It’s been a busy few weeks!

I began tidying the garden for autumn on 27 Feb.  I removed excess silver beet leaves, the spent cabbages (they had remained as a white butterfly habitat), and harvested the onions.  I also moved the compost from the left bin into the centre bin.  It’s looking good!

I had to remove the garlic from the bike shed in order to hang the onions there.  After trimming the stalks and roots from the garlic and removing the outer papery layers of skin, I had 6.88kg of garlic!  I have selected the largest 25 heads to use as seeds for next season.

I hung 44 onions in the shed – 24 large (in groups of 3) and 20 small (in groups of 5).

The basil harvest has continued.  I decided to make a garlic/basil pesto from most of the leaves in the freezer.  This has the end result of having a delicious basil spread and more room in the freezer!  I ended up with about 10 cups of the pesto – 9 of which went into the freezer.

3 March, the tomato seeds were ready for drying.  They look great and will make many delicious tomatoes next year.

The tomato harvest has been huge and shows no sign of ending soon!  Not only have I been picking large numbers of tomatoes, but also huge tomatoes.

So far I have made about 6l of very intense tomato concentrate that is now in the freezer.  The recipe is as follows:
Chop tomatoes into chunks, spread in a single layer on an oven tray.
Add several cloves of garlic and basil or thyme.
Bake at 180°C for about 1 hour, until the tomato chunks begin to brown on the edges.
Allow to cool slightly, process with a stick blender.
Freeze.

We have used the resulting “sauce” on pasta and diluted with an equal volume of water for tomato soup.  The flavour is INTENSE!

We had a major storm go through last week.  We had no electricity for 3 days, and no phone and internet for 8 days.  About 30cm of rain fell over a couple of days.  The road out was closed because of several landslips.  Our stream rose higher than I remember seeing it – as a result we have a number of fences to repair; some from the stream, some from fallen tree branches.

As you can imagine, this slowed down work in the garden.

Over the last couple of days, I have spread pea straw, planted out the last of the summer lettuce seedlings, picked the Austrian oil seed pumpkins that were ripe and sown seeds.

Today, 14 March, I sowed the following:
8 x Pea – Sno pea goliath
8 x Pea – Southland sno
8 x Pea – Wando select
8 x Pea – Bohemian sugar
8 x Pea – Petit provencal
3 x Rocket
3 x Lettuce – red flame
3 x Lettuce – red salad bowl
6 x Broccoli – de cicco
6 x Broccoli – Raab spring rapini
6 x Cauliflower – all year round
6 x Cabbage – Copenhagen market
6 x Cabbage – Dalmatian
6 x Chard – rainbow
8 x Broad bean – 4 purple, 4 brown seeds