Friday, July 25, 2008

July 21

Before everything else, new garden times for this semester are:

Mondays 10-12pm and Thursdays 1-3pm!

Here's some pictures from this week. It features our very own Amy Cheng and our growing green veggies. I've decided to put just one picture to do with our turnips for this week...

Bitter but big chinese cabbages,
and we speculate Amy's experiment worked, the shaded one is sweeter.

Partners for life, but to be separated and consumed soon

bok-choys

more pea flowers (we've found a couple of pods already!)

Amy carousing the parsnips to life

Amy watering the herb spiral with some rainwater collected over the week!

transplanting some spinach seedlings

Amy harvesting a bok-choy before the rabbits finish the job for us (note the bites)

Amy picking out some leaves from our unknown oriental veggie:
any clue on what it is, anyone?

Amy gets to roast one tonight

Hope to hear from you all soon.

We've got heaps of things planned for this semester for the garden that's sure to breathe new life and raise the excitement bar for all of you keen organic aficionados out there! Will tell you all about it soon.

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Permaculture Workshop One Slides

Amelie Barry has been nice enough to put up her slides for last Saturday's permaculture workshop on youtube for everyone to view!



Cheers!

Friday, July 11, 2008

July 9 & 10

Rain could not get us away from doing little bits of garden work this week. Similar to last week, we focussed on clearing the southern part of the garden, while also layering up the potato bins with another tire of dirt, and also twining the peas.

Snow pea flower

an example of a broccolli flowering from our container garden

Amy's experiment:
testing if limiting photosynthesis for a chinese cabbage will sweeten it

southern area of the garden A (social area?)

southern area of the garden B (shed)

false alarm:
what i initially thought was a threatened indonesian migratory bird turned out to be "just" a common swamp hen helping us with the weeding (thanks liz for saving me the embarassment)


Hamish choosing which sucker to eliminate (and put in the "to be re-used" pile, of course)

growth in our potato bins prior to the second layering

Finlay rolling the tire up to layer the potatoes, (with mum and brothers in the background)

At 5 years old,
the boy has muscles close to that of what you'd expect from a typical 22 year old student-gardener from Manila

Hamish picking his lucky turnip

Finlay, 11; turnip, 2 months (no genies this time)

See you all next week!

Saturday, July 5, 2008

July 2 & 3

Thanks to everyone who came to the SLC End of Sem BBQ and Movie Night last week. It was a real success. Stay tuned for future movie nights!

The SLC End of Semester BBQ and Movie Night
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This week, we began clearing the southern area of the bed in preparation for the assembly of the shed and the eventual establishment of a social area. Also, a few important questions were raised as to why the brocollis came out really...small, this as opposed to our successfully enormous bok-choys....It has been suggested that there might be too much Nitrogen in the hotrot soil we're using...other theories, any one?

Also "test-ate" a turnip from the garden, and i can safely say i've never tasted turnip as tasty and fantastic.

Thanks to Leanne, Jo and their kids for coming and helping out with the weeding and clearing! Also, congratulations to Amy for officially becoming the garden's support worker for it's LEAD program! Hooray!

the biggest they grew to despite very leafy growth

at a small size, most of the brocollis were already on the verge of flowering like this

so we harvested and mulched the brocollis

the lucky turnip

the peas are clinging and flowering

the herb spiral, parsley looking in good shape thanks to recent rains

newly acquired worm farm

"i eat your trash"

Rorie

Leanne

solemnly contemplating on weeding the perrywinkle invasives

See you all next week!

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!The SLC Recipe Corner!

Recipe #4 (#3 was the laksa in the newspaper article...)

Fennel, Spinach & Parmesan Salad (submitted by Amy Cheng)



2 baby fennel bulbs

1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil

¼ cup pine nuts

1 clove garlic, crushed

¼ cup lemon juice

100g baby spinach leaves

100g parmesan cheese

Salt and pepper to taste

Finely slice fennel and place in a large bowl and set aside. Heat oil in a small frying pan over medium heat until hot. Add pine nuts and cook stirring often until golden. Remove from heat and add garlic and lemon juice. Drizzle hot pine nut mixture over fennel and toss to combine. Wait until cooled and toss spinach and thinly sliced parmesan through fennel.

Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Serves 4.