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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

Winter mesclun salad pots

A fresh green salad in winter when dinners start to look mostly brown from slow cooked stews and tangines or to set off the deep red of a tomato based Italian dish, what a great plan.
At the beginning of April I ordered the mesclun winter greens seed mix from King Seeds.
I prepared 3 pots and 2 buckets with soil and some compost, and sprinkled the whole packet between the different pots. I put them out on the edge of the verandah - so they would get some rain - and waited.
I was thinking of the term 'microgreens' and I expected the growth to edible size a lot sooner. By mid-May so approximately 6-7 weeks later, I had pots of low greenery but they looked like weeds.
I was disappointed with the whole mesclun idea. I had successfully grown 3 pots and 2 buckets of little weeds. My one optimistic thought was the uniformity of what was growing in all the pots, perhaps it was the beginnings of a salad after all.
Before I pulled them all out in disgust, I regoogled the seed mix. It has arugula, miner's lettuce and minutina in it.
So I googled each of those separately. It was then that I realised what I thought was grass was actually very young minutina. I plucked some pieces and had a taste. They were definitely flavoured in the green salad genre - fresh, not bitter and not grassy.
This is what the different leaves look like when small:

Arugula (Diplotaxis tenuifolia)

Miner's lettuce

Minutina

These pots have been excellent. Now I know they are mostly my salad greens, I can pick out the few weeds in the pots. I clip the salad greens with scissors, as much as I need for a particular meal, and then it grows back in between.

Having more than one pot means I can cut an entire pot for a salad and while it is regrowing use the other ones. The pots on the verandah has meant quick access during meal creation to grab some salad making the salad grabbing a more regular occurrence than if picking required putting on boots and heading out into the winter dark to the vegetable garden.
We have used the mesclun greens together with some pepper, balsamic vinegar and extra virgin olive oil for a quick side salad, in sandwiches with cheese and homemade chutney, and on top of an omelet made from our chickens' eggs.
Based on the success of winter mesclun greens, summer ones will be added to the seed selection. Mesclun is a funny word. It is French for mixture, this is really one of the old salad ideas possibly back from Roman times. Mine should include flowers and more herbs as well to give it variety in flavour. Next time, I think I will include rocket, perhaps some mustard greens and add some edible flowers too like violets and nasturtiums. I like the idea of putting together the leaves to create the flavours pepper or mustard dressings would add to the salad. I will have to wait until we have finished eating the winter mesclun.

How to make hard shell almonds palatable

We finally cracked into a hard shell almond only to taste bitterness. It was strongly almond but also, according to the internet containing a glycoside, amygdalin, which metabolises to prussic acid (hydrogen cyanide) that is not good for you and mildly toxic.
We have three soft shell almond trees but these have been planted behind the hazelnut grove so don't get much sun. They are suffering from their lack of sun and also the other trees growing close to them. The almonds we did get off these trees were delicious. They were also easy to remove the almond out of the shell and we just ate them raw off the tree. But we didn't get very many at all, perhaps a handful per tree. We will cut down the extra trees around the soft shell almond trees to give them more of a chance and we have pruned them back to the healthy branches to hopefully help the development of the trees and more nuts next season.
We also have three hard shell almond trees situated in a sunny position and these were covered in nuts. The difficulty was the bitter flavour. We decided one is definitely a bitter almond tree but the other two are not quite bitter to the same degree. From the reading online and offline, it would seem, having the bitter tree is good for pollination purposes. So we started just collecting the nuts from the two trees we don't think are as bitter.
I tried cracking the nuts out of the shells and blanching them in boiling water but they were still bitter.
I tried roasting just the nuts in a frypan on the stove and they were still bitter.
I was about to suggest cutting down all three trees, when we tried the method we use for the hazelnuts. We put the nuts in their shells in the square cake tin on top of the fire for several hours. This makes them quite nice and gets rid of the more intense part of the bitter flavour.
These nuts we have covered in melted chocolate to create a sort of rough looking, scorched almond.
But we mostly end up just eating the almonds after they have been roasted over the fire.
The hard shells are definitely harder to get into. Come July they do seem to open up more and currently there are many split shells lying under the tree. So next season, I will keep a closer eye on what is happening to the almonds that have fallen from the tree and see if their shells can be more easily opened if left until late June/early July.
The vice grips do work for getting into the shells but more strength is required.
If I was planting almond trees, I would just plant soft shell almonds for ease of getting into the almond and the less bitter flavour.
But this article (and other similar articles from Italy and other European countries) about the superiority of hard shell almonds still has me wondering if the hard shell are better after all, just more almondy than I have experienced previously.

Hazelnut recipes

There are no fancy nut crackers here. We have found the vice grips work the best. You can adjust them to the size of the nut. It also means you know where the vice grips are because they are by the bowl of nuts.
The hazelnuts started falling at the end of February, through to end of March. Each day I would go out and collect them off the ground so they didn't go mouldy. It also meant the job of collecting them was not too big. One walk around the grove after arriving home and the nuts were collected.
We had half a shopping basket full of hazelnuts by the time they stopped falling. It looked a big cracking job. What would we do with all the hazelnuts?
What we found worked best with the hazelnuts was just cracking them as we needed them. We found the best way to roast them was in their shell. We put a layer in a square cake tin and sat that on the top of our logburner during the winter months. In the shells they have a barrier so depending on how hot your fire gets, it can take several hours to gently roast them, with no effort from you. Every now and then we might crack one and eat it to see if they are done. Sometimes the outer shells go a bit black looking so we figure they are roasted enough. Then we tip the nuts into a bowl. We have a had bowl of roasted hazelnuts sitting on our bench, ready to be cracked for a snack for the last five months. We have gone through a lot of hazelnuts this way - they are just so tasty, especially if still warm from being on the fire.

We have made our own hazelnut, chocolate spread. You do have to keep it in the fridge and I think shouldn't be kept for too long. We used Felicity Cloake's recipe. It is more hazelnutty, less sweet and much more like a breakfast spread than the commercial versions in the supermarket.
Other excellent uses of hazelnuts included adding it to homemade bircher muesli, filling for scrolls or sweet buns, any recipe that requires some nuts like loaves. I used hazelnuts in this persimmon loaf recipe.
The interesting one, that was thoroughly enjoyed was the hazelnut and anchovy spaghetti. It sounds an odd combination but the anchovy adds salt and the hazelnuts sweetness. It just works well. It did involve a serious session of nut cracking.
We haven't ground the nuts into a hazelnut meal for use in baking. Maybe in a few years when we are less excited by the hazelnuts we might have enough uneaten to do this.
We have almonds, walnuts and hazelnuts - hazelnuts are the most popular.

Recycling

Our block is just outside the rubbish collection areas. So while our neighbours down the road and around the corner put their supplied bins out for collection, we take our recycling and rubbish bag to the refuse centre ourselves.
This is okay. I like that it makes me think more carefully about what I put in the rubbish bag so we can lengthen the times between trips to the refuse centre. It is also free to dump the council rubbish bag at the tip and the recycling.
Just after we moved. I set up our recycling bins. I went to the hardware shop, knowing the measurements of our car boot and the number of bins I needed that matched the council's recycling streams. I bought the bins, that would mean I could fit all the recycling bins in the car boot but were still a decent size. I bought two different styles because their slightly different shapes, meant they would fit better in the back. I have four 50 litre lidded bins, one for the rubbish bag, one for glass, one for paper and one for recyclable plastics. I have a smaller 10 litre bin for cans. They all have lids and I didn't want lids that would blow away in the wind.
The bins are close to the kitchen for ease of getting the recycling into them and close to driveway, for ease of loading them into the car.
Since I set up this system, I have realised that I don't take them all to the refuse centre at once because we don't fill them all in an even way. I usually take three big bins and the smaller bin for cans. Having the separate bins also makes me aware of what we are using most. Plastics is our most used recycling bin, despite reusing plastic containers where we can.
Every time I go to do the recycling, I am glad I took the time to set up our bins. Others are at the refuse centre picking through their recycling, working out what needs to go where. We drive up, open the back of the car, empty each bin into the appropriate recycling section and we're done with the bins all fitting back into the boot. We are off to add our rubbish bag to landfill while the others are still picking through their assorted bins.
Glass is the only more difficult one because I have one bin, while after the first visit to the recycling centre I found they separate them by colour. I am wondering about dividers down the bin but currently our glass recycling is our least filled bin because we reuse a lot of the glass bottles. I don't take it very often to the recycling centre so it is pretty easy to empty into the right bins. I could have  3 smaller bins for this and we may make this adjustment in the future, if our glass recycling grows.
It is definitely worth the time and the expense, doesn't have to be much, to set up a recycling system in an easy to use way that matches where you need to take it for recycling.

Quinces

The quinces started ripening in April. 
Quince jelly is one of my most favourite things so I had been waiting for the quinces to ripen.
I made several batches of quince jelly. I love how it changes colour as it cooks. The first big batch I also made quince paste from the pulp. When I know that I want to make quince paste I peel and core the quinces.

Quince Jelly

Peel and core quinces 

Chop into quarters and put in a pot and add just enough water to cover the quinces.

Add the juice of a lemon.

Bring to the boil and let simmer until the quinces are soft.

Strain fruit through some muslin or a jelly bag or a pillow case so you end up with the light amber liquid separated from the soft pulp of the quinces.

It helps if you can strain the liquid into a bowl with measurements on the side, otherwise work out how many cups of the liquid you have.

Bring the liquid back to the boil.

Add in the same number of cups of sugar as you had liquid and stir until dissolved.

Let it boil away until it reaches setting point of 105C or alternatively use the setting point measures of putting a little onto a cold saucer from the freezer and seeing if it sets by pushing it with your finger to see if it forms creases or when you run your finger through it it stays divided.

Once it has reached the setting point (it is usually quite a red colour by then),  pour it into sterilised jars and seal.

 ( You can make some of this jelly for use in meat dishes but adding sprigs of thyme. I washed the thyme in boiling water and then dropped the sprigs into the jars before sealing.)

Quince Paste

Use a big pot, with plenty of room - with the cooked quince, weigh how much you have and add that much sugar and the juice of a lemon. Stir it in.

Put over a low heat and keep stirring it until all the sugar has dissolved.

Then simmer it gently. You have to be careful that it doesn’t burn and stick to the bottom of the pot and also beware of it firing hot, molten lumps out of the pot. 

It will gradually change colour. Don’t be tempted to speed it up by turning up the heat as it just sticks and burns. Keep stirring intermittently to make sure it hasn’t stuck to the bottom.

After about 1, 1/2 to 2 hours it should be done which you can tell by when you draw the spoon across the pot, for a moment you can see the bottom.

Tip into baking paper lined tins and leave out to set or you can put it in the oven on a really low heat such as 40C to set.

It should be set over night.

I wrap it in the baking paper and keep storing it in the fridge. Others say you can store it in the cupboard but I haven’t tried that.

Another use of quinces we tried was peeling, quartering and adding to the slow cooker. I covered them with enough water so that they would not go brown and added brown sugar as much as I felt would be nice. I set it on low overnight. By the morning we had soft, sweet quinces to have on our breakfast.

We also made spiced quinces that are currently preserved ready to go in a savoury dish. 

You can make these in the slow cooker too or on the stove top. I peeled and cored quinces. put enough water in the pot to cover the quinces. To the water I add one sliced lemon, 2 star anise, 1 cinnamon quill, 4 green cardamon pods and 1/4 cup of brown sugar. This simmered away until the quinces were red and soft.

Stars for free

Taking on a lifestyle block, especially an overgrown one, is a lot of work. It requires money to be put into it to fix things, buy the right tools or replace worn out parts.
For us, it also means a much longer commute.
Despite this, there is one aspect that does just seem a free bonus. It is the stars. I haven't got bored of them yet. Many a night we go out side and just stand, look up and marvel at what we see in the pitch black of the country.
We got up at a ridiculously early time to see the planets aligned and we have put on warm jackets so we can stand outside for longer on crisp, clear winter nights. I have seen a shooting star leave a blazing trail behind it as it fell.
They are beautiful and there are just so many of them. They feel a spectacular free gift for country living.
One night I was standing looking up close to the feijoa grove. It was quiet, other than the occasional bird squark and I was admiring the Milky Way when I heard feijoas thud to the ground. I had just picked up a basketful that day to process. When it is harvest time, the fruit doesn't stop but stars don't either.

June night sky from the country

Nashis and pears

The nashis ripened a lot quicker than I was expecting. They were ripe in late January, early February. From my reading on the internet, I was expecting March. The birds gave me the hint by digging in. This is a good way to find out if your fruit is ripe, but does mean you sacrifice some fruit.
The nashis were delicious - very juicy. One tree, they were quite small but these trees had no thinning done. Next season I will do some thinning to get bigger fruit.
We ate a lot of the nashis fresh and I also preserved some. I used the pressure cooker method. I peeled and cut them up, put the pieces into 500ml jars, filled them with a hot sugar syrup and then pressure cooked them four at a time in the pressure cooker. I half fill the pressure cooker with water, put in the jars, get it up to pressure and I can put the timer on the ring to keep it at pressure for 15 minutes before it automatically turns it off.
The other pears ripened much later in April. We have three different type of pear trees. We ate many of pears fresh and preserved some, again using the pressure cooker method. I don't do many jars of each fruit because they only have to last until the fruit starts again next season. I don't want to get sick of any of our fruit types.
I did make a couple of 500ml jars of Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's Mustard pears from his Fruit Everyday recipe book. This is a great book for new ideas of using up your fruit. We did try quite a few of the recipes as our fruit ripened and we had made all the usual recipes.
Mustard pears are quite easy to make. The hardest part is judging how much liquid you will need to cover the pears. I made too much and have a jar of the liquid as well.
Apples can be difficult to tell when they are ripe. We kept trying apples off the trees from January. we found the apples could be very tasty even when they are not quite ripe. We also used them in muffins and other dishes before some of the varieties were properly ripe. Once fully ripened, I have tried preserving some jars of apple pulp, again using the preserving method but cooking the apple down first. It will be interesting to see if these work. I haven't opened a jar yet.
We have a couple of Sir Prize apple trees. When the fruit were ripe they were not crisp but floury, easily bruised and not very nice to eat fresh. But these apples are amazing cooked up. I just peel them and then use one of those plastic round slicers to cut them into eight pieces and core them. I fill a large pot with all the pieces, add a small amount of water to stop the bottom ones sticking and let them cook down on the stove, stirring occasionally. They will cook down to about half the original amount. These apples don't need any added sugar (my hands get sticky peeling and slicing them) and they make the most delicious pulp. It doesn't last long in the fridge, despite how big a pot I make of it.We eat this pulp on breakfast, pancakes, use it in crumbles, with yoghurt - the kids would just eat it all in spoonfuls if they could.
The apple and pear season lasted several months through April, May and into June. The quinces started ripening in late April.
The ease of picking fruit and the number of fruit trees we have, is making me work towards the goal of pruning our trees so they are not more than 2 metres high. This should make all fruit collecting easier. We do have a fruit picking ladder and it is great but I notice I use the most fruit from the trees I can easily pick at any time, without needing to collect extra equipment. Currently our Sir Prize apple tree still has apples higher up that I couldn't reach.
We keep a selection of baskets in our kitchen. We have black plastic shopping baskets and some cane baskets. It is useful having a selection and different sizes for taking out to collect the fruit at any time. The baskets can then sit in the kitchen as we deal with the fruit.

Portable dinners

We are at the start of a long process.
At the moment we are using more fossil fuels than we ever did when living in town. The car, the ride on mower, the quad bike, the chain saw - all use fuel and all are being well used at the moment. This is just for a time while we get everything back under control.
Our current lifestyle does mean due to some child activities we end up needing to stay in town longer during the day. To avoid even later evenings, we are getting good at creating portable dishes, that we can make the night before and then take with us.This also saves on buying takeaways all the time. In the summer we treated it like a picnic.
These are the dishes we have made, taken in the coolie bag and that can be eaten watching sport or waiting for activities to finish.
pizza
toasted sandwiches
pita pockets with salad, cold meat and hummus
curry puffs 
Picnic rolls - this was in summer, when we just took sliced tomatoes, sliced cheese, sliced cold meat and lettuce, and made them on the sidelines
Grilled and sliced toasties
soup and bread

Dealing with Plums

The plums started ripening at Christmas in December, just as the loquats were finishing.
It is difficult to find the exact type of plums. I spent a lot of time googling plum types.
I found McGrath Nurseries page of plum types one of the most useful because it gives New Zealand based information. This page also helps to work out what a plum variety might be and then I would google the type of plum I thought I had for potential recipes.
We have something like 12 different types that ripen after one another.
Cherry plums can be seen as a useless plum but I found Sally Wises' blog and she has great recipes.
All summer we had the Sparkling plum drink on the go. The cherry plums were the best plum for this. We also messed around with her recipe a bit. We tried to reduce the sugar but if you reduce it too much then it will grow mould. Below is the adapted recipe we used but you can experiment with what works for you. It is the natural yeast on the plums that makes it ferment. Sally's recipe has cider vinegar in it but with a expect home brewer in the family, we stopped adding this. Partly because in beer the acetic acid flavour that is added by the vinegar is a flavour to be avoided in beer.

Sparkling Cherry Plum Juice

900g sugar
1kg clean but not washed cherry plums (or other plums). The plums should be unblemished.
1 lemon chopped
1 litre of boiling water
3.5l of water

Mix the sugar and the boiling water together in a large pot - big enough to hold all the ingredients (I used our big stock pot). Stir until all the sugar is dissolved.
Add the cherry plums and crush with a potato masher so they split.
Add the second measure of water and the chopped slices of lemon.
Cover with a clean teatowel and leave sitting on the bench for three to four days depending on your summer temperatures. Keep an eye on it after day 3 to see if little bubbles are appearing on the surface.
Once it has fermented a little, strain out the fruit and lemons using a sieve or lift them out with a slotted spoon and pour your light pink liquid into very clean plastic soft drink bottles. Put the lids on tight.
Leave sitting on the bench until the bottles are tight with the carbonation. You really want to make sure they are tight or it won't be fizzy enough. This can take another 3 days, depending on your summer temperatures. Once they are tight put them in the fridge ready to drink. This is a very refreshing drink on a hot summer's day.
This recipe makes 3 1.5l bottles of drink. We continuously had a stock pot of this fermenting on the bench so there was always more juice to refill the bottles.

Cherry plum tree in the overgrown orchard

With our many varieties of plum we made jam, we preserved some as pulp and as whole plums, and froze sweetened pulp. A large mouli makes life much easier when dealing with a lot of plums. You can quickly separate the stones and skins.

We also made a spiced plum chutney recipe, which is very nice. Unfortunately the internet has many spice plum chutney recipes, I think the one I made was this one. Note to self it is important to bookmark recipes so if they are a success we can make them again.
It is also important to label the jars. I didn't used to label my preserves because I knew what they were. Now we are preserving so many, I found it is important to date and label.
One other method I tried was this one of preserving whole fruit, supposedly so it tastes like fresh fruit. I tried this with some tasty doris type plums we had that were very good eating fresh. I opened a jar of these recently - 6 months later. At first tasting, these have definitely preserved, they have not gone off, but they certainly don't taste like fresh fruit. I don't think I will use this particular method again.

Using the yellow plums I tried this yellow plum salad but with the ingredients I had available. So I used a red capsicum and left out the beets. I had a tangy cheese so substituted that for the goat's cheese, that I didn't have on hand. The recipe I ended up making as below. It was very tasty and used up some plums.

Yellow plum salad

4-6 yellow plums, quartered and stones removed
red capsium cut into strips
two tomatoes quartered
tangy cheese like goat's cheese or feta or whatever you have available

Dressing ingredients:
2.5 Tbs extra virgin olive oil
1 Tbs white wine vinegar
1 tspn fresh thyme
1 tspn dijon mustard
1/4 tsp pepper
several grinds of black pepper

Combine the salad ingredients - feel free to adjust amounts to what you have available and to your taste. Combine dressing ingredients and mix well together before tipping over your salad.
We ate a lot of the plums fresh and it was the plums that started the practice of having stewed fruit in the fridge to go on breakfast cereal. The plums were still going when the nashis and peaches started ripening.

Dealing with an overgrown garden

Next growing season we are going to have a proper big vegetable garden to have more vegetables and a more continuos supply. We want to start towards being self sufficient in vegetables like we are for fruit.
In the summer I laid one trial bed in the overgrown garden area using cardboard over the grass and then a thick layer of wood chip mulch. My plan was by next season the cardboard would have broken down and the mulch would be weed free and ready to plant my new vegetable crops. This first bed I didn't know that the cardboard needed to be really wet, I learnt this later.
Alongside the first bed we put our three loaned chickens in a large run and they did a fantastic job of changing the grass and weeds into a cleared area over six months.

Garden when the chickens were first added

Garden area after a few months of the chickens clearing it. 

Once they had cleared most of the area but a few larger plants, we shifted them and laid another two beds. I used the wet cardboard (after removing all tape and plastic) and then mulch. We had a lot of mulch from the trees we had cut down on our arrival but we have gone through it pretty quickly putting it on the gardens to keep the weeds away.
I used string to lay out the beds. I made the three beds the same width so when I make bird covers etc, they will fit all the beds. The paths in between, I made wide enough for the wheelbarrow and to crouch down in, without hitting the other bed.
The mulch goes across all beds and the paths as one big layer so weeds don't grow up in the margin between the path and beds.
There is one more bed, which already has the rhubarb growing in it. This one has not been mulched and at the end of the rhubarb is an asparagus bed. I will have to wait for spring to see exactly where the asparagus bed is planted or if it is not producing anymore.
A few weeks a go I planted one of the beds with leaks, garlic, shallots and spring onions. I covered it with the protective netting to keep out the blackbirds. Despite that something still seems to manage to dig up the garlic but it is good to see, the garlic is already creating roots.
Last week I made a plan based on these three beds being four metres long. I ended up using an Excel workbook with each worksheet being a different bed, with what will be planted, if a seedling or a seed, when it will be harvested and what will be planted next in the bed.
Once I had my three beds planned, I had one more worksheet that is by month and what needs to be bought to be grown from seed, or transplanted etc. each month. This plan covers a full year.
The garden is organised.
Now back to the summer fruits. Plums followed the loquats.