The Quarter Acre Life

The garden beds were once again starting to get overgrown, so another clear-out to make room to plant some onion seedlings I had planted in pots and needed to get into the ground. The other task was to harvest and clear the pumpkins which had self-seeded in the raised garden beds, likely from the compost I put into the beds. I like to keep the pumpkins on the roof of the verandah until I'm ready to use them. It allows them to ripen further in the autumn/winter sun and keeps them away anything that might want to eat them at ground level. It also means it doesn't take up any other storage space in my garage or in the kitchen. When I'm ready to use a pumpkin, I just pluck another from the roof! 😄

This video is not from my property. My brother and I decided to surprise our Mum for her 70th birthday by going to stay with my parents for a few days. They live a reasonable distance from us, around 8-9 hours drive or a 1.5 hour flight. We spent from Saturday to Wednesday with them and it was a really wonderful time. One of the "presents" we gave was us working together to dismantle their run-down, no longer functional chicken area that was destroyed by strong winds from a tropical cyclone a number of years ago. The chickens were re-homed to their neighbour for some time, but all of his and their chickens eventually fell prey to pythons and goannas! The area had become a very overgrown, unmanageable eye-sore and it was time for it to go. Now that it is cleared (with the exception of the old chicken coop itself which we didn't get around to moving) it will be far easier to maintain and look a lot nicer. Some of the corrugated iron and star-pickets are earmarked to become new raised veggie garden beds... but that is a future project. Happy Birthday Mum! I hope you had a great 70th.

Stacking the woodshed with a load of firewood I bought (4 cubic metres). I did need to split a lot of it once more, as I have a smaller wood heater and some of the larger logs are a bit awkward, which took quite some time, but the kids gave a hand carrying the firewood over after and the company made it more enjoyable. I've been a bit slack making and uploading videos recently. I have a back"log" (ha! firewood dad jokes) of videos to get through and will try to put more up soon. The tune at the end part is something I threw together and started working on recently in FL Studio. I may develop it further down the... track (ha! music dad jokes). I'm stopping now.

I had some old green potatoes in the garage that I was keeping to use for seed potatoes, but they start shooting so much it looked they were trying to escape the bucket I had them in. I also needed to clear out my round bed (too overgrown) and thought "Why not throw some potatoes in there?" It's wasn't exactly the right time of year to plant them (early spring is best), but because we don't really get much frost here, you can grow tomatoes and potatoes almost year round. I tried my luck, and got a modest harvest of potatoes from it just before spring, which is the perfect time to plant another lot of potatoes to grow over summer. As usual, we made garlic-and-herb roasted potatoes to go with some steak and veggies for dinner.

I had some old green potatoes in the garage that I was keeping to use for seed potatoes, but they start shooting so much it looked they were trying to escape the bucket I had them in. I also needed to clear out my round bed (too overgrown) and thought "Why not throw some potatoes in there?" It's wasn't exactly the right time of year to plant them (early spring is best), but because we don't really get much frost here, you can grow tomatoes and potatoes almost year round. I tried my luck, and got a modest harvest of potatoes from it just before spring, which is the perfect time to plant another lot of potatoes to grow over summer. As usual, we made garlic-and-herb roasted potatoes to go with some steak and veggies for dinner.

While the idea of covering fruit trees to protect fruit from damaging fruit fly (not quite as much of an issue for the fig, but guavas are badly affected) and birds seems great, it's also not without its downsides. One of those being that any bugs that were on the trees when they were covered, now have a very protected environment and can thrive and spread without the worry of other predatory bugs or birds getting at them. The assumption is that the trees are covered, so it will be fine, but you do need to keep a lookout for outbreaks of things like mealy bugs or aphids - which I discovered while making this video. We got some nice figs from the fig tree, but nowhere near as many as the previous season. I've given the tree a good prune now, and hopefully that will encourage a strong fruit set this season. We did manage to eat a few nice fresh figs and also turned a number of them into fig paste. The guava, while it wasn't attacked by fruit fly, did produce a good number of fruit, but the fruit were a lot smaller and less impressive than I had hoped. Whether that was due to less sunlight getting to the leaves/fruit because of the cover, or because of whatever those aphid looking bugs took from the energy of the tree, or because it was recently heavily pruned... who knows? I did make a really nice batch of guava puree, which I turned into a guava and orange jelly... as in gelatine jelly... not jam jelly... Jell-O for my friends in the US. That was very tasty and something I will definitely repeat with future guavas.

Cockatoos and rats do seem to enjoy macadamia nuts. Not quite sure how to protect the nuts from either of them, other than chase away cockatoos when I see them. As for rats.... They mostly come at night... mostly. We made the mistake one year of harvesting all the nuts we could see when we saw signs of rats eating them... but that was a huge mistake. The nuts weren't fully ripe yet. Their shells hadn't hardened yet, and most of them went mouldy. The ones that didn't go mouldy were small and rubbery inside. Not pleasant to eat. So, it seems to be a very fine balance between leaving the nuts on the tree long enough to ripen completely, while beating the rats and cockatoos to the punch. It's all a learning experience. Observe. Adjust. Repeat.

Yeah, so I forgot I filmed this video... I've ended up putting up a number of videos that happened after this one. No matter. This will give you an idea of how some things started, like the watermelon, cucumbers, tomatoes, pumpkins etc.

This is a follow-on to the recent video where I bagged this bunch of bananas: https://youtu.be/hlTdnhQD4_I I saw that a few of the bananas (mainly the ones that had been partially eaten by birds before bagging) were starting to turn yellow. This is a good sign that the bananas have grown to full size and are all going to start ripening soon. Harvesting a bunch of bananas is always fun. It's a bit of work, but rewarding. Not only do you get a bunch of bananas for your trouble, you get to swing a machete around and chop down, then chop up (amusing juxtaposition) the stem, along with a bit of problem solving and some good exercise thrown in too. I like to hang the bunch up in the garage with a rope, then cut off individual hands of bananas to take in to ripen further on the bench. You do get to the point where all the remaining bananas want to ripen up at once, in which case we peel and freeze any we can't get through immediately. Frozen bananas are great in smoothies to drink and excellent in fruit smoothie bowls (topped with some fresh granola) for breakfast.

I love jalapeños. I think they are my favourite chilli. They're big, they're meaty, they aren't stupidly hot and they go well with just about any savoury dish. What's even nicer is being able to pick and pickle some from my garden. I hope that I can sustain a few healthy plants over a longer period and that I can get some much more impressive crops in future. I've had trouble with jalapeños in recent years, but had a few successful plants this year. Pickling them means I can store them for a long time unrefrigerated, but given that I only had two jars worth... they didn't last long enough to store for a long time, but they were very tasty! 😋

These bananas (Dwarf Cavendish) had fattened up sufficiently so that birds were starting to munch on some of the bananas. It was time to bag them up to save the rest of the bunch. I also had to cut down one of the other stems that formed the worst bunch of bananas we've had yet. I think the long rainy period we had while these were forming might have caused some mould to set in. That bunch really didn't do well. It's always fun getting the machete out to cut down a banana stem and trying to lower it safely without slamming the bunch into the ground or crushing anything else around. I like to take a notch out of the front of the stem, then chip away at the opposite side until I can lower the stem down gently. This one almost got away from me as it dropped quite suddenly, but I managed to catch it. The old stem and leaves get cut up and go into the compost bins.

When cucumbers start cucumbering, they don't mess about! We got a whole lot of them ripening within a few days of each other. I think ~16 cucumbers over about 4 days. This was the second batch of 11 cucumbers being harvested, along with having to fix up the vine, which had fallen down in the wind because of the weight of the cucumbers. It also shows the pickles that I made, or attempted to make. I wanted to try to make lacto-fermented pickles (fermented over a few days in a salt brine). The recipe I had said to let them ferment for 5-7 days. I think with the warm temperatures we were having, I should have stopped it at 3-4 days. I lost the lot to a mould outbreak around day 6. 😢 Oh well, I'll grow more and try again. I'll also make sure I plant a lot of vines next season so that I can pick lots of smaller ones for pickling, rather than having to chop up larger ones. It was a good learning experience though.

When cucumbers start cucumbering, they don't mess about! We got a whole lot of them ripening within a few days of each other. I think ~16 cucumbers over about 4 days. This was the first batch of 5 cucumbers being harvested.

I love being able to go out and pick something from the garden to have with dinner. We were having some eye-fillet steaks and some cherry tomatoes and cucumber went very nicely with it. The corn and broccolini were unfortunately not from our garden, but the dinner was really tasty. Medium-rare slices of steak covered in a butter, garlic, Dijon mustard and chive sauce, and of course the cherry tomatoes and cucumber. Yum! 😋

The most valuable thing I learned from "The Walking Dead" TV series was how to clone tomatoes this way. Thanks Hershel! I kept saying internodal shoots in this video... I think side shoots is easier to say and probably more accurate. I wasn't sure what they were called, but this method of cloning tomatoes is really simple and works really well. One tomato plant can provide you with almost infinite tomatoes.

This stealthy cucumber behind the garden bed was the first cucumber we got to eat of the season and it was a really nice one. Crunchy and cucumbery. Many more followed it, but this was the first.

One cucumber remained hidden behind the leaves and I didn't see it until it was a bit... large. We did try to eat some of it, but the skin was tough, the seeds were tough... the flesh was alright, but it really had gone a bit too far. The rest of it ended up going to the chickens. They liked it.