A change of direction

For anyone who has been hanging on all this time wondering what the hell happened at Greatrakes over summer, you’ve probably realised by now that I’ve decided to take the blog in a different direction, and rather than providing monthly updates, from now on I’ll be adding content whenever I feel the urge to do so – which may be several times a month, or maybe not for a few months at a time. So to tie up some loose ends, let’s just say that summer here was very late in arriving (in Axedale we only had one day in November that just managed to sneak into the 30s), however once it had finally done so, it came with a vengeance. For the last three months we have been baked dry with searing heat and very little rain – on the rare occasion that storms did form up in Central Victoria, we watched despairingly as they slid away to the east and west of us. Meanwhile to our north, in Queensland and across the top end of Australia, there have been record rains and devastating floods as the third year of La Nina drew to a close. For a year that had been as wet as it was though, here in Axedale we ended up watching our paddocks turn to dust, and by late February we were forced to bring in a couple of rolls of hay to supplement the dwindling supply of grass for the sheep and alpaca to eat. Thankfully we received a healthy drop of rain at the start of March, and a couple of days of good follow-up rain towards the end of the month – not enough to refill the tanks yet, but enough to get some green back into the fields.

Luckily here at Greatrakes we have an excellent bore that produces water that’s technically drinkable – as the rainwater tank behind the garage that I use for my vegetables started to get lower, I invested in some new hoses and hooked up a watering system to the bore for us to get through – and what a success that was, with bumper crops of beetroot, garlic, spring onions, mustard, beans, strawberries, basil, eggplants, sweet corn, cucumbers, zucchinis and tomatoes. For the first time in twenty years we’ve had a garden that we’ve been able to utilise to grow substantial amounts of produce – in fact this year we’ve hardly had to buy any vegetables, apart from those that we didn’t grow enough of last year (such as garlic, onions and potatoes), or those that we’re still waiting to finish cropping (such as pumpkins, sweet potatoes and melons).

We’ve picked at least 15 kilos of tomatoes alone this season – with many going towards making passata, sauces and confit, as well as being given away to friends and family. I’d have to say, despite my love of several of the sauces I’ve made, including some extra tangy and smoky BBQ sauce, it’s hard to go past the confit cherry tomatoes, either in a pasta dish or piled into a hot toasty – absolutely delicious little bombs of explosive, sweet flavour that are truly exquisite.

Over 10kg of potatoes came from just two raised beds, but unfortunately that still wasn’t enough to tide us over, so next season we’ll be increasing our crops exponentially. This was the first time that I’d tried growing potatoes using the layering method, where you let the plants poke their heads out of the ground for a bit before covering them with another layer manure and straw – repeated several times throughout the growing season, it saw us gather more than seven kilos out of each of two raised beds. Unfortunately, before I had hooked up the bore I had been using the rainwater tank and had tried to go sparingly as the dry summer wore on, sacrificing some of the watering that should have been going to produce big spuds – an error that resulted in about 4kg of the total 15kg being on the small side. Nonetheless, these were perfect for using in potato salads, or roasting tom make our own version of ‘pommes noisettes’.

I’ve never been a big fan of eggplant, but this year with all of the summer heat, our crops have been huge, and Vanessa has tried her hand at a couple of variations that have made me rethink this whole ‘not liking eggplant’ deal. In fact, I’d have to say that the roast leg of lamb (from our own paddock) that she recently cooked and accompanied with a smoky eggplant sauce using eggplants from our garden, washed down with our own wine that we produced this year at Shiraz Republic, would have to have been one of my all-time favourite meals!

I grew a small patch of garlic last winter from on bulb that we’d bought from the supermarket that had started to sprout – it produced enough bulbs to get us through the summer and make a valuable contribution to our sauces and pickling mixes, but sadly we’ve now had to resort to buying it again, so this year I’ve purchased a stack of bulbs of four different varieties, and we should be looking at enough garlic for us to be self sufficient for the next twelve months.

As far as mustard goes, I planted a small patch as a cover crop in one quarter of a raised bed, after I had harvested a crop of cabbages earlier in the season. Despite massive predation by cabbage white butterflies (which we would counter by spending about an hour a day picking off the caterpillars and feeding them to the birds), they produced a bumper crop of flowers, followed by so many seed pods that I gave up picking them all after filling three large paper bags. This turned out to be a big mistake, as the remaining seeds dropped everywhere, and I reckon I’ll be pulling mustard seedlings out from around my crops for many years to come. Still, with each paper bag full of pods producing enough seed to make a full bottle of the most delicious wholegrain mustard, we won’t be needing to buy more of that any time soon, so that has to count as a win, right?

When it comes to vegetables, I really love changing people’s minds about beetroot – it always amazes me when people say they don’t like beetroot because the only time they’ve ever experienced before is the soggy sliced stuff you get from a can. This summer we have rotated crops of beetroot throughout the season, growing several different varieties including the regular red beets, as well as golden varieties and even a striped variety that turns white when pickled! We’ve pickled most of the beetroot, both as slices and whole baby beets, but we’ve also roasted some to produce the most amazing flavours imaginable.

Meanwhile Vanessa has devoted much of her free time this summer to establishing a Dahlia garden. It’s been a tough year, but finally the hard work and hours of hand watering with a hose attached to the bore has paid off, and the house is currently filled with stunning blooms of all shapes and sizes. She’s also been paying close attention to the watering and dead-heading of the many hanging baskets that we have hung along the verandas at the front and back of the house – the pink and purple petunias along the front make a striking display as you approach the house, while out the back the cheerful mass displays of Calibrachoa and Bacopa perfectly compliment the gorgeous views out to the west.

Apart from the successes in the garden, and my continued slow recovery from Legionnaire’s Disease, the other thing of great note this summer has been the addition to our family of another German Shorthair pup – Mathilda, a gorgeous girl with a dark brown coat and a little patch of white hair on her chest – her father was a very tall dog and the speed at which her lanky legs are growing makes it look like she could be the same. After a few days of sorting out their pecking order and the ownership of various toys, Heide has really bonded with her new little sister, and the two have become great playmates (or partners in crime as the case may be). Reinhardt is far less enthusiastic about the young one’s eagerness to play all the time, but when things have eventually quietened down of an evening you’ll usually find the two of them curled up together on the same bed.

As far as work around the house, there hasn’t been a lot that we’ve been able to accomplish due to the heat. We did manage to build a new glasshouse though, thanks to an insurance pay-out after our last one was destroyed in a freak wily-willie (otherwise known as a dust devil). We were both working in our offices one afternoon when we suddenly heard what sounded like a truck coming up the driveway. With the searing heat and the natural amphitheatre that our house sits in, it’s not uncommon of an afternoon to see multiple wily-willies dancing across the paddocks, and they’re usually fairly small and harmless, but on this occasion it ran along the length of the house, tearing the cover off the spa and picking up a half full recycling bin from against the back of the house and depositing it several metres away on top of a hedge. We both ran out to watch this tornado-like dust devil roar its way across our side paddock before turning and running back along the edge of the Mount Sugarloaf Nature Reserve across the road from us. As it blew itself out we walked around the back of the house to survey the damage and discovered our glasshouse had been lifted up and twisted in two like piece of paper.

To be honest, we weren’t holding out much hope of getting anything back from our insurer – we were already pretty much assured that we weren’t covered for all the damage to our fencing from the October floods, so the thought of trying to convince them that we’d been hit by a freak windstorm that came and went within a minute, seemed like an uphill task. Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained right? So we contacted ING and they sent out an assessor, who then came back to us with an offer for a cash settlement that would enable us to upgrade to a larger, sturdier model, made right here in Victoria by Sproutwell Greenhouses – provided of course we were prepared to build it ourselves.

Let me say, that as much as I am in love with the quality of the greenhouse, the instructions that came with the greenhouse (plus the fact that there were about 4 different versions of the instructions provided to us, each contradicting the previous), was almost enough to question whether it was all worth it. I’m sure I’ll mellow over time, as the new greenhouse really is a massive step up from the previous one, but right now I’d be hard pressed wanting to set up another one any time soon.

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