Last night was our Friday pizza night (semi-traditional now). The wood-fired bakery I work at part time does an amazing pizza with sour cream, bacon, spring onion and caraway seeds I have tried to replicate. The result was pretty tasty and for a purist like me to stray from margarita or marinara means it might [...]

Planted today:
Cabbage - Golden Acre x9
Cabbage - Savoy x12
Cabbage - Toscana x6
Cauliflower x9
Cauliflower - Violet Sicilian x9
Broccoli - Romanesco x9
Broccoli - Tender Stem x24
Broccoli - Rapini x12
Broccoli - De Cicco x12
Broccoli - Marathon x12
Broccoli - Samurai x12

With Autumn well and truly upon us it’s time to get more winter veg in the ground. Aiko and Fizz the helpful gardening cat are filling planter pots for all the seedlings to come.

Some of the seedlings waiting to go out in the garden.

Aiko planting brassicas in the beds where the potatoes were. This is [...]

Our friends Brian and Carol down the road were kind enough to give us a few bags of quinces while their tree was full of fruit. We had made some delicious quince preserve last year so we thought this year we’d scale things up a bit. We ended up calling every pot in the kitchen [...]

We’ve just dug up the last of the potatoes and collected 103kg this weekend. Including the ones we’ve already eaten, our total potato harvest weights are:
Agria - 30kg
Rua - 11kg
Ilam Hardy - 15kg
Desiree - 15kg
Rocket - 15kg
Cliff’s Kidney - 15kg
Jersey Benne - 15kg
Red Rascall - 9kg
Maori Potato Selection - 8.5kg
Grand total - 133.5kg
We’ll store the [...]

This post should help restore some geek balance to the “farmgeek”. We had the pleasure of a visit from our friend Dave this weekend and as a result of some logistical issues I was lucky enough to have possession of his reprap for a few days. What is a reprap? From the reprap Wikipedia article:
The [...]

This recipe is from Tim Allen’s Book - The Ballymaloe Bread Book and it will put you off store-bought buns forever. It’s a little bit of work but well worth the effort.
Hot Cross Buns
Ingredients
25g fresh yeast
1 Tablespoon castor sugar
50ml warm milk
450g bakers flour (assume high grade flour here)
pinch of salt
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1-2 teaspoons [...]

We have a lot of wild apple trees in our road and they were laden with ripe fruit so we harvested some for the larder. The plan was to process and bottle them all for cooking through the winter but some of them turned out to be quite nice to eat. The pigs will get [...]