Murphy's law of pruning

I predict that avocados will be going cheap next summer, if my tree is any indication of the vintage. (Actually, I have two trees, but while one fruits, the other is locked in a battle for survival with a huge Phoenix palm on the boundary. I thought the Phoenix palm finally suffocated it last summer but a miraculous resurrection is underway: the avocado "stick" has put out a clump of fresh new foliage!)
I love avocados, so it was a thrill to find one tucked in between the elderberries when I bought this garden three years ago. I have no idea what variety I have (perhaps someone can identify it from this photo?) and I have no idea how old my tree is either, but it produces about 20-30 fat avocados a year. Each spring, the tree literally disappears into a cloud of small flowers, yet avocados aren't known for their fertility. A mature tree can produce up to a million flowers in order to form a couple of hundred avocados.
The biggest problem with my tree is its height. It's at least five metres tall and it's a spindly, gawky sort of thing. Plus it has a lousy position: it grows on my north-western boundary, in semi-shade, in very wet soil. I'm surprised that it has even made it this far, because avocados hate wet feet. Thus I treat every fruit as a sort of miracle baby and I get out there with my super long Fiskars pruning wand thingie (I know this extendable tool has a proper name but I've forgotten what it is) to deliver each fruit safely to my fruit bowl to ripen.
I haven't pruned the tree since I've lived here, but there's one branch that's growing practically horizontally. It casts quite a lot of shade over my potato patch so I decided this year that it would get the chop. I headed out tonight with the pruning saw, only to discover that... there are about 50 fruit on that branch alone! Looks like I'm in for a bumper crop.
Typical. I'll have to wait until this time next year to give it a haircut.

Let the garden revolution begin: "before" photos

One of the comments I often get when talking about my self-sufficient paradise is... "you must have an amazing garden". My reply? Usually a bout of hysterical laughter. I do have a big garden, but most of it is a big (albeit productive) mess. Remember, when I bought the place almost three years ago, it was just a jungle of weeds. Now it's a jungle of largely edible weeds. Just kidding. I've done quite a lot of deck-building and clearing around the back garden but I've got an enormous amount of work ahead of me if I'm going to pull off my resolution to open the garden to the public by the end of 2008. Here's the photographic evidence to prove it:

This (above) is where I park my car. I'm going to fringe this whole area with something flowery and pretty, but as yet I'm not sure what. Notice the 3m high clump of canna lilies, moth plants and weeds over the fence. I intend to rip all this out and plant an orchard here.

This is the path from my mailbox to my front door. Spot the 5m tall mass of ivy (it's clinging to dead willow stumps) and bamboo on the right hand side, and the lovely cracked concrete path edged by weeds on the right. I think a hedge here might help.

Out the back, I have this small square bed hedged with griselinia that's just begging for a water feature, I think. I need somewhere for the turtle to swim and sun itself.

Some parts of my garden are taking shape. I've put in lots of boardwalks but this area is very shady. I'm hoping the newly planted hydrangeas will save the day. Not sure what to do around the palms yet, but that's a hedge of coffee on the right!

This is my main sunny vege garden or potager. These raised beds aren't too shabby, apart from the sprawling plants and weed-infested limestone chip. You can see this part of my garden over the front fence and it's going to be the easiest bit to pretty up.

This is my shady vege garden. It used to be lawn but I dug half of it up. It's shaded on the right by elderberries and avocados so not much will grow. On the left is my potato patch: seven rows right now.
Ah, challenges aplenty from here: Pictured here is my olive and citrus grove (actually, I should technically call it my weed grove as there are far more of them in here than olive trees or lemons). I need to finish painting the house too.
On the right is my new maple tree garden. This area is absolutely infested with onion weed and I've just finished pulling out a bunch of other stuff. I want to build a small deck around the maple tree because this part of the garden faces west and soaks up the afternoon sun. And it's next to the potager, so I can pluck fresh strawberries...
I've got a lot of work to do out the front too... as far as first impressions go, my place literally screams "potential".

And I've got to do something about the compost situation. I have one small bin nestled into a virtual mountain of compostable material....

Making green walnut liqueur

Last winter a good friend of mine gave me some green walnut liqueur made by his mother. (Actually, I think he gave it to me to try... and then I sort of "borrowed" the rest of the bottle.) Green walnut liqueur is a traditional Italian tipple that tastes like liquid cinnamon and is as black as squid ink. It's unbelievably delicious and, quite frankly, it's miraculous stuff to make. It's hard to believe that big green unripe nuts can produce such a smooth, sweet result. Since that first taste last winter, I've become a bit of a nocino nut... and as I write this, there are two big jars of it sitting on my kitchen bench. My first batch will be ready to bottle in a fortnight, while the second batch (pictured here) is only a day old.
To make nocino, you need to harvest the green walnuts before the shells have started to harden around the nuts inside. (The best way to judge this is to poke a darning needle into each nut - if you can't push it right into the middle because it hits a hard shell, then the nuts are too old.)
I made my first batch of nocino in mid-December, using the recipe we published in Homegrown. If you bought our latest special edition, it's on page 117. If not, here are the ingredients: 29 large green walnuts (preferably harvested by a barefoot maiden!), 5 whole cloves, 2 cinnamon sticks, 1 star anise, zest of one lemon & one orange, 1 litre of vodka and 500g caster sugar.) Cut the walnuts into quarters (and make sure you wear gloves because they'll stain your hands black otherwise) and place in a large glass jar with all the ingredients except the sugar. Shake the jar every day for a month (or more - my friend's mum leaves hers in a sunny spot for three months) and then add the sugar. Stir daily for a fortnight, then strain through muslin and bottle.
The only downside to making nocino is that you're supposed to wait 18 months to drink it.... I don't think I can wait that long...

Hankering for hydrangeas

Hydrangeas are my new undisputed favourite flower. I ordered a box of plants from Glyn Church at Woodleigh nursery in Taranaki late last year and they haven't stopped flowering since they hit the dirt. I've planted a long border of hydrangeas, interspersed with hellebores, under a row of Michelia 'Mixed up Miss' on my shadiest boundary. I'm not sure if my soil is acidic or alkaline but I figure the hydrangeas will soon let me know. In the meantime I must also confess that my new favourite hydrangea is 'Ayesha', a distinctive variety that has the charming common name of "popcorn hydrangea" because of its unusual florets. We featured it in New Zealand Gardener last May but I've never seen it for sale. So when I walked past a carparking building in central Auckland a couple of days ago and spotted it flourishing among the weeds, it seemed, well, um, hardly a crime to do a little judicious pruning. I now have six cuttings in pots on the windowsill. There's a good reason why I drive around with a pair of secateurs in the glovebox...

Give us our daily bread...

When I set out to attempt inner-city self-sufficiency exactly one year and one day ago, I expected I’d come to crave a few costly delicacies – truffle-infused oil, foie gras, caviar (just kidding). Oddly enough, the grocery item I missed most was… crackers. I love crackers with any kind of cheese, or simply with thick slices of tomato and plenty of salt and pepper. Salada crackers are my favourite, but at $2.65 a box, that equates to more than a quarter of my weekly supermarket budget.
Last year I attended a cheesemaking course to learn how to make my own cheese, and I can grow my own tomatoes – but I’m yet to work out how to make crackers!
But now I don’t care – because I can bake my own bread and eat bread and cheese instead! In the spirit of sustainability, I’ve “recycled” (some might say pilfered) my mum’s old, abandoned breadmaker machine. I’ve always liked the idea of homebaked bread but I’m hopeless at kneading dough so I figure the breadmaker and I can develop a mutually beneficial relationship. In return for dusting it off and saving it from an almost inevitable one-way journey to the rubbish tip, it can do the hard work and make the dough for me. Then I’ll take over and bake the loaf in my barbecue. (This may seem crazy, given that you can bake the loaf in the, err, breadmaker, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who doesn’t like the flavour or texture of those fat loaves, with their weirdly uncrusty crusts, that breadmakers produce). Plus, my favourite type of bread is Ciabatta, and breadmakers don’t make long, crunchy loaves.
Because I’ve never made a loaf of bread in my life before, last night I followed the instructions on a bag of Elfin wheatmeal bread mix (just add yeast and water) and turned out a wonderful ball of soft, dough. I kept it in the fridge overnight (not conventional, but it was nearly midnight by the time the dough was done) and then I baked it this morning, having first rolled it in dried rosemary, sage and thyme from my garden.
I’ve got one of those six-burner barbecues with a hood, which probably sounds excessive, but I don’t actually have an oven in my house. (I live in what is, technically, a giant converted garden shed with delusions of being a designer apartment.) I bought my barbecue (from The Warehouse) at the end of 2006, in preparation for my year of self-sufficiency, and it has done me proud. I’ve roasted a whole chicken in it, baked a ham, baked cakes, muffins, pizzas and pies in it – and now I’ve baked bread it in too.
The wholemeal loaf came out looking, well, just like a bought one. The sort of loaf you might buy from an artisan baker – round, lightly brown on top and perfectly soft in the middle. I ate the first slice slathered liberally with a spoonful of last summer’s elderberry and strawberry jam.
Buoyed by my beginner’s luck, I decided this afternoon to attempt my first loaf of ciabatta. I found this recipe online and followed it almost to the letter (I couldn’t find bread flour at the supermarket so I bought a bag of Edmonds Homestyle Soft White Bread Mix and mixed it half-and-half with plain flour, which is half the price).
The recipe told me the dough would be “quite sticky and wet” but to be honest, when the breadmaker beeped to let me know it had done its bit, I figured I was doomed. It was closer in consistency to that gloopy glue I used to make out of flour and water for paper mache projects at primary school. But rather than concede defeat, I poured it out of the breadmaker and into a roasting dish to “rise”. It didn’t, although it did seep to the edges. I left it for an hour, by which time it was more like the consistency of pond scum. What the heck, I figured that if it was a complete disaster, at least I’d have made a long, large, flat cracker-type loaf. Not so much a bread stick as a bread sheet!
Using a large spoon, I scooped half the gloop onto a floured baking tray and left it for another 15 minutes, while I waited for the barbecue to heat up to 220˚C. (I turned the four side burners on, but left the middle two off to create a convection effect). The recipe also suggested spritzing the loaf with water, but I filled up a small baking tray with water and popped that under the barbecue lid to create the necessary humidity to stop the loaf simply turning into a rock-hard block.
But whadda ya know? When I lifted the lid a few minutes later, the gloop had transmogrified into something resembling… a loaf of ciabatta! A flattish ciabatta, but a ciabatta nonetheless!
I still had half the gloop left, so I figured I’d get a little fancier with my second loaf. I sprinkled dried homegrown herbs and sea salt over it and then poked little sprigs of rosemary all over it. Voila! I’m an artisan baker in my own right!

Cheers to 2008!

Happy New Year! I've just toasted the arrival of 2008 with a glass of homemade elderflower champagne. (I bottled my first-ever batch of this fabulously fizzy drink just before Christmas and it's now fermenting nicely in my garden shed.) My garden has two absolutely huge elders (Sambucus nigra, ) on one of my boundaries and last year I harvested buckets and buckets of the dark purple berries for jams, puddings, crumbles and cakes. I thought I was getting pretty darn imaginative on the culinary front... yet everytime I told anyone that I had elderberries in my garden, they'd say "Have you ever made elderberry wine?". I had to confess, that no, I hadn't. But 2008 brings a new year, a new season... and a new crop of elderberries. So later this month, when the elderberries are ripe, I'm going to make a case of elderberry wine to sup in winter.
But first, I thought I'd also try making elderflower champagne. It's only mildly alcoholic - it's more like ginger beer (but without the ginger) - and it literally tastes like you've bottled the scent of a summer's day. Delicious! My first batch is quite syrupy so I think I might dilute it a little with a hint of soda water. I was going to make a second batch but unfortunately most of the flowers have now developed into small berries.
Here's the recipe I used. It's very simple - the hardest part is finding elderflowers to pick as they're officially classified as a weed in most parts of the country. Start by picking as many flowers as you can. I used about 20 flowerheads, although some of them were reasonably small. You'll need a large plastic bucket with a lid to make it in. The ingredients are: 10 litres of water, 1kg of white sugar, 4 tablespoons of white wine vinegar and the zest and juice of two lemons. Mix together in the bucket, then add the elderflowers. Pick off any bugs but don't wash the delicate white flowers as you'll bruise them. The flowers have their own wild yeasts so you don't need to add any. Put the lid on the bucket and leave to steep for 24-48 hours, stirring every few hours. Then strain through a sieve and pour into sterilised, airtight bottles. Leave for a few weeks before drinking.