Garden Post 4#

An update for those of you following on what's coming up in the garden and what's going down the gullet as a result.

The cherry tomatoes are at the lovely stage of giving us a small handful of cheery red and orange bliss bombs a day and they are being popped straight into my mouth, mostly, refreshing on these humid Sydney summer days. When not being dealt with thus, they are halved and tossed into salads of weed and brassica greens, or as today they may be added to a dhal to have as a simple satisfying dinner meal with either roti or sourdough depending on what's on hand, or they may end up on the next lot of pizzas I make, the last ones having been quite successful and there being some dough left over that I have frozen for the coming week.

The yellow passionfruit are giving us a windfall, literally as most of the fruit is quite high on the vine where it has travelled up to the top of the paperbark, so it really is what the wind knocks down that we are collecting. There's plenty of fruit and we get a dozen or so drop a day. They aren't very big, just right for a scoop or two drizzled onto some home made icecream, and drizzled into the cream mix as well. I am not being wildly successful with the ice cream maker I got, there is something fundamentally wrong in the transition from the mixing bowl to freezing that is making for more crystalline ice cream than is ideal, and adding juice like that from the passionfruit makes it more likely to move to the crystalline end. Not all of it, though, I am still pleased to be downing a spoonful or two for dessert or a light-night-just-back-from-the-theatre treat.

The various brassica are still delivering and I am looking forward to a salad or two, including taking some on a picnic bush walk I have planned for tomorrow. My dear friend Maria Kelly gave me some seeds for a green called perilla, which is also called shisho and beefsteak plant, which is of the mint family which she reckons isn't supposed to be planted till next summer, but which I planted anyway and which have decided to strike an independent stance and are pushing ahead with rapid growth so I should be enjoying their minty flavour within the week.

The karawilla/bittergourd continues to traverse the top of the fence and has now made it's way into the mandarin tree but is studiously ignoring my pleas for a fruiting but I continue to have hopes for it.

Purslane continues to pop up and I will be tossing some in the dhal tonight. The aubergine plants are putting out promising signs of flowers.

Charly across the road gave us some of his figs, which were small but juicy, and his persimmon tree is heavily fruiting and he has given me the go ahead to grab some whenever they get ripe. His chili bush is going gangbusters and I will be nipping across for a few for a meal I am cooking for a friend visiting from Hong Kong who likes her chili.

Best of all, the cherry guava in the house on the corner has well and truly recovered from being brutalised when they were renovating last year and is covered in fruit that is just at the right height for fence picking and my own guava, the bigger pink variety, is showing signs of a health crop too.

Oh, and I finally got around to making some hibiscus tea the other day. It's simple - grab a handful of red hibiscus flowers, remove the sepals (the green bit that's like a cup and out of which the petal comes), toss the flowers into a saucepan with water enough for the flowers to be floating easily, bring to the boil and keep boiling till the colour had drained out of the flowers and they are a bruised purple or deep cornflower blue in colour. Strain this and to a litre of the tea add two or three teaspoons of honey. Bottle it and store in the fridge for a delicious cooling alternative to fizzy sweetened drinks. You can if you like squeeze a little lime or lemon juice in when you serve it up.