Fluffymilk

Oamaru Stone

2009-01-28T13:53:00.003+13:00

My friend Darren is here today and he has shown me how to start oil painting. He has a large Oamaru stone sculpture here that he works on each week. He has been interviewed for the local paper about his stone work and said I might get a mention in the article. Well see how that goes.

I'm still slicing beans! And i have no vinegar to make the pickle with. Still I best get back to it. my website format has been changed. Dave (top bloke) from studio mad fish has done some changes for me. They are so great up there!

The only bad news is that I now have tons of work to do..... best get back to it

ciao

Cucumber pickle

2009-01-27T12:11:00.002+13:00

I have decided to pickle the cucumber population from in the garden.

I have washed the vegetables and sliced them finely. I ended up with about 5 large cucumbers once two were given away and one was set aside for lunch. I only have 2 onions here at the moment so that will have to be my combination. It looks a bit pale so I have peeled a carrot and made fine carrot slices with the peeler for colour and that is when the Artist got carried away and decided to add baby purple beans to the pickle too. Awe, wont that look cheerful!

So with washed and sliced greens and orange and purple in a pottery bowl I lightly sprinkled the layers of prepared vegetables with plain salt and just covered with cold water. Placing this in the fridge overnight.

This is where I admit that I didn't get the beans into the freezer last night. Giving more away today and have also added to the glut to be frozen. The boys are still eating them as a snack food, but our young visitor (age 7) wont touch them.

Thats it! Im going to do that now.

2009-01-26T12:19:00.002+13:00

Cucumbers! they are everywhere! and that is only from the two early seedlings that I brought home from the market. I have them against an old bean fence and they are growing up that with a little bit of encouragement. One is a telegraph cucumber and the other is a more rounded shape. I'm running out of recipe ideas and will have to look at some pickling information.

I have also planted, perhaps two weeks ago, three gherkin plants. A week prior to that I put in two rows of apple cucumber seeds. These are past the two leaflet stage now.

Luckily both my sons take to cucumbers like they are apples and we are slowly making our way through the harvest.

On Saturday I got some yummy tomatoes. You know the ones that taste all zingy! I sliced the toms and cucumber and layered it in a bowl with finely sliced onion. Over this I poured vinegar, brown sugar and water. It was only what was left in the bottom of the vinegar bottles. About 1/4 Cup all up, the same volume of water and a dessert spoon of soft brown sugar.

I was pleasantly surprised that my boys ate it and loved it! the vinegar must have changed their response to the onions. They are usually such drama queens about any raw onions.

My ice berg is in the freezer and I'll be slicing beans later on today. I'm completely out of time so I'll be bagging and freezing in batches.

Purple beans & freezing vegetables.

2009-01-25T09:14:00.004+13:00

At the moment we are harvesting a great big bowl of purple beans each day. The boys are eating them fresh and I have a big job to do to get them into the freezer. Visitors are being sent home with fresh veges from my garden and I'm loving it. I put the beans in a stir fry the other evening and they went green! What is that about? Other than that we have been eating them fresh, often straight from the vine.

I will put a large container of water in the freezer today to make an iceberg. This will be put in the sink to keep the water chilled for the cooling off part of the blanching. Tomorrow I will wash all the beans, top and tail then slice them. Then in small batches I will plunge them into boiling water, drain them and drop them into the chilled water. The beans are then drained and prepared for freezing.

There are a couple of ideas that I use when freezing vegetables. One is individual packs. If I have plastic bags I bag up one meals worth of the blanched vegetables and freeze them that way. If not I free flow the veges. I get them as dry as possible and lay them out on a tray. once the vegetables are frozen I gather them up and put them into ice cream containers. This way I can use what ever amount I like for a meal and return the rest to the freezer. This is a slower process and I need to do smaller batches at a time due to freezer space and how many trays I can balance in there at a time. But it is so worth it for the convenience.

It is a good idea to write on the lid because there have been some very disappointed faces on children looking for ice cream.

home growing vegetables

2009-01-24T14:00:00.003+13:00

I am reintroducing myself to growing my own vegetables. I have doing the fencing and built a chook house to keep my hens off the young seedlings. I have started breaking up the earth in my fairly large garden. Into this I have thrown what organic matter I have been able to get my hands on. Horse manure..... Calf shavings. ( that is the wood chips that the calves were housed on while they were being bottle fed. not shavings of actual calves!)

I have grabbed some plants and seedling from the shops and stuck them in. some with great results and some mediochre.

Now it is research time!

Im looking for crop rotation and companion planting ideas.