is so enticing in a cake?

Country-style apple cake

Adapted from an undated ‘Successful Baking’ recipe card. The recipe specified a 20 cm round tin; for that option, halve the apple slices instead of quartering them, and bake for about an hour.

• Preheat your oven to 180 and prep some muffin tins; I made 16.
• Quarter and core a couple of granny smith apples (leave the skin on).
• Cream 185 gms soft butter with ½ cup white sugar and ¼ cup light brown sugar for a few minutes.
• Beat in 1 tspn vanilla, then 2 large eggs.
• Sift and fold in a heaped ½ tspn mixed spice with 2 cups of SR flour (my recipe scribbles indicate I’ve also made this with 1 ¾ cups white SR and ¼ cup wholemeal SR flour).
• Stir thru 150 mls milk. While this a fairly firm batter, add a dribble more milk if the batter is too stiff to manoeuvre.
• Transfer the batter to your muffin or cake tins. Arrange the apple slices so they are standing up, and press in gently.
• Bake for about 25 minutes for cupcakes or until done.

garden share collective: june

I don't feel sad about winding down the veg garden after summer, and letting it (mostly) hibernate  over the winter months.

In fact, it feels more in tune with the seasonal changes to do so. The days are getting shorter and darker, the garden beds are seeing less sun as it is lower in the sky, and the soil will be getting colder too, along with the air.

So it has been satisfying to pull out the last of the beans and skeletal tomato bushes, lift up the makeshift duckboards I used as paths, wiggle out stakes, and lean the trellises against the back fence.

So yes, even though the garden is approaching its dormant period, I have been doing a little work. I also plan on engaging my friend B's partner J to dig over the soil and help me bury in a couple of bags of finely pulverised fowl and sheep manure and mushroom compost I brought back from dad (the car still smells). As a big chunk of my growing area is reclaimed from the lawn, I enjoy this process of feeding it up; I also recognise that it will be necessary for the next few years at least.

I've also killed off another quarter of my back lawn, ready to dig up and turn into additional planting space (tomatoes!). There are times when a man's muscles are very much needed, and this is one of them! Hopefully I will organise to get J over in the next couple of weeks.

One sunny lunchtime I went home from work, pulled on my blundies, and planted out ten little silverbeet seedlings that mum and I had gathered from dad's garden on my last visit. In the space of an hour, I'd dug over the ground where the tomatoes had been (this bed gets the winter sun most of the day), planted the seedlings, installed protective guards around them (old plastic pots with the bottoms cut off), seasolled them and gave a little sprinkle of snail bait. And took a photo for you!

The next day was also sunny, so, on a roll, I again went home at lunchtime (I'm less than ten minutes away from work by car) and cleared the front of that bed of the yellowing parsley. What long, tenacious roots! Realising my kale seeds were seriously out of date, I sowed the lot in a row in front of the silverbeet; I figured I'd either get the lot or none. Well, after a decent wait, it appeared the answer would be none, so I bought a fresh packet and tried again. Who else reckons the first lot will now come up, and I'll be forested in curly kale?

I guess at this late stage I won't be harvesting any kale until spring, but it is good to have it back in the garden; I have missed growing and cooking it. And it thrives on frost, so it is a sturdy plant to grow in these climes.

The garlic is continuing to grow its fine ribbony green shoots in these growbags (below). Its quiet progress is reassuring as we enter winter.

But I am peeved to tell you that something - probably something slimy with a shell on its back - got to my green golfball-sized capsicum before I did - before the bloody thing was anywhere near ready - and ate half of it. So the capsicum experiment has ended on a sour note, and will probably never darken my garden beds again.

Don't forget to see others in the Garden Share Collective. Click on the logo in the column at right to see more green thumbs.

on sweeping up autumn leaves

I’ve confessed before that this is my favourite time of the year. We’ve left behind the glare and heat of summer (such as it is in Hobart) and even though the days are getting shorter and the evenings cooler, we haven’t yet been plunged into the dark drag of winter.

The other reason I love autumn is the deciduous leaves, in all their glory, from rich fiery reds to golden glowing yellows; large flag-like shapes to small, intricate specimens. My route to work has many fine trees and shrubs and even vines, making the start and end of my working day a beautiful journey.

But here’s another autumnal confession: I love sweeping up those fallen leaves. Actually, I love any kind of sweeping out in the garden, but in this season, I get to indulge in this gardening chore — well, it seems, all the time.

On the weekends, I like to start my ‘working’ day by sweeping the small undercover area outside my back door, which collects the long golden leaves of my peach and nectarine trees. Then I move methodically along the pathways around the house and in the backyard, again picking up the fruit tree leaves.

Then I start in the driveway out the front, which runs the length of my block. Here it is the larger, flatter leaves of my ornamental blossom tree. Sadly the delicate, finely serrated leaves of my cut-leaf birches are long-gone — those still-young trees are fully exposed to the winds that roar up my street, and theirs are the first leaves to be carried off. And the ruby foliage of my young viburnum shrub was lost overnight, blown off by ghastly winds. Here one day, gone the next, before I could take a photo of it.

Sometimes I follow this pattern again in the afternoon, to tidy away any end-of-day leaf fall; or perhaps I’ll just do a quick go down the driveway.

So that is the how and the when, but what about the why? Why do I find this task so appealing?

I suspect that, like doing the dishes or the weekly laundry, it’s a sense of imposing order and neatness over my world (though it is admittedly Sisyphean at times, when, as fast as I sweep, the wind throws more leaves to my feet. But if I’ve set my mind to sweep now, I’ll pigheadedly refuse to admit defeat and down my broom). It’s satisfying to clear away the fallen leaves and other garden debris from the driveway and literally have a clean sweep.

The brisk, repetitive motion is also an enjoyable form of exercise. Back and forth, to and fro, walking up and down: it’s steady and calming. I saw a neighbour use one of those contraptions that look like a cross between a vacuum cleaner and set of bagpipes — and I’m not sure whether it was sucking or blowing — but I thought, where are the cardiovascular benefits in that? And the noise! Blasting away the peace! When the neighbourhood is quiet, just the birds twittering and the rhythmic sound of straw bristles brushing the concrete, it gives me time to think.

Because sweeping can be very conducive to contemplation (perhaps it is my suburban version of Buddhist walking meditation?). The morning sweep: my mind is still foggy with sleep, thinking about what gardening or household chores are ahead of me, assessing the state of the garden — now that the days are shorter, I don’t see my garden during the working week, and this is my gentle reunion with it. It’s a good opportunity to take stock of the weather, the birds, the garden, the neighbourhood, and I guess, me. Those repetitive movements can lull one into introspection. Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing with my life, what I could be doing; sometimes I compose sentences and turn over phrases and tweak words, not with a red pen in my hand but a broom. Mowing the lawn certainly doesn’t inspire such quiet moments of reflection, or such a sense of calm, purpose, order. I shall be sad when the autumn leaves have completely fallen and finished, and not just because of the bare branches they leave behind. I will no longer have quite so much sweeping to do.

lamington cake

A couple of weeks ago, B and her four and a half year old daughter H visited, and we baked a cake together. B suggested something with icing might go down well, and I was inspired by Shady Baker Jane’s sweet Australia Day cake; so a lamington cake it would be.

For an iconic cake, what better source than Merle from the CWA? Foolproof and four and a half year old proof, surely.

And it was. H and I measured and stirred and counted out cups and spoons and eggs. B graciously tidied away said cups and spoons for washing up later. We checked the butter was soft enough to cream by pushing it with our little fingers; we double checked the recipe to make sure we’d used every ingredient. And we licked beaters, because if there was any wisdom a young cake baker should receive, it is that one must always taste the batter, and the cook always licks the beaters.

This was a big cake mix — obviously meant for a lamington pan, which I don’t have — so we used a brownie tin and just under a dozen very small paper baking cups. The advantage was that those little cakes would be cooked and ready to eat faster than the main cake. Next time (when I’m cooking without my young apprentice) I shall halve the recipe and simply use my brownie tin. The cake was lovely and moist; a good basic plain cake, and every baker needs one of those in her repertoire.

But the icing — well, wow-wee. This is why people write books about giving up the evils of sugar. This stuff was addictive; a pure, sweet chocolaty sugar rush. We swirled and daubed it on the cakes then topped with large flakes of shredded coconut, which sat beautifully on the main cake in particular.

A fun day was had by all. H left with all the little cakes packed into a fancy tin — B refused to take any of the main cake! At first I was fearful I would never get through it all, especially all that wicked icing. But I did! A lamington cake is a fine thing, and should not be restricted to Australia Day celebrations or baking days with little girls.

A lot of coconut happening here:

Lamington cake
Adapted from Merle’s recipe posted on the Random House website. Use the specified large rectangular cake tin (31 cm x 21, and 4.5 cm deep), or a 20 cm brownie tin plus baking cups as we did.

• Preheat oven to 180 and prep your chosen baking tin.
• Cream 250 gms soft butter with 1 ½ cups sugar.
• Beat in 4 eggs then 1 tspn vanilla.
• Sift in 2 ½ cups SR flour, 2 tbspns cornflour, 1 tspn baking powder (yes, SR flour and baking powder) and a pinch of salt.
• Now stir thru ½ cup greek yoghurt. It will be a very stiff batter.
• Transfer batter into your cake tin and bake for 40 minutes or until done. If you’re using smaller baking cups, these will be done in 20–25 minutes.
• Allow to cool a little before icing. To make icing, sift together 2 cups icing sugar and 2 tbspns cocoa powder. Moosh in 90 gms softened butter and 1 tsp vanilla. You won’t get it all combined — don’t worry, the hot water next brings it all together. So gradually add hot water; start with 2 tbspns and trickle more until you get the consistency you desire (we stopped at a thick frosting-like paste). Taste and adjust; we added more cocoa for a sweet but proper chocolaty taste.
• Spread the icing over the cake and sprinkle over as much coconut (desiccated or flaked) as you desire.