Apples and oranges

and paris market carrots and purple dragon carrots and cylindrica baby beets and gourmet delight bush beans and zucchini and mixed heritage radishes and there are jaune flamee tomatoes as well in there somewhere and - oh yes - eggs. And a long green chili. No pattypan squash today, but there will be strawberries later, I think because I'm hoping to re-do the netting a little bit later (if the rain holds off). At the moment, the netting is so cumbersome that I need to send a neighbour-child in under it - and then pay him in strawberries, which is fair but unphotographed.

The oranges surprise me - they've been hanging around since winter, and the tree is flush with new growth, but these are still as sweet as anything (though hard to pick without climbing.)  The apples from the hen's run are gorgeous - but we didn't net them. We will next year. The others from the ballerinas are not quite ripe - we only netted half a dozen of those just to see if they're worth the trouble.

A possum pulled the netted nectarines down. Clearly we need to think this through.

Made up a couple of dozen pitticelle and *gasp* froze them - but we've already tried it with latkes, and we know that if you blast them (frozen) at 240 degrees fan-forced for ten-fifteen minutes, they crisp up very, very well.

The next lot will go into the dehydrator for soup mix.  :)

Fires and hedging

As it turns out, the hedging should probably have been done in early October.

It's all fires and helicopters right now. And tradesmen, of course (how we do love our tradesmen!)  The potatoes I planted in grow-bags are flowering now, and I have baby tomatoes on the yellow pear and cherry  tomato plants. We're harvesting peas (novella) and kale and spinach, and the fennel looks great. It's all coming up. The olives are blossoming, plus the apples; the chickens are laying (3 out of four) and

Dave put the new bridge in today and all the sleepers.

Bless you, Dave.  :)

We're back -

We had to go away for a few days while the floors were sanded.

The weather this week has been most odd. Very cold, and three days of rain, then very high winds and rather hot (25+ degrees). The garden seems to cope better than I do. One of the Rockets has started to lay  :)

The apple trees are flowering, the plum is beginning to plum and the michaelis hedge is one of the prettiest things I've ever seen. I adore this place!

Today I put in another row of spinach, two rows of fennel, a row of carrots and radish (we're eating those other radishes now) and a few more beans. But I was watering most of the day because oh! those winds!

My regime at the moment in the vegie garden is weed one and feed two beds each day. Full watering happens every second day for ten minutes.

In seed news, the brandywine and jaune flamme tomatoes are up, but still a long way from transplant sized. The yellow and red grapes are flowering.