Very Early Spring in our Garden

Warm breezes and a different quality to afternoon's light signal a change to Spring here in our subtropical home. Although the nights have still been cool, a sense of the season turning came earlier again this year than the flipping of our calender's page to September. It is a glorious time of year here which I relish before the heat of Summer takes hold. 

Out in the garden, green-tipped new growth abounds and more and more flowers are coming into bud and bloom. The mandarin tree is covered in promising white blossoms, purple lavender spires scent the air, plump mulberries are ripening and delicious, the passionfruit  in a pot is sending out its first tendrils and the veg patch waits, under a blanket of mulch, for new plantings. 

Creamy petals and a tinge of pink on a salvia's bloom.

Ripening mulberries on our little tree.

Little native raspberries beginning to form too.

The intriguing bloom of an iris.

A mass of perfumed lavender blooms.

White blossoms on our mandarin tree.

Early growth on our new passionfruit vine.

Chocolate Cosmos has a chocolate-y scent!

This Spring, I plan on adding even more salvias to the garden, with plants gifted to me by a new gardening friend, along with different varieties of cosmos. Packets of Cosmos 'Picotee' and Cosmos 'Sensation' seeds have arrived. I ordered my seeds from Green Harvest, an Australian organic seed supplier based up in the Hinterland not too far a drive from here. (I am not affiliated with Green Harvest in any way; I just like to buy my seeds from them.) 

There's so much to look forward to in our garden this Spring! I'd love to know what you are planning to grow as the season changes where you are in the world.

Meg

 

Generosity In My World

With fresh eggs from her chickens, juicy oranges and macadamia nuts from her abundant trees and delicately scented nasturtiums in a little posy, my friend shared with me some of her garden's bounty. I brought her sweet local strawberries and homemade cake as a thank you. I think we were both thrilled!

Gifts from my friend's garden.

The juice from my friend's homegrown oranges, and the golden-yolked eggs from her happy chickens, went into dozens of orange and chocolate chip muffins. The hard shells of the macadamia nuts have all been cracked open and the creamy, sweet kernels enjoyed wholeheartedly. What a healthy treat! And those pretty nasturtiums graced our table for many days and reminded me of my beautiful friend each time their vibrant petals caught my eye. 

Produce grown just a few doors down from our place.

From one of our generous neighbourhood gardeners, we received fresh lettuce and rocket, picked right there and then from his productive garden. We laughed together as he told me to watch out for a caterpillar or two! I brought his gift home, washed the leaves (no caterpillars😋) and made a healthy salad for dinner that very same day. So fresh and delicious! I plan on reciprocating with a big bunch of homegrown Italian parsley and some homemade biscuits...I think chocolate chip might be his favourite!

Homemade chocolate loaf cake.

Almost every week, my mother-in-law bakes something for her grandson's lunchbox. She brings her delicious baking over on Sundays when we all share afternoon tea together. Over the years, I've been so thankful for the extra biscuits, muffins, pikelets and cakes that she quietly puts on my kitchen bench and that I transfer to the freezer for enjoying later throughout busier weeks.  In return, we send her home with produce from the garden or some soup or some extra slices of sweetness from our afternoon tea. 

Fragrant Vietnamese Mint

Cutting of Salvia Leucantha (Mexican Sage)

Over the past few months, I have gotten to know a fellow gardener who is teaching me about her culture's cuisine and how she grows the food she likes to cook. We've exchanged laughter, ideas and plants. Recently, this sweet gardener gave me a pot of Vietnamese Mint and I have struck cuttings from a salvia that grows in my garden to give to her. We both love salvias!

Salvia Leucantha in bloom in my garden.

These are just a few examples of the generosity in my world; there are countless more.  They rely not on the exchange of money but on generosity of spirit, a willingness to share and a heartfelt thanks for the kindness and love that changes hands. 

Meg

Some More Simple Savings

Saving at our place is often about the little things, done often and over again. These more frugal things keep a little extra money in our family's cookie jar each week and add up over time. Many of the simple savings we make relate to the food we eat:

A nourishing homemade lunch.

We've had some cold days this past week, and I can think of nothing better than a bowlful of hot homemade soup on such shivery days. I made a huge pot of split pea and bacon soup earlier in the week and we've been enjoying it for lunch each day. I used yellow split peas, vegetable stock, onion and bacon, carrots and celery and a lone sweet potato, and added bay leaves and parsley that I grow in the garden. Here is a recipe, from the Erren's Kitchen website, for just such a soup. One big pot of a soup like this goes a long way!

A healthy & delicious afternoon snack.

Each week, I make a batch of homemade yoghurt. I make unsweetened yoghurt and top this with some fruit, like these locally-grown strawberries, in-season now and so far less expensive. I had one ripe passionfruit, left from those that came in my weekly produce box, so it's juicy pulp went on top too along with a sprinkling of chia seeds. Delicious!

While I use an EasiYo to set our yoghurt, I do not buy the matching sachets. Instead, I follow this recipe from Wendy over on her blog, My Abundant Life. (There are lots of money-saving tips in her blog's archives.) Not buying a tub of yoghurt from the supermarket each week saves us money but also reduces the amount of plastic coming into our home. (*I am not sponsored by anyone to promote EasiYo, it's just what I use to make yoghurt.)

Frozen portions of celery and capsicum.

A couple of weeks ago, I bought two huge bunches of crisp organic celery, 2 for $10, at a local health food grocery on a member's saver special. Celery has been incredibly expensive at times over the past year and organically grown celery even more so. (Here is an article from The Guardian about soaring celery prices.) Currently, at two major supermarkets, the price for a bunch of celery is $4. That's down from $7 a bunch. Given celery can be found among the list of fruit and veg with the dubious mantle of 'The Dirty Dozen', relating to those most likely contaminated by pesticide residue, and that the celery in my garden has not taken off (yet), I thought paying the $1 extra per bunch for organic celery was worth it. 

We use a lot of celery, in soups and stews, during Winter time. Storing two bunches of celery in my fridge crisper would lead to wastage (It's a lot of celery!) so I rinsed and chopped it all up and then bagged handfuls of it in the clip lock bags we wash and reuse over and over again, and froze it. I know we'll use it before our Winter time is over. While it's not for stir fries or salads, when you want crunchy celery, it's fine for the soft, cooked celery of soups and stews. There are delicious things, such as pesto, that you can make with celery leaves, you can add them in to the mix when making stock or you can put them into your compost bin or worm farm where they'll break down to become food for your soil. No waste!

Some smoothie bananas.

Overripe bananas inevitably end up in banana breads or smoothies at our place. For smoothie bananas, I simply slice them up into chunks, spread them out on a baking tray and snap freeze them. Once frozen, I transfer them all into a container and use them up by the handful in smoothies. No waste and frozen banana makes for creamy smoothies!

Homemade muffins & silverbeet pie.

With silverbeet, spring onion and parsley, picked from our garden, I made another scrumptious Silverbeet Impossible Pie. We had a slice of this with soup for lunch on the day it was baked and then warmed up for dinner the following night. It's just so good! 

While the pie was baking in the oven, I used fresh juice, from the oranges my friend grows in her garden, to make batches of orange and chocolate chip muffins. I simply added chocolate chips to Nigella Lawson's Orange Breakfast Muffins recipe. They freeze beautifully and are perfect for adding to school lunchboxes.  

Tangy & luscious lime butter.

The juice from the limes I have been foraging from a local tree has been made into batches of tangy and luscious lime butter. While there's jars of jam in our pantry, they remain unopened while lime butter is in the fridge. It's sublime on toast!

Making the most of our homegrown produce, as well as that so generously shared by friends or foraged for free, baking up a storm while the oven's on, making big batches of simple and nourishing food that can be frozen or enjoyed as leftovers, eating seasonally and having ways of eliminating food wastage means that we eat well and save at the same time in multiple ways.

What simple savings have you been making at your place?

Meg

Some Simple Savings

The simple savings we make here don't usually come via a flashy sale with price tags advertising huge discounts. Instead, they tend to reveal themselves in the everyday things we do over and again. These are some of the little savings we've made of late by making, growing, reusing, mending and finding our own:

This plant, grown from a cutting I brought home from my Mum's garden, has filled out its hanging basket. Both the wire hanging basket and its liner were 'rescued' from my stash of old pots that I keep on a table under our house. I am not sure what this plant is called but it has pretty tangerine bell-shaped flowers. A free plant from my Mum's place that's now growing here too.

I stamped a plain piece of brown paper, which came wrapped around a little bunch of flowers I received, with tiny flower heads. I added it to my ''saved" gift wrap along with this silver and black piece that came with flowers too. I think both will look lovely once re-used and tied with black ribbons.

A large dish of lasagne was baked to share as a meal with friends. I used grated zucchini and carrot and pumpkin to add to the very small amount of meat I had to make the filling. I sprinkled the creamy sauce on top with a little parmesan cheese and baked it until golden.  I served it with steamed veg. Warm and chocolatey prune muffins, from a recipe I found in a Grass Roots magazine, with homemade vanilla ice-cream, made a lovely dessert too. As we were feeding two extra hungry teenage boys, this homemade meal saved us quite a bit as I'm sure you can all imagine just how many takeaway pizzas growing boys can eat!

Little harvests from the garden are finding their way into lots of our meals. There are handfuls of crunchy snow peas for stir fries, juicy yellow tomatoes for salads that are also lovely and sweet when roasted. I've made two Silverbeet Impossible Pies now, with silverbeet and spring onion and parsley from the garden, which is just delicious hot or cold, for lunch or for dinner. The little limes, from a tree that I walk past almost every day while out with Sir Steve dog, are destined to become lime curd to dollop onto our homemade scones. At one of the big supermarkets, limes are 72c each. These were foraged and free!

 

One of my favourite op-shops is open again now and I found this black button-up cardigan amongst the racks of clothes. It cost me just a few dollars. I will get a lot of wear out of it because it's lightweight and thus perfect for our mild sub-tropical Winters. I also mended one of my son's favourite t-shirts to extend its life a little longer. 

Making things last that bit longer, reusing what we already have, growing and making our own, buying second hand and keeping an eye out for that which is free or a good bargain saves a little here and there which, over time, adds up to dollars and cents not spent but saved.

Meg

Food Growing in our Garden

While I dream of an entire backyard devoted to growing food, in reality our main veg patch extends just down the length of our back ramp. While not the largest of patches, I still manage to home grow a variety of foods that we enjoy picking and eating. 

Little yellow globes of goodness.

These little cherry-like tomatoes are an heirloom variety, called 'Lemon Drop', that I've not grown before. I will be saving a few seeds though because I want to grow them again. They are delicious in salads and a lovely colour contrast to the usual red cherry toms.

Crisp & crunchy snow peas.

Snow peas are one of my favourite garden snacks. I can't walk past them without picking one to munch on! Besides walking around the garden and eating them, I've been harvesting small handfuls and adding them to stir fries. They've grown so well this season. 

A frilly fancy lettuce.

Lettuce has so far been a bit of a hit and miss affair this Autumn. I planted some which were bitter after a blast of heat earlier in the season. These frilly fancy lettuces are doing well though. The leaves are being used on sandwiches and in salads. 

A little purple eggplant.

I'm not a huge fan of eggplant so just planted one this season. These are a small variety and perhaps, once they get a bit bigger, will make their way onto a pizza somehow or maybe into a bake of some kind. There's no point in growing what you don't enjoy eating!

Bright green basil. 

Sweet basil is flourishing in the garden where it self seeds happily. The bees and I love it! There's been such an abundance that I've been able to give bunches away to friends who want to make pesto too. Here is a recipe for Macadamia Basil Pesto which is so delicious.

Tall spring onions.

Spring onion grows in our patch all year round. I cut some almost every day and use it in everything from our morning omelettes, salads, stir fries and I always garnish nachos with sour cream and chopped spring onion.

Leaves & stems of silverbeet.

Then there's  silverbeet. It's the most dependable veg in our patch, there's always an Autumn abundance of it and it's so nutritious. One of my favourite recipes in which to use our homegrown silverbeet is this Impossible Pie from Fiona over at Stay Home Instead. Perfect for lunches!

A garden volunteer.

This is the last pumpkin from those that grew on the volunteer vine that popped up in the garden. I picked it after I took this photo as it's time to pull the vine out now and make some more space for new plantings.  Of course, I will roast some of it as that is one of my most favourite things to eat in all the world!

What is your garden growing?

Meg

Lately

We are spending all our days at home now like so many others all around the world.  There is work and school to do from home throughout Monday to Friday. Our old wooden table is set with schoolbooks and our study is, for now, a makeshift office. Around and in between this different way of working and learning, there is much that is happily and reassuringly the same about home.

 Homemade pumpkin scones with jam & a dollop of thick cream.


  Fresh, spray-free fruit & veg in my custom-order box.

Crunchy cornflake crackles.

As always, there's much home cooking cooling on the kitchen bench. This nourishes us, sustains us and, in the case of these cornflake crackles, indulges us in a little childhood nostalgia when days did indeed seem more carefree than they do just now. While this refined-sugar free version of these honey joys, is far less sweet than those I remember from my girlhood days, they are every bit as yummy and the bottom still sticks to the patty paper case! 🙂

The first eggplant flower.

A delicate little snow pea flower too.

In the veggie patch, the seedlings I planted weeks ago are growing taller and leafier and the first flowers on the eggplant and snow peas have emerged. The buzz of honeybees, blue-banded bees and teddy bear bees, begins early in this north-facing part of our garden. Our own teeny-tiny little native bees are there among the flowers too but they are just quieter. I am harvesting homegrown lettuce, spring onion, herbs, mandarins and spinach and can't wait to pick the first snow peas to munch on!

A novel & one of those cornflake crackles.

Everyday, I find myself with a book (or three) in my lap which is not that unusual in less extraordinary times either. The pile of books I borrowed before the libraries closed is dwindling. Some of the novels have been ho-hum but I am very much enjoying In Love with George Eliot by Kathy O'Shaughnessy.  It's been quite fascinating to learn more about the life of Marian Evans, who wrote under the nom de plume of George Eliot. Perhaps, when there are no library books left on my bedside table, I will seek out one of George Eliot's Victorian novels to read. 

Little blue & cream drawstring bag.

While my bedside table is emptying of novels, my sewing table has a growing pile of old linens from which I am making little drawstring bags. These are my favoured project right now. Each finished bag is tucked into my present box for later gifting. They are perfect for holding a washcloth and bar of soap or a few packets of flower seeds and a card. While I am often 'distracted' by sewing up these bags, I have made some progress on a couple of unfinished garments too. (If I ever finish them, I'll show you! 😄)

Early morning light along the path.

Each and every day too, there are early morning and late afternoon walks, with each other and our lovely Sir Steve dog, along the winding paths of our leafy neighbourhood. The Autumn light at these times of day is gentle and soft. Quite a way along one path, nestled safely into the fork of a tall gum's branches, there is a precious koala. With a handpainted sign at the bottom of 'her' tree, letting us all know she's up there, this fluffy native has become quite a neighbourhood celebrity! Can you see her way up high in these branches?

A fluffy koala in a gum along a neighbourhood path.

Just as this koala is settled and snug in her tree, so too are we in our home. In these uncertain times, I would not want to be anywhere else. 

Meg

Three Things from My Garden

A delicate spray of sweetly scented blossoms, a bunch of fragrant homegrown herbs and a simple bouquet of little flowers are the joy I brought inside from our lush and green garden this morning...

Homegrown flowers and herbs.

That single spray of white star-shaped flowers came from my climbing Stephanotis vine. (Madagascan Jasmine).  Its sweetly perfumed blossoms are also known as wedding flowers because they are often used in wedding bouquets. I placed my single spray in a little vintage milk bottle, along with some of my favourite blue and white treasures, atop the old hoop pine table near our front door. Its heady perfume will offer a long-lasting and sweetly-scented welcome home. 

A spray of sweetly-scented Stephanotis in an old milk bottle.

While the Stephanotis is covered in sweetly-scented stars, the herbs in our garden are covered in lush new growth. The bunch of pungent basil and savoury rosemary I picked are now sitting in a blue jug of water on my kitchen bench ready to add flavour and freshness to our meals. The basil is destined for a pasta sauce while the rosemary for a focaccia and some herb-y roasted potatoes. Homegrown herbs have such vibrant flavour!

A bunch of fresh, homegrown herbs.

Into another old jug, I placed a happy little bouquet of small Zinnia flowers. With their creamy petals and centres of golden yellow, these Summer flowers always make me smile. I love them so for their simplicity. They seem to match perfectly the crocheted 'lace' of a favourite vintage doily.

A bunch of happy little Zinnias.

This is the joy of the garden for me; the food and the flowers that we grow. Whether it's a bunch of herbs or a bunch of flowers or both, I am beyond content when there's abundance in our garden to pick and enjoy.

Meg

p.s. If you would like to learn more about growing the beautiful Stephanotis vine, here is a Gardening Australia video and factsheet.