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?

Holiday gardens!

While I have no idea how my own garden is going back home, I've found plenty of time on my holiday to enjoy some other gardens!

Here in London, our special friend Greg organised to take me to the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew.  We have been there before of course, but he thought I would like to see their latest exhibition - Incr-Edibles! They had some fabulous displays like this garden below fashioned just for the exhibition:

They also had a garden party set up, with all the herbs growing in the bowls and pots:

We walked for about an hour to see an exhibition titled 'Bouncy Carrot Patch' which sounded like fun. We were disappointed when we finally found it - a patch of mulch cordoned off with some construction webbing with an apology stapled to it!

The gardens are spectacular. They are trying to get people not just interested in growing vegetables for themselves, but educating them about where vegetables come from. I heard more than one adult asking what some of the plants were. Plants they should have been able to recognise from the food they put on their tables! I was surprised.

I have some more photos to post soon... Not just a crack plant, a crack TREE! 

Time to rest!

Remember my nematode problem? I can't forget it! I've been trying to 'cure' my vege bed of root knot nematodes. I planted a mass of mustard seed and let it grow for a few months, until it was just starting to flower. The other day I slashed it down. Here is my progress slashing photo:

 

After I slashed it, I dug it into the soil which I will keep it moist while it breaks down. As the mustard decomposes, it releases a gas the nematodes don't like. The slashing and digging was hard work, I'm not going to lie. I also sowed some more mustard seeds, so they can grow over the next month and I will slash and bury them as well. I spread some sheep manure and Piggypost before I covered it all up with lupin mulch.

Today I tried another remedy. Apparently the nematodes don't like molasses. So I mixed up molasses and water in a watering can and poured it over the garden bed:

 

 

 

 

I've read that the sugar can kill worms and good critters in the soils as well. To remedy that, I have some Troforte ready to spread in a few weeks to encourage the good guys back to the soil and the compost in my two compost tumblers will be ready by then as well, so that will help:

 

 

                                               

Anyway, while my garden bed and my compost have a rest, so will I! I'm off on a holidays for a few weeks so my next blog will be from the road... maybe a bit of foreign garden inspiration!

The Beagles are also exhausted from all the gardening and are looking forward to their holiday:

 

 

 



Living on the edge

I’m convinced that growing in my front garden brings a sense of community to my neighbourhood.  The mornings I’m out in the garden I hear a cheery “Good morning neighbour!”  from across the short expanse of road. “Lovely day for gardening!”

My husband has a theory that the introduction of water restrictions has caused a decline in neighbourliness. He thinks back to when he was younger and people used to stand around on their front verge, with a tinny or a glass of West Coast Cooler in one hand and the hose in the other while they watered their verge lawns. It would be a good time to catch up with the bloke over the fence and you’d know if something wasn’t right with your elderly neighbour across the road if they weren’t to be seen watering their verge for a couple of days, so you’d go and check in on them.

When I’m in my food garden or on the verge planting natives, drivers slow down and wave as they pass. In the past week I’ve met two neighbours who drove up their laneways, then came back on foot to introduce themselves and have a chat about things.

Yesterday, while waiting for her husband to drop something off, a woman got out of her parked car and wandered right into my garden and started chatting. She was most impressed with my herb patch and told me all about the exotic fruit trees and vegetables growing in her backyard not far from here that she inherited from a previous owner. She spotted my Thai basil and gave me some tips on how to use it. She was cooking bolognese for her two boys that night, so I sent her home with a bunch of sage, basil and thyme and she was delighted. How often can you make a stranger happy by something so simple? She told me she’d pop back and drop off some sugar cane for me to plant.

And you know what? She did! The next evening, she ran down my driveway with a bag of sugarcane. She also brought some seeds from a fruit in her back yard that she said was delicious, but she didn't know what it was called. She said if I had any success with the seeds, she'd love me to drop one of her plants back to her!

Crack Plant

Crack plants amuse me.

 

I have vincas in my garden that get watered over summer and get some manure and slow release fertiliser. They don't look half as happy as this crack plant growing by my front door:

 

    

 

This plant gets swept over, the dogs walk over it and catch their leads around it. The neighbours son pulled all the flowers off it for fun once. It certainly doesn't get watered and yet, all summer it has thrived in a crack. Maybe I should pay less attention to my plants in the garden.

A pocket full of seeds

Some of my herbs are just going to seed now, and I’ve come up with a very cute idea!

I bought these seed pockets, made up a quick label on the computer and now I have sweet little gift envelopes to fill with seeds for my friends.

My basil, Thai basil and garlic chives are going to seed now. I like to let them flower to attract the bees and then I will collect the seeds and make up some more of these Garden Beagle envelopes!

Mycophobia?! I can't believe it has a name...

I have a fear of fungus. There, I've said it. As a gardener a fear of fungus is fraught with issues.

I can't say exactly where my fear came from. One incident I remember all too clearly from my childhood is that back on the farm each year around this time, my aunts, uncles, cousins and my Nan and Pop would come over and we'd pack some food for a barbecue and all head out to Stone Henge. That was the name of a particularly rocky paddock, one that was so covered in rocks and boulders it never got cropped. The upshot to this is that mushrooms were free to grow. So we'd take buckets and small knives and set off in different directions picking mushrooms. It was always a wonderfully fun day... I liked to stay within sight of my Nan and then just bend down and pretend I was picking loads of mushrooms. She was oddly competitive. And didn't like the idea of someone picking more 'shrooms than her. She was much the same about fishing, but that's another story! At lunchtime, an old plough disk on a circle of rocks became our barbecue and we lit a fire and cooked up a storm.

Anyway, one year I happened across a mound of mushrooms, ran over and went to pick them, but as I turned them over, it was a pile of toadstools, white underneath instead of mushroom pink. Worse than that, they were crawling with maggots. And I had just touched them. I have goosebumps all over me just typing this, I'm not joking.

Needless to say I never ate any of the mushrooms we picked. Nan got all of those, so I don't know why she was so worried that I'd pick more than her!

My fungus experiences weren't just limited to the annual mushroom harvest. Each year when Dad was out ploughing the paddocks, he'd come home with some mushroom specimens... enough to make the hair stand on the back of your neck. They were HUGE. The size of a large dinner plate (there, I've got goosebumps again). Mum would put them aside for us to look at when we got home from school. Sometimes we'd put them on a dinner plate and take them to school for show and tell. Mum would get out a big sheet of clean, white paper and we'd rest the giant mushroom on it overnight, then by the morning, it would leave its imprint on the paper. Gross. Spores.

My husband and friends once forced me to go to a whole fungus exhibition while travelling in Bormio. I wasn't very thrilled. They seemed to think my goosebumps were as fun to look at as the fungus itself.

Anyway, now as a gardener I'm convinced fungus is haunting me. I have discovered fungi so diverse and creepy and fascinating it astounds me... and gives me the heebie jeebies. Just this week I discovered these two horrendous outbreaks:

 

The one on the left looks like dog vomit. It may actually be dog vomit fungus. Yes, that is a real thing. One day it just appears like a froth. Then I made the mistake of watering it. As the outside crust disintegrated and the water hit the inside, it exploded into a dust cloud of black spores. That is the stuff of nightmares.

The one on the right are the field mushrooms of my youth. Here they have entirely lifted up a layer of mulch like some beast bursting out of the ground. Tell me that's not creepy!

Once, I even emailled an expert at the Department of Agriculture about various fungi in my garden. I didn't know whether to pull them out, whether they are good for the soil or harmful to me, especially when one started climbing my spinach plants. That's the one below top left:

 

 

The one on the bottom left looked like an egg... before it exploded into the monstrosities on the right. The expert said not to worry about any of them, just don't eat it. Even he didn't know what the one was that climbed my plant, though.

Down at our dog park, there are giant "fairy rings" of mushrooms and the lawn is always greener, more healthy and faster growing in those rings, so it must be good for the soil. As the fungus mycelium grows in the soil, it must make the nutients more easily available to plant roots.

I once read that the biggest living organism on our planet was a mycelium, the white hair-like roots of a fungus that grow underground, it covers an entire forest floor in Canada. I can tell you I won't be travelling there any time soon!