Clever, practical birthday present

The practical reinventor loves to sew.  After eight years of working pretty solidly on it, she's pretty good at it.  Last year's resolution was to make clothes rather than buy them, so during the year, she made all her own knickers, worked out how to make t-shirts and continued with blouses and work tops.
For her birthday, the creative reinventor did this:

This started off as a bar with a couple of stools. 
The stools went off to Bolt Coffee, and this started its transformation.

It's the right height, and has a handy shelf, but it wasn't long or wide enough.

Or pink enough.

The pink was pretty easy to take care of, but the long and wide bit required a trip the to Green and Orange Temple to Lost Weekends for a sheet of MDF.

The two screwed together didn't fit through the door, so it had to be assembled in situ.

Et voila! A pattern cutting table!

Which is what you get for the sewist who has almost everything.

It's since had a cutting grid glued to its top, which is a huge help for accurate fabric cutting.

As a sustainable present, it ticks a lot of boxes:  something that will be used for years and years, very little of it was new, and it was extremely thoughtful.

It's the glory!

The local agricultural show is a time of great excitement at Marmalade Cottage.

This is the third year the practical reinventor has entered some produce

The jam and marmalade prizes remain elusive, but the garlic came second as did the pineapple relish.

But that was nothing - nothing - compared with the home grown and pickled beetroot.

Not only a first prize, but an OTT rosette for the President's Choice!

And a total of $6 prize money.

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.

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.