Here’s the finished result of Karen’s hard work - garlic plaited and ready to dry. We ended up with eight big plaits and a whole lot of heads with no stalks attached. We’ll eat the singles first while the plaits can dry in the cool shed.

The cleaning was quite laborious this year as the ground [...]

About six months ago on the shortest day (or not long after as I recall) we planted 200-odd garlic cloves. It looks like almost all of them have grown well and now it’s time to harvest. The tops are just starting to die back which is as good a sign as any they are ready.

Here’s [...]

Despite the very unsettled spring weather (or more likely because of it) we’ve had our best year ever for brassicas. It seems that a cold, long winter killed off most of the white butterflies and the last few months of weird weather has disrupted the life cycles of those that survived. We’ve seen perhaps only [...]

We are blessed with good friends and neighbours that give us food (knowing of course that we’ll reciprocate :-). This batch of preserving is red currants, rhubarb, plums and blackberries.We still have quite a bit more to process but Karen and Kelly did pretty well for an afternoon over the wood stove.

Much like the apple trees down our roadsides, there are plenty of plum trees too. This is the haul from a leisurely Sunday afternoon of scrumping with Karen, Daniel and Kelly. Look out for some plum preserving action soon.

I couldn’t resist some gloating over these. The Xmas ham was pretty tasty. BBQ ham steaks? Sensational.

With so many family and friends visiting over the holidays we thought it smarter to cut our ham in half so it would last longer. This turned out to be a wise idea once we started eating it. This is the 2nd half of our 8.4kg ham from our own pigs. It tasted as good [...]

I came out to the garden this afternoon to find a swarm conveniently hanging on a tree lucerne branch. Bees usually swarm around Spring/Summer for a lot of different reasons but in this case I was just happy to have them so close and easy to capture. It’s a small swarm - maybe 3-5000 bees.

Before [...]

You can tell it’s organic - there are weeds in the background. We had this with a delicious cheese sauce for dinner about ten minutes after this photo was taken.

Karen is quite pleased with this harvest - mainly because she got to it before the chickens did.