Mulberry vodka recipe

Mulberry vodka was mentioned. We have a mulberry tree. It felt like something worth investigating. The recipes I found appear to be very simple - always a plus.
Find a jar, 1/4 fill it with sugar.
Add in mulberries until it is 3/4 full and then top it up with vodka.
Leave to sit for 12 months, then remove the fruit and enjoy as a fruit liqueur.
I like experimenting with fruit alcoholic drinks, the plum brandy was delicious, plus this recipe sounded easy. It was just a matter of waiting until mulberry season.
Unfortunately mulberries ripen in the busy late November, early December period and they do it by falling on the ground.
I managed to collect some ripe mulberries, that I decided was enough for two jars one Saturday afternoon. But there was no vodka in the cupboard.
Adding the sugar and mulberries, the jars sat in the fridge awaiting a shopping trip.

Once the necessary vodka was purchased the jars were moved to the bottom of the pantry to do the infusing thing.
One week after the addition of the vodka and the colour of the mulberries is shifting to the vodka from the fruit. The sugar is still dissolving so I will continue to give them a regular shake.

One year sounds like a long wait. I think testing will begin in about six months to check for flavour development.

Making your own jar of olives

One of last things to preserve on the block are the olives.
We have four trees. I don't know what types, as they were here when we arrived. One has bigger black olives (that lost their black colour through the brining process), one has smaller green ones and another small black right through little olives.
To know when they were ready for picking. I tested them every week or so in May.

Testing for ripeness
I tested them by pushing a finger nail into the skin and checking the colour of the liquid. Once it went milky they were ripe.

I ended up picking the olives off the trees because it was easier, than shaking the tree and picking them up off the ground.
The green ones ripened earlier than the black ones.
Once inside all the articles I had read said to deal with them straight away, otherwise they would shrivel up.
So I washed them, made sure they were undamaged.
I had chosen to brine them because I had successfully done this before and it seems a good system to avoid spoilage. It is also pretty simple and just needs time and salt.
I put the washed olives into a clean jar with an air tight lid.

Brine solution for olives
I made up the brine solution of 1/4 cup of salt stirred until dissolved into a litre of water.

I filled the jars with the brine solution. The olives floats so I used a piece of cheesecloth just to keep them below the surface of the brine.
I set up calendar reminders in my phone to replace the brine after one week and then after two weeks and then once a month. Changing the brine solution means more of the bitter flavour (oleuropein) will leach out. I would empty the whole jar, give it a bit of a clean, rinse the olives and refill with more brine solution.

How long to keep brining
After three months, I tried an olive when I changed the brine solution. You give it a wash first to wash off the salty brine. Either it is okay or you spit it out super quick. Two jars were ready after four months, another is still too bitter so is currently in a new brine solution and I will test it next month.

What to do after brining
Some recipes say to leave the olives in brine and just keep changing it - rinsing the olives before use but I wanted them in the fridge so I am trialling a post recipe I found.

Post brining
Rinse the olives and place in a clean jar. Depending on how many jars you have done, you will need to adjust the amounts. I had two 300ml jars ready for eating so this made enough for the two jars.
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 vinegar (I used cider)
500ml water
pinch dried oregano
pinch dried thyme
Olive oil
Mix together everything but the olive oil until the salt has dissolved. Pour around the olives in the jar until it is full. Carefully pour a layer of olive oil over the top.
I am keeping mine in the fridge. After waiting all these months, I don't want to risk them spoiling. They are tasty.

What tomato is best to grow?

There are so many varieties of tomato.

I am still experimenting with finding the tomatoes that best suit our growing conditions and what we want to use the tomatoes for - in our case primarily puree for cooking but also sauce and sandwiches. I like to give a variety more than one season to prove or disprove itself.
At the moment all my tomatoes are planted outside - not in a green house. They are all grown from seed apart from any plants we receive.

Season one I planted:

• Organic Brandywine because it was supposed to be the best tasting tomato in the world
• Mortgage Lifter because the story is neat of a farmer paying off his mortgage by selling these seedlings for a $1 each. Also because it was supposed to be good at producing a lot of tomatoes and disease resistant.

We ate them fresh.

Season two I added in:

• Cherokee Purple because we bought them at a market once and it was the best tasting tomato we had ever tasted. It was so savoury it was close to salami than the usual tomato.
• Cherry tomatoes Lady Bug because it won a top taste award once.
• Cherry tomatoes Sungold because it was supposed to be a heavy cropper with a fine taste.
• Some tomato plants we were given for free that produced many, large yellow tomatoes.

I made relish and sauce and puree.

Season three I added in:

• Tommy Toe cherry tomatoes
• San Marzano tomatoes because they are supposed to better for sauce and puree as they have more flesh and less watery juice
• Beefsteak Select because it is supposed to be an old fashioned tomato with a good acid/sweetness balance and be great for slicing.

I made a lot of puree that was less watery and a thicker sauce.

My conclusions so far are:

• Brandywine tomatoes are quite sweet and maybe this is why they are considered the best tomato in the US. They don't feel very balanced and maybe it is our soil but they are just not the best tasting tomato. I am not going to grow that particular seed anymore. They also seem susceptible to disease and don't produce a lot of fruit.
• Cherokee purple are nice but I haven't yet successfully grown them to the flavour level, I have tasted from a market. I am continuing to persevere.
• Of the cherry tomatoes the sungold were the most delicious and the most prolific. They are an F1 hybrid so you only get 15 seeds per packet. I may go back to these but am trialling Baxter's early bush and sugar plum this year for cherry tomatoes earlier in the season. The sungold's were most successful in the first year, with less success in the second year plantings. It is not a great idea to have cherry tomatoes planted together that are orange and red when ripe because it is confusing to know what is ripe.
• San Marzano do make excellent sauce and puree. They are, however, susceptible to blossom end rot. This meant quite a bit of fruit I couldn't use. I am planting them again but I am also adding in a variety called costoluto fiorentino, which is supposed to be great for eating fresh, sauces and particularly for roasting.
• Beefsteak, I think were good but will plant again this summer to see if they are preferred to the mortgage lifter.

I am narrowing down my preferences to:

• A heavy producer that is tasty for puree and not too watery
• A flavourful tomato for sandwiches and salads
• An early in the season high producer of tasty cherry tomatoes
• A variety I haven't tried yet in case there is a better tomato out there
• For each of the four - easy to grow and disease resistance preferred.

Lastly ditch all your pizza sauce recipes and use this one: Secrets to a great tasting tomato sauce.
It is fast, easy and the taste is great - particularly if made with good flavourful tomatoes - now would that be san marzano or costoluto fiorentino, Cherokee purple or ......

Tips for top marmalade

Well it has been awhile. Life on the lifestyle block is a busy one.
The hardest thing about homemade marmalades, jams and jellies can be getting the setting right, without adding pectin - which seems like cheating. 

There are many marmalade recipes around. The one I made is a three fruits one using grapefruit, lemons and tangelos from our property.

I used a recipe from a Cordon Bleu cook book. I think these three tips made a difference to the set and the distribution of rind bits throughout the marmalade.

Note - this marmalade is a darker colour because I was running low on white sugar so used brown sugar as well. If you wanted to make a darker marmalade, substituting all the white sugar for brown would do that.

Top tips

1. Slice the fruit thinly, keep the pips aside. Put all the fruit in a bowl, cover with water. 

2. Tie up all the pips in some muslin/cloth and also add the parcel to the water. Leave overnight. Squeeze out the muslin with the pips in it. Quite a thick liquid comes out, which according to Cordon Bleu is the pectin. Tip the water and fruit into the saucepan before the making of your marmalade.

3. After you have boiled the fruit until soft, added the sugar (usually cup for cup of fruit) boiled it some more and got it to setting temperature (105C). Remove from heat and let cool for a bit. This seems to help the distribution of the rind throughout the jar. 

Alcoholic drinks from fruit

After the success of the loquat liqueur that I now make every year, this year I wanted to try something new.
I came across this brandy plum recipe. It says people requested the plum brandy as gifts because it was so nice. I am not a brandy drinker but the loquat liqueur worked out so I was up for the challenge.
It worked really well, mine is quite sweet. It is very drinkable and delicious with a piece of dark chocolate.

This year we also made cider with our own apples. 

The apple festival in Wakefield is an opportunity to get apples pressed. I took along a mixed basket of our different apples and returned with 5 litres of delicious apple juice. 

I added 500ml of water to bring the specific gravity down so that the final alcoholic content would be around 4.7%. I did add yeast. I used a Belgian beer yeast because I thought the fruity notes would be nice. I let it ferment in our beer fermenting fridge at 18C until it stopped bubbling. 

It was quite dry tasting so I back sweetened it with splenda to the level of sweetness I preferred, through small additions. I bottled it with additional 5g sugar per bottle to make it fizz. 

It is very nice, sweet, but not oversweet, and with a strong apple flavour. Next time I might use an ale yeast instead because the flavours of the Belgian beer yeast I think detract from the apple. I think mixing apple varieties is a good idea to get a complex apple flavour.

I also want to experiment again with juicing rather than pressing. The juicer apple juice was not very nice compared to the pressed apple juice but I cannot find a reason why it should be so different.
This coming summer it might be time to try perry.

Growing parsnips successfully

Top tips learnt from growing parsnips

• Plant them - they are really easy to grow
• Thinning is a good idea or you get teeny ones beside the big ones
• Plant in spring for a winter of fully grown parsnips
• Make sure your soil is loose so that the parsnips can grow down easily or they have multiple roots rather than one large one.

Parsnip with Lego Darth Vader for size comparison

In trying to get my garden producing all year round, I planted parsnips in October with my spring plantings. I planted Guernsey parsnips.
I dug up the soil and made some small trenches for the seed.
I wasn't sure of success so I planted two rows.
I didn't expect many parsnips on my first attempt, so I didn't bother with the thinning.
The parsnips were watered regularly over the summer.
They grew very well.
They say to wait until after the first frost before harvest to make them sweeter. We did eat some before the first frost and after. They were all sweet and delicious.
We have had parsnips in the ground all winter.
They have kept well in the ground and when we have needed parsnips I have dug them up from the garden.
Something to note - apparently if they sprout again the middle becomes inedible so remember to dig them up before the weather warms up again - I must do this because the few still remaining in the ground have started sprouting.
Having parsnips, potatoes and kumara meant roast dinners could come from the garden. This year rather than just the salad season, we had a roast meal with all the vegetables from our garden, the sheep from the farm next door and cider made with our apples. We were quite proud.

Successful watermelon growing

The most satisfying thing to grow in the garden this year was watermelons.
I chose the moon and stars watermelon because it said it had excellent taste and across the internet people seemed to have success with this variety.
I grew the seeds indoors and didn't plant them out until late November.

Four water melon plants in this bed, plus a rogue potato plant

It was exciting to see little watermelons start to grow but would they taste like proper watermelons?
I watered them regularly and the summer was a hot one.

End of January

Once they started getting big I carefully place plastic lids under them to keep them off the wet ground.

Mid February

Mid February with lego man for size comparison

It was a long wait, watching the melons get bigger.
The test for ripeness is tapping and they should sound hollow. There are some handy YouTube videos on watermelon tapping. This was the best one I found as it is short and easy to hear the difference in sound.
The other sign I used was the browning of the curly piece of stem by the ripe watermelon. Once it was brown and dead looking, the watermelon is supposed to be ripe.
The watermelons ripened in early March. We got one watermelon a plant, which in kilograms was quite a bit of watermelon, especially when one kid doesn't really like it.

They are quite seedy these watermelon but they are sweet and juicy and delicious.
Once you have cut a watermelon, it does seem best to eat either immediately or within a few days for it still to be crisp. Taking a plate of watermelon places worked well, especially when we could say we grew it ourselves.
You can also make a pickle out of the rind that is a cross between a pickle and candied peel.
We have saved seeds and this year will plant half saved seeds and half new seed to see if we can get watermelons from the saved seed.

Growing kumara in the Lower Moutere

Top tips learnt on growing kumara

• A long, hot summer
• Digging a pit, lining the bottom with something, like cardboard, and refilling with loose soil
• Cover the small shoots with netting so birds don't pull them out of the ground
• Burying rocks in the soil, helps keeps the soil temperature up
• Lifting the vines so they don't put down more little roots.

A bucket load of kumara

Last year I tried growing kumara.
I dug a pit, put some cardboard at the bottom and shovelled the dirt back on top.
I put the in shoots, purchased from the garden shop down the road, but I didn't cover them with netting and the birds pulled them all out of the ground.
I bought a second lot and planted them - with the moon and in a hook shape. But they only produced teeny weeny kumara that were not worth anything
This year I chose a more sunny position.
I dug a pit, lined the bottom with cardboard.
I planted shoots from the garden shop.
I covered them with netting.
I pushed some large stones into the top of the mound of earth to help retain heat in the soil.
It was a hot summer and I regularly watered the patch.
The vines grew very well. I pulled them up as they stretched along the ground to keep them from putting down more roots.
Working out the best time to harvest was tricky. Some information suggests when the leaves turn yellow and others before this.
We harvested in late March.
I have only been planting a small plot as an experimental bed. It was like an archaeological dig, following the vines down under ground to the tubers and bringing them out undamaged. It is easy to break the vines off from the tubers and then locating the tuber can be difficult so the gentle scrapping and loosening the soil and tubers with my hands helped to get all the tubers.
One of the bigger kumara I found was after I thought the pit was empty and was forking through the soil one last time. There it was a massive kumara.
All up from plants we harvested 4.5kg of kumara.
At the time kumara were selling for $7.50/kilo.

Summer harvest - tips to feeling a successful food grower

It is easy when gardening to get disheartened, with the crop yield, the vegetable size or the taste.
It is good to remember that it is likely each year a crop will probably fail. Failure is relatively cheap when growing from seed. One seed packet is an investment of $3-$4. So while it can feel a big fail, it had so much potential for success the investment is worth it.
But the weather plays such a big factor. This year was a fantastic, warm summer. We grew so many cucumbers and dill pickles we still have jars of them preserved. We gave them away, we ate them and we preserved them. The previous year was a very wet, cooler summer and my cucumber plants went brown and died.

Don't give up too early
Sometimes crops just take awhile to get going. I grew runner beans (blue lake runner beans) and in the first part of summer, I thought they were okay but not a great crop yield and they were quite small beans. However through the months they just got better - bigger beans and more of them. We were picking enough for four people every few days.

Spread the risk
Having a wide variety of vegetables planted, that suit different conditions, increases the likelihood of having some good wins.

Enjoy the wins
Watermelons were a stand out achievement this summer. I grew the seeds inside and didn't plant them out until late November. I planted Moon and Stars variety. All summer we watched them grow, watering them frequently and then as they got bigger, lifted them off the garden with plastic trays so they would not rot. We waited until the curly bit from where the fruit was attached to the vine, went brown and when you tapped it, it sounded hollow. A lot of tapping was involved.

The watermelon was sweet and juicy.

Next summer, it may not be the right conditions for watermelon. I am planting them again so we will have to see. I have also saved seeds from inside the last lot. I will plant some new seeds and some saved to see if they grow proper moon and stars watermelons. I only grow the one variety at the moment, so cross pollination should not be an issue.
Kumara were another great performer. I only planted a small patch but it returned 4.5kgs of kumara. This year they were expensive in the shops, so it was double win.

It is not you, it is the variety
Trialling different varieties of a vegetable also allows you to work out what works best for your garden soil and weather conditions. I am still working out the best varieties of tomatoes that suits our climate and also how we use tomatoes. Carrots are another one I am still undecided what variety works best for the soil conditions.

Growing dill pickles

Top tips learnt from growing dill pickles

• A long, hot summer will give you a lot
• If you have too many, let them grow bigger and eat as cucumber
• Make sure you and everyone in your family really love pickles

This year we decided to grow dill pickles. I grew from seed cucumber homemade pickles from King Seeds through September and October indoors, in the sun and with watering every day.
I planted these out in late October when the weather was very warm.
I planted about six plants in the sunny position beyond the kumara patch. They were watered regularly and initially covered with netting until the plants were big enough to not be pulled out by the birds.
Once they started, they didn't stop producing and needed to be checked every day.
At one time the old fridge, my husband uses for keeping fermenting beer at the right temperature, was full of dill pickles fermenting. The photograph below is the first lot before another jar was also added. The pottery crock is full of pickles fermenting. The big pottery crock was filled several times over the season with fermenting pickles.

Fermenting sour pickles start to take over the beer fridge

Letting dill pickles ferment naturally produces the traditional sour pickles. These are delicious but different to the sweet preserved pickles you may be used to from the supermarket.
I used Alton Brown's sour pickle recipe.
I did get sick of translating the imperial measurements of this recipe so below are the metric amounts I used or adjusted to the right ratios, depending on the size of the jar and weight of cucumbers:

• 155g salt, approximately 1/2 cup
  
• 3.78 litres filtered water
  
• 1.36 kg pickling cucumbers
  
• 1 tablespoon black peppercorns
  
• 1 tablespoon red pepper flakes
  
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
  
• 1 teaspoon dill seed
  
• 1 tablespoon dill tips
  

Fermented pickles keep best if the pickles are whole, so you need big jars for storage. The ones I ended up slicing lengthwise to fit in smaller jars, have gone soft as the months have gone on.

If you prefer the supermarket style pickles, Alton Brown's kinda sorta sour pickles recipe are as good as any you buy. They also can be eaten straight away or I have also kept some of these jars sealed and they have lasted the distance and stayed crunchy many months later. In Alton's recipe he uses champagne and cider vinegar. I used all cider vinegar but also - because I was making these a lot - I used rice wine vinegar and any other vinegar we had in the house!

By the end of the cucumber season, the whole bottom shelf of the fridge and some of the preserving shelf was full of pickles! This may be more than we can eat before next season. We may have over pickled.

Mulberrries and Jelly

Mulberries come at a bad time in the Lower Moutere on the lifestyle block. They ripen at the end of November, just as everything is piling on in for the end of the year.
This year I was determined to be prepared.
They also don't ripen all at once so gathering enough for some jelly can take awhile. I laid out a plastic sheet under our mulberry tree and every day went and collected the ripe fruit that fell and then picked off any ripe ones hanging on the tree.

Over several days I gathered several cupfuls - enough to make a small batch of jelly.
However that busy time of year got the better of me and the fruit I had left to ripen in the basket, went too far in the heat. I had to give a 1/3 of the fruit to the chickens as it had developed mould.
Everything on the internet says mulberry jelly or jam doesn't have high pectin so won't set well unless pectin is added.
I decided to add apple as the pectin addition. I did half and half apple to mulberries.
I covered them with water and boiled them until the colour (and flavour) had been extracted from the mulberries and the apples were soft.
I then filtered the mixture through some muslin to retrieve just the red coloured liquid.
Once the fruit had let go all their juice, it was back on the stove.
Once it was boiling, I added in a 1/4 less sugar than the amount of liquid I had.
Stirred until the sugar dissolved and then boiled it until it reached 105C.

The jelly became a beautiful red colour and I poured it into sterilised jars.
The flavour is not strong and the apple complements it nicely.
My jelly could be set firmer with additional pectin but being less firm, the kids can't go through it as quickly on their toast.
This season's preserving is underway. The loquats are back next.

Spring is elderflower cordial

The last few weeks has seen the elderflower shrubs come out in thousands of teeny white flowers.
The taste of spring is elderflower cordial.

The branches are quite springy so you can pull them down to pick the flowers and let them ping back.
We collect about 20 or so stalks of flowers that usually have several separate groups of flowers on the stalk.
Back in the kitchen we use the flowers to make elderflower cordial.
It also requires 3 lemons from the garden, water and sugar.

Elderflower cordial
20 -25 stalks of flowers.
3 lemons
1.5 litres of boiling water
750g - 1 kg sugar

Snap off the longer stalks to leave all the little groups of flowers in a bowl.
Use a potato peeler to create strips of lemon zest from three lemons and place into the same bowl. (Keep the lemons for the next day.)
Pour the boiling water over the flowers and lemons. Push the flowers under the water and leave it overnight. It does not smell very nice - quite vegetative.
The next day strain the mixture through some muslin to collect the mustard green liquid in a pot.
Gently heat the liquid and then as it starts to steam and bubbles are rising from the bottom of the pot add the strained lemon juice of the three lemons and the sugar. I use up to 1kg of sugar but it is worth tasting and checking as you go by mixing some of the concentrated cordial with water in a 1 to 3 ratio. We have found if looking to drink it mixed with soda water rather than normal flat water, it needs to be a little more sweet. The liquid changes to a more golden colour from the green.
Once the sugar has all dissolved and the cordial has been gently brought to the boil, pour into sterilised jars - that don't last very long.
Mix cordial with either water or soda water in a 1 to 3 ratio. Perfect after a hot afternoon in the garden.

You can also make Elderflower Collins cocktails:
1 shot of gin (or 2 if you prefer)
1 shot of elderflower cordial concentrate
Shake with ice, pour into the glass and top up with soda water.

The one problem with being eager elderflower cordial drinkers is that so far we haven't had enough elderberries ripen to make jelly.

Eating through the hunger gap

This year I have been more successful in having vegetables from the garden during the supposed 'hunger gap' than during the winter.
I have a forest of broad beans that we are picking while still green, small and delicious. Fried with bacon and served on sour dough bread, they made a tasty Sunday dinner.

Saturday the salad was from the garden using the pea tops, which we need to pick almost every day at the moment to keep on top of them. I have planted corn between the rows so that as the peas finish, the corn will take over and we will be eating corn fresh from the garden in February - if they grow well. The mandarins came off the tree in the citrus grove. The snapper came from out in the bay.

I have a future aim to be able to make a salad without a dressing using mustard leaves that taste of mustard and garlic tops to give a garlic flavour. Rocket could provide the peppery note. But my mustard is still growing so I dressed this salad with a honey dressing - 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil, 2 tablespoons rice vinegar, 1 teaspoon of dijon mustard and 1 tablespoon of honey. Mixed well together it worked nicely with the mandarins and pea shoots.

Planting for winter crops - New Zealand Christmas problems

The year round vegetable garden is something I am still learning to master. There is a big difference between planting all year round and harvesting all year round.

Year one on the lifestyle block I planted more vegetables after the main late summer harvest. It was too late they were great come late spring and early summer but over winter they were too small.
The winter mesclun was a hit though.

Year two, I planted early in February. Towards the end of winter and into early spring we have had some lovely leeks. But it was still too late. The red cabbages are not ready yet and there are still leeks in the garden.

Then I learnt that to be successful in the year round harvesting garden, winter crops need to be planted alongside the summer crops in spring and in early summer. Reading a Northern Hemisphere gardening blog recommended to me, the writer talked about planting mid June to mid July. When is the equivalent in our Southern Hemisphere seasons?  You guessed it mid December to mid January. Just the time when we are busy getting ready for Christmas, enjoying Christmas and New Year or taking a holiday away. No wonder that all year round garden seems challenging.

This year I have my root vegetables of carrots and parsnips in on the spring planting. Hopefully they will not get eaten when they are teeny and vulnerable. I plan to plant brussel sprouts, cabbages, leeks and cauliflowers in the mid December to mid January window. The brussel sprouts seeds are just starting to sprout in the pots.

Each year my aim is to produce more vegetables in quantity and variety and at more times during the year. Learning new skills takes time and practice.

Peas for self sufficiency

This year I understand better the position of peas in the self sufficient garden.
I am not growing them for year round freezing or bagfuls. I am growing them as the sweet vegetable that will fill the gap, while my spring vegetables are growing and before the summer harvest begins.
The plan is to plant peas for trimming the tops as salad greens, sugar snaps for use with the whole pea pod and then because we have the space, I have planted some peas that you do pod - for sweet treats.
I planted the peas for trimming and the sugar snaps about a month ago but made the mistake of not covering them. Very few have survived. I think the birds enjoyed some tasty snacks.
I replanted and covered them. Now I have plants!
The peas planted for trimming were microgreen peas fiji feathers from King Seeds.
I trimmed them two days ago and then trimmed them again tonight for dinner for four. If you let them grow too much they get tougher. I will probably need to trim them every day or every second day to keep to the yummy tender shoots and leaves. They do taste just like peas.

At the end of the microgreens are planted the sugar snap peas. I chose this variety because of the comment "excellent eating quality." They sounded tasty. I was concerned they might get trimmed as microgreens by accident but the advantage of the fiji feathers is they look completely different to the sugar snaps. If all goes to plan, early November we should be using these pods in our cooking.

My peas for podding are the peas alderman. I have grown these the previous two years and they are delicious. Very few make it anywhere near the kitchen. They get eaten in the garden and that is a yummy way to enjoy some peas. They should follow on from the sugar snaps.

Peas are also nitrogen fixing. Once the peas have finished, if I dig them into the soil, they will also enhance the nitrogen content of the soil for future plants to use. The peas will keep giving us more vegetables.

The beautiful commute

People ask me how the daily commute is and I say... it's beautiful.
To prove it, I started taking a photograph on my phone every morning on the commute into Nelson from the Lower Moutere.
The photographs were taken between April 2016 and April 2017. They are not every work day because sometimes I was doing the driving or off holidaying and it still beautiful everyday.

Feijoa jelly single variety experiment

I hadn't thought about the variety of feijoas we had growing until I was told about this helpful guide with photographs and tasting notes from Country Trading: get to know the feijoa.
We scooped our way through quite a number of feijoas trying to identify our varieties. We combined the images and tasting notes from the page above, with the excellent variety photographs at Waimea Nurseries,
This got me thinking, if feijoas have different levels of sugar affecting their sweetness, do they have different levels of pectin too? Pectin is the substance that in the right pH conditions (hence the lemon juice) forms the structure to make feijoa jelly set.
In previous year's my feijoa jelly has set as quite a stiff jelly but my last batch, while a different recipe, was not as well set. I began to wonder if the variety of feijoa had caused this difference in setting thickness. Perhaps one variety is particularly good for jelly.
Let the single variety feijoa jelly setting test begin!

I made the same basic feijoa jelly recipe for all five varieties.
1. Feijoas sliced and boiled in enough water to keep them covered until soft.
2. Fruit and liquid strained through muslin.
3. One cup of sugar, plus a teaspoon of lemon was added for every 500ml of fruit liquid.
4. The jelly was boiled until it reached 105C and poured into sterilised jars.
The feijoa jelly production line was set up with pots being cleaned between each variety to stop carryover.

One aspect that is hard to tell from the Country Trading images is size. I have added a tablespoon for size in my images below.
Feijoa variety one - believed to be Unique variety

Feijoa variety two - identified as Anatoki variety

Feijoa variety three believed to be Pounamu variety

Feijoa variety four identified as Apollo variety

Feijoa variety five believed to be Keiteri variety

Results

I waited until the following day and the best set jelly was variety one, believed to be unique variety. The second best was variety three believed to be pounamu variety, though anatoki (variety two) was also pretty good. 

Conclusions

But like any decent experiment one needs to say; more needs to be done in this field of research. My varieties 4 and 5 have become dessert syrup. I wonder if this may be because I let the fruit boil for too long before straining it due to my production line of jelly making. I may have broken down the pectin. I really needed to boil them for a set length time each so this was controlled. 

I also think ripeness was probably a factor. As fruit ripens, the pectin is broken down, so very ripe fruit has less pectin. Variety one and two had fruit that was less ripe than the other varieties and variety four, identified as apollo, were the most ripe to over ripe.

When making feijoa jelly in future, I think it is a good idea to think about the variety being used as its sweetness and pectin levels probably do mean differing amounts of sugar and lemon juice need to be added.

In other features, the nicest golden colour jelly was variety three, believed to be pounamu. The results on which one tasted the best? It is feijoa jelly - they are all delicious!

Note: Initially when identifying the feijoas we had thought it the number of seed pockets in the cut fruit were important. However for the jelly experiment, I collected the feijoas from the different bushes in different containers. We found the following in one container - five, three and four seed pockets. I believe these are all anatoki variety.

Note: Many feijoas were eaten during this experiment and the different varieties definitely do have their own individual flavour.

Happy to have the above feijoas better identified, if they are incorrectly labelled.

Winter garden

Don't plant spring onions in winter in temperate regions. Either the chickens or the frost took most of these plants. It may be the particular bed I used, which I have noticed is more shaded so the spring onions were in frost much of the day. I have planted spring onions in raised beds before through winter so it is important to think about where these are planted. Now it is spring, I have planted more.
The leeks haven't grown much but are most are still present and not dead so I am hoping with spring they will decide to grow bigger.
The garlic is looking great and I am excited to see if we actually will have a decent garlic haul come December/January.
The shallots are not as successful. Not all the shallots have sprouted. Some have disappeared, possibly eaten by a chicken. But some have sprouted and are looking strong so we will at least get some shallots.
The red onions were only planted a few weeks ago in late winter. They are mostly still in the garden, not dead but not thriving as yet. Hopefully like the leeks they will take off with the warmer spring weather.
The garden is an ongoing experiment of trying different things, trying to repeat the same for what works and changing what doesn't. The advantage of our increasing garden space is hopefully we will have room for failures while still having enough vegetable supplies. I think I need to plant in excess, now we have the space, to see how much survives. It is definitely still a learning experience for the garden.
I have just improved our cloches from bird netting, held up by a random selection of bamboo. Now I use three hoops of flexible black pipe from the Bunnings plumbing section. It is black water pipe. It is relatively narrow, quite flexible, already cut into lengths and was only $5 something for each one. I push each end into the ground, bending it over the garden bed, then I put the next one in about a metre down and stretched the bird netting over the top, pulling it tight at each end to keep it up in the air above the plants. I was looking at buying the netting off the roll but ended up buying a 4m x 4m piece already packaged as part of my experimental kit. I used tent pegs at each end to tie it down to the ground. It looks a lot more organised than the previous set up. I use mulch across the garden so some of the bigger sticks are also now holding down the sides of my cloches to the edge of the bed.
I could buy also frost protective material for next winter and use it over the same black pipe, if they prove up to the task. My only concern is the cloche will not be tall enough for keeping my tomatoes all summer away from the birds. Once the current plants are big enough, not to be eaten by the pesky black birds, I plan to take off the netting. This won't be the case for the tomatoes, so I will need to find some long lengths of flexible pipe.

Firewood on the lifestyle block

Now I have worked out how to maximise food out of the chickpea can, back to the farm.
We cut down two massive tress but firewood has been in short supply from the property.
While we had cut down the two trees just after we arrived on the property, this was only six months before winter so particularly the gum was not properly dry to use for this winter's firewood.

The cat enjoying the new fire

We put a new fire in May. We decided on the Pyroclassic because it is designed to be heat and fuel efficient. It is also supposed to be able to heat a 220 square metre house. This fire burns wood from front to back so we can chop our firewood at 40cm lengths and they will fit in the firebox.
The firebox has restricters so you can only load a certain amount of wood. This means very dry, hard wood works the best. This year we have been experimenting with the different types of wood because we got in two wood deliveries, one in June and a smaller one in early August. This year we probably went through about 6-7 square metres of wood. The dense, dry, hard woods really push out the heat.
This fire is designed to run all day and night and long term this is the plan. It is more like a central heating furnace. So if it is cold, it does take a couple of hours to crank out the high heat and then it will keep pushing out the heat even after the fire has gone out as the ceramic firebox releases the stored heat. In the morning, it can still feel warm to the touch even when the fire inside is out from the night before.
It would seem good hard woods are woods like gum, tree lucerne and Australian hard woods. Kanuka is one of the best but we don't have much of that currently growing and it seems to be frowned on to burn.
Next year more of hard wood will be dry so we are hoping to be able to keep the fire going while we are at work so we can come back to a warm home. We also hope to keep it going all night so in the morning it is still putting out the heat and we can just add more wood. We need the dry, dense, hard word for that as to fit enough in to keep it going, the logs need to be smaller.
In the middle of winter this fire did all the heating for our hot water too. We turned off the electricity to the cylinder. Sometimes it also cooked our dinner on the top hot plate too or roasted our harvested nuts in their shells. So despite buying in firewood this year, rather than being able to use our home chopped wood, we think we haven't paid any extra for heating because our power bills were the lowest they have been all year.
The fire didn't heat our whole house, but this is more to do with the windows not being air tight and the ceiling needing an upgrade in insulation.
We also bought a fan (the valient ventium III) that is purely driven by the change in heat between the base sitting on the hot fire and the top. It is very quiet and helps push the air down to the other end of our large living room.
As we have attempted to work out our firewood supplies for next season, we see they are linked to sunshine and insulation.
Our home is well positioned for sunshine. In winter, in the middle of the day, the living room can reach 26-28C purely from the sunshine. The insulation in the roof does need improving so while we try to capitalise on the sun heated room with the fire, we are losing heat out through the roof. In time for next winter we hope to have at least completed roof insulation in the living room and had the window seals fixed so they all seal properly. It will be interesting see what sort of difference that makes to the room temperature and the amount of firewood we need to burn to keep it warm.
Unfortunately it was only at the end of winter, that we had the brainwave about the pile of macrocarpa prunings in a far corner of the property. We had looked on this all summer as a fire hazard but despite this, it didn't occur to us to use the dry wood as kindling. Now it has. We fill the firebox with broken off sections of the slender branches and the fire starts with a real roar, kicking out the heat.
We hope in the future to grow a kanuka patch that we can enjoy but also harvest and keep sustainable to have a continuous supply of dense, dry, hard wood. For next year and several more years to come, our clean up work on the property has given us enough wood to store for the winters. But we will need to start planning that firewood of some kind to have mature enough to use once the clean up work is complete.