The picnic

Going to Perth's outdoor cinemas in summer is one of my favourite things to do. Last week I packed up a picnic and we went to see a comedy with some friends. As the sun went down, we snacked on a whole range of things from my garden:

 

 

We had delicious home-grown and home-made; basil pesto, semi dried tomatoes with thyme and garlic, mini zucchini and bacon quiches... and at the top of the picture are slices of fresh cucumber, with a dollop of cream cheese mixed with chopped chives, with smoked salmon on top, finished with a sprig of dill. Fresh and delicious. The picnic was a big success!

Open Garden season

I love Australia's Open Garden Scheme season. It's a peek into peoples' backyards. But not the boring backyards, only the nice ones are chosen to be a part of the scheme. We get to look at different backyard designs and stroll around to see how the space works and feels, how you move around it and how many people can occupy the space comfortably. It's quite inspiring. 

It also gave me an opportunity to meet a Perth landscape designer I have admired for some time now. I have read Janine Mendel's books on design and they struck such a chord with me. You can imagine my disappointment that I forgot to take my book with me to have her sign it at the weekend!

Janine Mendel's philosophy is that with our gardens and outdoor spaces getting smaller and smaller in the city, we shouldn't waste outdoor space re-creating a kitchen by putting an eight-seat table, eight chairs, fridge, cook top, cupboards, sink etc in the garden... when we already have a kitchen just a few steps away indoors! It makes so much sense! She is of the opinion that if you design your house well, so that your indoors can open up to your garden, you can sit at your dining table and still feel like you're outdoors by having the plants nearby. People are forgetting that gardens are for plants, not just about the hard landscaping, paving and patios. I won't go on about it too much because you can get her book Urban Sanctuary - designing small gardens and read about it yourself! But, I will say that it makes perfect sense and her garden (shown above) is a perfect testament to good design.

Christmas in January!

I got home from work the other day and my husband said he had a surprise for me. He wouldn't tell me what it was, which is unusual, because most of the time he can't help but tell me what he's got me for my birthday, weeks before the actual event. An hour or so later I spotted a man walking down our driveway. My surprise had arrived. On this man's trailer was a beautiful, handmade jarrah garden bench! It is true that I may have squealed with excitement. My Christmas present had arrived, a little late, but absolutely perfect:

 

 

I had designed the food garden specifically to put a bench here, so I could sit and watch the plants grow. It's important to have places to sit in a garden, so that you do stop and take time to admire it, not just journey through the garden to get to a destination.

 

And just like the benches you see in botanic gardens the world over, my garden bench has a plaque of its very own:

 

 

I love that my husband thinks of my garden as art, not just some strange hobby that keeps me busy, and well fed!

Chilli mussels

We made chilli tomato mussels for dinner the other night, with lots of ingredients from the garden. They were delicious:

 

 

...and quite easy to make too!

 

I made a sauce by gently frying some finely chopped onion in a little olive oil, adding crushed garlic (from last year's harvest) and some chopped red chillies (from the garden). Then I added diced tomatoes (from the garden) and a glug or two of white wine.

Then we quickly steamed the clean mussels with about a cup of boiling water for 3 minutes before emptying the water out and pouring the sauce over the top to bring to the boil for a few more minutes. We stirred in some fresh chopped continental parsley (from the garden) and served it with fresh sour dough bread and real butter. Yum!

 

 

It's a condition.

Every year, around this time, I start suffering from a strange condition. At first I didn't recognise the signs. But I think I've figured out what it is.

I call it Frangipani Envy.

 

I'm not sure if anybody else suffers from a similar affliction. I find myself driving along the streets of Perth spotting every single frangipani tree in front yards and gardens. In my imagination I've uprooted each one of them and planted them in my own desolate backyard, instantly turning the bare space into an oasis.

 

The frangipani trees in Perth at this time of year look so beautiful, I love their green dappled shade, how they drop their blossoms on the lawn making it look like a tropical resort and their perfume wafting down the street in the evening as you walk by.

 

After I admired a frangipani in a friend's backyard last year, he kindly took some cuttings for me. I have planted them, and they are thriving and some are even flowering. It's just that they're only about 40cm tall. Not exactly the arching, shady specimens I admire in others' gardens.

 

Above is one of my very short specimens. I have five in my garden, but they're not much to look at yet. The yellow and white variety are my favourite because they have the strongest fragrance and the flowers appear to glow at night in the half light.

 

I will persevere with my frangipani stumps. But I think when we start to makeover the back yard, I might have to spend up and buy myself some semi-mature trees to fill the space. And hopefully cure my annual bout of Frangipani Envy!

The Kitchen Beagle

Beagles are not just great in the garden. They are also very helpful in the kitchen. A beagle owner knows they rarely have to mop the floor because as soon as something falls of the bench top, the chances are a beagle will have scoffed it before it even lands. Unless it is lettuce. Or cucumber. In that case, a beagle will leap up from across the room to beat the other beagle to it, then chew it a bit and spit it back out on your floor.

Beagles also think they are equivalent to the "pre-rinse" cycle on your dishwasher if you turn your back for just the right length of time while stacking dishes.

They also ensure you have a tidy kitchen at all times, because, as beagle owners will tell you, anything left within a certain distance of the edge of the bench, or dining table, is fair game for a hound. Also sometimes if you don't quite push your dining chair in quite far enough, anything on the entire dining table is fair game.

Today as I was chopping up my tomato harvest to make sauce, I found a tomato with a bug hole in it and accidentally dropped it on the floor. I managed to get to the tomato faster than Mustard (surprising) but a big tomato-coloured grub fell onto the floor. While I was contemplating how I was going to pick the thing up without actually touching it with my bare hands, Mustard had a better idea. He ate it. And he looked pretty pleased with himself, too:

Just another job in the kitchen well done, by a beagle!

What to eat when all you have is a garden

You know those days when you get home late after work, you haven't had time to do the grocery shopping and there's nothing in the fridge to eat? That's when the food garden comes in really handy.

 

We had one of those nights recently. So I went for a search in the garden, feeling a bit smug that I'd decided to put lighting in the patch. I picked a few things, some zucchini flowers (yes, we're STILL eating zucchini), some cherry tomatoes, some herbs... and whipped up a meal:

 

A few squares of puff pastry with some tomato relish on, a handful of tomatoes, topped with herbs and cheese, popped in the oven until the pastry was puffed and golden, made a nice dinner with the stuffed zuchini flowers on the side. Maybe not the healthiest meal I've ever whipped up, but it was delicious!

The first harvest of the year

Happy 2013 readers!

 

This will be the first full year in my food garden and there's so much to look forward to. Already my fig tree has baby fruit and I'm thinking of fresh figs in March.

 

But for now the garden is all about tomatoes and corn. Yesterday I picked about 3.5kg tomatoes:
 

 

I served the corn on the bbq on New Year's Eve to a group of friends.

 

But the biggest hit was the bruschetta we served with home-grown tomatoes and basil and the toasted bread rubbed with home-grown garlic. One of our guests (a chef) said she hadn't eaten tomato for seven years. I think she had one of those epiphany moments you have when you taste a real home-grown tomato.

Simple bruschetta:

Fresh tomatoes chopped, torn basil, a pinch of salt, a dash of good olive oil and a splash of balsamic vinegar. Toast the bread and rub it with garlic. Top the bread with the tomato mixture. I like to shave a bit of Parmesan over the top, or you could use a soft goats cheese.

Perth's week-long heatwave really took its toll on our tomatoes. Many of them got sunburned and turned white. From there they seem to turn into sacks of mush. We lost whole bunches of beautiful big tomatoes. But thankfully the rest of the garden survived.

 

Here's something strange. My Black Krim tomato turned out to be not so black:

 

 

This week's task will be to turn a whole lot of those tomatoes into sauce and relish. I'll keep you posted!