Is silver beet just for the birds?

Silverbeet and its cousins chard and rainbow chard are always such attractive plants to grow. No matter what you do to them, they seem to grow healthy and strong, they don't get attacked by pests and they're loaded with all those good phytonutrients the leafy green vegetables have. But it doesn't taste as nice as English spinach and let's face it, most people tear off the big stems and feed them to their chooks. Which is great for your chooks, but why not eat it?

 

I recently harvested a giant mound of silverbeet and made this delicious filo pastry, three cheese, pine nut and silverbeet roll:

 

My husband couldn't get enough of it... and anyone who knows him is aware he's a bit of a Popeye type, so the 'spinach' went down well. This winter I think I will plant a lot more english spinach in the garden and might even try 'perpetual spinach'.

Just a yellow lemon tree

When a good friend of ours was surprised with a half wine barrel from her fiance for Christmas instead of the puppy she was desperately hoping he had hidden around the side of their house... they asked for our advice on how to plant a lemon tree in it. Instead of giving advice, we armed ourselves with a drill, tools and hydrated coir peat and set about helping them achieve their lemon-tree dream. (This was in exchange for a dinner of freshly made pasta with sauce made by their wonderful neighbour. A side note here - I hope I am convincing you of the merits of having a great relationship with your neighbours already?!)

 

Anyway, this was the final result:

 

 

How did we get there? Here's a brief run down of how to plant a fruit tree in a barrel. Firstly, drill a number of holes in the bottom (A friend of mine was once surprised that her wine barrel of strawberries filled up like a pond after it rained once and didn't drain, even though it's made of wood. These barrels hold wine, so it stands to reason they will hold water. That's just what they do.)

 

We like to bolt in caster wheels to our wine barrels so they can easily be moved around, to get sunshine or so you can sweep underneath them etc. So we put three evenly-spaced heavy duty (60kg+) rotating caster wheels on the bottom.

 

Next, so the pot drains well and the base doesn't rot out, put a 10-15cm layer of coarse gravel or blue metal in the bottom. Then fill with the best quality potting mix you can find (look for the ticks on the bag) and mix in some hydrated coir peat. You can buy this in blocks, put it in a bucket and fill it with water and it puffs up like a sponge. I like to add some seaweed solution to the bucket as well.

 

Then, plant your lemon (or other) tree, water it in with some diluted seaweed solution, then put a good layer of mulch on top of the pot to reduce evaporation (I like to use coarse pine bark, because it holds its colour nicely)

 

And there you have it! Above is a dwarf lemon sold under the name Lots'a'lemons. Mine is growing well in its pot and has a constant flush of almost mature fruit, baby lemons and flowers, so it almost fruits all year round.

 

It isn't a puppy, but I'm sure they'll get a fair amount of enjoyment from this tree for many years. Now we're hoping for an invite back when the lemons are mature for a tasty margarita and we can enjoy it too!

Tree cucumber?

Like my wonderful fig-sharing neighbour, I too have been sharing the food garden bounty! As the tomato plants have started to die back and I pulled out the dead corn stalks (it was just too hot this summer to grow the beans up the dead corn stalks) some of the other vegetables are just coming into their own. Like these Lebanese cucumbers that are so vigorous, they're climbing our bottlebrush tree:

Now we have cucumbers hanging out of the tree!

Cucumbers are a bit like zucchini in the way they like to hide and secretly grow into giant monster vegetables. I can monitor their growth from my kitchen window and when I see one is the perfect size for picking, I go and hunt for it. Do you think I can find them, though?? How do they do that?!

Consequently, we're eating a LOT of cucumber, which is great because it's such a tasty vegetable. We eat it in chicken and salad wraps, I make it into salsa, I make a chunky tzatziki by mixing cucumber cubes with Greek yoghurt, fresh mint and crushed garlic, it makes a wonderful side dish for bbq lamb cutlets, another recipe with yoghurt, I mixed diced cucumber with halved cherry tomatoes in yoghurt with some chermoula spice mix. Yum! Of course there's always cucumber in vege stir fry, salad and of course, the jug of Pimms. But a family of two (the beagles don't like cucumber as much as they like other vegetables) can only consume so much cucumber. So I have been leaving a few specimens with my (non-food growing) neighbours with the last of the cherry tomatoes and an invitation to help themselves to basil or herbs from the herb patch to make up a salad.

Fig bounty

Back in September I planted a fig tree in my mini-orchard and wrote about how fast they are to establish. Well, that fig tree is twice as big now, starting to spread its limbs out in a beautiful umbrella shape and is already covered in fruit:

 

Now I'm just waiting for the fruit to ripen. In the meantime, I'm lucky enough to have a wonderful neighbour who has several varieties of fig trees on her property. It felt like Christmas when she knocked on our front door the other day with an ice cream container overflowing with freshly-picked figs. Here they are, after a very light sprinkle of brown sugar, run under a hot grill for a couple of minutes, then put on a bed of creamy plain yoghurt, topped with a drizzle of maple syrup:

 

 

They were so delicious that when I saw my neighbour out on her verge picking more fruit, I ran over to thank her for the bounty. Bless her... she sent me home with another container full! What a wonderful neighbourhood we have landed in.