Tomato tales

Once upon a time in Pretoria when I was a young bride (heh heh), my husband planted tomatoes. If I remember correctly they grew without fuss and we had so many tomatoes that they filled a wash basket - huge, gorgeous, luscious healthy tomatoes! Oxheart I think.
Since I have been gardening here in Cape Town, I have tried year after year to emulate that achievement, with plenty of disappointment and frustration. I have been told that it is very difficult to grow tomatoes out of doors these days and that one has more success in tunnels.

This year was the worst ever. The seedlings which I raised myself last September, were ready to go into the ground by early November. Again they were Oxheart. They grew vigorously and I had high hopes of achieving that dreamed of bumper crop. The plants looked fabulous and were full of flowers. They were fed and watered with devotion, using chicken manure from my own bantams. Then overnight it seemed, they became pale and covered in a fine reddish web that smothered them like some stealthy, creepy organism out of a horror movie. The deep green of the leaves was replaced by a ghostly white - I have NEVER seen such sickly tomatoes. The few fruits that were on there looked terrible. I was not just disappointed, I was deeply ashamed! The whole lot got yanked out and thrown in the dustbin. UGH!

In the first week of January I was at the nursery and thinking that it was far too late to plant tomatoes, I only looked at the seedlings out of curiosity. Oxheart and Rosa. Then I thought, bugger this I'll try again, and into the trolly they went. I bought Reliance organic compost and soon they were flourishing in their new beds.

Rosa seedlings after three weeks

No one could have been more determined than me to get it right this time. Their position was very pleasant, morning sun and slightly shaded in the afternoon. No water touched their leaves and they were fed and watered very regularly. My pride was at stake here after all.

I decided to be proactive regarding blight, red spider mite, fungal, viral,or any other horror disease. I sprayed them once or twice with milk against fungal disease. My main weapon was very experimental, namely Echinacea. Being a phytotherapist it made sense to me that Echinacea might have a preventative effect on the plants similar to humans. So I mixed 25 ml Echinacea tincture in 500ml water and sprayed them every week. They grew so fast and vigorously that I could hardly believe my eyes. It was as if the Echinacea was a tonic. However, I didn't do a control batch to see whether they would have  thrived anyway - because of the soil, compost or feeding with chicken manure. So next year I'll have to do a proper experiment.

Now it is almost 2 months to the day that I planted the seedlings. The Oxheart got some leaf curl disease and I pulled them all out. I don't think I'll try them again. Rosa did develop blight on the lower leaves, but I cut those leaves off and continue to spray the growing tips every week. This week I increased the amount of Echinacea to 30ml per 500ml water. One thing I can say with certainty, the Echinacea didn't harm the plants in any way.

Rosa after two months.

The Echinacea that I have is very strong 1:4 compared to the 1:10 that you can buy commercially. I think it helped prolong the health of the leaves, without entirely preventing blight. Most of the tomatoes look very healthy, but here and there, on otherwise very healthy bushes, there is the odd tomato with blossom end rot. The rest of the tomatoes on the same bush are fine. Very strange.

Hopefully I'll be able to post a picture of the harvest! Hold thumbs for me!!!





Decadent and VERY easy ice cream.

To complement the rhubarb compote, nothing beats a creamy, smooth ice cream. The one I make takes a few minutes, and is dead easy. It is a little pricy, but worth every cent.

You need:
250ml fresh cream
250g mascarpone
1/4 cup olive oil (optional)
100g organic sugar
2 tablespoons natural vanilla

METHOD: Whisk together the mascarpone, sugar, olive oil and vanilla at high speed. When well mixed, pour the fresh cream in a thin stream into the mix while whisking at a moderately fast speed until nice and thick.

I make my own vanilla extract using alcohol. I fill a jar with vanilla pods and cover with 60% alcohol. I leave this in a cool dark place for months and pour off the amount of vanilla extract I need, as I need it. The alcohol in the vanilla extract is great for preventing the ice cream from crystalising.

Once the ice cream mix is lovely and thick, pour it into a container for freezing. Lick the whisk , bowl and spatula very clean! You can taste the olive oil in this ice cream, and I think it's very nice. But you can leave it out if the idea doesn't appeal.

Final result ready for the freezer!

Rhubarb: From garden to compote

Despite the fact that the spot where my rhubarb lives is rather dry I had some very nice stalks this year and wrote on my "to do" list: make rhubarb compote! If you leave it too late, the rhubarb can get a bit woody. So I harvested it and got cracking to make a delicious compote.

Almost 900g! But by the time I peeled it (lightly) I reckon about 850g. The right proportion of rhubarb to sugar is 1 part sugar to three parts Rhubarb, so I added 200g of organic sugar and two tablespoons of wonderful natural fynbos honey. There is no need to add any water. As it is gently heated, the rhubarb sweats juice which dissolves the sugar and the honey helps to provide liquid too. I prefer to simmer gently, but the phone rang and when I came back into the kitchen the compote was bubbling furiously, luckily not burned!! I added two tablespoons of chopped crystallised ginger to the compote, which gives a nice surprise here and there when you eat it, without giving the compote an overpowering ginger flavour. One can add vanilla or orange zest, it all depends what you are in the mood for!!!

Final result!

Garden vistas

On Sunday I browsed through the book, "1000 Garden Ideas" by Stafford Cliff, which I bought at the Exclusive Book Sale the day before. The book is very inspiring and I just love being transported into beautiful gardens. It also made me see my own garden in a different light, so I went around with my camera and took some pictures. Here they are:

For reflection

This is an area I developed for reflection and quiet. The pond provides the sound of running water. It is a lovely shady place to sit with a cup of tea.

A formal design

The crunch of gravel past the Helichrysum hedge I am trying to cultivate, lends texture to this spot. From above on the deck one can see the shape of the bed filled with miniature Agapanthus and Tulbachia (Wild garlic) A lovely Thuja graces the side of the gate on the right.

Another view

The garden is broken up by the position of the house on the plot, situated very centrally. This allows for the concept of many smaller gardens all around the house. The herb garden is at the back leading to the enclosed vegetable garden.

The herb garden

Enclosing the vegetable garden was the best thing I did last year. It allows for a space protected from the chickens and dogs, as well as sheltering the vegetables from the very harsh rays of the sun.
From the herb garden and down a few steps is a patio area under a fig tree, and further down is my bee garden with the Echinacea bed and a few olive trees where I also try to grow some vegetables and herbs.

The bee garden and Echinacea bed

So that's a little tour minus the front garden which is under reconstruction, so needs to get established before being photographed. All in all the garden is not that big, about 1000 sq m, but by European standards quite large I suppose.

Thank you for taking a stroll in my garden. I hope you enjoyed it!

It's a new year......

It's interesting how the new year brings new issues and events, that can either challenge you or make you wonder what else is lurking to make the year horrible? In the garden, my tomatoes which started off so well last year in October, by December I had pulled them all out. They had the most dreadful attack of red spider mite and blight combined, that I have ever seen. I've been reading up on plant diseases in The Garden Guardian's guide to environmentally responsible garden care, by Johan Gerber and luckily there is a good section of photographs showing what the various plant diseases look like. It's a bit like the medical textbooks which show the absolute worst cases of skin diseases you could imagine. It's extremely useful, because it doesn't help to treat a plant that has a fungal disease with a remedy for a bacterial disease. This book also shows the insect pests, but fortunately these are not really an issue for me, because the bantam hens have eradicated most pests by eating their larvae and eggs which are often in the soil. I manage to keep pests off broccoli by growing them under special netting.
I recently discovered that one can treat plants which have fungal diseases with milk. One part organic milk to 10 parts water, sprayed on all parts of the plant, will prevent disease like powdery mildew. I also discovered that bicarbonate of soda is great for preventing fungal diseases. You use two teaspoons of bicarb in a litre of water with a drop of detergent and a drop of vegetable oil. You need to spray preventatively, so I'm spraying once a week with one or other mixture. I am also experimenting with Echinacea spray against bacterial blight. I've been spraying once a week with a mixture of  Echinacea tincture and water. Time will tell if this is going to work, because blight seems to attack the plant as it gets older. After the loss of the first lot of tomato plants, I decided to plant a new batch of seedlings, and with all the fussing over them, and lots of compost, they are looking very healthy so far!! Fingers crossed.

I was very sad to lose one of my two old hens about a week ago. She appeared to have had a stroke and rapidly declined, dying within a day. I kept her comfortable giving her sips of water and placed her in a safe spot away from the other chooks. She was about ten years old and I had a very heavy heart for at least two days after she had gone. Now one of the young lot is sitting on five fertile eggs from my neighbour up the road. The other two bantams are sitting on unfertile eggs, together in a basket in the garden hut. I'm tempted to share the eggs between the three hens, so that they all get a chance at motherhood.

Sitting in vain, bless them. Should I give them two of the fertile eggs?

A fun herb identification task

Here's a fun thing for December. How many herbs can you identify in this bunch? The winner will have his or her name tweeted. :)

What’s On My Food? :: Spread the Word

What’s On My Food? :: Spread the Word