Of potatoes and lemons and the smell of coffee

The coffee sack potato experiment seems to be going rather well.  They've been in their sacks for a good month now.  The theory is that once the plants show leafy growth, you cover that with soil, and in doing so prompt the plant to grow another layer of tubers.

Here's the Creative Reinventor holding the sacks' sides so the soil doesn't fall out.  Two of the three sacks have reshot leaves, so it's time to fill them again.  We also decided to try the same with leeks.  No such progress yet.

You've got to admire the tenacity of plants.  This lemon tree had a nasty citrus gall wasp infestation.  It needed hard pruning twice to get rid of all the galls.  And it's done this.  Quite out of season, but it's in a sunny spot, and Perth doesn't really get cold.

Meanwhile the Practical Reinventor struggles with the black dog.  The Corona-crisis has rendered her unemployed and this is not a good state of affairs.  Thankfully the weather is mostly nice enough to cycle every day, and exercise is a saviour.

The Creative Reinventor is doing rather better.  With the pandemic forced the early closure of his first cafe, it's also brought a new landlord who's most supportive of setting up a quirky cafe.  And the rent is rather more reasonable than the original site.  There has been much fitting and sawing and painting and discussing and we're looking at opening in July. Exciting!

Autumn growth

The sunflowers have started to bloom and the bees are befuddled, but grateful.  Well, a bit grateful.  It appears the bees have gone feral.  The Creative Reinventor went to say hello to them the other day and was stung for his trouble.  It may have been his black t-shirt, but the consensus is they've gone feral.  Fortunately he's not allergic.

Neither reinventor can deal with this disaster.  We'll have to pay a proper apiarist to do something.  Either take the hives away and requeen.  Or just take the hives away.  The hives sit in quite a large bit of back garden that is now out of bounds. 

In other news, there are lots of green tomatoes.  Of all sizes.  There's a slim possibility, if the sunny weather holds (it won't, there's rain predicted for most of next week) that they're in a sheltered enough position to ripen.  We could, of course ripen them on a windowsill with a sacrificial banana.  Or we could make green tomato chutney.  With the rip-roaring success of the ripe tomato relish, the chutney idea is winning.

Optimism

This is a dragonfruit cutting.  It sat in its pot silently for weeks.  Then it put up a shoot.  The Practical Reinventor feels like this is her spiritual plant totem.  She's not being doing well of late.  While the  coronavirus restrictions have not helped, it's the employment market that's been the problem.  Where she'd normally have a week or two off between contracts and just enjoy the time, there have been 11 contracts withdrawn from offer.  Employers are either terribly nervous, or realise that one of the employees they've just sacked could do the job instead.  Sigh.
However, there's a short, freelance contract happening, and her mood has lifted.
Hopefully this is the first step out of the mental morass.

There were tears

While all the fun things are put on hold, and we're all confined to quarters, there's been a lovely resurgence in the skills we used to value.  Of course this isn't all good - there's been a run on vegetable seedlings and when they ran out, seeds.  Some smaller seed companies are completely overwhelmed.  The price of laying hens has skyrocketed.  One feels a little sorry for the hens going to homes where the people know nothing about looking after them.
However, Marmalade Cottage has always grown vegetables and baked bread preserved food.

First up, onions.  The Practical Reinventor is very fond of a pickled onion, so there's no excuse for years of buying them.

It'll be about a month before we know whether they're any good.  A report then.

And this old favourite - once a winner (well, third, but still) at the Perth Royal Show.  Pineapple relish.  Which comes out looking like this:

And is fabulous with cheese.

And since the tomato lady up the road is still selling her wares by honesty box, some of these:



















became these:

which got whizzed up into the most amazing tomato sauce.  They're in the freezer waiting for a day cool enough to justify lighting the pizza oven.
It's been a while between loaves, so we made some of this too:

All in all, it's been rather productive.

Desperate times

We had to finally close our little cafe last week.  It's been coming for a while, not just the corona-crisis, but the upcoming end of lease and the clear animosity of the landlords towards us.
That means four people out of work, and a significant portion of income lost.
The much-vaunted jobkeeper payment doesn't apply.  
Right now, we're focusing on surviving this crisis and working out how to rebuild when things improve.

Drama Queen

It's perfectly normal and healthy for chooks to moult once or twice a year.  They stop laying, lose some feathers, have a bit of a rest, grow them back and go back to laying.

Violet has to go further than everyone else.  Of four attempts to take this photo (she kept running away - do chooks feel embarrassment?) this was the best.  Makes you groan.

Re-evaluations and starting again.

So things just went stupid for a bit there. 

The Creative Reinventor is managing local council stuff, too many people asking for extra-hot coffee (don't.  Just don't) and increasing wholesale orders for his magnificently roasted coffee.

The Practical Reinventor, who had been doing the catering in a leased commercial kitchen suddenly found the Person-To-Whom-She-Was-Paying-Rent showing her true colours and they weren't pretty.

Then the reinventors did the sums and reluctantly, the Practical Reinventor went back to work.  Luckily there were two pleasant contracts in the offing, with a week off in between.

And now...

Who knows?

The catering business is officially dead - there's no money in food.  Unless you're a celebrity chef with a cookbook contract.

Meanwhile, the garlic is thriving, the broad beans have just started blooming, and the poor citrus trees have ripe fruit, blossom and juvenile fruit.  Which would be the effect of climate change.  Exhausting.

In among the hard decisions, we decided that since the feijoa tree had had four years to produce, and hadn't, it had failed its probation.  It's been replaced with a lime, and there's a cumquat squeezed into one of the chook exclusion zones.

The end of summer

The reinventors consider if the majority of the garden makes out of summer alive, that's success.  Summer in Perth is brutal.  Long, teeth-achingly hot, dry and unpleasant.

It's not a nice heat, it drains one, there are rarely summer rains to break up the unbearable, shimmering blue of the sky and everyone gets crotchety.

The chooks pant and lose their feathers, egg production drops (who could blame them?), the dogs search for shade and cool spots on tiles, the cat whinges if the air-con isn't set at arctic.

The people just complain and sweat and endure.

But summer appears to be waning.  Most of the garden has survived.  Unlike many chook-owners we know, our whole flock survived, and there are new green shoots in the gardens.

The self-sown garlic is already growing strongly, so we've planted several dozen extra cloves with more planned.  Ordinarily garlic wouldn't go in until ANZAC day, but nature is telling us it's time.

The deciduous trees are confused, not sure whether to lose their leaves.  We shall refrain from pruning them for another month or so.

It might even rain tomorrow.

On the logic of dogs frightened out of their wits

It's one of those Perth things, it hardly ever rains here, so when it does, it's quite an event.

There have been summer storms over the last week.  Proper storms with thunder and lightning.

The dogs have been beside themselves.  Trembling and clinging to the reinventors' ankles at considerable risk of tripping, kicking and stepping on paws.

During the day, the reinventors have been out doing what they do, and the dogs have been deputised to take care of the house, chooks and cat.  Ordinarily this arrangement works in a most tickety-boo manner. 

Except for the storms. 

Day One, the Practical Reinventor got home to find one dog missing, but only a whistle away, and the other home but sheepish and with great scrapes on either side of its face.

The red dog, being skinnier, had gotten though the gap at the bottom of the gate.  The white dog musts have gotten painfully caught and wrenched itself free.  If there was blood, the rain washed it all away.

Nasty.

The next day, the white dog was still in the yard, and there was no sign of the red dog.  Then the phone rang.  The red dog had managed to get out, cross two major roads and a nice bloke drinking at the pub about a kilometre away had caught her and phoned us. 

Embarrassing.

The third day of storms, D, our lovely 95-year-old neighbour had intercepted both dogs heading for parts unknown and corralled them in her yard.

Again, embarrassing, but at least there was no further canine injury.  You have to wonder why a dog would, when scared, leave its nice, safe yard and house, where it knows its people will be, and run off to... somewhere.

There's a bloke been to look at the gate and what might be done about it.

Fortunately the storms seem to have passed.

It probably won't rain again til May now.

Slow cooking

What with recovering from a nasty workplace injury, then starting a new business, the plinth for the back yard pizza oven got pushed to the back of the list for a while.

 

And now it's ready for the base, which we'd like to be marble or granite, then the oven itself. 

You can't hurry these things.

Stay of execution

This plum tree came with the house.  It's properly mature, probably 30 years old and the neighbours kept telling us how much fruit it produces.

Except it's never produced fruit for us. 

One or two, despite clouds of divine blossom and the efforts of our bees.

We gave it a savage prune.

We fed it.

Talked to it.











No change - just a few sad fruit

Our lovely next door neighbour has a similar tree.  Same problem.

We'd just decided to cut it down and replace it with a productive tree when a farmer friend suggested that the problem was likely to be that it needs a pollinator.

As it used to fruit, we think the pollinator was in someone else's back yard.

There are a lot of old houses around us disappearing to make way for blocks of three and four units.  The developers clear the blocks completely.

The practical reinventor managed to pick one plum and take it to a specialist propagating nursery.  Turns out it's a Kelsey plum.  Fairly unusual and a lovely fruit, with sweet pale yellow flesh and lots of juice.

This is a mariposa.  It's a blood plum and should provide both ours and our neighbour's tree with the right kind of pollen.

In which the reinventors decide to make wine

It was a spur-of-the-moment thing.  We found the strawberries going cheap and decided we'd made more jam than we know what to do with.

So, off to the local shop-with-everything.  And came back $80 poorer but with gadgetry!

Pretty much any fruit can form the basis of wine - the naturally occurring sugars will ferment all by themselves under the right circumstances, producing alcohol.

First mash your fruit. Then add water and the right kind of yeast.

And a Campden tablet and some stuff to encourage the yeast and rather a lot of sugar.

Stir it daily for a week. Then strain it into your demijohn.

This will be a particularly messy task and will take ages.  But, you know, wine!

Once it's in the demijohn, you need a special bung with just the right sized hole to take your air lock.  Don't even contemplate skimping on these.  As the wine does it thing, it burps and hiccups gas, and since you need to exclude as much air as possible, which means filling the demijohn to the top.

If you don't allow the gas to escape in a controlled manner, it will take matters into its own hands.

Now it's sitting in a cool, dark cupboard, and in a couple of months, we'll bottle it, optimistic that we'll end up with something dry, pink and bubbly.