First Sowings of the 2011 Season

Ok, so it is clear by now that my record-keeping skills are not exactly meticulous as I look upon my last entry on February 2010. Anyway, a lot has happened in the interim with the birth of my daughter, Tess, in June 2010. This event brought to home some of the reasons for the home vegetable growing in the first place, so I’m hoping updates will be more regular. Also, I now have a vegetable bed (pictures coming soon), and so I at least have somewhere to put the plants, which helps.

Anyway, today I sowed 24 seeds of Galina, which is a yellow cherry tomato, 16 seeds of Silverbeet, which is a chard, and 24 seeds of a yellow tomato called Yellow Perfection. All seeds are from Seeds of Victoria.

Marmalade Update

It was rather amiss of me not to write an update about the marmalade. According to the instructions I was following there are a couple of ways to know if a preservative has reached its setting point. These include using a thermometer and when a certain temperature has been reached then the setting point has also been achieved, and a second method involves letting a small bit of the preservative lie on a cold plate for a couple of minutes and if it has the consistency you require then it too has reached the setting point.

I went with the first method of setting the marmalade, but I must have done something wrong. The marmalade is very runny, but on the other hand it is absolutely delicious. Anyway, I still have several jars of blueberry jam to get through until we can start on the marmalade and I am hoping that it will have set a little by then. If not, it will make for a delicious orange marmalade sauce.

Orange Marmalade

In the middle of winter there are not many fruits that are in season, but one such useful fruit is the Seville Orange, which is available between January and February. The Seville Orange is also known as bitter orange, and has a very bitter or sour taste, but the reason I am interested in it is its use in making marmalade. Following a recipe from the Preserves book in the River Cottage Handbook series, today I bought a kilo of Seville Oranges and two kilos of demerara sugar.

So far I have cut the oranges up, squeezed the juice out and shredded the peel. Once this was done, I re-added the juice and covered the shredded peel with water. It is currently in my kitchen looking a bit like this:

 

They will remain in the bowl for 24 hours before being turned into about 6 450g jars of marmalade.

The seeds that I planted the other week are coming up well, and only a couple of seeds don't appeared to have come through, but there are plenty to help me start a herb garden once they get a big bigger and it gets a bit warmer outside. This is what it currently looks like on my kitchen window sill:

I think, moving from left-to-right we have sage, basil, chives and oregano but, due to my lousy record-keeping, I will have a much better idea when they grow a bit more.

First Sowing of the Year

Today I started my somewhat smaller gardening year by sowing a couple of different herbs. These consist of basil, garlic chives, sage, and oregano. I am only growing 8 modules of each herb since I am sowing them so early, but I wanted to get a start as the weather here in Victoria is so unseasonably mild due to El Nino. I am using top soil mixed with vermiculite for the sowing material and the root container is currently sitting on a heat mat. Hopefully the first seedlings should start appearing within the week.

My bread adventures continue, as I am currently creating two whole wheat loaves of bread with a mixture of seeds inside the bread. As I grow in confidence it is fun to try different mixtures in order to vary the bread being created.

New Year's Resolution Part 2.

I have come to the realisation that I should really write down some of the things that Iwant to achieve this year, to present myself with some goals otherwise I will probably just let the year slide by. As I continue on the quest of self-reliance, I want to learn new skills around the house that will come in useful and can be built upon over time. Now, the list below is modest to say the least, but this year will be the yardstick against which I will compare my progress.

1. Build my vegetable garden. I am not sure that I will have the time or the money to plant anything, certainly not in time for the Summer (hey, I didn't say that the goals would be aggressive), but I would like to have something in the ground for the Winter crop.

2. Bake my own bread the entire year. So far I have baked bread five times and thoroughly enjoy it, albeit with very mixed results. A picture of the first loaf was posted on to the blog but the second was too salty and failed (I was experimenting by making it with apple juice and including raisins), and the results have been a bit mixed since, though last night's wholewheat bread was a triumph (even if I do say so myself).

3. Carry on with preserves and increase the range this year. Ove the last two years my wife and I have created apricot, plum, and raspberry jams and have been pretty successful at it. Not sure what this years flavour will be, but I want to increase the amount that we preserve and also the types of preserves.

4. Make my own sausages. I was given a meat grinder with sausage-making attachments a couple of years back and my first attempt at making them failed miserably (mainly because I was missing an important piece of the grinder). Since then I haven't gotten round to trying again, but this year I will.

5. Make my own beer. I tried this last year, but it didn't turn out too well. This year I shall attempt it again, and this time to try and actually get it right.

Like I said, there is not a lot to do there, but I want to make sure that I make progress in all of these matters, and maybe go above and beyond.

Bread

As part of this blog, I am going to examine all aspects of self-reliance. Now, obviously bread cannot be made without such ingredients as flour, which is a food stuff that I do not grow, but the making of bread is still an important step in self-reliance for me, so that I do not rely on mass-manufactured bread that contain all sorts of ingredients.

This bread was created following a recipe from a book that was recently bought for me for Christmas. The River Cottage Bread Handbook is a very easy to read, easy to follow recipe book that shows how to make all sorts of bread, e.g. ciabatta, flatbreads, etc. as well as biscuits and so on. I have only so far done the basic bread recipe (two pages long after approximately 30-40 pages of detailed instructions), but as can be seen above it appears to have been very successful and from now on I can start exploring how to create different types of breads, as well as variations on the basic recipe.

Frost Dates

Hmmm...I am very disappointed to learn that Victoria's frost dates mean that the growing season is less than it was over in Port Coquitlam. According to most of the sources I have seen Victoria's dates are April 19 for the last frost date and the first frost date is 5th November. Oh well, it is still a pretty damn decent length.

My New Backyard

This is a picture of my new backyard, or to be precise the back of my yard. the house is to one side of the lot and so there is a bit of garden to one side, but this used to be a driveway to a workshop. we are not going to use the workshop per se, so this driveway is open to be developed for a veg garden. I am currently thinking that I will install two 4ftx20ft beds eventually, but that is a lot of gravel to move so baby steps.

This is to the one side of the driveway. There is a shed and some kind of extension that I think can be used as a greenhouse, especially if I install another window. I may also add some kind of coldhouse at the bottom of the windows. This area gets Sun all year round, so it'll be a good area to develop for crops like tomatoes, I think.

This is to the side of the house. It will receive Sun during the Summer but I do not know when the Sun will be high enough to get over the roof of the house. I won't be developing this area this year, but will keep an eye on the situation over the year so that I can make a plan for next year.

New Year's Resolution

Since I last posted back in the Summer I have moved to a place called Victoria, which is on Vancouver Island in BC. Unfortunately, the area for my vegetable patch is a lot smaller than in my previous house but, on the plus side, the climate is warmer and therefore the growing season is slightly longer.

On a bigger issue, the area that I am considering for my vegetable patch needs a lot of work as it is currently covering in gravel. sounds like fun. I need to work out my plan and see what can be done and grown this year. Pictures coming soon.

Second round of peas

As predicted, I haven't been keeping up with the blog. Since my last post back in June the garden has been growing nicely and I have harvested quite a bit. Radishes and lettuce mostly, with a fair amount of zucchini.

We have harvested all of the peas located in the first raised garden, and today I sowed a second round in the same position. I am hoping that it doesn't exhaust the soil too much, but I did put in some more compost and some fertilizer (organic, naturally). I wonder what the outcome will be.

I will be putting a second round of lettuce and mesclun mix in soon, but I fear that the weather is still a little too warm, as it is in the high twenties.