Patterson’s Curse

Until recently I knew 2 things about Patterson’s Curse (Echium plantagineum):

1) It is a noxious, introduced weed that is overrunning the grazing lands of Australia and is poisonous to some livestock.

2) It produces beautiful, small, purple flowers in spring. These flowers create a picturesque blanket of vibrant colour across the landscape that would adorn many a travel brochure if it weren’t for point 1) above (oops). And I’m not just parroting what I’ve been told, I’ve seen fields clothed in violet and stood in awe – they are spectacular. But poisonous (bummer).

When wandering the Richmond farm recently, I stumbled upon a mass of broad-leafed plants. I had no idea if they were weeds, treasured rarities or perhaps promising herbal remedies. I wasn’t even sure if they were planted or invasive. They were tucked nicely in a cluster in one corner of an overgrown bed, but so were roses and tomatoes and any number of unidentified plants around the property, so that didn’t tell me much.

Patterson’s Curse

Then I spotted a rather telling purple bloom.

Patterson’s Curse flower

What did I say about it being beautiful? Am I right? Imagine a field of these things! It’s winter now so the flowers shouldn’t even be out. Think what they’d be like in spring.

Being the conscientious citizen, wizened farmer and good neighbour that I am, I resolved to discover if this was in fact Patterson’s Curse and, if so, to eradicate it from my lands by any means at my disposal before it spread to some of the horse pastures nearby.

Quick smart I made my way to my computer and searched for Patterson’s Curse. The images and descriptions confirmed my suspicions, the Richmond farm has a PC infestation. But, before I could break out the napalm, I spotted the tagline on the CSIRO page about Patterson’s Curse: “Paterson’s curse is considered a great resource for apiarists“.

There are about 50 beehives on the 18 acres I’m now caretaker of – that’s a lot of hungry mouths to feed. So, rather than ripping and burning, I’m going to nurture and love my little patch of Patterson’s Curse. One mans weed is another colony’s feast. Bees win, horses lose – at least in my corner of the world.

Patterson’s Curse flower – food for my bees

Peanut Plants are Fascinating

I bought some peanut plants on a total whim. I half expected them to die within days of transplanting but they were on sale so….

Peanut plants in the ground

I stuck them in the ground and watched them flower – pretty little pea-like, yellow flowers.

Then I watched some more and, as the flowers died off, spike-like shoots came out of the branches and headed straight into the soil. These are where the peanuts form underground.

Peanut plants sending shoots into the soil

Of course I also observed the holes where the bandicoot dug at the peanut shoots – but what else could I expect?

Then there were a lot of shoots and the leaves yellowed.

Peanut plant ready for harvest

So I harvested one of the plants.

Digging up a peanut plant

About 30 nuts on this plant.

One Harvested Peanut Plant

Then I hung it to dry. It needs to hang upside down for about 2 weeks. I would have put it under the house but I’m sure the dreaded possum would have found it so the nuts dried hanging off the back of one of my dining room chairs.

Peanuts hanging to dry

Then I tasted one and it was yummy.

Raw peanut

Then I roasted a few and they were yummier. I had no idea how to roast peanuts so I just put a bunch on a tray and stuck in in the oven for a while at a low heat. I’m sure there’s an optimal time and temp but I didn’t pay much attention and both my first trial and a later attempt produced roasted nuts (though a couple in the 2nd batch were a tinsy over-roasted – as in the photo below) so I’m thinking it doesn’t matter all that much.

Roasted peanut

I am for sure positively planting more peanuts each year. I love the way the plant looks, grows and tastes!

Pecan Pie Recipe

Homemade pecan pie

I’ve never been a huge fan of pecan pies – I’m more a berry pie kinda gal – but with acres of trees literally dropping pecans by the bucketful, I thought I’d give pecan pie another try. After all, it’s been decades since I remember tasting one.

Confession – after making my pecan pie, I’m still not a huge fan. I’m not one to complain of sweetness but boy is this sweet. It lacks the tang that comes with a good berry pie. But then, it’s not a berry pie.

My pecan pie tastes just like I remember pecan pie tasting (except my crust more closely resembles a strip of plywood than a flaky pie crust) and I may make more in the future to impress friends (once I learn how to make a pie crust). Frank loves it but I’m probably not going to be adding this to my list of must-haves. Which is a shame because not only does it use pecans from the farm, it uses my honey and eggs from my chooks too.

To make it I modified the old standard from The Joy of Cooking to use honey rather than corn syrup. I did some online searching and saw I’m not the only person to make this substitute in a pecan pie. It my not be my favourite type of pie but it’s still a very good pie (ignoring the wooden crust). So, here’s my pecan pie recipe:

Mix:

- 3 eggs

- shy 1 cup sugar

- 1/2 teaspoon salt

- 1/3 cup melted butter

- 3/4 cup honey

Stir in:

- 1 cup pecan halves

- 1 teaspoon vanilla

Fill a 9-inch pie shell (home made or store bought) with the mixture.

Bake the pie 40-50 minutes

Serve warm or cold

It’s incredibly easy and as sweet as anything you might ever want to eat. Serve it with ice cream or whipped cream for a really decadent treat.

Strawberry Fields

Back in September of 2011, Frank and I bought some strawberry plants. They spread and filled their tiny bed but didn’t produce a lot of fruit, probably because they didn’t get enough sun.  So, almost exactly one year ago, I transplanted bunches of them to a new bed. The bed was in full sun and those strawberry plants rewarded me by bearing an incredible number of berries for months through spring and summer. Then they spread some more and filled the bed to overflowing.

Strawberries in Chatswood

This past weekend I spent some time thinning the plants for their own good and so I could take some with me when we move to the farm. As an aside, the farm is about 2 kilometres from where we bought those first 3 strawberry plants. Almost poetic!

Jas, Maria and Paul benefited from my thinning as well since I gave a bunch of surplus plants away on freecycle.org. I like thinking those 3 little plants have gone on to fill beds all over the region.

Back on the farm, a small hill was selected and some of the worst of the weeds removed (I didn’t want to totally clear it because I don’t want to lose my top soil if there is a good rain shower before the strawberries stabilise the hill).

And in went my strawberry plants – about 50 of them.

Now I simply sit back and wait for spring and bowls full of sweet strawberries. Just in case something goes wrong (that’s the voice of experience there), I have my back-up plants in a pot. I transplanted them a few weeks ago and they seem perfectly happy to live in this pot as long as I want them to (one is even flowering already and it’s mid-winter here). I’m as sure as I can be that I’ll be eating strawberries in a few months!

Banana, pecan and chocolate chip muffin recipe

Banana, pecan and chocolate chip muffins

This is a fusion dish – a fusion of our soon-to-be-vacated suburban house produce and our soon-to-be-inhabited farm produce. Bananas from the back yard and pecans from the orchard combine to create quite the taste sensation. Obviously the chocolate chips go well with both (and anything). It was an experiment born of an old muffin recipe and it is now my banana, pecan and chocolate chip muffin recipe:

1) Mix together:

• 1 egg,
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 1/4 cup honey
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 1 squashed banana
• 1/2 cup almond meal
• 1 cup flour
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• 3 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 cups chocolate chips
• handful of chopped pecan nuts (plus a few larger chunks for the top)

2) Spoon into muffin pan and top each muffin with a nut or a chocolate chip.

3) Bake at 200 C (400 F) for 15 – 20 minutes.

4) Let stand in pan for 10 minutes and place on cooling rack until cool.

5) Store in an airtight container.

Do I even need to bother typing that these things taste wonderful?

The 80-20 Rule of Gardening

I am a devout proponent of the 80-20 rule in all things. Life has taught me that it is really true that you can achieve 80% of the results with 20% of the effort. Life has also taught me that seeking perfection is a mugs game - just when you think you’re almost there, something changes and you aren’t. Perfectionists can keep their perfection; for me, near enough is good enough.

Honestly, if I’m ever offered a choice to go hard or go home, it’s a dead cert I’ll go home. At which time I’ll open an inexpensive bottle of red wine, pick up a good (or at least not bad) book and thank my lucky stars that I’m not one of those who are out there going hard. 20% effort is plenty.

This attitude to life is ideally suited to the garden. As I look around the grounds of the Richmond farm there are conservatively 7000 things that need doing. Before I get overwhelmed and hide under my bed, I’m taking a step back and looking for that 80% bang for my 20% buck. This has found me focusing around the house; cleaning the verandah (removing 50 kilo bags of fungicide and 220 litre drums of mystery acid, ripping down vines, sweeping, scrubbing, stacking, storing….), pulling up the worst of the invasive weeds from the front bed, finding the old path under the overgrown shrubbery, removing metres of ratty clothes lines and dozens of old clothes pins from the balustrades, … just taking one thing at a time in order of their visual impact.

And it’s working. I’m seeing amazing progress after just a few days work.  Here’s the front of the house after clearing the porch but before I started cleaning up the” walkway”.

Here it is part way through. Lookie, stepping stones – in the wrong place and overgrown, but still, stepping stones.

During

And here is my front walkway after a bit of hard work.

After

It’s definitely not done. There are more weeds and pruning and plantings and…. But that 80% result means I can now walk up to the front door without dodging weeds and rubbish, I can sit on the verandah and actually not worry about getting covered in some crud, I can look at the house and see a home. Not bad for 20% effort.

For those perfectionists who aren’t convinced that I should ignore the 20% of results that take 80% of the effort, not to fear, it’s still there waiting for me. In fact, when I finish my first 80% I will look at the remaining 20% and tackle 80% of that. This process will have me creeping towards perfection. Which I’m convinced doesn’t exist so I’ll just keep on creeping and enjoying my method of minimal effort for maximum results. The 80-20 rule rocks!

Foraging for Dinner

Out on the farm we are half-camping with minimal supplies to keep us going. There’s a nice flat on the property but we don’t want to move too much in because we’ll just have to move it out when the house is ready to occupy. Which is no real reason to be short of food, yet still, we haven’t stocked the kitchen with much. But Frank’s a great cook and has been feeding us well off some pretty basic ingredients.

Recently we looked around the property and figured we’d forage for our dinner. The rose garden is a Sleeping-Beauty-like mass of weeds, many of which are actually cherry tomato plants.

Wild tomato plants

The pecan orchard is dropping nuts by the bushel.

Pecans on the tree

Those seemed like a great start to our newly created Tomato and Pecan Pasta recipe:

1) Saute in butter:

• 1/2 onion
• 1 clove garlic

2) Sprinkle with fresh oregano and thyme (thankfully, one of the first things we moved was some pots of herbs and seedlings – I’m not going without a garden all winter!)

3) Add 1 cup cherry tomatoes and 1/4 cup crushed pecans then simmer for 10 minutes until the tomatoes are soft and starting to burst

4) Pour in 1/2 cup coconut cream and continue simmering until warmed through – about 5 minutes

5) Serve over pasta

Wow! Seriously, this could be a signature dish at any Michelin restaurant.

Passata, tomato sauce and tomato juice

Tomatoes are growing like weeds in the heritage rose garden at the Richmond Farm. They’re all cherry tomatoes so probably came up from compost. Frank and I picked several batches and roasted them with a bit of olive oil and some Italian herbs – yummy.

But there were still more tomatoes to be had. Oh, the pressure!

Fresh tomatoes, ready to become passata

So we decided to make passata. Strictly speaking, passata is uncooked, sieved tomatoes. But, after spending some time on the internet reading recipes and techniques – all of which called for some sort of heating, even if only after bottling by standing the jar in a pot of boiling water – we decided on a lightly cooked variety. The reason for this is we wanted it to keep and we weren’t confident that straining a bunch of tomatoes into a jar would prevent them from growing mould or worse.

Sieving the tomato skins and seeds

Bottling passata

Here’s our recipe for our passata (or maybe tomato sauce) with a bonus bottle of tomato juice:

1) Wash any number of tomatoes.

2) Put them in a pot with a few basil leaves (optional) and a tiny bit of water. Simmer for about 15 minutes until the skins start to loosen.

3) Spoon liquid from the top of the pot into a sterilised bottle – voila, you have tomato juice.

4) Squish tomatoes through a sieve leaving behind the skins and seeds.

5) Heat sieved flesh until it just starts to boil.

6) Pour passata into sterilised bottles and put the lid on immediately so they seal tightly as they cool.

7) Store in the cupboard, no refrigeration required until you open the jar.

Passata and tomato juice

I believe most people throw away (or compost) those tomato skins and seeds. Not us – we hate waste. We made a spaghetti bolognaise at the same time as we were making passata and plunked the skins and seeds in with the mince. The result was possibly the best bolognaise sauce I’ve ever eaten. Besides the rich tomatoey flavour, those seeds added a really nice crunchy, kind of nutty texture. What a surprise treat!

Winter 2013

As part of my attempt to record the changes in my garden through the seasons, I sometimes (when I think of it) record the beginning of a season with a post (Winter 2011, Summer 2012 and Autumn 2013 being the most obvious examples). Here’s my photos for Winter 2013.

Last week I pulled out the sunflowers and corn. The rosellas had eaten every last sunflower seed and the possums had gobbled every last corn kernal. It looks like the rosellas haven’t accepted the loss of their favourite meal since there they are, those bright red spots in the middle of the photo above. They hopped down onto the bare soil as if hoping for a dropped seed. Then they flew off, possibly to try again later. Ah, the optimism of parrots!

The garden is much barer than it should be. If we weren’t moving I’d have filled it with lettuce, peas, rocket, broccoli and plenty of other winter crops. As it is I’ve repositioned a few volunteer plants like kale and bok choi to fill the gaps so it won’t look awful to any prospective tenants. That said, it’s still not too bad. The mandarin tree (in the back in the photo above) is loaded and the bananas (below) are throwing another spear – the 4th this year. And, for sheer beauty, you can’t go past the poinsettia tree (just sneaking in on the left, above). All-in-all, even in winter, I love this back yard.

But now, onto my new winter yard. These shots of the farm were taken on the 29th, 3 days before the official start to winter but I think they’ll do. Here’s the front, where the chicken run and veggie garden will go.

And here’s out back where some of the beehives now stand (including on the back verandah).

The property is thick with cockatoos and corellas – they love the pecans, but no rosellas. Instead we get beautiful colour from these fantastic little wrens. They’re called the Superb Fairywren and not for nothing does such a tiny little bird get such a grandiose name. They are gorgeous.

Superb Fairywren

Honestly my head is still so full of plans for the property that I’m not sure what I should photograph now for posterity – so I’m taking lots of pictures of lots of boring (and weedy) bits of land. I can’t wait to watch it evolve. Winter is a great time to make a new garden here – I just need to find time to get digging!

The Possum’s Okay

The plan was to return to the farm after 5 days, but, as is often the case, things didn’t go according to plan and our return was delayed by a week. Which was no big deal for me but quite possibly a life-changing deal for a local possum.

When we opened the door it looked like a storm had blown through. There were only 1 or 2 pieces of furniture and some buckets, mops and old newspapers lying around when we left. When we returned, mops and buckets were tipped over, toilet paper was unrolled, the fireplace screen had fallen down and there were several puddles of water on the floor. We briefly thought some freak storm with whirlwinds blew through. But the puddles weren’t under wet spots on the ceiling and what kind of wind blows down an iron fireplace screen? Our minds settled on the fact that an animal had been trapped inside, running amok, trying to escape. Piles of poo near sliding doors reinforced this opinion.

Then we went into the master bedroom and found this in one of the high cupboards.

Brushtail Possum in the house

A brushtail possum and… we thought maybe a furry toy but had to conclude a young possum, were hiding in the closet. (Editor’s note: Thanks to Willowcreek Farm, I have re-concluded that the furry toy is the possum’s tail. Well, I’m embarrassed!) There are 2 possible explanations for what happened: 1) While Frank was enthusiastically clearing the roof of overhanging branches and leaf rubble, the possum took refuge in the quiet house. Or 2) The possum fell down the freshly-swept chimney.

Whatever caused it, a possum had been trapped in the empty Richmond house for 12 days with no food or water. I would have never thought that was physically possible so maybe explanation 2 is what happened and she only fell a couple of days before we returned? Though the thought of a possum falling down a chimney isn’t comforting either.

We opened the sliding door, shut the bedroom door and left her alone. We returned after dark to find the bedroom empty. I hope she had a good feed and drink and survived the ordeal both physically and emotionally. I will try never to think of this drama again because it sort of freaks me out to imagine the terror of the poor possum going around and around and around trying to find a way out of her prison cell. Eeek.