Making cheese!

For a long time now I've wanted to give cheese making a try, but I was a bit scared of the implied commitment. What if I bought a kit and hated the whole thing?
Last weekend I gave in and bought the Mozzarella and Hard Cheese making kit from Green Living Australia and it arrived at the end of the week. I've just made my first mozzarella and aside from a little hiccup (should have kneaded the salt in better) I'm pretty happy!
During the course of the week I also purchased a brew kit via Gumtree from a lovely older couple. They offered to sell us some more bottles and I definitely misheard the quantity, because we'll need to make at least one more car trip to get them. The price is good though and at worst, I can share the bottles with some friends that brew. At best, we'll get a lot of beer put aside next winter (I did mention to my mum that she should donate a little space in her always-cool home to my brewing endeavours jokingly, that would be nice!).
We also got some work done in the garden and I've been working on sewing a bag but for now, my bed is calling me.

Got started planting!

Tonight after work I got stuck into planting! First up were some San Marzano tomatoes I got as little seedlings; they went straight into my raised bed with my basil seedlings. Topped that off with some pea straw and then had the bright idea to move my capsicums, eggplants and chillies out the back to get more sunlight. There's only a few of those..or a few of as many varieties as I can get (jalapeno, habanero and all the ones I got on Saturday, eggplants I got .50c for a punnet..).
Then we surrounded the bed with chicken wire. Hopefully the chooks can't beat that! They did get into a lower one last week and eat almost every thing so I need to start again on corn, beans and squash. Fingers crossed!

In the background the compost heap is visible;

Today's effort;

Salsa! Fire roasted and lots of it. Since my oven's on the fritz I had to toast the ingredients under the grill but it was still delicious.
I found the recipe here via Pinterest and fortunately it comes in both a small batch recipe and a canning recipe. I'll definitely be coming back to this once I've run out to make a full on preserving batch for later!

Happy Saturday

This morning I deviated from my normal 'breakfast at my parents' routine and went to the Spring ABC Gardener's Market.
It was the first time I've gone and I have to say it was lovely. I bought a handwoven basket, comfrey, horseradish, poblano chili, serrano chili, bhut jolokhia and scorpion chili. I think I'll have to go along to the Autumn Market next year to compare.

I was also a bit lucky as I just planted the new plants out into larger pots and found my serrano was actually three plants! They're all in separate pots now so hopefully they'll all recover well and I'll have a happy bonus.

Adventures in Hot Composting

 

This is what I got up to last weekend! I've had some compost bins for a while, just the standard types you can get from hardware stores; plastic square things that take ages to break anything down and a tumbling composter that makes a nice, rich mix in a few short months. But a week or two ago I caught a great segment on Gardening Australia (Produce to Preserves from 28/09/2013 which can be found here).

This segment captured my imagination for three reasons; 

• The couple in question are from my state (home state pride!)
• I really want to learn to preserve food
• I'd love to be able to churn out my own compost for my garden

So I set to work! I started trawling Gumtree and found a listing for free pallets, then my friend Sarah and I went and picked up a trailer load to share. I used mine to construct a simple little compost area as seen above, then set to work mowing the verge to collect enough "greens" to use in the layers. I followed the tips I found on Deep Green Permaculture and layered the cuttings with shredded paper, dry leaves, horse manure and wood chips that I had left over from my large gumtree being removed. Because we had some cool rainy weather during the week I covered it up with some black plastic pool liner. 

Since I have a spare propogation thermometer I've kept it stuck in the top of the pile to ensure it's staying warm and today J did the first turn for me; so far it's looking pretty good! This is the temperature it was sitting at the other day and this morning it was up at 50 degrees. The thermometer was back down at around 30 degrees when I put it back in after the turning so I covered it back up with the plastic to keep the warmth in overnight. We'll keep turning it every couple of days and hopefully soon I'll have a cubic metre or so of compost for my patch!