It’s been quite some time since my first blog post about my food garden, so I thought I’d put up an update post to show what’s new and how things have changed since that blog post. Way too much is going on to try to fit everything into one post, so I’m going to break it up into a few posts.
Fruiting trees and plants
Fig
We have had some amazing figs from our black Genoa fig tree (which we were given as a cutting originally). We have even got a few figs this year from the first cutting/clone we took of the original tree, maybe 3-4 years ago. I have some more cuttings of the Black Genoa growing in pots to give to two of my work colleagues and one for my sister-in-law. Figs are really easy to clone.
Fig paste, fig jam, fig chutney, fig and prosciutto pizzas… so many things you can do with figs. Or just eat them as figs.
We also have a white fig tree, which we bought to give some variety and hopefully spread out the fig season slightly, but that tree has grown quite large (requiring a solid prune back) and hasn’t yet produced a single fig! I think we’re giving it another year. Hopefully the threat of replacing it with something else will force it into fruit. I do see some promising signs on some of the branches, but I thought that last year too. We’ll see.
One of the black Genoa figs, almost ready to eat
The birds also love figs, and if left uncovered, we would get very few. The tree is pruned to stay roughly within the bounds of the frame for the bird netting.
This is the first fig for 2020. There was an initial flush of maybe 10 figs or so, this being the first ripe one, but the second flush looks like almost 10 times as many as the first flush!
Passionfruit
Mango might be my favourite fruit, but passionfruit is my wife’s favourite. We have one vine doing particularly well, and a few others that are struggling to get established. I put two more vines in recently, in the hopes that at least another one takes off and does as well as our original one.
I recently put in some new raised veggie garden beds (blog post coming soon) and found that the compost that I put in from my compost bins contains a number of passionfruit seeds. I pulled out nine seedlings and put them into some pots with a garden compost mix to get established, before planting them out around the trellis lines.
The passionfruit vine is the mass of green on the fence between the two bit of Spanish moss hanging down from the top of the image. Not that you can tell, but it is growing along the trellis lines I setup along the fence.
A pretty good bowl of passionfruit. Given that they sell for up to $2 per passionfuit at the shops, this bowl covers the cost of the vine.
Blueberries
The blueberry hedge seems to be doing quite well. Not yet quite at the stage where it’s forming an actual hedge, but hopefully one day. It really is nice to be able to go outside and picked a handful of blueberries to munch.
We really haven’t managed to do much in the way of cooking with the blueberries yet, because they just get eaten as soon as they’re gathered. Still waiting for the “more blueberries than we know what to do with” day to come, but eagerly looking forward to it.
Not a bad haul of blueberries that day
The blueberry hedge, undergrown with strawberry plants - Nov 2019.
The blueberry hedge, undergrown with strawberry plants - Dec 2020. That is another passionfruit vine growing along the fence trellis on the left-hand side of the photo.
Blueberries at different stages of ripeness
Blackberries
The blackberries have been very rewarding this year. We had a few nice ones in previous years, never really enough to pick a whole bowl-full at once, but they have been spectacular this year. They are growing along the fence trellis. I cut them right back at the end of last season and was actually a little worried that I had gone too severe, as I didn’t see any signs of growth for a number of months. Then they exploded. The new canes came flying out of the ground, and I had to keep feeding them around the trellis lines almost weekly because they were growing so quickly. When I saw the number of flower clusters forming along the canes, I knew we were in for a good crop.
I’ve made two separate small batches of blackberry jam. Both turned out reasonably well, but making perfect jam is a true art that I don’t think I’ve quite mastered yet. The first batch caught a tiny bit on the bottom of the pot, which gave a slightly burnt toffee flavour. It definitely didn’t ruin it, but it would have been better if it hadn’t caught. The second batch was better, but also not perfect. In an effort to not burn it, I took it longer and slower, and perhaps a little too long, as it turned into a very thick, solid jam. Very tasty though. The basic recipe is: as many blackberries you get, e.g. 400g, half the weight of the blackberries in sugar, e.g. 200g, and finally, a squeeze of lemon juice. Cook it down until it’s jammy, and you have blackberry jam.
Blackberries at different stages of ripeness
A ready-to-pick blackberry
A nice bowl of blackberries. Time to try making a blackberry jam!
Blackberry jam made
We had the blackberry jam on some pikelets with whipped cream
