Winter fruits

This winter is the first time our fruit salad has avoided the onslaught of fruit flies.

The fruit seems to be ripening nicely.

We had the opportunity to try the first peach. Yummmm

Long time coming

I must admit, I'm terrible at keeping up to date on the blog. With all the busy things that go on in life it seems to be the bottom of the list. Never mind- there is never a better time than now to say hi! "hi".

Now that we have been introduced again, let me tell you a little about what's been going on. On the personal front, we are selling our lovely house in Brighton for what will hopefully be a tree change. Mad cleaning, packing and preparing for the daunting open house events.

On the business front, we are getting ready for a very busy couple of weeks. This Saturday we will be at the Billy Cart markets in SandgAte. Next weekend we are at the lovely 5th Ace markets in SandgAte and the Racecourse rd festival. Then on the 22nd to the 24th June we will be at the Pregnancy Expo in Brisbane.

Busy busy times ahead!

Making a recycled ribbon bow for presents

With left over ribbon from party presents make this cute present topper.

Simply cut the ribbon into equal ish lengths. Ties them all together in the middle of the ribbon. Curl the ribbon strand by strand by pulling the ribbon over the blade of a pair of scissors. Be care to pull it the way it is currently curling. Don't cut yourself. Split the ribbons in half and voila. Staple to a small piece of cardboard. Put some double sided tape on the back and you are ready to pretty up a present.

Plastic Facts

This week we started our first sustainability challenge. It seems like an easy one; No new plastic bags. I say no new bags because if you currently have plastic bags, throwing them away only creates more waste. Did you know we are the second highest waste producing country in the world? Reusing them is much more energy efficient than recycling them!

http://tribalenergies.com.au/blog/what-do-plastic-bags-really-do

We know plastic bags are bad. There has been a lot of media, campaigning and discouraging of plastic bag usage. Why? Here are some of the nasty little facts.....

1.8.7 plastic checkout bags contain enough embodied petroleum energy to drive a car 1 kilometre.
2. It is estimated world wide that 1 trillion bags are used and discarded every year.
3.Australians use 3.92 billion plastic bags a year, that's over 10 million new bags being used every day.
4.Australians dump 7,150 recyclable plastic bags into landfills every minute or 429,000 bags every hour. 50 million per year!
5.If 50 million plastic bags were made into a single plastic sheet, it would be big enough to cover the Melbourne CBD.

Information taken from http://www.cleanup.org.au/au/Campaigns/plastic-bag-facts.html

I did my weekly grocery shop today with 3month old in tow. I went armed with my Eco bags but I had made a poor miscalculation. Vege bags! I normally try and put larger veges on their own and watch the checkout assistants cast a disapproving eye at the little particles of vegetable that now litter their conveyor belt. Today however, I needed to buy some products that don't lend themselves to naked conveyor belt surfing. The only alternative was plastic bags. I know I have seen other alternatives and I will attempt to find them and link to them later in the week. Please feel free to comment with any you know of underneath.

So day 2 I must say has been a fail on my part.
;(

Home Made Tomato Paste

I am lucky enough to be part of a wonderful family who were always crafty and into making things. Lucky for me I married a chef and that craftiness has now extended into the kitchen as we often have lots of left over veges or excess from our little sustainable vege garden.

This time though, it was gifts from two other family members that resulted in 4kg of tomatoes! I like tomatoes but not enough to eat 4kg in time. We always save all our glass jars for such an occasion and made homemade tomato paste. We have made other variations including tomato ketchup, a nice tomato pasta sauce but yesterday was just about a base tomato paste recipe.

We usually add garlic and onion when we are cooking with tomato paste so we added it to the tomato paste recipe but you could leave it out if you wanted. To 4kg of tomatoes I added 4 finely diced pickling brown onions( the small ones or you could add 2 larger ones if you like) and 1/3 bulb of garlic which I crushed.

Put the onion and garlic in a pot and sweat on a low heat. This takes the bite out of the onion and garlic and leaves a nice flavour. Be careful not to brown or burn the onion or garlic.

Add the 4kg of tomatoes which I cut into quarters. They were Roma tomatoes so I didn't chop them too small.

Add 2 cups of water and bring to the boil.

Let it simmer, making sure you stir it regularly so it doesn't burn on the bottom, until the water and tomatoes have cooked down into a nice consistency. This may take a few hours.

You could add herbs or salt and pepper but I prefer to add these later when cooking.

Prepare your jars while you are waiting for it to boil down.
I usually scrub mine to make sure all the food is gone, put them through the dishwasher and then put them in a pot of boiling water.

Once you are happy with the consistency you need to blend your tomato paste. We have a stick blender and blended it while it was hot. Mainly because I don't like having to wait and it is easier to jar later, but you can wait for it to cool down and blend it in a bench blender.

If you have a hot mixture, you can put the hot mix straight into the jars (obviously tipping out any excess water), put the lid on and then turn them upside down for 10minutes. When ten minutes is up, turn them right way up again and they vacuum seal themselves!

If you elected for cold mixture, when you have added it to the jars you need to put the jars back into the pot with the water and heat them up until the vacuum seal button in the top doesn't pop back up again when you push on it.

If you are like me and burn yourself accidentally when you are doing anything involving hot things, take extra care once you have blended the hot mix, use a funnel to get it into the jars and handle the jars with tongs. It doesn't hurt to have a bowl of cold water, ice pack or other responsible adult around either!

Our mix filled 4 jam size jars. Make sure you label the jars with the date you made it so you know how old it is in the cupboard. You can make pretty labels and put some check fabric and string around the top and they may great Christmas Presents.

It's hard to imagine that it has been almost a month since the last blog. Time is certainly flying by at the moment. With just under 4 weeks to go before the arrival of the second sprout our little Nan's Garden family, things are starting to get a little hectic. That being said it is certainly time to do some planting and not neglect the garden so we have lots of yummy things to eat. At the moment we have been munching on Bok Choy, broccoli and the yummiest fresh asparagus.

What to plant in the Cool and Temperate Areas:

Seedlings

• brussel sprouts
  
• Chinese cabbage
  
• Cauliflower
  
• leek
  
• globe artichoke
  
• cabbage
  
• capsicum
  
• okra
  

Seeds

• climbing beans
• dwarf beans
• french beans
  
• beetroot
• carrot
• celery
• cucumber
• eggplant
• lettuce
• marrow
• melon
• parsnip
• pea
• pumpkin
• radish
• silverbeet
  
• spinach
• sweetcorn
• tomato
  
• zucchini

In the Subtropical and Tropical Zones
Seedlings

• broccoli
• Chinese cabbage
• tomato
  
• cabbage
• capsicum
• okra
  
• silverbeet

Seeds

• climbing beans
• french beans
• broad beans
  
• beetroot
• carrot
• cucumber
• eggplant
• lettuce
• marrow
• melon
• okra
• pumpkin
• radish
• sweetcorn
• zucchini

This is the time that all your veges love a hit of liquid fertiliser once a fortnight. We use our worm juice as a liquid fertiliser but you can get commercially available things like Seasol.

Happy Planting!

Spring has sprung

Don't forget to check out our competition below. You still have until Monday morning to enter. Special clues this weekend!

Time for a Green Thumb Update though.

What to plant in the Cool and Temperate Areas:

Seedlings

• brussel sprouts
• Chinese cabbage
• onion
• globe artichoke
• cabbage
• capsicum
• okra
• silverbeet
• tomato

Seeds

• climbing beans
• dwarf beans
• beetroot
• carrot
• celery
• cucumber
• eggplant
• lettuce
• marrow
• melon
• parsnip
• pea
• pumpkin
• radish
• spinach
• sweetcorn
• zucchini

In the Subtropical and Tropical Zones
Seedlings

• broccoli
• Chinese cabbage
• onion
• spinach
  
• cabbage
• capsicum
• silverbeet
• tomato

Seeds

• climbing beans
• french beans
• broad beans
  
• beetroot
• carrot
• cucumber
• eggplant
• lettuce
• marrow
• melon
• okra
• seed potatoes
  
• pumpkin
• radish
• sweetcorn
• zucchini

Don't forget all those wonderful Spring flowers that help with the butterflies and bees!