Botticelli sunrise

Expecting to see Venus riding in on a clam shell at any moment...

occasional verse #7

Equinox has come and gone,

Days are shorter, nights grow long.

Apple pancakes, golden hours,

Pomegranates, dahlia flowers.

Tis winter in a little while,

But Autumn mornings make me smile.

occasional verse #5

Watering the orchids and what do I see?

New, green flower spikes,

One, two, three!

Wait a moment, here's one more...

Altogether, that makes four.

Best of all, way down low,

One orchid flower, smiling hello!

First day of Autumn

Popped down to the plot today to do some staking of late tomatoes and tomatillos. And got some nice surprises. Aphids have plagued summer broccoli, but luckily the calvelry flew in and the little buggers are being gobbled up by some good tempered ladybirds and their offspring. 

The tomatoes and eggplants are kicking on, tomatillos are flowering their heads off, the sunflower heads are ripening and there are all sorts of self seeding surprises popping up - cucumbers, more tomatoes and teensy, baby love-in-the-mist. Quinces are swelling on the tree and all in all, Autumn is looking promising.

strange beast

Lots of posts from out the back at the moment. It's all really happening out there. My true love has been building stuff at his work bench which he followed by a big clean up and all of a sudden it's a gorgeous place to be.

We had a little darts session out there with friends who are visiting from interstate. The orchids are throwing up new shoots, mouse melon is climbing all over the place (though sadly not fruiting), the lemon myrtle is flowering and so is this weird little cactus. The strange flower looks like something from a rockpool but smells like rotten meat. Fly pollinated, I'm guessing. Awesome.

Breakfast for two

I've never been lucky enough to grow a prolifically fruiting eggplant bush. The bloke a couple of plots over seems to have a knack for it. I shall never forget the gorgeous plant, more like a tree, he grew a couple of years ago, covered for months in glorious pale purple flowers and long skinny purple-black fruit. Awe inspiring.

I have no such luck. After an optimistic burst of growth early in the season, my eggplant plants tend to stay fairly stationary for most of the year, producing a scattering of flowers and if we're lucky, one, maybe two fruit. And it's tricky to know what to do with a single eggplant. 

Now hopefully, things will be different this season. It's been a slow start but the other day we got our first fruit. Just the one, there are others but they're a while off yet. And rather than buy some more eggplants and spoil the specialness of eating our homegrown fruit by mixing it in with the others; or wait for the others to ripen and risk having the first one spoil, I decided to find a recipe I could make with just one eggplant.

And I came back to a recipe I made sometime last year. Smoked eggplant salad. From Turkish Flavours by the intimitable, Sevtap Yuce. You should get her books, they're delish. The salad uses two eggplants, and serves four. So one eggplant - breakfast for two!

The recipe is simple: toast the eggplant on the stovetop until the skin is crispy and burnt and while it cools, chop a handful of parsley, a garlic clove, a tomato (I used a handful of yellow cherries from the garden, quartered) and a small green chilli. Peel the burnt skin from the eggplant and chop it too. Throw it all in together and season with salt, pepper, olive oil and lemon juice. Mix it all up. Serve it on crusty bread.

Everything but the garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper came from the garden. And it was perfect - I can't bloody wait for the next ripe eggplant.

January moments

Cornflowers in the kids' corner.

Self seeding tomatillos to share.

Garden art.

And backyard lotus, one year on.