Cabbage Salad

September 9, 2015September 8, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / 3 Comments

At Christmastime last year, I walked into a bookstore. I don’t remember what I was looking for, but I know I wasn’t looking for a cookbook.

But there, facing outward on the shelf was Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi. The simple beauty of the cover made me stop. I picked up the book and opened it, and suddenly my will was no longer my own.

There was an entire chapter on eggplants, and another on mushrooms, and pulses, and brassicas. There was even a chapter titled “Green Things”, featuring everything from artichokes to broad beans to asparagus. All accompanied by mouth-watering photographs.

I had to have the book. So I gave it to my husband for Christmas.

This afternoon, I was faced with cabbage in the garden that either needed to be picked or weeded. I chose to harvest. I had a longing for a cabbage salad, but didn’t want cole slaw. I went to Ottolenghi’s book, and found the perfect recipe.

Not that I actually made the recipe from the book, of course. It called for macadamia nuts, two different kinds of cabbage, mango, papaya, and fresh chilli…none of which I had. But I was intrigued and inspired, particularly by the dressing, which involved lime juice, lemongrass, maple syrup soy sauce and chilli flakes reduced over high heat to a thick syrup, then mixed with sesame oil and vegetable oil.

The original salad had you caramelise the macadamia nuts in butter, sugar and salt. I did the same with pumpkin seeds. I substituted oranges for the mango and papaya, used my one variety of cabbage, and fresh mint and cilantro from the garden.

The result was a marvellously complex, fresh, and delicious salad.

And even more importantly, I learned new flavour combinations and new techniques (the caramelized nuts, and the reduced dressing) for future salads. The best kind of recipe!

Not your ordinary gym experience

September 8, 2015September 8, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

I don’t exercise. When people ask, I say that the garden is my gym.

It’s true, because the garden provides exercise, but in reality the garden is nothing like a gym.

You go to the gym, and a 5 kg weight is always going to weigh 5 kg. The rowing machine provides smooth, consistent resistance. The treadmill is free of rocks and tripping hazards.

Things are less dependable in the garden. The hoe bounces unexpectedly off tough roots and buried rocks. You’ll be turning soft soil, getting into a nice rhythm when suddenly the soil fights back. Twitch roots grab the spading fork and wrench your back in ways you cannot describe to the physiotherapist. Each forkful of soil is different—live.

At the gym, you go for an hour, you do your routine, and you leave.

In the garden, you start at 7.30 am. You fill the wheelbarrow again and again, and still there is no end to the weeds. At noon you stop for lunch, and your body begs you not to go back to the garden. You go anyway, because there is still so much to do. You work more slowly. Garden work doesn’t encourage good exercise form, and you need to stop frequently to straighten your aching back.

By late afternoon, you feel you can’t possibly pull another weed. You look up from your labour and see that you’re nearly done with this bed. If you can just carry on for another 30 minutes…

You make the final raking of soil and sigh. You can rest now, as soon as you put your tools away and finish the other chores you’ve ignored in order to finish the day’s gardening.

Your back screams as you bend to pick up your tools. You slowly trudge from the garden…

And then an irrigation line breaks. Water gushes everywhere, and you want to weep as you rush to fix the problem, wrestling with wet, muddy pipes.

When you finally stagger inside, it is time to make dinner. You have been at the gym for nearly ten hours.

I can’t believe I never thought of this before…

September 6, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Every spring when it’s time to mark out the garden beds, I pull out my tape measure and take it our to the garden, along with the hoe, spading fork, wheelbarrow, secateurs, and weeding tool.

The tape measure is fiddly, gets muddy and wet, and is one more thing to forget to bring out, one more thing to forget to take in at the end of the day.

Last year I got smart and made myself a measuring stick from bamboo, with the key measurements marked on it.

But now I feel totally stupid, because this year it occurred to me that I could just mark the measurements on my hoe, which I always have in the garden with me. In fact, it’s the first tool I need once I’ve marked out a bed, so to use it to measure the bed in the first place is logical. So logical, I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before!

Plant tags

September 5, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

I use a lot of plant tags every spring—many hundreds, at least. I reuse as many as possible from year to year, but they don’t last forever.

I hate the idea (and the expense) of buying plastic tags, so instead I use empty milk bottles cut into strips. Permanent marker shows up well on them, and they last several years. Best of all, they’re free, and I can make hundreds of them every year.

Five Years on…remembering the 2010 quake

September 4, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

“Good, good, good, good vibrations…” The sound of the Beach Boys emanating from the wind-up emergency radio made me smile. I bopped to the music, learning then that the best way to weather the aftershocks was to keep moving. Knowing then that my relationship with the earth had fundamentally changed.

I was sitting on the floor in the middle of my dark living room. Just a few minutes earlier, at 4.35 am. We had all been jolted out of bed by a M7.1 earthquake centred about 20 km away. The rest of the family had all gone back to bed, but I knew I couldn’t. I would have been up at five anyway, and the excitement of such a large quake wouldn’t let me sleep.

And so, when National Radio broadcast the Beach Boys minutes after the quake, I was there to hear it and smile.

Memories of the first quake and the nearly 15,000 aftershocks since are still fresh. Just the other day, one of my daughter’s friends was recounting how they had had little food in the house when the quake struck. With power out and shops closed, they subsisted on Weet-bix for four days.

We were more fortunate. It had been a good winter garden, and though it was only early spring, there were plenty of vegetables to eat. And with a gas stove, we were able to cook those vegetables in spite of no electricity.

As for water, we might have been worried, if we’d known what the quake had done to our well. But until the power came back on, we were blissfully unaware that the well had filled with black silt. We confidently used the many litres of water I had stored for this very possibility—a week’s worth of drinking and cooking water. More, if we were frugal with it. The rain barrel behind the shed provided water for the toilet.

We circled the wagons and waited. The family was together. It was spring, and there was much to do in the garden. We spent the days outside in the sun, and the nights eating by candlelight, and riding out the aftershocks. What little we knew of the extent of the damage came through the wind-up radio, which we listened to eagerly. It was an oddly peaceful time—the aftershocks were frightening through the nights, but the sun shone during the day, and we went for walks as a family and played board games.

I am by no means a “survivalist”, but I do believe in being prepared. Though we had no idea what a major earthquake was like, we were prepared. And being prepared, we weathered it well, even when we did discover that our well was destroyed, and when it was another five months before we had regular, reliable water. Even when we were subjected to thousands of aftershocks, some even more destructive than the first quake.

Life has changed since the quakes. I cannot enter a room without assessing safe areas, hazards, and exits. I store even more water, and make sure I always have over a quarter tank of petrol in the car. I keep a torch by the bedside. I expect to get lost every time I venture into the centre city—another building will have been demolished, another will have sprung up, another road will be closed for repairs. More fundamentally, I now understand, in an intimate and visceral way, the dynamic nature of the planet. I know the vast power of the earth, and how insignificant my own is by comparison. I am in awe. I am in love. I am honoured to be allowed to live on this amazing world.

Duct Tape

September 3, 2015September 2, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

It is the answer to every problem, the fix for every break. It is one of the most essential tools I use.

Old watering can is cracking? Wrap it in duct tape!

Binding on your favourite book splitting? Put some duct tape on it!

Rubbish bag tear? Duct tape will take care of it!

Hole in your sneaker? Duct tape will fix that!

Outdoor outlet needs a little more rain protection? Secure a plastic cover onto it with duct tape!

Break the hoe handle? Duct tape will hold it together for years!

Duct tape!

Spring

September 2, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Yesterday was the official start of spring, though the plants have known it for weeks. The crocuses are all but over. The daffodils and snowdrops are blooming. The willow trees flushed green last Thursday. The grass needs mowing.

So, naturally, it’s been cold and rainy for five days.

But cold and rainy at the beginning of September is fundamentally different from cold and rainy in July.

It may be twelve degrees in the house in the morning, but I don’t feel the need to light the fire—it feels warmer than it is.

The sky is light at 6 am.

The sky is still light at 6 pm.

The magpies tussle on the lawn and sing in the early morning darkness.

The plovers run in fits and starts across the paddocks.

We are all restless to be outside, regardless of the weather.

Weeds seem to spring up overnight in the garden.

Yes, it is spring.

Capturing water

August 29, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Summers are dry here. Nor’west winds whip hot and dry across the plains, sucking moisture from the plants and soil. Though I protect my garden as best I can, with mulch and shelter, there is no escaping the need to water, at least once in a while.

That’s in a good year, when it rains occasionally during the summer.

Last year, we got almost no rain from October to February, and our autumn and winter have been unusually dry as well. The prediction with climate change is for more of our years to be like that.

Which naturally leads me to worry about water. For now, there is plenty of water in our well to keep the vegetable garden green in a dry year. But if we have more and more dry years, who knows what might happen to the water table.

So this year, when we needed to address some aging guttering on our sheds anyway, we tried to arrange things so we could make better use of the rain that does fall on the property.

We had a rain barrel before—a rusty old 55 gallon drum of unknown origin, from which we were able to draw rust-flecked orange water in an emergency. It was great for flushing the toilet after the earthquakes, but it wasn’t particularly pleasant, and it wasn’t enough water to make much difference if we needed to use it on the garden.

Now we have a 900 litre tank collecting water off our large shed roof, set up so I can easily attach a hose and draw off the water when I need it. And the water from the small shed’s roof is being directed into the pond, so that, hopefully we won’t need to refill it with water from the well when summer evaporation threatens to dry it up. Any overflow will water the garden around the pond.

There is still a lot of water we don’t capture, but the rain off the house roof currently runs out into perennial garden areas, including some of our fruit trees, so it’s reasonably well used.

Waste not, want not. At least, we hope so.

Broomrape

August 28, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Belgian white carrot in a broomrape embrace

We have a moderate infestation of broomrape (Orobanche minor) on our property. It shows up here and there in perennial beds and in the vegetable garden.

Broomrape is a parasitic plant. It contains no chlorophyll, and when it is not flowering, the entire plant is below ground. Its fibrous, root-like tentacles encircle the host plant’s roots, sucking off nutrients and water from the host.

Though it “officially” prefers clover, in the vegetable garden, it seems particularly fond of carrots. I regularly find carrots being strangled in a broomrape embrace.

The gardener in me is dismayed every time I find one.

The scientist in me is fascinated.

Many parasites are very host-specific, that is, they only live on one or a limited number of host species. Orobanche minor appears to have a wide host range, but there is evidence that individuals parasitising different species are actually genetically isolated from one another, because the parasite’s reproductive cycle is tied to the host plant.

Eventually, that isolation could cause Orobanche minor to speciate…or maybe it has, and we haven’t noticed yet.

Perhaps some day my carrot-loving parasites will be different enough from my clover-loving parasites that they will have a new name. Maybe Orobanche carota!