First strawberry today. I ate it before I took a photo.
March, 2009:
Potato Onions & Walking Onions
To be honest, they didn’t look like much when Lee gave them to us, but now, perhaps a year later the potato onions have formed two big clumps and the walking onions have ‘walked’ into two new clumps.
I presume that this autumn, or just later in the summer, we can dig up the potato onions, split them up and next spring replant as seperate bulbs. Probably not enough to eat yet, but we will be able to give Lee back a decent clump for his land.
The walking onions are less prolific but more interesting. A small bulb forms at the top of the onion, which eventually is heavy enough to bend the leaf down. Where it touches the floor it roots and then grows a new clump of onions. So, they ‘walk’ around the garden – amazing.
Cherry Blossom and Broad Beans
It must be spring, I heard a cuckoo yesterday, we have started eating broad beans and the cherry blossom has become tiny cherries (although my photo was taken while the site was down and is still beautiful blossom).
The broad beans are still very tiny, but are fantastic in stir-fries, which I am amazingly managing to make almost entirely from stuff from the garden. This is a first for this time of year – I guess we are getting better at this self sufficiency lark.
We put loads of broad beans in last november, as they are so easy to grow, add nitrogen to the soil and come out of the ground as our summer crops go in. Our new hand flour mill should be fine at turning the dried broad beans into flour, which I am thinking I can sneak into all kinds of dishes!
I am still gutted that we lost all of our blog, but perhaps it is a good thing to start again. We are still waiting for windows and doors for the house renovation, which should be here soon, and I have plenty of lime-washing and tiling to do – then our new start can commence. Life is all about death and rebirth, sometimes you just have to let things go so that something new can come. Something better perhaps.
Governments could do well to accept this and let the old economic system die, directing resources into the new paradigm of local, sustainable, low-energy, post peak oil world, rather trying to maintain the pyramid selling system of capitalism that has simply run out of frontiers and cheap abundant energy. Globalisation is unsustainable, and is coming to an end. The days of cheap food in supermarkets, grown by slaves all over the world, is also coming to an end.
Hopefully we can inspire a few people to realise this, and start on that endless path of learning, that we started 6 years ago, that is smallholding and self sufficiency. For me, at least, the loss of the old blog is an opportunity to rethink and change the content and style of my posts, to try to share as much of our lives and knowledge as I can.
Horsey Help
Maurice helping me weed the garden. He was very good and even stuck to the paths between the beds!
WEEDLESS GARDENING
Author – L. Reich
An interesting book about no-dig gardening.
Marvellous March Munch
Here’s last night’s dinner with everything except the rice produced from the garden! Everything, including food, is so colourful this time of year.
Ingredients picked fresh from the garden.
Stir-fried beetroot, onion, broccoli, pumpkin, brussels sprouts, and asparagus. Sounds like an odd combination but it tasted wonderful!
Add rice, spinach and coriander and we have an Organic Spring Veg Risotto – yummy!
Cleaning the Water Tank
We’ve been meaning to clean out the water tank for ages but of course all the other jobs took priority until we were watering the gardens a couple of days ago and the water pressure dropped and the hoses started spluttering, stopping, spluttering again. After I’d fiddled around opening taps all over the place thinking there was air in the system somewhere Andy decided to go check out the tank and found a huge mass of eucalyptus roots clogging the main tap coming out of the tank. So the next day he had to get down and dirty and clean it out. Oh yeah, don’t be alarmed by the pics, this isn’t our drinking water and that’s the accumulated sludge of 10,000 litres of water over more than a year!
New Beginnings
Well, all our websites got hacked. And we were very much less than impressed with the way our hosts handled the situation. So we’ve moved to a new hosting company whose servers are fully powered by the sun and the wind!
Unfortunately in the process I managed to lose the backup of the old blog (totally my own fault, should not have attempted moving servers when I was tired and had a headache – doh!), and have lost all our archives. This is a bit of a blow as it was 5yrs of our history from the very beginnings of Quinta das Abelhas. But, thinking positive, this is a great time to be starting over – not only is Spring in full swing and it’s a general time of rebirth, but our renovation is almost complete so it’s a bit of a new beginning for us too.
Bear with us while we get this new blog up and running, it might take a little while.
