Potty Combinations

Fern at Life on the Balcony often comes up with some awesome pot combos like this one, and this one. In my last post where I waxed lyrical about carrots I mentioned my own impropmtu pot combo of carrots, sunflowers and cornflowers. Sorry Chandramouli, I have no idea how big the pot is - I'll measure it when I get time - but it seems as deep as it is wide and about twice to three times in length. Needs to be deep enough to let the carrots grow well.

It is not the only odd, spur of the moment pot combo in my garden. When I went to pull the zucchini out and replace it with a broccoli I noticed a few violas (johnny jump ups) around the edge of the pot. Not wanting to lose them and their lovely colour I kept them in the pot combo. Add one broccoli seedling , three types of lettuce seedlings, some dwarf snow pea seeds and voila, a lovely if wierd combination. Here are two pictures of it a month on.

The purple of the violas and the white of the snow pea flowers are lovely together. The trellising keeps everything in place without crowding the broccoli like last time.

You have to be careful with combos. One of my new ones will be doomed to failure. Yes, I dared to do the taboo, I put alliums and peas together. It was more an oops and a lax moment in failing to look at my companion plant list; leeks and peas were planted in the same container, along with lettuce, broccoli (including one romanesco broccoli seedling.) I can't bring myself to remove either so I'll let them battle it out, maybe one will win, maybe they'll both die, but oh well.

Any other good ideas for random combos?

Epic Storms and Epic Fails

After three tries and three epic fails by my web browser over the past few days, I gave up completing this post yesterday. Grrr to the confines of using university internet and thus not my usual browser (there is a long story of useless IT in this grandparent of a university.) Stupid explorer (not my first choice but my only choice at present when at uni) gobbled up my first three tries, but hopefully the fourth will work. Over the weekend we had a rather epic storm, a ‘once in a hundred years’ type storm complete with hailstones the size of golfballs (and one, I swear, that hit tennis ball size.) Melbourne received quite a bit of damage. One of my cousin’s houses had one damaged window, another cousin scored eight broken windows! Fierce. The balcony garden did not escape unscathed, the succulents were whittled away into green sculptures with no ‘leaf’ left undamaged, the lemons were shorn clear off their branches, as too were a few habaneroes which I found on the opposite side of the balcony to their bush, the basil was stripped bare in places, several sunflowers were decapitated, the zucchini and cucumber and tomato dissolved into a puddle of browny-green mush and the leek seedlings were hit so hard most of their potting mix ended up on the bench not in the seedling pot!!!

But it is not all doom and gloom. The time has come for Autumn planting and this destruction gives me a good excuse to remove all the plants I should remove but might not have given they had a little life left in them (that was until the storm hit.) So it is out with the cukes and the zukes and the matos and the mess, and in with broccoli, snowpeas and more lettuce. The dead flowers will be replaced by an autumn sowing, most likely a random blue mix or gerberas. From destruction there will be new life. And if it manages to stop drizzling I might even be able to clean up the leaf litter too!

And I did manage to salvage some produce from before it hit, a zucchini and two ripe habaneroes. Pictures soon.

Balcony Garden Roast Post

Finally, after a week of cleaning and recovery, and also a week of far too much uni work, I have managed to pluck up the energy to write this post. The first ever Balcony Garden Sunday Roast was held over a week ago. It was held in lieu of another balcony garden dinner party, because the usual suspects couldn't find a single weekend evening free in common! Instead it turned into a Sunday roast, beef, yorkshire puddings (just like I used to make when I worked in the kitchens of English pubs) and all the trimmings, plus entree and dessert, all using at least one element from the balcony garden. While the balcony is big enough to host many plants, it is not an ersatz dairy and as such the cattle portion had to be obtained from the Vic markets. So too the cheese for the cheese platter was obtained at the markest, as unlike Gavin at The Greening of Gavin who seems to be a homemade cheesemaker extraordinaire, I am not quite set up to make my own cheese (but boy oh boy would I love to.) Indeed it is probably best to start the post with a look at the cheese platter. Normally something to end a dinner party this time it took the place of pre-dinner/lunch nibbles.

The garden element was multi-coloured carrot sticks taken from the pile pictured later in this post (the other half went into the salad.) So too a little sprig of indoor-grown basil added to the plate. This was to have homemade gluten free crakcers with it, which I lovingly cooked earlier in the week, adapting a recipe from here.

Probably in part due to my makeshirt wine bottle rolling pin, and the substitution of a gluten free flour to the mix difficulties arose. Alas the crackers were liable to break a tooth they were so hard, and provided a novelty factor for the day but served no real nutritional purpose. (note they were made with potato flour and the balcony garden element was rosemary)

The entree was a duo of soups. One was a potato, leek and bacon soup utlising leeks from the garden.

The other was a sweet potato, coriander, chilli and coconut cream number, which took chillis from the garden (the coriander, though also grown of the balcony garden, was taken from my cousin's garden as she had a ridiculous surplus!) It was all served with a steaming hot, homemade foccacia, same recipe as this one, just minus the leeks and bacon.

Both soups were tasty and some members of the dinner party with less dietary restrictions decided to sample a bowl of each. Then came the main course of roast beef, yorkshire puddings, roasted potatoes (four varieties), jerusalem artichokes and mushrooms, steamed snow peas, broccoli, beet leaves and silverbeet and a salad of greens, tomatoes and carrots. All steamed greens and salad elements were balcony garden grown.

The final piece-de-resistance alas comes with no photos of the final product. I blame wine induced forgetfulness. It was a deconstruction of a lemon meringue pie. I made meringue casings, and in them placed homemade lemon curd icecream (which used lemons from the balcony garden) on top of which was to be placed a nut crumble. I burned the nut crumbled in my view so declined from serving it, however most disagreed and ate it straight from the cooking dish! Raspberry sauce I got at christmas topped this little number off and it was enjoyed by all.

All in all it was a magical day. Somehow the intended afternoon meal went well into the night, with most guests staying until 9pm!!! I suspect the 12 bottles of wine and apple wine and coffee cocktail I crazily made helped in this regard. Thanks to everyone who came, and particular thanks to those who helped with the dishes, it made the hungover Monday cleanup that much easier! I will definitely have another balcony garden function once the next harvest comes in. Until then I am enjoying the remaining greens and carrots all by myself!

Monday Harvest

I am so, so, so excited, I finally had harvest worth mentioning. Ok so this is probably going to include a couple of harvests from a little over a week ago too, but it is not often in the middle of winter I get a haul such as this and I don't want things to miss out just because I pulled them out early. One such fellow was the daikon radish. He was smaller than a usual daikon but really really tender.

I also pulled out enough veggies for this salad.

Carrot thinnings, which I ate, they were like little lollies, slyly addictive! So yummy.

And some snow peas and broccoli found their way into my meal one night.

All very small harvests. I don't keep tallies or totals or anything, except for the tomatoes, and the balcony garden is not a money saving venture nor a concerted attempt at sustainable living, it is simply an adventure, an adventure in gardening. The reason I had such a large harvest this week(ish) was due to a Sunday Roast we had here yesterday, the point of which was to show off my newly harvested goodies. I had leeks for the potato and leek soup, although when cut down there wasn't really enough of them so they were topped up with a couple of others from the markets.

Some greens which included snow peas, broccoli, beetroot leaves, silverbeet of plain and rainbow varieties and rocket. These were steamed and served as is.

Carrots for the salad.

Tomatoes for the salad.

And lettuce for the salad.

Stay tuned for my post about the roast and you will see what the salad looked like before we all attacked it. I took the last two lemons off the lemon tree for the dessert, deconstructed lemon meringue pie, but more on that feast later.

So there you have it, a pretty fine harvest if I do say so myself. And I am giddily excited that I finally get to join in on Daphne's Dandelions Monday Harvest extravaganza.

Cooking with Leeks

Ok so these weren't homegrown leeks as in this post but shortly after boasting in my post about the abundance of leeks on the balcony I realised I had one sorry looking little leek in the bottom of my fridge. Somehow I got the master idea of putting it on a freshly baked focaccia. I finely chopped some bacon with the leek and sauteed them both in a frying pan. Then I added it to the foccacia recipe - I used a variation of this one - it was an interestingly salty but tangy bread treat. It looked like this.

Being a household of one I had to eat it for days. Warm out of the oven, for lunch with some cheese, as a bready side to a meaty, veggie, gravy dish in my cool little four-compartment lunchbox (although I do think they should have seperate lids, if I hadn't had the forethought to indepdently glad wrap the gravy sodden peas and the yoghurt covered stewed apples I would have had an almighty mess in my bag!)

I made a few mistakes, firstly the topping tended to fall off. This can be fixed by adding some cheese or, alternatively, placing the filling in the middle. This way it would also stop it from burning. I am tempted to make this as a side for Sunday's Balcony Garden Roast. What do you think? What else can you do with leeks?

Slow-Leak Leeks

I started growing leeks quite a white back now, probably not at the intended time and some were not paired with amicable companion pants.

The examples pictured above are nearly ready to be pulled. They were planted with golden and slow bolt beetroot (two plantings in each pot) and a late addition of some rocket in one of the pots.The leeks took so, so, so long to reach this stage that I nearly gave up. Unfortunately because the pots are fairly shallow the leeks themselves will not have a significant amount of bleached area. I was also too lazy to mound up the soil around them, or use the toilet roll method. Still they are homegrown leeks, and will be added to the pot fairly soon as part of a potato, leek and bacon soup for the balcony garden Sunday lunch!

I grew some other leeks, most noticeably some poorly placed ones pictured above which were planted at a much later date in a pot with two bush beans (can you see the lone leek trying to peak through in the rear of the above picture??) Not very good chums, the beans and the leeks, but they struggled on. You can see them in this picture below, the beans were rapidly growing but the leeks, being less than good companion plants for the beans were stilted in their growth. You can barely see them peaking through the bush beans.

I thought the leeks would be much happier when the beans were eaten and replaced with a tomato! Tomatoes and leeks have an ok working relationship and should at least get along quite well. Alas the leeks took one look at Mr Big Rainbow tomato and keeled over. A quick transplant of two of them seems to be promising and they have a largish pot all to themselves. The other three remain in the tomato pot and only a miracle and some sunshine will help them now.

Produce in the Pan

Flowers are wonderful, they make a garden colourful, fragrant and attract a bevy of friendly bees. If you want a post about pretty flowers go here. However, when space is tight, only beneficial flowers, impulse buy flowers and personal favourites make it in. For me ornamental flowers come second to the flowers in the veggie patch, and for the matter the veggies themselves. I grow to enjoy, and flowers are certainly enjoyable, but they are better viewed while munching on a lemon slice, made with home grown lemons or a salad from garden greens, or something equally delicious produced with the garden veggies.

If you haven't guessed by now this is going to be another cooking/gardening post. I wanted to show what I did with all that extra produce I found when I got back to Adelaide (click here to find out why totally awesome second balcony sitter did not devour it all, bless her.) This is only a basic recipe, a stirfry to be exact. But I just had to use all those yummy snow peas. And don't forget the broccoli shoots, which, having been left for 2 weeks grew big, almost to bursting/flowering stage. (aha now there is one flower that is not welcome in my garden, a broccoli flower which is an omen of the armageddon for the broccoli plant.)

I also had 5 bush beans, taken from my two bush bean plants which were now compost, well my balcony version of compost. Not a lage haul but I blame the time of year I planted them. I needed the pot for a tomato, and to help the leeks in there, because they don't really get along with beans and thus were not thriving. Presto chango, 5 beans to eat and one happy indoor tomato/leek pot.

I also had some more snow peas, coriander and silvetbeet. What to do?

Stick it all in a frying pan with chicken, a chili soy sauce (don't forget the teaspoon of sugar also) and noodles.

Serve with a side salad

et voila, one wonderful way to use balcony produce which may or may not be eaten in the vicinity of balcony garden flowers.