You say tomato, I say..how many tomatoes?

The answer is 15.4kg so far, give or take a few hand picked numbers. In fact a quick stroll around the garden yielded 6.3kg tomatoes for today, 700g cucumber, 3.5kg courgette (one weighed 1.4kg!!) and 2kg eggplant. Which explains why my benches look like this :

 

I also put most of the remaining plums and damsons in the steam juicer and made juice. Not sure if I will use it to make jelly or cordial so I've just bottled it for now.

 

So far this year the main harvest looks like this:

•  15.4kg tomatoes
• 6.3kg eggplant
• 5.5kg raspberries
• 4.1kg courgette
• 4kg brambleberries
• 2kg potatoes (but loads more still in the ground)
• 1.8kg redcurrants
• 1kg cucumber
• a few chilli and capsicum
• loads of rocket :-)

Plums!

Just a quick note as we have relatives here this week...however a few days ago a neighbour rang to offer some plums and damsons that they weren't using, so after a quick scoot down the road for a 15 minute picking frenzy I ended up with about 13kg plums and 5kg damsons.

I've made damson jelly (9 jars), plum sauce and bottled the rest....saving a  few for fresh eating. I still have about 3kg left to use up, and that's after my nephews have eaten about 1kg and I used another kilo for a plum crumble.

 

  

 After all that I need a nice lie down...although I think I will find a better pillow that Lily has!

It's finished!!

Hurrah hurrah! Today the electrician came and installed the powerpoint for the chest freezer, anf the light switches for the cupboards, so the pantry renovation is finally finished ... and just in time for the arrival of my nephews and brother and sister-in-law from the UK tomorrow.

 

 

Oh and while the electrician was here he also installed a new ceiling fan in the living room, and moved the old one form there to my office, and replaced our ceramic and wire fuses with something a LOT more modern - hey we even have safety cut-outs now!  How very 20th century!

Saucy Minx

OK, ok so technically it's pasty minx and I'm not that minxy but it you have to admit, it was a great title!

I sourced some cheap saucing tomatoes (seconds, $1.50kg) so decided to make tomato paste out of them. I slow roasted them (they were commercial and not home grown so this was to help bring out the flavour) with some local olive oil for a few hours, then put them through a food mill, then put them in the crock pot overnight  (or a saucepan during the day) to slowly cook off the moisture. Then I gave them the fowlers/water bath treatment for storage.

 

 

 

From 20kg of tomatoes I got about 15  small (about 250g) jars - that will keep us in pizza for a year if nothing else :)

Pantry Update

Handles on - check
Anti-mouse door roller things on the bottom of the doors to fill in the gap - check
Shelves stacked - check

Huston we are go for launch  :*)

 

  

  

Next week the electrician is coming back to fit a power point for the chest freezer, and put in the light switch for the pantry lights.

I'll leave you with a picture of one of last weeks "dinner baskets" from the garden