Gardening from Scrap #2

Whilst we have been enjoying the spoils of our previous Gardening from Scraps endeavour, we have been waiting patiently for some rosemary sprigs to take root. I read recently (on Pinterest of course) that if you strip away leaves from the bottom inch or two of a sprig of rosemary and place it in water, it will grow roots and you have yourself a new rosemary plant. This seemed like another fun gardening activity for the kids.

In truth, it took a month to grow all the roots you can see in the photo above, and I am sure we could have planted them weeks ago, but life with 3 is busy and the constant rain of late hasn't helped. We also lost a couple of the sprigs when my husband thought I had placed them in a glass jar on the windowsill for his cooking convenience. Fail!

Nonetheless, the rain has finally stopped, the husband has been told not to touch, and we finally planted our little rosemary sprigs in the veggie patch.

What have you been planting this winter?

High Tea Birthday

For my birthday we hosted our families at a lovely morning tea. I had envisaged a relaxed and beautiful morning chatting with family over tea and scones. I envisaged the guests arriving to find a table filled with flowers, beautiful bone china tea cups, piping hot pots of tea brewing and dessert towers filled with mouth-watering delicacies.

That wasn't quite what the guests arrived to...

The table was partially set with flowers and tea cups and looked stunning.

However, the towers were empty and the kitchen was a war zone. The baby was screaming, the 2 year old was sheepishly hiding after tipping an entire tea pot of flowers and water all over the freshly laid children's table and having earlier broken a porcelain tea spoon, and the 4 year old was sulking about having to clean up the playroom for our guests. I hadn't brushed my hair, cleaned my teeth or managed to put on any jewelry.

Thankfully the guests flew into action upon arrival. G-G nursed the screaming baby and put her to sleep (the magic touch). Pop finished grilling the vegetables for the sandwiches. Nan and the Aunts stacked the dessert towers with the aforementioned delicacies (most of which they had craftily created themselves) warmed quiches and helped make the sandwiches. Someone put on the kettle and made tea. The cousins distracted the children and ran outside to play. Phew!

The table was set and we finally sat down for the most decadent High Tea! It was exactly what I had envisaged...

I loved picking the different camellia's from my garden for the table decorations and used old tea tins (now residing in the children's play kitchen) as vases. I used these tins as vases when I hosted a High Tea for my sister's baby shower over a year ago and got many compliments, so I recycled the idea. I discovered I have 6 different varieties and colours of camellia in my front garden - white, blush pink, light pink, dark pink, fuchsia, and fuschia with white spots! I am loving my winter garden. We even used the children's play teapot for a vase on the children's table.

My Mother-In-Law has a beautiful eclectic collection of fine china tea cups which looked beautiful on the table,  along with some of my sister and mine Limoges Legle tea cups, and my Grandmothers bone china teapot.

The children's table was set with the Royal Dalton cups and plates which my boys received for their Christenings and 1st Birthdays. The children all enjoyed baby-chino's, quiches, gravadlax, chocolate waffer sticks, macaroons and meringues. Not to forget the gingerbread men the boys made with their Dad the morning of (these may, or may not, have been the reason for much of the chaos when everyone arrived...).

All up it was a beautiful day. We stuffed ourselves silly and loved every moment.

So what was on the menu?

A lot of the above was made by my talented mother, sisters and mother-in-law. My husband made the house-cured gravadlax, and my creation was the sandwich.

Char-Grilled Vegetable Ciabatta with Marinated Goat Cheese and Avocado.

The ingredients:
3 Zucchini, sliced thinly
1 Jap Pumpkin, deseeded and sliced thinly
4 Red Capsicum, deseeded and sliced
3 Avocados
Goat Cheese (we used a marinated peppered balls goat cheese which was marinated in lemon and pepper).
Sourdough Ciabatta Load

The recipe:
Toss vegetables with olive oil, salt and pepper and lay on grill of BBQ. Turn after several minutes and grill for a further 3 minutes.
Slice ciabatta thinly, spread goat cheese on one slice and avocado on another.
Layer vegetables on top of goat cheese and top avocado slice. Slice in half.
Makes 14 half sandwiches.

The result:
Delicious, fresh and creamy.

I wish I had a photo to show how gorgeous these sandwiches looked but alas I do not - they were eaten too quickly! (Saved by my sister who snapped this photo).

Tune back in for my husbands Gravadlax recipe in a couple of days.

Do you enjoy entertaining? Are you ever prepared when people begin arriving?

Gardening from Scrap

That is not a typo - we have embraced gardening from scraps left over in the kitchen. Who knew there were so many vegetables which can be regrown from kitchen scraps? Well this person did obviously and I stumbled upon their blog through Pinterest of course.

This proved a fantastic gardening project with the kids. First we watched the cut shallot bulbs sprout new shoots in a glass with some water for a few days.

Then everyone enjoyed helping to plant the new plants into the garden and watching them grow more and more. 

The best thing about shallots (and leeks, which we also recycled) is that the kids can see them growing bigger everyday, they grow so fast! Finally everyone loved picking veggies fresh from the garden to put in our dinner!

So far we have recycled shallots, leeks and potatoes (still waiting to harvest the potatoes). We are considering recycling some garlic and maybe even an avocado (though that will be a long term goal as avocados take 5-7 years to fruit). And we have an unexpected pumpkin plant curling across the backyard from the neighbours compost heap. We have had no luck so far with encouraging any pumpkins to grow, despite partaking in some artificial pollination of the male and female flowers.

Have you recycled any kitchen scraps into your veggie patch?

Veggies Update!

Its been about 6 weeks since we finished planting our veggie patch. All the veggies have survived the record breaking temperatures we experienced in January (I think I faired far worse than the plants did). And with the help of a little chill garlic spray we seem to be beating the grubs and bugs who try to devour our plants. A friend with a bumper veggie patch had mentioned using the chilli garlic spray for her tomatoes, and when my aunt mentioned her huge tomato crop was ruined by caterpillars inside the fruit, I decided this was something we needed to investigate further for our one little tomato.

The Ingredients:
12 large cloves of garlic (about 1 whole bulb)
6 hot chilies (dried or fresh - I used fresh as we had a surplus from the Margarita & Taco Fiesta)
2 cups of water
1 tablespoon liquid soap (I used dishwashing detergent - just ensure it doesn't contain de-greaser and isn't anti-bacterial)

The Recipe:
Combine the garlic, chillies, and water in a blender and puree until it forms a frothy-orangey-pinkey concoction.
Let the blender ingredients stand overnight to gain potency and so that the solids settle to the bottom of container.
Pour the mixture through a strainer lined with cheesecloth to get rid of all the particles, as these will clog up your garden sprayer.
Pour this concentrate into a jar with a plastic lid (a metal lid will react with the liquid).
Stir in the liquid soap.
Label the jar (your don't want to add this to a recipe by mistake!)
When ready to use, mix 1 tablespoon of concentrate with 470mL of water in a garden sprayer.
Spray plants during the afternoon so that the hot sun mixed with the spray does not burn your plants.
You can respray every second or third day if needed.

So far so good for our little tomato, who is growing fast and looking healthy. And we are the proud parents of 3 more little tomatoes growing alongside it.

I have been using the spray close to every other day, on not only the tomatoes but on all the veggies and herbs. My basil was getting destroyed by a little green grub, but with a healthy spray of the chilli garlic spray every couple of days it is once again flourishing and it is definately time for some pesto making.

During my chilli garlic spray research there were a few other tips I came across which would have been helpful to have known before we chose our vegetables and planted them.
1. Apparently, corn and tomatoes are not good companion plants as the corn attracts the pests which destroy the tomatoes. Whoops! We have rows of corn surrounding both our tomatoes plants!
2. Marigolds are great companion plants for tomatoes as they deter these same pests. So I bought a couple of punnets of marigolds which are currently sitting between our tomato plants waiting to be planted.

We also have corn heads and jalapeños growing which the boys and my hubby are very excited about.

And just today I have spotted some delicious looking beans hanging from a couple of our bean plants - I am surprised that the beans are almost as tall as the tiny little plants they are growing from. Clearly the wet weather of the last 2 weeks has spurred everything in the veggie patch to grow at a rapid rate!

We have bought a passionfruit vine to plant down the back as at our last house there was a terribly neglected passionfruit vine that produced amazing quantities of delicious passionfruit. We figure a plant that thrives on neglect is a good bet! We are still harvesting a few blackberries every couple of days from our little bush and besides the possums pulling out the dill plant all the herbs are doing well. We are also watching impatiently as our avocado tree comes into fruit and hope the fruit grows faster than the possums can eat it!

All up we are loving our little garden down the side! And the boys love picking and eating the produce from it!

Veggies! Veggies! Veggies!

I think the first thing Nathan said to me when we bought our house was, "I want to plant a vegetable garden." Noah didn't let him forget that statement either, constantly reminding him, "Dadda, we still need to plan and plant our vegetable garden, don't we?!" And since we have 2 little boys who love being in the garden and "helping out" it was a goal we wanted to realise sooner rather than later.

So with the some inspiration from this pin on Pinterest, we decided we should utilise the "garden bed" on the eastern side of the house, outside the laundry. It has the benefits of being just outside the laundry so its convenient to maintain, but its a bit of a dead area in the backyard. It also gets a good amount of sun, but not too much. This was the drab looking site we picked for our veggie patch.

Over the course of a few weekends, even a little planting on Christmas Day, Nathan and the boys built a garden bed and planted our veggies. It took a lot of reminding to get Beau to keep the dirt in the garden bed but all-in-all the boys were great little Bob-the-Builders/Don Burkes.

So far the veggie patch has two types of beans, two types of tomatoes, corn, carrots, blueberries, basil, jalapeno chillies and shallots planted. We have already been able to pick and eat some of the blueberries! Delicious! And we have our first tomato growing! The carrots are constantly being "checked" by Beau, so lets hope they survive and we are so thankful the veggies all faired very well during Tuesday scorching 42C day!

The boys seem to be enthusiastic about watering the veggies, and especially about eating the blueberries! We can't wait to be harvesting more veggies from our patch soon! Maybe our next batch of tomato relish will be from our garden!

Next stop collecting our own eggs...maybe next year.

Tea Tin Basil

After we had completed the Herb Garden Redo back in October I did not throw out the sad and woody basil plant which I had left in the original pot. In fact, those large planter boxes have sat on the balcony and now down in the garden providing many more hours of dirty fun for my boys (I am trying very hard to embrace the mess of my two little boys and the dirty fun they get up to).

Furthermore, after reading this pin on how to prune basil so you grow larger leaves, and hence a larger plant, that sad looking basil plant was starting to look like it may be worth saving. Thank you again Pinterest for some useful information which actually worked.

So I needed a new pot solution for this recovering basil plant, and with my new kitchen completed I was missing having herbs in my kitchen to just pick at when I needed a leaf or two (not that the balcony is such a trek to pick from my new basil plant - all of 15 feet from the kitchen!). I saw a couple of pins using old tea tins for herbs and kitchen plants and as I had a plethora of tea tins following an amazing High Tea Baby Sprinkle I hosted for my sister, I just had to wait for one of the tins to be empty and my desire for a small indoor basil plant would be realised.

It was the Mother's Bouquet tea that was completed first - hardly surprising in this household I suppose. And what a cute little addition to my new kitchen this tea-tin-basil-plant makes!

P.S. I highly recommend reading this basil pruning tutorial. It takes about 30 seconds and it is so worth it! I can't make pesto fast enough to keep up with my plant on the balcony! And it had taken my neglected old woody plant back to producing lots of leaves that are significantly larger than I had been getting for the last year.

Herb garden redo

With spring in the air, and our new house and garden, it was time to rescue the neglected herbs. Previously planted in unattractive long green planters, the herbs had been long neglected since we moved out of our Fairlight townhouse in June. The basil had become woody and sparse, the spinach had been all eaten (by a spinach-loving-toddler who didn't discern leaves from roots), and the rosemary was starting to get brown leaves.


I think you'll agree this little corner of our balcony looks pretty drab and unattractive. So after a little reading about how to care for each of our herbs, and taking a little inspiration from my mum's herb corner, I bought some new basil, spinach and lavender, and a number of different sized pots to repot the herbs into.

This is the result:



A little more attractive, definitely more lush, and I love the pop of lavender in the back. We still reused the chalkboard garden stakes, and what remains of the red and white toadstools. The oregano, the rosemary and the very sad looking parsley are all from the old pots.

We have spent the last 5 months renovating and repairing the interior of the house (more on those renovations to come soon), and whilst we have many plans for the garden area, this may be all we manage for the next year.

Once again, I had a little boy delighted to help "move the dirt" using his dump truck and spade. Though I'm not terribly sure how much dirt got moved into those new pots - it all just ended up on the balcony. He had fun though and it was an hour of dirty fun spent together.



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Chalkboard Garden Stakes and Toadstools

I had quite a lot of fun with my 2 little boys planting some new herbs in our garden on the weekend. Too much fun in fact, to take any photos of the 2 of them up to their elbows in dirt and mud. Apparently, little boys love digging in dirt - who knew?! :)

My 3 year old was especially excited when we bought some cute little chalkboard garden stakes to label our herbs with. We bought them at one of our favourite coffee shops, Favourite Things, which is stocked full of - well favourite things. My mum actually bought us the cute red toadstools in the same shop a few months ago. We go to this cafe on Tuesdays either before or after the boys music classes and I think my son is of the opinion that they "make the BEST baby-ccino's" as they come with a chocolate coated snake.

Hopefully this lot of herbs survive a little better than the last lot which suffered from too much water as I had planted them in what was previously a fish pond. I didn't really think through the drainage issue very well. This time we planted the herbs is pots resting in the space that used to be a fish pond.








I am looking forward to having Noah and Beau help me water and care for these herbs and especially the spinach which Noah is super excited to eat!

What do you love planting and/or eating from your garden?

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