Australian Bush Life

Add blended garlic to sterilised jars and top up with olive oil.

10 months after our garlic harvest most of the garlic cloves that we use for cooking had begun sprouting and many were also drying out. Even though they were still useable for cooking we decided to process some of our garlic. This would ensure we have useable garlic for cooking through the next 2 months when we will begin our next annual garlic harvest. Processed garlic can also make great presents.

We peeled all our leftover cloves and separated the already more drier looking ones to go through a dehydrating (drying) process and then better more juicy looking cloves to go into oil.

DEHYDRATING (DRYING) GARLIC

Blended garlic in the dehydrator.

We simply put all the cloves into the blender to create finer pieces. This helps in the drying process as the smaller they are the quicker to dry and they will make smaller more useable flakes.

Then we spread the blended pieces out into our dehydrator as thinly as possible and dried them for a few hours, stirring them once or twice through the process to ensure that all the pieces are dried evenly.

After they have cooled they can be added to a sterilised jar* and should last for many months if stored at a stable temperature.

FRESH GARLIC IN OIL

You can put in whole garlic cloves but we blend the cloves so that we have a pre-diced garlic blend that is ready to use at cooking time. We get the hard work dicing out of the way now and just put a teaspoon straight into our recipes! Once blended simply fill a sterilised jar* with blended garlic or whole garlic cloves, add olive oil (or any other oil you like).

We find for the garlic to have a longer preservation time when storing in oil is is really important to keep all parts of the garlic as well covered with oil as possible. This reduces air or water coming into contact with the garlic and causing it to degrade. To ensure good coverage use a knife to mix the oil right through the garlic pieces (or cloves) so that the garlic is thoroughly covered in oil. Using this technique the garlic can keep in the fridge for about 2 months or longer just make sure the oil is still covering the garlic after each use.

*We always pre-boil any jars and lids we use before we add food to reduce bacteria and other micro-organisims that will degrade the food.

Click here for more information on how to grow and harvest garlic…

Growing garlic. At about 4 months of age.

We were really upset a couple of years ago when we were forced to buy chinese garlic from a mainstream supermarket chain as there was no australian garlic (or organic) available. It wasn’t organic and we didn’t really trust the product and what it might have been grown in but we love garlic so much and add it to every meal so what to do? We decided at that moment that we should grow our own garlic in our vegetable garden. Then we can store it well enough to have our own healthy organic garlic year around.

Being easy to grow, using low water whilst growing and storage after harvest is really simple requiring minimal processing organic backyard garlic is a very sustainable food to grow if you are like us and eat it with every meal.

We plant our own cloves on the shortest day of the year (or there-abouts). We choose the healthiest looking cloves to plant that have come from big healthy garlic bulbs. We only plant the largest outer cloves to ensure we get the best results, and eat our way through the inner smaller cloves. Just plant the cloves flat end down or sprouting end up if they have already started to sprout and about a thumbs depth.

They grow over the winter and into spring and usually there is enough water for them just from rainfall. They only tend to need a bit of watering later in spring / summer and closer to the harvest when the weather is getting warmer and the bulbs are fattening up.

We harvest them around Christmas time (garlic plaits make great Christmas presents). When we start to see some leaves browning off or leaves falling over we pull out one garlic to sample it for taste and bulb size. We keep doing this until we are satisfied they are ready and then we pull out the lot.

We braid the garlics into chains and store them in a place that is dark, has minimal temperature fluctuation (stable daily temperature) and has airflow to avoid moulding / rotting. We keep one garlic braid in our kitchen at all times ready for use.

We have found that after the shortest day of the year stored garlics can still tend to shoot even if stored well. This is just them letting us know they want to be planted. Any cloves that are not chosen for planting are still fine for eating even if they have sprouted but they can start to loose a bit of their freshness and / or dry out a bit.

Dried Garlic (LHS) and garlic in olive oil (RHS).

This year in late October we decided to process the last of our garlic cloves to ensure we had a fresh supply for eating to take us through the year before our next christmas harvest and fresh bulbs.

Click here to find out how we dried and preserved our garlics in olive oil…

Last year we invested in a heat tray to try to assist us to get better germination rates of our fruit and vegetable seeds. Unfortunately last year we bought it a little too late (in October) and we didn’t get the best benefits from it’s use but this year we have been going full stream ahead. For us in South-eastern Australia it is great to get our seeds germinating from about mid August onwards.

We currently don’t have a greenhouse but have it as a project on our to do list, so the heat tray is the best way for us to warm the soil and get germination happening ahead of nature. The main reasons that we use the heat tray are to increase germination rates which in the long run means less effort in raising seed (and thereby in seed collection also), extend the cropping time by allowing an early crop and also to allow us to grow fruit and vegetables with long growing seasons which may not reach maturity using nature (seasonal temperature) alone.

We get the best early cropping results with tomatoes, zucchini, cucumber, squash, corn, pumpkins etc.

We really need the heat germination tray to allow us to grow melons (rock melon, honeydew, watermelon etc) and also it really helps for capsicums, eggplants, chillis etc as these foods all have really long growing times to produce the fruit / vegetable some well over 100 days. So without the head start we found we just ended up running into autumn and the weather cooled just as the fruit / vegetable was coming on line and we didn’t have much success.

Heat germination tray for germinating seeds. Speed seedling growth for planting out.

We sprout many of the seeds in toilet rolls on seed trays and then transplant them into larger pots and keep them indoors during August and September. Usually by October the soil is warm enough and the chance of frosts really low so we can begin planting out our large seedlings into our vegetable plots.

Growing seeds in toilet rolls.

We use the inners of our toilet rolls to raise seeds ready for planting. They are so useful as it allows us to raise seeds and then plant them out without disturbing the seedling roots as you can just plant the whole toilet roll directly into the ground. The toilet rolls readily break down into the soil so there is no cleaning up later on, and adding this carbon source to your soil is a good thing.

We save them all year long as we find that we need the most rolls in spring and autumn when we tend to grow large numbers of seedlings for planting. We have been experimenting with the size of the roll. You can use them whole, cut them in half or 2/3rds. In general those with the biggest seeds need 2/3rds to whole size to allow space for their roots i.e. corn and curcurbits like pumpkins, zucchini and cucumbers. Half size rolls are okay for smaller seeds like basil, tomato and capsicum / eggplant / chilli.

We particularly tend to use the rolls in late winter and early spring as we try to raise seedlings indoors. We try to get seedlings going inside where it is warmer to get an early start. We then plant out these seedlings later in spring, for us usually October is best for warmer outdoor soils and the end of frosts.

We find this gets us cropping earlier and actually using less effort as we get a much higher success rate with our seeds and seedlings this way. Also some fruits and vegetables have such a long growing time to produce the fruit and if we had to wait until the soil was warm enough we would run out of growing time as they would be trying to fruit into the cooler autumn months. This is particularly for melons, capsicums, chillis, eggplants etc that take a long time to get to the fruiting stage.

Tomatoes ripening on window sill.

Tomatoes ripen due to ethylene which is a gas they themselves produce when they are ripe. So a good alternative to hanging up your dead tomato vines to allow end of season tomatoes to ripen is to leave green tomatoes in an open space amongst already ripe tomatoes.

We have been able to ripen so many more tomatoes at the end of the season by using these 2 techniques. We hang up the tomato vines that need to be pulled out (for upto 6 – 8 weeks). Then once tomatoes on these hanging vines show the slightest bit of ripening we pull them off and leave them on a window sill with at least 1 ripe tomato so that the ripening process can complete itself.

We pull the ripening tomatoes off the dead vine as soon as they show any color so that the dying vine (which can look really dead, but is still working) can put it’s last effort into the greener tomatoes that still remain. Also best to pull off any really small tomatoes that are clearly never going to ripen and also any dead or shrivelled tomatoes as they too will just sap the plant of energy as it dies.

We find that the longer they take to ripen at the end of the season the less sweet they are. We tend to use them as sauce base for pastas or pizza base paste and if the sauce mix needs a bit of sugar to sweeten them up then we add a bit to flavour.

Alfalfa seeds soaking in sprouter.

We regularly sprout alfalfa seeds for a supply of fresh greens – particularly for salads. We found that they don’t sprout well in the summer as they become soggy and effected by microbes, best grown under 20 degrees air temperature. In summer we rely on lettuce from the vegie patch but over autumn, winter and spring we re-sow alfalfa sprouts weekly for a constant supply of salad greens.

We have a sprouter that we picked up for a couple of dollars from a garage sale, but you can sprout them in a jar too. We use about 3 teaspoons of seed per week to keep us in regular supply. The seeds take about 1 week to reach a good size for eating and once they have reached this size we take them out of the sprouter and put them in a re-usable container and into the fridge. Our sprouter has multiple levels so we can have sprouts of different ages growing at once. But once you move them into the fridge you can immediately get some more seeds going again anyway.

Alfalfa sprouts in sprouter after 1 week.

For best alfalfa sprouting results when we first place the seeds into the sprouter we let them soak for between 4 – 10 hours before straining. After this they are rinsed daily until ready to eat. The sprouter we use has an automatic draining system to eaily flush the seeds with fresh water.

More tips on growing our own food…

Pumpkins a sustainable food source.

From a sustainability point of view growing pumpkins is right up there. They are easy to grow and harvest. Often self germinating seeds can be pulled out as seedlings from my compost bin or worm farm and transplanted directly to the pumpkin patch. They provide a large amount of filling and healthy food. You can add pumpkin to a wide variety of recipes and can even eat pumpkin seeds.

They don’t require any energy to process them for storage due to their thick and protective skins. Pumpkins stored well can easily last over the following winter and spring. It’s also really easy to remove, clean and store away seeds for growing yourself more free pumpkins the following year. If you have the space to grow pumpkins just go for it. They get the big thumbs up from us!

Hanging pumpkin fruits off a fence or trellis.

We had a little issue this past summer with a pumpkin vine growing through a fence. A pumpkin grew from a flower quite high on the fence and we knew that as the fruit grew it wouldn’t be able to hold the weight of itself and would have fallen off. As we have seen pumpkins hanging off a trellis at display gardens we decided to tie it onto the fence to avoid losing the fruit.

This was quite a successful technique and really easy to do. At the moment we are quite happy letting our pumpkin vines run out to the bush as they take up a lot of space, but for those that need space saving ideas this worked quite well. We have seen some people hang their pumpkins in little mesh bags directly off a trellis or some other climbing frame. This makes a really interesting garden feature, which could also provide a shady area underneath in peak summer.

Space saving tips for cucumbers, beans and corn…

Autumn pumpkin harvest.

Now the weather has cooled we have noticed that our pumpkin plants are really dying back, for us this was time to consider harvesting our pumpkins. The leaves on the pumpkin vine are shrivelling and drying up so the pumpkins now don’t recieve much in the way of  nutrients from the vine. So we harvested over half of the pumpkins where the stem of the pumpkin (just where it joins the vine) has dried up. When they snap away from the vine you know they have dried up well. We kept a bit of this stem (about 3-5cm) on the pumpkin as this will continue to dry and might fall off by itself while in storage. We’ll check again over the next month to harvest any remaining pumpkins as the stem dries away from the vine.

A couple of pumpkin vines from the pumpkin patch needed to be pulled out for space but still had reasonably green leaves so we kept quite a bit of the vine attached to let it dry out and put all the nutrients from the leaves into the pumpkin as it dies.

Cleaning and drying pumpkins ready for storage.

To store them we just ensured each pumpkin was clean and dry and then placed them in a room with the least variation in temperature range. Heating and cooling foods causes the greatest chance of rot, so where ever the temperature range is reasonably stable is best. The room doesn’t neccessarily need to be dark, but avoid direct sunlight or at least keep them in low light for best results. To make them last the whole winter we use any that might look like the are rotting in any way first and leave the best ones until last. Can’t wait for all the pumpkin soup to come.

More on sustainble pumpkins, pumpkin seeds for eating, space for your pumpkin patch and hanging pumpkins on fences or trellis’.

Cucumber recycled climbing rack.

Over the last summer we used climbing racks for our cucumber plants to climb on. We picked up this steel ‘rio’ frame off the hard waste, someones waste is usually something we can find a use for. Recycling the rubbish allowed our cucmbers to grow upwards and save garden space by going vertical not horizontal. The cucumbers also like to get up there and into the sunlight and actually seem to produce more fruit than when they trail on the ground.

The frame worked really well for cucumber plants. We planted a cucumber at the base of each foot of the ‘A’ frame shape and once we had helped the plants get their grip they climbed and filled the frame. Climbing frames make it easier to find and pick the fruit. Also the small birds like Superb Fairy Wrens love to climb on the frame and pull off any insects that they find on the cucumber plants, they are the best organic pest controller you can find!

More on growing our own food…