In the lime light

About two years ago I planted one of the CSIRO's Australian Red Centre Lime trees in a half wine barrel. I thought I was getting an Australian Finger Lime, the ones where the centre of the fruit comes out like caviar. I thought that would be marvellous with fresh oysters, sprinkled on mini lemon tarts or in cocktails. Well, it turns out my lime, and the one I thought I was planting, are completely different plants! Oops.

This year the Red Centre lime had a bumper crop as you can see below:

The fruit is tangy and tasty, but it would take a lot of work and a very small juicer to squeeze enough for an evening of margaritas! I am keen to try some of the fruit thinly sliced and placed on top of white fish fillets, then baked in the oven. But for now, I had a small bucket of fruit to use.

What to do with them? Well, an idea came to me at the weekend, while we were sausage-making with our Italian neighbours and shared an amazing lunch of home-grown and home-made delicacies and heard stories of life in Italy and what it was like coming to Australia on the boat. The conversation turned to grappa and what it was good for. My husband suggested the only thing it was good for was cleaning drains. But our hosts said they pickled kumquats in grappa and sugar. The Red Centre lime is about the same size as a kumquat and it got me thinking. What about lime-infused tequila, or vodka? (...or grappa for those who are brave enough)

So I put my rain jacket on this morning and while the beagles snuffled for dog biscuits I'd scattered over the paving, I picked the limes. After washing and slicing them open, I put them in boiled jars, topped some up with tequila, some with vodka and one lucky one with grappa and sugar. The I added these super-cute 'jar bonnets' that my friend gave me and there you go, pickled limes, ready to taste in 6 weeks:

I'm not sure what I'm most excited about... a glass of the lime-tequila on ice, or trying a lime-vodka martini? Of course, the limes won't be wasted... I think I'll still use them on fish or maybe in a dessert. I'll let you know how it works out. Maybe I will still find room to plant an Australian finger lime to add to my lime tree collection?

A place to rest

Remember my asparagus? How I said it was a long-term commitment? And that you had to leave it in the ground for several years before you could start to harvest it? Also, how I dug the poor things up from my previous house and brought them with me to give them a permanent place to rest in my new home. Well... I have a confession to make. I had to dig them up AGAIN. Yes, I've just added another year on to my harvest time frame, right there. The problem was, you may remember, that I only had a matter of hours to dig them up and plant them at my new house and that was well before I had designed the layout of my food garden. It turned out they couldn't have been in a more inconvenient spot. Even after the landscapers went to so much trouble to rope them off with fluorescent orange construction webbing so they didn't disturb them, I came along and disturbed them all. They were right at the top of the stairs. Oops.

 

So today's job was to prepare a new patch of soil and plant the crowns out (again) and hope for the best. That's me in the photo with a margarita, toasting their future success. Now I might mention the limes in the Margarita are not from our lime trees. (Thank you Laina for supplying them). We had a potting disaster with the lime tree recently, and while it's coming back with a vengeance, it did lose most of its fruit in the process. I went to re pot it because the potting mix had become hydrophobic and worn out, but when my husband pulled the tree out of the half wine barrel, the whole bottom of the barrel came out too! There was a mercy dash to the nearest garden centre to get a new wine barrel, some caster wheels from the hardware store and some gravel for the bottom of the barrel, to go with the new potting mix and compost that was waiting! Now that you've all waded through that tedious story, I think you deserve a drink too! So here's a recipe, perfected after many, many trials...

 

Nat's best margarita recipe

 

To a cocktail shaker add:

 half a dozen ice cubes

2 parts gold tequila

1 part Triple Sec

1 part freshly squeezed lime juice.

- Shake and serve in a salt-rimmed glass.

Tomorrow is a big day in the garden too... a big load of pine bark for the verge. This begins the transformation of the verge from highly compacted sand and scruffy patches of lawn, to an attractive (I hope) native strip! Stay tuned.