Tag: gardening

The Sunday Muse, January 31

We of the Never Never.

A few years ago, shortly after my Dad had died, my Mum moved to Melbourne to be closer to family.  One day, we were on our way to the city to meet some friends. As we walked up to the tram stop near to where she was staying at the time, out of the blue, and apropos of no conversation we’d ever had, she offered to help me out financially to have a baby.

I was…speechless. And she was tearful as the words tumbled out. She had always thought i’d be such a great mother, she said, and she didn’t want me to miss out on that. She had a little money put by from Dad’s estate and she wanted me to help me out in any way possible, if that’s what I wanted.

We stood in that street in Northcote, both of us welling up with tears, and all sorts of emotions we could barely find the words for, let alone express, seeped into the air around us.

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Veggie bonanza.

Veggie Bonanza

Some nights, it’s all about the veggies for dinner – pictured above is a beautiful farro & pomegranate salad, grilled baby zucchinis, stuffed zucchini flowers with tarragon, garlic green beans, roasted pumpkin with cumin, and roasted mushrooms with goats cheese & thyme.  Soooooo delicous!

The zucchinis, zucchini flowers, green beans, garlic and herbs were all from my garden…so glad to see my efforts showing up on my dinner plate at long last.  It’s making all the hard graft so satisfying.

This is also a perfect illustration of my pathalogical inability to cook for one…I just can’t do it!  Well at least I have leftovers for lunch today…and who doesn’t love leftovers.

As Julia Child might say…Bon Appetit!

 

The Sunday Muse, January 24

Food, Money and Love

This week i’ve been thinking about how my compost worms used to be the best fed worms in Melbourne. Perhaps Australia.

I’m going somewhere with this, I promise…just stay with me.

When I was working a regular, 9-5 job, getting paid on a fortnightly basis, my life and spending habits revolved around that schedule…everything was arranged to be paid, bought or spent within that two week period, and it would all re-set and start again once the next fortnightly pay cycle came around.

I never really questioned whether I needed to spend money on this schedule…I just did. You get paid, you buy stuff. I don’t mean going out and buying all manner of unnecessary crap like some teenager with a credit card – for the most part anyway (ask me about my eBay/op shopping addiction some other time) – I mean regular stuff like groceries and things for the garden, and clothing and toiletries whenever the need arose. But the point was, when it came to buying all these things, I was on a treadmill of spending…I just did it because i’d been paid, and because it was part of my fortnightly routine.

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Pumpkins are the schoolyard bullies of the garden.

Pumpkin Taking Over

Really, there are no explanations necessary here.  They come up out of the compost and before you know it, they’ve taken over.  At least this one seems to be setting some fruit!  But experience tells me never to count my pumpkins before they’ve hatched…

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From the garden.

Beans

Over the past week, it has been so hot here in Melbourne (getting up around 40 degrees celcius) everything around the place, including me, has been wilting.  Then in true Melbourne style, when the change came through and the rain and the cold rolled in, the mercury plunged to down around 19 degrees…I tried to keep the garden hydrated during the heat but sometimes it was like pushing, um…you know what, uphill.  So I was very glad for the downpour, and water I don’t have to pay for!

During the extremes of weather, and of course the Christmas madness, i’ve had little time/inclination to devote to the garden, so I snuck out this morning between rain showers, and after a very, very refreshing 12 hour sleep, to pull a few weeds, tie a few things back, and do a bit of harvesting.  Today I got some bush beans, some broad (fava) beans, and some curly lettuce.  Yum!

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Bountiful beetroot.

Boris & Beetroot Full Size

Boris the cat getting a run for his money from one of my giant beetroots above…I really should have picked them earlier, I don’t know why I didn’t…maybe it was because they looked so pretty in the garden!  I ended up with more beetroot than I knew what to do with, so I was scrambling around for recipes to make sure they wouldn’t go to waste.  Here are a couple of the best.

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