Grow your own food

The garden diary

2006

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Summer10

Autumn 2010: the harvest continues

Summer is over now, and this summer was the best one for growing fruit and vegies that we have had during our time down here. There is so much to harvest and conserve. Much of our tomato harvest goes into the freezers. We clean the tomatoes and freeze them whole. At some time during the long and dark winter months we will use the frozen tomatoes to make tomato soup, tomato ketchup, tomato sauce, tomato paste and relish. Each of our 360 litre chest freezers uses around 1kw of electricity per day and as soon as one of them is empty we will turn it off and start it up again later in the year once we need the storage space for the new harvest. This is a very efficient way to store the harvest. A big advantage of this system is that we can process much of the harvest during the winter months rather than in summer, when there is so much to do anyway and never enough time.

The many uses of apples:
we harvest a lot more apples than we can eat fresh or sell fresh. We experiment with storage of whole apples on paper in a dark container, but we don't know yet which ones are suited best for this old fashioned way of keeping apples for winter and spring.
We dry a lot of apples in our food drier and use a whole lot of jars for storage of dried apple slices. The skin and apple cores go into a juicer and provide us with fresh apple juice. The pulp from the juicer goes straight to the chooks. Every single bit of every apple is used!

Experiences with our greenhouse

The first growing season in the greenhouse was brilliant. Cucumber vines on their strings grew up to the roof, the tomatoes did very well and so did everything else. Two seasons followed where nothing did really well. Why?
As always we had planted everything in pots, but some tomato seeds fell on the floor and took. These seeds grew into strong and productive tomato plants while the tomatoes in the pots did poorly. Were the pots transmitting too much heat to the roots of the plants? Is planting in soil without pots a better way? Against all recommendations we changed our system to plant directly into good soil on the floor and our winter vegies are doing very well. Let's see how this will work next summer!

Eggplants grown in unprotected beds:
this summer was warm enough for our eggplants out in the open garden beds to be productive . The ones in pots in the greenhouse did very poorly.

The poultry

Our Aylesbury ducks (left) have grown into stately large birds that spend all day exploring the bottom paddock together with the Indian Runners (right). We decide to keep three Aylesbury ducks, one Aylesbury drake and seven Indian Runner ducks plus one Indian Runner drake. From the middle of May there is water in the winter creek and they all spend endless hours in it even when the temperatures sink below zero during the first cold nights! By the end of April the Aylesbury ducks start laying eggs.

Left: A Salmon Faverolles pullet in the large orchard next to the blueberry plants

Right: the big black hen is a first cross between a Welsummer rooster and a Plymouth Rock hen. The offspring is sex linked with the male chicks showing barring and the females being black. As the photo shows they develop a brown tinge around the neck as they mature. We are very impressed by the vigour of these crosses but we decided not to continue developing the Welbar breed because that takes too much time (years) and too much room for the spare roosters one needs to keep for the project.
The hen in the back is a Lavender Araucana.

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