Blackberries!!!

As I've mentioned before, I love to grow berries. Canberra has the perfect climate to do it, with its distinct seasonal changes. This year has been almost perfect: a very cold winter (though I don't actually like that part!) and a warm, wet spring/summer.

As I mentioned in the other post, I've already had a good blueberry and boysenberry harvest (with a few stragglers to come), and I'm excited to see some raspberries (my favourite berry!) blossoming on my new plants, but this summer belongs to the blackberry!

If you're close to my age (41), or perhaps older, you might remember being able to pick blackberries from their brambles in parks, alongside roads or down little country lanes. Of course that was before the authorities realised that they were in fact an invasive weed, and started spraying them. Pretty soon the only place you could get berries was in punnets.

Of course they still have the potential to be an invasive weed, but by golly they're delicious! So I was very happy when my parents gave me a cutting of a thornless variety to plant. I learned my lesson with the boysenberry (or should I say I am still learning it!), and only plant my bramble berries in garden beds that they are allowed to take over (they are ruthless - sending up suckers from beneath the ground as well as runners above!). My blackberry shares a garden bed with two pear trees, but so far they are getting along. I've had a good harvest every year, but this year is amazing! I gave it a pretty savage pruning in late winter, and it's gone crazy! This was one part of the plant at Christmas time:

So far this week, I've picked almost 600 grams of ripe blackberries, and I don't seem to have made a dent! Luckily, berries are easy to freeze and can be used in so many different ways. I also have a lot of volunteers to help me get through them! Anyone that turns up at my house in the next couple of weeks may be offered blackberries!

Some of the plant sticks up over the fence, so I thought it would be nice to share my berries with the neighbourhood.

As we live on a laneway, I just put up a little sign, and they help themselves.

Hopefully it brings back some memories for them, of summer days spent with purple fingers and the delicious taste of blackberries on the tongue!

The Christmas Harvest

If you're anything like me, you're pretty busy in the week leading up to Christmas, and not a great deal gets done in the garden. This year, as I didn't have to work until Christmas Eve, I did a lot of Christmas baking for gift and for our visitors on Boxing Day. I made my 'famous' shortbread, made with my late Grandmother's recipe, and highly anticipated by some members of the family; Christmas cookies, sugared peanuts (that turned out really well and were gobbled up by my spouse well before Christmas!); and Oliver and I made chocolates. I also made a yummy trifle as I do every year.

I find though, that once Christmas is done, I'm super keen to get my jobs done while I have some time off from work. So in the last four days I've been pretty busy. I did some indoor cleaning and organising, but also did a few things outside, including harvesting my first crop of apricots, which I'm confident will ripen nicely off the tree. The one I tasted was delicious, so much so that I took the ladder into the garden to make sure I picked the really high ones. I'm amazed at how big the apricot tree has grown since I planted it last year. It's easily twice the size of the apple trees in the same garden.

I also picked my first zucchini (yum!),

a bucket of potatoes (which I cooked straight away and forgot to photograph!) and in the next week or so will probably be picking several kilos of blackberries. I'll go out and take a photo of the bush tomorrow, it's amazing!

I also did a bit (OK, a lot) of weeding, tied up more tomato branches and cut off some more of the un-flowering leaves (I'm sure there's a proper name for them!). 

Grow your own breakfast

This morning, I really wanted a leek omelette. If you've never had one, I recommend you try it. I found this recipe a while back, but don't tend to use the salt, pepper or nutmeg. Just the leek is enough.

Even better is when you grow the leeks yourself.  The leeks I planted in October are just big enough for me to pick.

 So I pulled out two of those, and together with a couple of my eggs, I put together a little omelette and satisfied my craving.

Great way to start the day!

A berry good harvest!

Super busy this weekend, but I did manage to pick some berries. A good punnet and a half of blueberries:

And the same of boysenberries:

I do so love boysenberries, but geez they're painful! If you've never grown them, they grow on branches covered in tiny little thorns that love to attach themselves to you even when you're just passing by.

We put our boysenberries in a few years ago, and then a few years later tried to take them out, but they send out underground sucker, so once they're in, they're almost impossible to remove. So I've given up and just let them grow in the little bed beside my driveway. Because they do taste very good!!!

Little Harvests

We have had a fair amount of rain (more than 50mm) over the last few days, with some big thunderstorms keeping things interesting (I love summer storms!).

I've been too busy to take pictures but the storm clouds have been amazing!

So I haven't been out in the garden much, but this morning was able to go and pull out a few weeds and pick some food!

A punnet's worth of yummy blueberries:

Some potatoes for dinner (slow-cooker vegemite roast lamb with home grown rosemary and garlic!):

 And my first cherries in a couple of years! YUM!

This a dumb thing to say, but the stuff you get to pick and eat is definitely the best part of growing food (oh, and we'll be a bit better off when the zombie apocalypse comes)!

Garlic....

“Without garlic I simply would not care to live.” – Louis Diat

I love garlic. It probably doesn't make it very pleasant to be around me sometimes, but it is one of my favourite favours (and aromas! There is nothing like the smell of garlic sautéing!).

So growing garlic is one of my favourite gardening adventures.

And today was garlic harvest day.

In January 2012, we visited a friend in Meander, Tasmania (an absolutely gorgeous part of Australia, if you ever get the chance to go there). When we were leaving (to do some more Tassie touring), he gave me three heads of beautiful organic Tasmanian garlic. Since then, I've been growing it. Today, despite my chooks' attempt to decimate the garlic crop a while back, I harvested 28 lovely heads, including an enormous one, at least 5cm wide!

My monster garlic head!

I know a lot of people don't think that organic makes much difference, but garlic is one of the vegetables where I can really taste the difference. This garlic tastes so good!!!

So I've picked it, braided it (I just watch this video for instructions- I still need a little practice!),

My 'braids'

and it's hung up in a little old caravan that I'm planning on turning into a drying/storage room.

I cannot wait to cook up lots of lovely garlicky things!

I love roasted garlic cloves with some roast lamb, or a bit of cabbage fried in butter and garlic (and perhaps a little vegemite!). My father-in-law used to swear by a raw clove of garlic and a slice of cheese every evening. What's your favourite garlic recipe?