Summer Harvest

On account of my slackness, here's the abridged version!

Cucumber pickle

This pickle is exciting for a couple of reasons. When I was in England recently, I bought the National Trust's Good Old-Fashioned Jams, Preserves and Chutneys by Sara Paston-Williams, and it finally arrived off the boat this week. Naturally, I've been itching to get into it. The other reason is that it's made with cucumbers from our garden. Our very first home-grown pickle, although I did have to buy the onions and capsicum, since the birds pulled all my onions up almost before they'd bulbed, and the capsicums aren't quite ripe yet.

So, last night I sliced up two onions, a green capsicum, and just under a kilo of cucumbers using my new favourite device ever, my new V-slicer. Took me around three minutes to slice the lot of 'em!

The veges all went into my medium ceramic bowl, with a good handful of salt, to sit overnight and draw out any excess liquid. I covered the bowl with a tea towel and let it sit on the shelves in my dining room where it wasn't going to be disturbed.

Came back to it this morning and poured around half a litre of liquid out, gave the veg a good washing, and rolled it in a clean tea towel to wring the last of the water out. I left it in the tea towel while I prepared the vinegar.

Cider vinegar, sugar, mustard seeds and a little bit of ginger. That's it. Very simple.

I heated the vinegar, sugar and spices until the sugar dissolved, let it come to the boil, then emptied the veg out of the tea towel into the saucepan.

It's important not to simmer the veg for too long, or else you end up with a slimy heaving mass of greyish ooze, rather than lovely crisp green veg. Around five minutes should do it, and in my case, worked perfectly.

The tricky part was getting the pickle into jars. Because it is essentially vegetables in vinegar, it's important to get a good balance of veg and vinegar in each jar. Inevitably, the vinegar all rushes out leaving all the veg behind, leading to a scooping rather than pouring motion being required.

These will sit now for a couple of weeks to mature before being opened.

More harvest

As we suspected would happen, now that the tomatoes have started to ripen, everytime I go out there, there's newly ripened ones on the plants. Today, I have harvested 2 cucumbers, 55g of snow peas, and around a kilo of tomatoes. This brings the total current harvest to:

5 cos lettuces
5cucumbers
4 strawberries
6 carrots
1.6kg roma tomatoes
455g snow peas
The little tomato in the photo above is supposed to be a Lemon Drop, but despite being the right shape, never showed any signs of being yellow.

I did notice while I was out there just now that the first mini capsicum is starting to darken from green to brown, so hopefully there'll be capsicum soon too. The corn is all flowering, and the beginnings of what I presume will be the ears of corn are starting to form too.

First harvest...

Very exciting, our first big harvest. We've had almost all the lettuces out, and about half a dozen carrots, but I went down to check the state of things this evening, and found the following ready to come inside:
The tomatoes are not overly ripe, but the few that had ripened on the plants had been eaten by birds - they eat away at one side, eat the middle out, and leave the rest, like this:Not impressed. So as soon as they start to turn reddish, we're bringing them in to ripen in a paper bag somewhere dark. Not ideal, but at least we don't have to share with the birds.

Current harvest to date:

5 cos lettuces
3 cucumbers
4 strawberries
6 carrots
650g roma tomatoes
400g snow peas

Given we only planted nine weeks ago, I'm pretty happy with this. There's capsicums on the plant, but they're not ripe. The eggplant is flowering. The pumpkins are taking over the world, as is their wont, and there's about a dozen baby pumpkins on the vines. The corn is as tall as the fence now, and the flowers have formed, so ears shouldn't be too far away now. All in all, going swimmingly.

Chooks!

We finally got up to Michael's sister's place last night to visit our chooks. She has six chooks in the pen, two for her family, two for Michael's parents, and two for us. We share the cost of the chook food between the three households, which means it's costing us around $10 a month for all the fresh eggs we can eat, and in fact sometimes more than we can eat. I will never buy an egg from the supermarket again - these actually look like eggs, and taste like eggs, rather than the insipid mess you buy at the supermarket. The yolks are bright yellow, and so tasty.