Salad season

We harvested the first beans of the season today.  They'll be dinner tonight with our pickled beetroot.  Food metres: about 20.

In a couple of weeks, there'll be more beans from these seedlings.

Before the weather gets too hot, we'll be planting little patches of beans at fortnightly intervals.  So far we have three of 10 plants each.  Shortly they'll need a thick layer of mulch to cope with the Perth summer.

Red-stained fingers

We had our first beetroot harvest last weekend - nearly three kilograms, far too much to eat fresh, so pickles!

 
First you boil them and then slip the skins off.  Slice or chop (we did some of each).

Then you need your preserving agent, with which you combine your flavourings.  Vinegar does the hard work preserving the beetroot, and we've added fennel, bay, cinnamon and some dried lemon peel.  Smells lovely.

 

And here you have the finished product!  In a week they'll be ready to eat.  Just in time for the beans. Beans, beetroot and fetta makes a gorgeous salad. 

Goings and comings

Joan, one of our rescued battery hens, died the other week.

She wasn't looking well on Saturday afternoon, and by Sunday morning she'd fallen off the perch.

We buried her under the mulberry tree.  The stresses of their early lives often mean battery hens die younger.  In the 18 months she'd been a member of the Marmalade Cottage CWA, she learnt how to roost at night, how to scratch for worms and slaters, the joys of dust-bathing and how much she loves fresh greens.

When she arrived, her beak and wings had been clipped and she had lots of feathers missing.  Straight away she took to life in the CWA hall, challenging for the ambitious role of deputy boss chook and feathering up beautifully.

We miss her, she had spark.

Shirley has also left, but for happier reasons.  She's gone to a young family who needed a chook who understood how to be a proper chook to teach some rescue battery hens the ropes.

Meet Beatrice.  Her former owners are moving house and their new place is not chook-friendly.

Things are a bit tense in the CWA hall as the girls work out the new pecking order.  Beatrice - having a reputation for escaping - is under house arrest until things are a bit more settled.

Maybe this year

While asparagus are pretty tough and don't require much special care, it is a few years between planting and eating.

This is the third year the asparagus have grown at Marmalade Cottage.

When you plant crowns, you need to leave them alone for at least two years for the plant to sufficiently establish before you can cut the spears and have it survive.  For seeds and seedlings, it takes a good five years.

We might be lucky this year.

Behind the asparagus is a silvanberry.  It's bred for Perth conditions, but struggled last year.  We're quite pleased to see it's survived.  Perhaps there will be berries this year too.

Keeping the bees happy

This plant has been a mixed success.

It's red mizuna, an Asian stir-fry green.  It's rather too peppery for the reinventors' liking, but the bees think it's wonderful, and it's helpful in deterring nematodes.

It's also taller than the practical reinventor and looks quite impressive.  Last year's single plant produced hundreds of seeds, these are self-sown. 

Citrus in bloom

This is the tangelo, both fruiting and flowering.

It smells divine.  Utterly intoxicating.

As does the lemon.  And the bees agree

Gratuitous chook shot

And hasn't the passionfruit vine grown?!  It now all but covers the chooks' outside area, and it's been there only about 18 months.

In Perth, it's been quite wet the last few months for the changeover between winter and spring.  This was a rare sunny day, and the chooks couldn't wait to get out for their free-range.

So, so fresh

Tonight's dinner included this:

 Some lovely, young garlic, which went wonderfully with this:

our self-sown silverbeet.   It was less than 15 minutes from picking them, by torchlight, to eating them.

Nothing compares.

Eponymous

This needs no explanation.

Thanks Ali for the limes and Fi for the grapefruit.  Along with a similar pot of lemonade fruit, there are an extra 20 jars of marmalade on the shelves in the mud room of Marmalade Cottage.

A little tart

Marmalade Cottage doesn't have its own cumquat tree, but lots of friends do. 

The reinventors' favourite way with cumquats is simmered in a sugar syrup until soft, then bottled with a generous slosh of booze.  In this case marsala.  They'll be superb in a couple of months.

Dough

The reinventors haven't bought a loaf of bread for a few years now.  We've been experimented with a fairly standard dough recipe.  The latest success is expresso choc chip raisin bread.
Messy but delicious!

Sap rising

Spring at Marmalade Cottage is rather gorgeous, if you can look past the lush growth of weeds.

Waaaaay back at the beginning, the Creative Reinventor told the Practical one he loved the fragrance of jonquils.  So, in the 10 gardens they've had together, she's planted him a jonquil patch.  This is one of the few to be appreciated for a second year.

The white Californian Poppies have seeded for their third season.

The roses are in no doubt it's spring.

Paws for thought

Sometimes there's a tennis ball that needs chasing, and you just have to run through the freshly cut grass.

Defeating the chooks

Even though the chooks won't eat garlic, they have absolutely no respect for the reinventors' efforts at growing food and will scratch it out of the ground.

Laying fine chicken wire across the ground before the plants erupt from the soil is one way to protect them.

Finally, it's winter

Winter in Perth is a bit of a joke - usually it's sunny and 22 degrees during the day, and we almost never get a frost.
With climate creep, the roses refuse to stop blooming and the hydrangeas refuse to lose their leaves even when the new ones are budding up the stems.
So the practical reinventor took matters into her own hands.
A severe prune for the hydrangeas and the roses.

With these saved to adorn a mantlepiece.

Soon there will be the creative reinventor's favourite jonquils along with a variety of ranunculus, anenome and daffodungles.