Strawberry Delight

The strawberry patch went well this year, though the slugs ate quite a few. I used some garden-friendly snail-bait in a tube to tempt them away. But there were so many, I didn't worry too much about it.



I'm not sure if this is a biennial variety. They didn't do too much last season. It's a variety called "Cambridge Rival" and they are so sweet, they are almost like sherbert sweets - possibly even too sweet for me! I might get another variety that fruits at a different time to extend the strawberry season. I replanted some of the newer runners into a different section of the patch and used black plastic as a weed mat for the next season.

Potatoes Galore!

(L - the waxy white, firm Coliban - R - the creamier, softer Dutch Cream

I tried a few different varieties of potato this season. White - Dutch Cream, Coliban, Pontiac, Nicola and Sebago; Pink - Desiree. A friend gave me some seed potatoes. I have to say after a few seasons now, the Dutch Creams are still my favourite and their flavour changes even with storage time. Fresh out of the garden and into a potato salad or steamed - they are to die for! You cannot get that rich creamy flavour from the shop-bought ones. The home-grown Desirees were pretty yummy too!



We had literally buckets of them and I weighed them to collect some of my stats :)
We lost a few (mostly Dutch Cream) due to very heavy prolonged rain and reduced drainage ( due to clay soil - still!). They rotted in the ground - bummer. Probably lost at least a kilo :(

Still, I planted 12 potatoes, most of them cut into pieces and got a total yield of just over 21kg! At say only $3 a kilo for pesticide-free home-grown delicious potatoes, that's $63 worth! The Sebago had an astonishing yield - one seed potato of about 100g (cut into pieces) yielded 5.85 kilos of potatoes. That's nearly a 59x yield by weight!



I laid them out in a dark room to let them dry out a bit after all that rain. I had many more potatoes than shown in this picture. We are still eating them now (4 months later) and had potato and pumpkin mash using our home-grown pumpkins for dinner tonight. YUM!

Tonnes of Top Tasty Tomatoes

Well, not quite tonnes. But kilos and kilos. I made two mistakes with tomatoes this season - I got them in the ground too late for our slightly shorter mountains summer and I viciously pruned them to allow large fruit to get larger - I did this too late and lost lots of baby tomatoes. But despite all that, we have extra tomatoes for sauces/pickles or soup to eat and store, with a few green ones to ripen or pickle.

Typical morning sweep's harvest:




unripe Rouge De Marmande (above) and Martino's Red Roma (below)


And of course there were some for the slugs to enjoy!


I tried quite a few varieties this year for fun. I also planted some seeds saved from last season. Most worked and one looked like it had crossed and had weird-looking fruit (a failed beefsteak).

All up I planted Black Russian, Cream Sausage, Martino's Red Roma, Roma, Amish Paste, Tommy Toe, Rouge De Marmande and some cherry tomatoes in a pot by the back door. The Tommy Toe fruited prolifically and tasted lovely but I was surprisingly more taken with the (yellow) Cream Sausage that had a firm and quite sweet (less acidic) flesh. I also loved the Rouge De Marmande - a perfect mix of firm, juicy, tasty and sizeable.


Mostly Tommy Toes (small round), Rouge De Marmande (large ones on right)


(Above) Tommy Toe (top), (L-R) Cream Sausage, Martino's Red Roma, Amish Paste
and below a small Rouge De Marmande, Cream Sausage and Black Russian.

And below the lovely and striking difference in texture and colour of these three (shown with chopped up squash)


There are supposedly around 7500 varieties of tomatoes to choose from in the world!! A far cry from the few varieties sold in stores. So far I still prefer the Amish Paste to the Roma for taste and texture, the Rouge De Marmande and Black Russian for good performance in cooler climates, juicy, tasty flesh and long-yields, and Cream Sausage for sweetness and chunky, firm texture. The Tommy Toes are good for ridiculously large numbers of large juicy cherry-like tomatoes with a slightly acidic flavour.

Honestly, you could spend your whole gardening life just trying different tomatoes!

Amusingly, according to Wikipedia, the country known for its famous pasta sauces and love of tomatoes grew only 17% of the number of tomatoes that China grew in 2008.

Rain, Hail, Blistering Heat and a Surprise

The poor veggie patch has been subjected to near 40 degree heat, two freak heavy hail storms and some thundery showers for some relief in the last few weeks. I just got the shade cloth up before this last heat-wave and I think that's helped a lot, particularly for the lettuce and bean seedlings that are just too young to survive the big fry.

The espaliered apples and a self-seeded pumpkin had some of their leaves almost shredded.





But none of this crazy weather has deterred my strawberries who have veggie patch domination plans of their own!:


And you can't keep a good plant down ... a surprise flower popped up from a bulb buried in dirt I'd dug up for a path to our studio:




We've got a couple of these in our garden - do any Blue Mountains people know what it is? I hope it's not a weed, 'cos it's a spectacular flower. We do have a lot of bulbs around the garden that were planted by previous occupants.

Summer season meals

Though I didn't plant enough zucchini this year, there was still enough even on one plant to have with several meals (above - spinach, beetroot greens, tomatoes, zucchini, chilli, sage, lemon verbena and some cape gooseberries for dessert). This made a nice pasta sauce!



Some zucchini got a bit excited after a lot of rain!:

Teenie Weenie Zucchini

The ridiculous heat we had a week ago affected the zucchini. I did cover them in shade cloth (kindly donated by a friend) in time for that stupidly hot 40+degrees Sunday, but I think the damage had already been done. Jerry Coleby-Williams grows his food under shade cloth all summer.

The many days of rain afterwards helped some of the new ones. So the little ones were a little tasteless but the larger one was sweet and delicious. I could really taste its crispness in the stir-fry we had. I'm still not sure if this plant is a new hybrid or one of my heirloom plants as zucchini self-seeded from the compost. (Note to self: plant seeds in mushroom compost to avoid confusion!).