Rockin' Rockmelons

I am always looking for things to plant in my garden that I haven't grown before.  When I saw some Rockmelon seedlings at Bunnings I jumped at the chance to try them out.  They were planted out a month or two ago and they have really taken off and are trailing all over the place.

There are lots of little yellow flowers on them and like pumpkins there are male and female flowers.  The bees have been doing a marvellous job so I was hopeful that we might get some fruit.

The other day I was out watering and was very excited to see one little fruit on the vine!  Hopefully there will be more over time too :)

Party time for the worms....

I had been wanting to get a worm farm for a little while....  I love the idea of being able to turn our kitchen waste into compost and fertiliser for the veggie garden.  On Valentine's Day my darling husband brought one home from work for me (how fortunate that he works in a building supplies store!)

Laila was very excited by the whole business and soon set about helping me put it together.

First of all you soak the bedding block in a bucket of water until it turns into a nice sludgy consistency,  We also tore up the packaging and placed it into the bottom tray.  The worms will eventually eat through this!
The kids loved stirring the sludge mixture hehe!

Next we emptied the mix into the tray and tipped in the box of 1000 worms (so it said - I didn't actually count them!).  We also got a worm blanket for the top which keeps it all moist and dark.  Lower right photo is Laila saying goodnight to the worms under the blanket.

Just had to have one more peep at the worms and have a hold hehe.  Standing very proudly with the farm!

We have had to shift it from this spot as we found it wasn't in the shade at all times and with this boiling hot weather lately it needed protection from the sun.  We now house it under the back porch which also makes it very handy and close for putting our food scraps in.

Laila told her teacher all about it and then was asked to stand up in front of the class and do a little talk about it.  It has been and will be a valuable learning exercise for her and all of our family.

A Plum In Your Mouth

Every year around this time, a neighbour from across the road turns up at our door with a big bucket of lovely Satsuma plums to give us from his tree in the backyard.  Two nights ago he didn't disappoint and we received a HUGE amount for which the kids were very excited about.

It was perfect timing because over the last month or so we were very lucky to have received peaches, nectarines and grapes from another friend who had grown them all in his backyard too.

The supermarket fruit just doesn't hold a candle to this homegrown stuff!  The nectarines especially were a real highlight and we all gobbled them down greedily hehe.

So with a big bucket of plums on my kitchen bench I set about deciding what to do with them all.  The first thing I thought to make was some lovely jam.  I do love making a bit of jam!  In the past I have made orange jam and strawberry jam and I also like making my own tomato sauce (but that is another story).

I used two kilograms of the plums and I was able to make ten small jars.  We have already given one to Mum and one to a friend.  I also owe a home-grown pumpkin to this friend so hopefully this will sweeten the deal until my next pumpkin is ripe hehe ;)

Tonight the kids and I marched over to give a jar to the neighbour who gave us the plums.  He wasn't home but his wife said he will be thrilled with it (even though he also makes his own!)

I also found a cool website called Jamlabelizer which has funky templates which let you customise and print your own jam labels.  I had lots of fun making these!

Last but not least - today I decided to make a Plum cake from a recipe another lovely friend had passed on to me.  If I can resist cutting it tonight I will take it for morning tea at her house tomorrow!

I still have at least another kilo left so I am open to suggestions on how to use up the last ones!  Leave me a comment with your ideas or even links to recipes you have used :)

Grow Food Not Lawns

I have been following this facebook page - Grow Food Not Lawns for a while now and really embrace the philosophy.  I now look at my front lawn (well lawn is an optimistic word - more likely weeds) and picture all of the lovely things I could plant in its place.

If you have followed my blog for a little while you may have seen my post about digging up some of my lawn and planting pumpkins.  This has been a roaring success with us having picked around 8 pumpkins to date and there are at least three more growing.  I have turned them into pumpkin soup and roasted veggie frittatas among other things.  I have also been able to give a couple away to friends which was great.

So, with that success in hand, I set my sights on turning another patch of weeds along the driveway into a productive extension of my veggie garden.

It took quite a bit of digging over.  The existing soil is virtually sand so I added in some compost and a bit of potting mix too.  Then I planted some silverbeet and a couple of beetroot plants.

I will take pics in a couple of weeks to show the progress.  I hope they will flourish.  I noticed today that they get all the morning sun but are shaded in the afternoon so we shall see if they like this spot or not.

Back into the swing of things...

As I mentioned in an earlier post I lost a number of my plants in some extreme hot weather we have had recently.  I am fortunate that I do get full sun for most of the day in my garden which, for the most part, is exactly what it needs but then occasionally we get this freakish 40C and above weather.

This past week or so the temperatures have been in the twenties so I have taken the opportunity to replenish and replant.

I am fortunate indeed to have a husband who works in a building supplies chain and is able to get us a good discount on anything we need in the way of plants and gardening supplies!  So I grabbed a few things...

Last year I happened upon some sweet potato seedlings.  I wasn't exactly sure how to grow them - whether you had to keep mounding them up like regular potatoes so they were a bit of an experiment.  After several months the leaves all started dying so I thought I had better pull them up and to my surprise found a heap of fabulous sweet potatoes underneath.  When I saw the seedling again this year I was quick to grab three for myself and one for Mum!

I also stocked up on spinach, parsley, a yellow caspicum and some white eggplants (just to be different).  I also bought some Rockmelon seedlings to try but I am going to have to read up on how to grow them.  It says on the tag to grow them on a trellis or fence (which I am) but I would have thought the rockmelons would be too heavy for that.  We shall see.  It's all about experimenting here ;)

The kids are starting to embrace the garden philosophy slowly and when we went to pick these out they both wanted to choose some plants of their own.  The both wanted a strawberry plant and then Laila fell in love with the purple Petunia and James the plant with the weird orange 'flower'.  He was quite chuffed with it when I told him I thought it was a very 'boy-ish' plant and not a pretty one like the one Laila picked hehe.

The garden bed is in need of some enrichment so I have been turning it over and digging in some compost.  The pots are coming along well too and I still have some spare spaces to fill.

I have plans to do more out the front (where my pumpkins live) but am waiting for some cooler weather as it is going to be quite a big job!  I will talk more about that another time.

Kale Frittata

Recipe time!

One of my favourite veggies would have to be *drumroll* Kale!!  Yes it deserves a drumroll because it is just.that.good!

Rich in vitamins A, C and K.  High in manganese and vitamin E and also a great source of protein too.

I have been growing it in my garden over the past two years but I lost most of it recently due to some extreme hot weather we had.  At the market on Sunday I consoled myself by buying a huge bunch and when the weather cools again I will be getting some more to plant as well.

Anyway onto the recipe!  This is one of the ways I like to use it - in a frittata.

You will need:

300-400g Kale washed and roughly chopped.  (I like to remove any really thick stalks too)
1 onion chopped reasonably fine
2 cloves garlic
2 eggs
4 eggwhites
1/4 cup low fat ricotta
1/4 cup parmesan cheese
Salt and Pepper to taste
1 tsp mustard (optional)
Olive oil

Here is how it goes:

Oil frying pan and fry the onion, garlic and Kale until almost cooked through.  Remove from pan and wipe out.

Mix together eggs, eggwhites, ricotta, parmesan, mustard, salt and pepper.  Carefully mix in Kale/onion mixture.

Oil frying pan again and gently pour in the mixture.  Cook over medium heat until set and bottom is starting to  turn golden (sneak your egg flip under and have a peek).

Now if you are lucky (unlike me) you might have a frying pan that you can put under the grill so that you can cook the top without having to flip it.  If you do then please do this as it is much easier than trying to flip it.  Ask me how I know lol ;)  A metal-handle frying pan is high on my list of cookware priorities!

Otherwise you will have to be brave and do the frittata-flip dance.  Shake the pan a little to make sure it is loose and then invert onto a plate.  Slide it back into the pan and continue cooking until the other side is nicely golden and voila - Kale Frittata!

Serve with a side salad or serve it as a side to your favourite meal.

Eggplants

When I first started my garden over a year ago I planted one eggplant seedling in a pot as a kind of experiment to see how it would go.  It did very well indeed so I decided I would definitely grow one this year too.  I have, in fact, got three different plants this time around.  The regular one, the Lebanese ones (long finger-shaped) and on a trip to Bunnings one day I came across one called a 'Fairy-tale' eggplant.

The regular one out back has been doing fantastically.  I have made several vegetarian moussakas with what it has produced as well as included some in one of our favourite dishes - roasted veggie quinoa salad.

The Lebanese one out front (in my pumpkin patch) is also doing swimmingly!  These ones I have added into my roast veggie frittata and are also delicious cut lengthways down the middle and lightly pan fried in some olive oil and garlic.

My little fairy-tale one in the ground out the back hasn't been doing so well though.  I think there may be a problem with my soil or something because it really has not grown much at all since I planted it.  With the recent heatwave I almost lost it too.  It got burnt and I really didn't think it was going to come back but this morning when I was perusing the garden I came across three little eggplants hiding under some leaves!

Much excitement hehe.

These are my other two eggplants - 

The left one currently has four coming and the lebanese one has more than 30.

From my experience growing eggplants seems fairly easy so I would encourage you to have a go!