Julie's Stuff

We are coming to the end of the summer veggie-growing season sadly. The big tomatoes are gone, making way for broccoli and cauliflower:

and the cherry tomatoes will be gone soon, making way for beans. The only things still going strong are the capsicums, which have busted out of their cage:

(note to selves, make cage much taller next time!), and the corn (another week to go until the next planting is ready to eat), and the last planting of lettuce.

We, unfortunately, after 2.5 months or so of eating all home-grown salads, can’t eat the store bought stuff any more. Cucumbers are just bearable, lettuce is expensive and is relegated to a filler, but tomatoes are completely inedible. When did they become rubbery?? Fortunately we’ve got a rural area (Dural/Galston) not too far away and there’s a seller on the side of the road who is still selling properly ripe tomatoes. When that source runs out, were screwed. We’ll switch to veggies until ours come online, but if we get like this about store bought broccoli we’re going to be in serious trouble over winter because there’s no way we can produce enough for our winter veggie requirements. I’m still not convinced that this veggie growing thing is a good idea if it’s going to make us this fussy!

There was much discussion in the blogosphere many months ago from people who were planting veggie gardens and were going to keep track of how much money they were saving thanks to their garden. I chose not to keep a record of the “savings”, because we were pretty sure that we wouldn’t make much money if anything. We had thought that by planting some large tomatoes for making sauce we’d be able to recoup most of our expenses (bought tomato sauce isn’t cheap), but based on last night’s experience this doesn’t look like a great proposition. Last night, after ordering a food mill for tomato processing and some mason jars for long-term storage, we turned these:

Into these:

That’s about 6-ish kilos of tomatoes into 11 (and a bit) 500mL jars of sauce. A dozen jars cost us $48 including shipping, so $4 a jar. A jar of tomato sauce costs us about $5.50. So, excluding the plants, mulch, cow manure, compost and blood and bone, we made a profit of $1.50 a jar, or $16.50. Of course the jars will be reusable for many years with only the lids needing to be repurchased, so I could amortise the cost over, say, 5 years. But still, even if you take out the cost of the jars entirely, our total saving by making sauce instead of buying it is $60.50. Yeah. A bag of mulch costs about $15, and we use about 2.5 bags over the tomatoes alone and that’s not counting all the other stuff we put into the beds in spring.

Of course our weekly veggie bill has dropped from about $60/week to more like $15 (which is mostly fruit and potatoes), and that will last for about 2.5 months, but at best we think we break even. It’s a good thing we’re not in it for the money!

So the Sydney Royal Easter Show is coming up soon and I have been contemplating entering. I’ve entered twice before, once documented here and once undocumented until now. Going through the blog for the past year I’ve realised that the last time you saw my entry into last year’s show it was incomplete. Well, I finished it in time to go to the show, and had some success:

It’s tricky to see, but that’s my golden silk shawl with a “Highly Commended” ribbon, which is pretty much the equivalent of fourth. Buoyed by my success (well, ribbon = success in my book!), I thought about entering this year. I thought that if the Year of Lace club sent something that would fit into one of the classes I’d enter that. Now, the show has rather odd categories for lace. It must be made of either an animal fibre (excluding silk), or a plant fibre (including silk). So all those lovely wool/silk blends don’t fit in anywhere. And what did I get in the lace club? Yep, you got it, lots of lovely blends! Until the last shipment I was getting worried. This time, however, there was a little addition to the usual pattern + wool. Beads!

That puts it into an entirely different category – beaded knitting. No archaic yarn requirements. It seems that the only requirement is, well, beads. So, off to the Show I go again. Wish me luck!

And as an added amusement, the yarn’s colour name is “Purple Martin”. For those who don’t know, the Boy’s favourite colour is purple. And his first name is Martin. It’s destined, obviously.

Because then I might have caught this little problem before I’d knitted so much:

Can you tell? Yes, the reds in the middle of the second lot of round motifs are lighter than the reds in the first one. There are three very slightly different reds in this pattern, and I’d managed to choose the wrong two. Sigh. Luckily the first one is right, so I only had to rip back half of it…. After a good solid day’s knitting I’m back to where I was though:

Looking better!

And in the spirit of taking photos of works in progress:

If you notice any miss-crossed cables, please don’t tell me!

Sometimes lettuce doesn’t quite work the way it’s supposed to either…

My last couple of posts have made it look like growing vegetables is easy. I promise you that it’s not without its problems. The corn from last night looked like this:

The other half of the cob was fine, so we think some kind of grub got in there pretty early on. Now to figure out what kind of grub it was and spray. We will happily spray if it means getting more corn!

And the tomatos that are producing wonderfully now had a bit of a shaky start:

That would be black bum, otherwise known as Blossom-end Rot. Caused by not enough watering usually, but in this case it was thanks to a couple of 40C days just as the first fruit was setting. Nothing we could have done about it unfortunately, but everything seems to be going along OK now.

The peas and beans are a bit crispy too thanks to the heat. The Boy is talking about making a very large shade sail for next year to try and prevent some of this. We shall see.

We emerge from a food-induced stupor (mostly thanks to my mother for the fabulous Christmas lunch) to wish everyone Merry Christmas somewhat late. First up, the traditional tree and year bauble photos:

This year’s year bauble was hand-made (no, not by me – we paid someone) because we couldn’t find any of the same style as the ones we already had. The tree also got a lovely Hawaiian bauble as a present from Michael:

And of course it wouldn’t be Christmas if the Boy hadn’t got new Christmas socks. I introduce Robbie Socks:

Yarn – Lorna’s Laces. Mostly left over from previous Christmas socks.
Pattern(s) – Standard Boy-sock numbers. Holly pattern shamelessly ripped off from a random Christmas stocking. Robbie (brown nose) and Rudolph (red nose, obviously) faces were duplicate-stitched on with the chart taken from here. Snowflake lace pattern on the top of the foot (essential for ventilation in the middle of summer) from here.

I hope everyone had a great holiday. I’m looking forward to another two weeks off work and a lot of cricket to watch. There might even be some knitting!

The garden has really hit full stride now. Far from the one or two cherry tomatoes of a few weeks ago, we can now proudly eat a large salad straight from the garden.

Including a couple of peas too. We barely grow enough to make it on to our plates, let alone cook, so we eat them raw as part of the salad.

But this week is special. It’s not just salad any more:

There is nothing better than corn picked, put straight onto the barbecue and eaten about 15 minutes later, just warmed through. Yum. We eat well.

Homegrown salad:

The tomatos are only just starting to ripen (there were two for last night), and the capsicum was probably picked a bit early, but we don’t care! Mmmm … yum ….

This was part of the conversation I had with the Boy last night in the ultimate Macgyver rescue. So, let me back up a little. My mother and I are singing Messiah this year and last night was a rehearsal at the Opera House. To avoid having to deal with Christmas taxis, I’ve taken to driving in and parking at the Opera House. So last night I set off, noting that I’d need to get some petrol on the way home. Turns out the petrol gauge was a little optimistic and I ran out somewhat sooner than I’d imagined. On the approach to the Harbour Bridge in fact. In peak hour. Looking on the bright side, getting towed across the bridge is a good way of avoiding the traffic….

The towies left Inkey (our car) in a spot I could leave it for a couple of hours and I got to the Opera House as fast as I good – only 20 minutes late and I only missed half of the warm up. Not too bad. Then came the fun part – getting petrol back into the car. Fortunately I have a wonderful mother who drove me to the nearest petrol station where I bought a couple of petrol cans and some petrol and then back to the car. Whereupon I discovered a problem. Unleaded cars have a little spring-loaded cap just inside the filler thingy (that’d be the technical term) that didn’t open when I attempted to pour petrol in from the can. So a phone call the the Boy was in order.

I first thought that he could come get me in a taxi with a funnel or something, but that’d take a while and he’d have to buy a funnel on the way. So we had a conversation that went something like this:

The Boy: Do you have a pencil in the car?
Me: Er, yes (spotting a nice simple wooden pencil from our favourite winery that we’d left in the car because we’re slobs)
The Boy: Do you have your knitting?
(Me thinking – huh? This is no time for knitting!)
Me: Uh, yes (after scrambling around thinking I’d taken it out of my bag before I went to singing)
The Boy: Take wool, wrap it around the pencil. Take the other end of the wool, wrap it around the fuel flap or something. Put pencil in the petrol filler thingy to prop open the flap. Pour petrol in.
(Me thinking how on earth did it come to this!)
Me: OK, here goes.
Me: Success! We have petrol.

We also had the forethought (on prompting from the Boy) to take a photo of the event. Here it is for your amusement:

So, my lessons for the day:

1. Always carry a pencil and your knitting.
2. Holden fuel gauges are incredibly optimistic.
3. It’s my job to buy petrol!