Storing Kumara

It felt like the final pick in the garden this afternoon. The last of the beans, courgettes and blackberries. Then the pumpkins came in and the kumaras dug. There were some beauties amongst them but they seemed really hairy this year! Yonks ago I remember Dad experimenting with wrapping the perfect kumaras in newspaper to keep them for longer. Not many of mine escaped some sort of fork prong abuse so I was only able to try the method with the few survivors. Looking forward to seeing how it works.

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Drying and Storing Garlic

Just when I should have dug the garlic this year the rain came down and the mature cloves sat in wet, sticky mud. Two weeks later than they should have been dug, there came a fine few days to dig it. There was so much mud still sticking to them that I went against the rules and blasted all the mud off with the hose. To help it dry quickly I pegged each garlic onto the clothes line and let them wind dry for a few days until the rain came again. For a month they sat in the garage, spread out on chicken wire laid over the top of my clothes drier frames. After a month of hot, hot days they were all dry and today I plaited them ready for storage following this guy’s youtube clip. His was simple to follow so long as you got the first three garlics positioned right.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqqgLJx_1rQ

A few had rot spots that I rubbed off

Getting a trim and a quick tidy

If you start right it will be fine!

From the back

63 garlics plaited up

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Deseeding and Skinning Tomatoes

Last year I preserved my tomatoes by baking them but this year it is way too hot to have the oven on. I wanted a method I didn’t have to stay in attendance with and that wouldn’t heat up the house! The solution was to rough chop the tomatoes, green chillies and garlic then put them in a slow cooker in the garage for two hours. Another hour without the lid got rid of the excess tomato liquid. I don’t have a mouli so it was into a colander then mash the tomato pulp through the holes with a bowl. It was very fast and worked rather well, some of the seeds got through but it kept back nearly all the skins. From here it will be into snaplock bags and into the freezer.

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Blackcurrant Jam without topping and tailing

I love to grow berry fruit and eat it but the task of processing needs to be quick and painless! Kudos to those that top and tail their blackcurrants, your commitment to the task is beyond my level of dedication. For me, it is just as good to leave the odd little green stalk on and totally ignore the little dried flower end. The end product when you use a blender stick on your simmered fruit is a smooth jam with a dense texture and a strong, rich flavour.

Blackcurrant Jam

• Weigh then wash your blackcurrants and put in a deep saucepan
• Add a cup of water per kilo of fruit
• Gently simmer until the fruit is soft and cooked.
• Blend in the pot with your whizz stick
• Add the same blackcurrant weight of sugar and stir in until dissolved
• Now bring to a rapid boil and continue to boil for 20 mins, stirring often to stop it burning on the bottom.
• Take off the element and stir for another 20 mins
• Have your jam jars heated and your lids boiling in a small pot, fill your jars and cover with the hot lids.

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Power to the Raspberry Patch

Not well done but I’ve let the raspberry canes engulf the electric fence. In spite of a kill switch to disconnect the power, I keep getting cracks across the back or anywhere else when I daydream picking raspberries. Since they’ve upped the power unit supplying the farm this year it’s been a particularly shocking start to the season! At last Stan took pity and had a look at why the kill switch wasn’t working… took him two seconds to work out I had both ends connected to the power.

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Wilding Apple Trees

Over winter I dug up a few wilding apple trees that were growing at the side of the road, no doubt germinated from apple cores thrown out of car windows. Now that spring is here they are leafing up quite nicely, who knows what the apples will be like, but in the meantime I’m hoping they will help pollinate my peasgood nonsuch this year. The cuttings I took last year from that tree are flowering at the tips, not sure if that means there will be roots underneath but it looks hopeful. The greenhouse has been planted way earlier that I can outside too, it’s warm today but I’m sure we’ll get more frosts yet here in the South Waikato!

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Kid’s Crafts

At four and five our grand kids really enjoyed ‘doing’ these crafts with some help. The borax crystal names were ready by the next day and the miniature gardens were an instant success with their little solar light glowing at night and a swing suspended from the handle.

For the crystal names, help them form their name in cursive writing with coloured pipe cleaners, then suspend them in a borax solution: 3 tablespoons of borax to 1 cup of hot water and some food colouring. I added extra borax to make it work well but shouldn’t have, the solution over crystalised. The name was then suspended on a skewer with fishing line. Next day we hung them outside to drip dry.

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