Chapter 22: Christmas carrots and champagne calamities

one of our sunflowers destined to become part of our sunflower and pumpkin seed bread next week

Christmas and New Years have come and gone. Santa's reindeer enjoyed one of our very best purple carrots, and to celebrate the end of a fantastic year we popped open our first bottle of mulberry wine. It tasted nothing like wine should, in fact it tasted more like a rough whiskey. The kind of hard liquor that burns a hole in your stomach and puts hair on your chest. Not sure what went wrong there. None the less, we awoke alive on the other side of 2011. Perhaps it would make a better cleaning agent for burnt bottomed saucepans, blocked drains, a pesticide or even a biofuel for running our car...

There are only 8 days to go before our Funky Frontyard Farmer's challenge begins, when we attempt to feed ourselves for a full week almost entirely on what we have grown from our suburban block. Nature, unfortunately does not always work to such deadlines, and some things have not quite gone to plan. Last year we bagged at least 5kg of mulberries, our freezer and our children could not possibly fit in another single mulberry. This year, due either to the ridiculous amount of rain and lack of sunshine or our neighbours hacking off a major limb of the tree last year, we have experienced a mulberry famine, having picked less then a measly handful; Joe is berry upset.
Day after day Joe has been crawling around on the shed roof amongst the mulberry leaves, searching for any sign of new growth. It is one thing seeing your grown man climb a mulberry tree, it is altogether another thing to hear a grown man sobbing in a mulberry tree. Oh well, our mulberry tarts and smoothies for the challenge will simply have to be struck off the menu. On the upside, it means that we wont be able to make any mulberry wine this season. Shucks!

Joe's lamenting has extended beyond the mulberry tree and he also wanders forlornly amongst the citrus orchard, which is months away from fruiting. He sighs as he passes the green grapes, potatoes and capsicum, none of which are likely to be ready for the challenge. And yet there is still hope, the tomatoes have just started to turn red, the beetroots, carrots, pumpkins and zucchinis are all doing wonderfully, and the silverbeet is promising to be a staple... it makes a delicious topping on toast, lightly pan fried with fresh mushrooms, garlic, white wine, olive oil and a squeeze of lemon.



Turk's turban pumpkin's - coolest pumpkins in the patch

 Needless to say we are all feeling rather nervous about the success of our challenge but have defiantly chosen to press on, if only for the sake of loosing those Christmas kilos.

 Cash Crop - Off to Market
About a month ago, G took it upon herself to plant all of our silverbeet in the herb bed. Consequently, we have had so much silverbeet growing in our garden we can't eat it quickly enough. Even the chooks are over it. So, with too much Silverbeet to eat, Jo and I decided to head off to the Glenbrook markets and try our luck at selling it at a local produce market stall.

Our silverbeet was a success! With 6 big bunches to sell at $1 a bunch, we had sold 3 bunches before even reaching the stall. Wow! 3 bucks! Like they all say, its not about the money, although N and G oogled over our 3 gold coins with amazement that their parents were able to make money so easily.



Mushroom Success

A few weeks ago we decided to try our hand at growing mushrooms. We bought a mushroom kit from the local nursery and set it up in the garage where it is dark and cool. We have tried it in the past with no success, but this time, we have had excellent results, having already harvested 30 or more mushies, with plenty more to come.

Of course, with this recent success, Joe has plans to turn the garage into a boutique mushroom farm, having heard rumours that you can grow mushrooms from spent mushroom compost from industrial mushroom farms. After a spot of research, Joe has located a mushroom farm only 10 minutes away in an abandoned railway tunnel. stay tuned.



our home grown mushhies and silverbeet



breakfast, yum!



if your children won't eat their vegetables, lie to them...we told ours they were ice creams.

 Lavender Champagne - Part 2

4 lavender champagne bottles, sitting in the garage. 4 lavender champagne bottles, sitting in the garage. And if one lavender champagne bottle should accidentally explode, there'd be 3 lavender champagne bottles sitting in the garage...



Jo bottling the champ's


The Lavender champagne taste test opened with a bang last week. After one bottle exploded 3 days after being bottled, we were trepidatious in opening our homemade champs. The first 2 bottles were a little flat and tasted too sweet (too much sugar added - should have stuck to the recipe). But our last bottle went off with an impressive bang! So impressive in fact, that there is a dent in the ceiling and champagne still all over the roof. I guess we'll never know how good that last bottle would have tasted so we have deceided to make it again to find out.

Next week our challenge begins on Sunday the 9th January, and ends with a funky frontyard party on the following Saturday. We aim to post a blog each day of the challenge to let you know how things go.Stay tuned to read all about our challenge week and an exciting funky frontyard farmers finale announcement.  

chapter 21: 10 places to hide a goat

 During the week we made home-made cheese. Not only was it easy to make but it was even easier to eat, and we would like to share the recipe with you. Tasting very similar to fresh ricotta, it was made simply with lemons and full cream milk. It was light, creamy and it melted in our mouths, yet it also caused my husband to start acting strangely.

At first, Joe sat quietly on the couch in a brown study. next minute, I saw him outside with his measuring tape, then back indoors and on the laptop. He was up to something. Outside again pacing out the length of the back shed, then the car port, garage, and finally the chicken pen, before rubbing his hands together with seeming delight, and a big dirty grin.

"Darling, what are you up to?" I enquired. At first, Joe seemed sheepish... but on closer inspection, I realised my husband looked far more goatish!

"No way! we are not getting a goat!"

Joe paused to muster the most convincing rebuttal he could conjure whilst pretending to scrape chook poo from his boot. "But darling, it could live in here with the chickens, no one would have to know a thing about it. We could feed it silverbeet and lettuce from the garden, and any clothes that the children no longer fit into. And best of all, we can make more cheese!!!"

"So they eat clothes?" I queried.

"They eat anything!" He said.

Sufficed to say, as this conversation took place directly beneath my low hanging clothes line, I remained even less convinced.

"We are not getting a goat".

How to make cheese

Heat 2 litres of milk to approx 90 degrees, or a rolling boil (not bubbling). Make sure you keep stirring so as not to burn the milk. When heated remove from heat and immediately, but slowly add 5/6 tablespoons of fresh lemon juice (We actually used limes). Continue to stir slowly in one direction, and you will begin to notice the milk separating into curds (the lumps) and whey. Continue to stir for about a minute then cover and leave to cool for 2 hours.

After 2 hours, strain the curds and whey through muslin (like a baby wrap) or cheese cloth over a colander. The curds will remain and the whey can be discarded. Hang the cheese in the muslin over a sink to drain completely for another 3 hours.

Now it is ready for a taste test. Yum! You can season with salt, or for that matter anything sweet or savoury to your liking'. This recipe makes a ball of cheese about the size of a shot put, but not as heavy.



If you don't eat it all at once, refrigerate it in an air tight container. It lasts 4 or so days.

We used our cheese in salads and will be making more in a week or so to make stuffed zucchini flowers.



Lavender Champagne (part 1)

lovely bug adding to the mix



Steve spoons in the vinegar

Another little home-made number we had a go at this week was lavender champagne. We got the initial idea from an elderflower champagne recipe but being short of the key ingredient and after some research we found that lavender could make a good substitute.

A bit of bubbly is an essential for any celebration, and with our FFFC now only weeks away we needed a summer time champs to pop at the end of our challenge.

It only takes a few weeks to brew lavender champagne and so it was exactly what we needed. We're not sure if it will work or how it will taste but we are hoping when we pop our first bottle it conjures memories of long lost summers and searches for cicada shells but most of all we want to make sure it is alcoholic! This is why we decided to add more than the recommended amount of sugar, even though there is a strong chance that the bottles may explode due to the pressure. Its a risk we're willing to take.

Champagne anyone?

Lavender Champagne Recipe

Ingredients
100 lavender flowers
2 lemons
600 grams white sugar
250 grams sultanas
6 tablespoons of white wine vinegar
6 litres of water
1/4 teaspoon champagne/all purpose wine yeast

Remove the lavender flowers from the stems. Grate the zest of two lemons. Finely dice sultanas and mix all three ingredients together in a bole. Boil 1 litre of water, pour into a large bucket or tub (we used a carboy). Add sugar, lavender, lemon zest and sultanas and stir until sugar is dissolved. Add the juice of 2 lemons and white wine vinegar. Then add a further 5 litres of water and allow to cool until temperature is below 30 degrees. Add yeast, gently stir it in and cover with muslin wrap or carboy lid and airlock.
 Leave for 7 days at room temp then strain liquid into sterilised bottles and cap. The bottles need to be airtight. You could cork the bottles or simply use what we are using, clip lock glass bottles. Store for  a further 2 weeks. Taste and enjoy!

At least that is our plan. At the moment ours is still fermenting in the carboy. We intend to btle it  tomorrow and will let you know how it goes.

Last blog we said we were going to mull over our mulberries, intending to make something delicious from our multitudes of mulberries. Unfortunately our mulberries haven't quite come to the party yet but stay tuned. Instead we are going to take you right back to the birds and the bees and chat about hand-pollinating zucchinis.


pollinating Zucchinis and Pumpkins

 Our zucchinis are well and truly doing their thing and have produced nothing short of very eager flowers just sitting there waiting for Joe and his little paint brush to come pollinate them each morning. Zucchini's, pumpkins and other similar plants of the gourd variety have male and female flowers. In order to bear fruit, pollen from a male flower must travel to a female flower for pollination to occur, and thew fruit to grow. Usually the bees will do this for you, but as they have recently been dropping dead due to excessive mobile phone microwaves (at least that's what the communists want you to think), you may have to do it yourself to get results.

our Turk's Turban pumpkins successfully taking over the yard:)

You will need:

1 paint brush (Soft)

1 sunny morning

to be able to tell male and female flowers apart.

Its actually very simple. female flowers have a bulbous miniature fruit at their base, while the male flowers stand on a long thin stem. inside the male flower is the stamen, which is covered in pollen (when the flower is mature). take a brush and carefully collect some pollen on the end. (choose the strongest, sexiest male flower you can find).  Then transfer the pollen to the female flower, brushing it on the claw looking pod (pistil) in the centre of the open flower.

pollen from a male flower

You will know if the pollination is successful when the fruit bulb starts to swell after a few days. if the female fruit pod turns yellow and shrivels, then unfortunately, its an old spinster.


Time to get busy in the pumpkin patch with your paint brushes.





Chapter 12: Greenhouses, Recipes and Exploding Butterflies.

Chapter 12: Greenhouses, Recipes and Exploding Butterflies.

It was a sweltering 43 degrees here today and as the sweaty stench of newly laid cow manure permeated our t-shirts, there in the palpable humidity, time seemingly stood still as Jo and I shared a blissful moment of gardening satisfaction. We were standing inside our brand new greenhouse. Out there, beyond our plastic see through veneer, in the real world it was a mild 22 degrees and although it was tempting to savor the moment inside the greenhouse, if we had stayed in any longer, we risked fainting and collapsing in cow manure. It was hard to make out the expressions on our neighbours faces through the foggy poo condensation on the plastic walls but we are fairly certain they were looks of pure jealousy. That's right, we have a greenhouse and now we can grow tomatoes all year round.

A few weeks ago we took a trip to Bunnings and bought some lengths of pine and a roll of heavy-duty plastic for about $50. We have spent the last couple of weekends sawing and nailing the frame together, finishing with a lick of paint and attaching the plastic sheeting. We designed it so that the roof is detachable and can be rotated to allow for ventilation on warmer days and we left a sheet of the plastic detached from the sides for a door. It is tall enough to stand in and the base is 1m squared. The greenhouse is easily moved to where it is needed and currently we have it on top of one of our veggie patches in the front yard.

 After digging in two new bags of manure and mulch today we will let the bed lie for a week or two before planting tomatoes and basil as a test run.

Drying Rack

We have also been busy building a drying rack to dry flowers and fruits from the garden for preserving and storing. The idea was inspired when we stumbled across some recipes for making wine from flowers. You may remember that we were planning on making elderflower champagne, however, after a little research, we found that elderflowers actually grow on enormous trees, so we searched for alternatives. We came across several other recipes for making wines from flowers including hibiscus. As we have two hibiscus bushes in full bloom at the moment, we've been drying as many flowers as we can.

Flower wines
The recipe requires around 60 grams of dried hibiscus flowers to make about 4 bottles of wine. Rather than letting them simply shrivel in the sun, we decided to do the right thing and turn them into something everyone can enjoy... wine. There are plenty of other flowers that can be used for wine making, including sunflowers, lavender, marigolds, pansies, orange blossoms, daisies and many many more. Its also a novel way to make your own blends of unique teas for your next tea party. The wine takes at least 6-12 months to mature in the bottle.

Here is a pic of our drying rack suspended in the shade of our carport to maximise air flow. It is basically two frames with fly screen strtched over top and bottom and hinges to allow it to open.

Butterflies & Possums attack
But dear readers, not all has been rosey in the garden.

Picture this:

You wake up to a beautiful Autumn Saturday morning, sipping on your coffee in your bath robe and slippers as you draw back the blinds to let in the streams of morning sunlight. All seems peaceful...you can even forget about those oddballs across the street with vege gardens and that bloody new greenhouse. Not to mention that smell...what the hell is that smell? Surely they don't own a cow?!

And then you see him.

Tiptoeing pensively, staring upwards at the sky again,  holding that squash racquet above his head. "Darling, quick, it's our oddball neighbour again...the one with the greenhouse...he's swinging at the air with that racquet again and running all over his front yard...oh wait his wife has come out now, and she has a racquet too... what the hell are they doing?! Dont ever speak to them again!!!"

At least that's what we imagine our neighbours must say about Joe's new hobby. Lately, we have been inundated with a plague of white cabbage butterflies. The Green grub lavae have devoured all of our Pak-choy, swedes, and brussel sprouts, leading us to wage war on them. We struck upon the idea of swatting butterflies with tennis racquets as a arguably humane and organic alternative to pesticides... but more importantly, its so much fun. The only problem is that while we are having a great time swatting little butterflies, and cheering as they explode in delicate puffs of white, our neighbours across the way don't see them, only us, swinging racquets at thin air.
It was initially hard to pluck up the courage to swat openly infront of prying neighbours, but we figured that if you can stop for council pick up, you can shamlessly swat butterflies in your front yard too!

The little buggers have really made a mess of things, and set us back in our produce plans. We have also been waging an offensive on the ground, hand picking the grubs off what is left of our greens, and spraying them with garlic, chilli and soap spray.  We will aslo trial a vegetable oil spray, and let you know how it goes.

To add insult to injury, the local possums have either sat on or devoured all of the foliage from our new avocado tree, countless beans and the potatoes that were growing oh so well in potato bags. The potato leaves are supposedly poisonous, but this does not seem to deter them, we can only hope that it has given them a bad bout of gas. As a result, we will have to net our potato crop and start again.

Our potato plants a few  weeks ago before the possum attack......................and our potato plants now.

At this time of year the possums are extra hungry with the onset of winter. They will eat everything. Last year they ate every leaf off our chilli bush, and then the chillies, basil, lettuce, and anything that wasn't netted. In Spring, you can get away with planting a few things in the open. Winter is a different story.

Whats on the menu?
Something else that our obese possums may be interested in is some of our garden recipe ideas for our FFFC week. Jo and I have set about planning possible menu items that could be prepared using only garden produce and our extra items (flour, oil, coffee and milk).

Here are some of our favourite menu munchables.

for entrees:
Lets start with chilled potato and leek soup.
Sweet potato wedges with citrus and chilli marmalade.
Escargo, sauteed in parsley garlic and home made champagne. (See online poll).


for mains:
Gnocchi with roasted baby beetroots and basil pesto.
Home grown mezze platter; grilled capsicum and zuchinni, hommus, flat bread, fallafel, and dolmades made with vine leaves and bean stuffing.

Spicey Lentil burgers with cool mint and sliced cucumber.

Home made pasta with cherry tomatoes, basil and chilli.

Poached eggs with roast tomatoes, rocket and herbed flat bread.

and for desserts:

Macadamia and blackberry tarts, served with homemade lavender icecream.

Sweet pumpkin pie.

Lemon sorbet & Mulberry crepes.

Yummmmmmm....

Let's not forget a fine selection of home made mulberry wine, beers, flower champagnes, teas and Aldi's Brazilia coffee.

LLLLLLLivin' the high life.

Next week, we are going to talk about the theories behind Moon planting and our first attempt at making citrus jams from our grapefruits, oranges, and lemons. Also we will be preserving some of our summer herbs before the frosts, or possums, get them first.

N and G dressed up as scarecrows one morning to do their bit for keeping white butterflies out of the garden. N even put vegemite on his nose!??? A scarecrow tactic supposedly.

Lastly, dont forget to vote in our poll. In short, should Joe capture and prepare some of our healthy garden snails to trial a swish escargot dish? The verdict now lies in your hands. I won't be eating them though...

                 P.s. thanks to those of you who have given us feedback this week. Our highly coveted honorable reader of the week award, for starting not one, but four veggie gardens and an orchard, goes to Hayley! Hide your avocado tree from the natives, lest it suffers a simlar fate.

 cheerio gang.

Chapter 10: Help or we may starve in January.

Cooking from the Garden

This afternoon Joe took Noah and Georgia to the park to give me time to create an amazing culinary experience, albeit a trial but I felt so confident, a little too confident. Using shallots, eggs, zucchini, baby tomatoes, basil and chilli from our garden, I embarked on our first all-home grown meal prototype. Our plan is to practice making dishes that we can use during our F.F.F.C. I had envisaged that this dish would be a stuffed zucchini dish (our zucchinis are huge) that would be tasty but also look good on the plate.

Recipe: Stuffed zucchini omletty thingo's.

I started by cutting the zucchini into cross-sections of about 5 cm. Then I scooped out the inside of the zucchini leaving a 1 cm rim and a base. I then put these zucchini 'cups' in hot olive oil that was seasoned with salt, pepper and shallots. Cooking the base and then the top rim for about a minute each. I stuffed two of these with a mixture of diced zucchini, sliced baby tomatoes, basil and chilli and then the other two with the same ingredients as well as a beaten egg. I then put them in the oven and coooked them til egg was set and zucchini seemed well cooked.

Stuffed zucchini omletty thingies...mmmmmmmm.

After tasting both types of stuffed zucchini we agreed that the presentation was more of a winner. The zucchini tasted watery due to the way it was cooked and the flavours were too jumbled and eggy. We did however, enjoy a lovely 'sunset champagne' as I cooked. All you need for this little baby is champagne and a hibiscus flower (this one is from our garden). It doesn't add to the taste whatsoever but it looks fantastic and the bubbles do their job.

'Champagne Sunset',  just like a sunset goes down nicely, every afternoon...

There are alot of flowers that are edible from your garden including some varieties of hibiscus, marigold, gladioli, carnations, pansy, lavender and roses . We are going to use elderflowers to make our own champagne for the FFFC.

Any Suggestions?
As you all know our challenge starts in January and we have vowed to prepare food and drinks using only the produce from our garden (with the addition of milk, coffee, flour and olive oil, we are also sneaking in salt and pepper). After eating our stuffed zucchini thingos, it gave us food for thought. Coming up with interesting recipes from the garden is proving harder than we thought. We need your help and are calling on your culinary creativity to design a recipe for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Check out our last weeks 'walk around our garden' post to get some ideas of what's available in our garden. Or if you are filled with confidence of gastronnomical proportion you may want to try your hand at designing a recipe specifically for our final dinner party in January. We would love to road test any recipes you send us and will post them on the blog.


Home made Mulberry wineToday is actually quite a momentus day in our household. As you may have read in one of our earlier posts we have been trying our hand at brewing our own mulberry wine. After months of it brewing away, tenderly cared for by Joe's regular visits and singing, today we managed to fill 7 rosey red bottles of 'uniquely' tasting mulberry and grape wine. The initial taste-test wasn't poisonous which is promising. Fingers crossed in six months it will taste even better.

Our mulberry wine.

Alright gang, we are looking forward to hearing some of your recipes and trying them out in the weeks to come. Next week we are heading indoors to show some of our recent supercheap revamps to our kitchen and living area as well as some of our council pickup gems.  

Chapter 7: Woo Hoo for home-brew!

Woo Hoo for Home Brew!
Welcome back our fine followers. It seems that the number of followers is becoming less exclusive by the week, increasing by a staggering 130% in seven days! Is cyber space big enough to fit all 7 of you... who can possibly tell. There you are, all hot and smelly after building your compost heaps, crammed together in that possibly unventilated cyber space you currently share... you must be thirsty. They say you can get it milkin' a cow... I wouldn't know, but i believe you can get it brushing your hair, or even sitting on a chair. Yep, you can get it any old how... matter'o'fact I'm getting one now... right out of the fridge... a home brewed beer!

There is something inexplicably satisfying about drinking beer that you have brewed yourself and best of all, its remarkably cheap and easy! We are by no means guru's at brewing. In fact, we are relatively new to it all. But if we are going to survive this F.F.F.C., a home-brew is most certainly required at the end of each day of the challenge. Currently we have only brewed about 10 batches of beer, and we have also dabbled with making our own wine from mulberries and grapes that we have grown on our yard.


What do I need to make home brew?
There are plenty of resources online about brewing, but if you want to keep it simple, you can buy all that you need to get started from K-Mart or a home-brew shop for around $100 - $120. We actually found most of what we needed on ebay for around $60. Your bare essentials include a carboy (that's a big plastic container), an air-lock (a squiggly tube that sticks in the top of your carboy - it lets gas out but stops air getting in), a bottle topper, a cleaning agent such as bleach (cheap), bottles, lids, and the yeast/malt/brewing sugar kit (about $20). Once you are set up, a batch of 65 beers or so will only cost you about $25. That's pretty good for 2 and a half cases. A brew will take about 1 week before you can bottle it, and another 2 weeks minimum before you can drink it. It is better to leave it longer (6 weeks or so).

Mmm is for Mulberries
In our yard we are lucky enough to have an established and very old mulberry tree. It is huge! We are also very lucky to have a grape vine which produced some lovely grapes, although most of them were eaten by the Rosella's. Throughout spring and early summer, Joe and the kids spent hours picking mulberries. They are truly delicious. If you have the room, a mulberry tree is a must. Very low maintenance, grow from cuttings and grow quickly. Just remember, they can get big, so plant them in the right spot.

By the end of spring, we had collected about 5 kg of mulberries and stored them in deep freeze. We also managed to save about 1kg of grapes from the birds. The mulberries are delicious in pancakes, or heated into a syrup to drizzle over ice cream, or in apple and mulberry pie. mmmmm.

Mulberry wine
Also as it turns out, they are not a bad fruit to make wine from. After some research and a visit to a brewing store, we mushed our grapes and mulberries in the blender, added water, sugar, lemon juice and some cinnamon sticks and of course some wine yeast, to make our very first home made batch of mulberry and grape wine. How exciting! That said, wine takes much longer than beer to mature, and ours is still in the carboy, so we have no idea how it will turn out. Fingers crossed it will be a wonderful summer wine that we can serve at our end of challenge dinner party.

Why don't you give it a try? The whole beer thing is dead easy. Okay, you may not have a grape vine, but why not take a trip to the hunter and snip yourself a few cuttings before next spring? (because its illegal). Alternatively you could visit your local nursery or Bunnings and see what vines they have in stock. A grape vine costs about $10. Surprisingly, you can make wine out of lots of other fruits, including just about any berry, even kiwi fruits and bananas!

I know, its a big step... but we have already inspired you to have chooks, right? Not to mention a compost heap and a veggie garden, and your neighbours already think your a hippie. Hell, what does it matter if they call you an alco too. How awesome would it be to invite friends around for a dinner party and pop out a bottle of 2011 uniquely home made wine. And if it tastes really bad, don't despair, give it away as a Christmas present, someone will drink it.

What's growing in the Garden
OK, enough about the home brew, back to the garden. In preparation for the funky front yard challenge we have decided to expand out vegetable garden. With the onset of Autumn, we have planted several new crops, including Papa's broad beans, beetroot, pak-choy, bok-choy, swedes, more all season carrots, garlic, shallots, lazy-housewife beans, red kidney beans, chick peas, silver beat and radishes. Spinach, strawberries, turnips and leek are also good to plant now.

Hot Potatoes

Most exciting of all is our potato experiment. Some months ago, a friend mentioned the mysterious method of growing potatoes in sacks in order to increase the yield. The general idea is as follows. A sack or porous bag, such as an old potato sack is rolled down so that it is only about 20cm deep. Add soil and 2 or 3 potatoes (eyes facing up). As the potato plant grows, unravel the bag by 10cm or so and add more soil, leaving the top of the potato plant exposed. Continue this process until the bag is full. Throughout the process the potato plant is tricked into growing new tubers, growing far more potatoes than usual.

We thought we would give it a try. If it works well, we can start a potato bag or two every month and work out how many we would need to grow. Potatoes take about 120 days to mature, and can be grown almost all year round in temperate conditions. Traditionally they are planted from about July through to December, although this will vary depending on your climate.

Potatoes are super easy to grow, but it is recommended that you don't plant them in the same soil again for 3 years to prevent diseases building up in the soil. This is another benefit of planting in bags. The soil can be tipped out and used elsewhere. Potatoes are good companions for cabbage/corn/peas/beans. Garlic and French marigolds are good at preventing pests and diseases with potatoes, and nasturtiums help improve their growth.

We took a trip to one of those hippie organic produce shops in Katoomba last weekend, and did our best to blend in with the tie-die and long, naturally greying heads of hair cleaned only with blossom oil and herb extracts. To their benefit, and ours, they had a wonderful range of organic fruit and vege and dried beans and grains. The purpose of our visit was to select seeds, and vegies to plant for the winter. We left with some lovely Dutch cream, Kipfler and Pontiac potatoes which we have used in our potato bags. You might be wondering why you would bother growing your own potatoes when you can buy them relatively cheaply from the shop? Just wait til you try your own home-grown ones, oven-roasted, drizzled in olive oil, cracked pepper and sea salt, totally more delicious than anything you have ever bought. Home-grown potatoes store for much longer than those you buy as well.

Bags of poo

Joe and Noah also took a trip down into the Richmond farming district in search of horse manure for the garden. If you live near any farms its worth doing a poo-patrol. The occasional farm will sell their manure for about $2 a bag. Big, heavy, 30kg bags of poo. For 20 dollars, you can fill your entire car with 300kg of poo for the garden and drive home with the windows open and a satisfied smile on your face. If you live near the Richmond district. Our top poo stops are on Londondary road and The Driftway. Use well rotted manure in your compost, or dig it into your garden beds before planting hungry vegetables such as pumpkins and tomatoes. For the brave hearted, make a potent poo-tea and use to fertilise the garden every week or two.

There you go. You have no excuse to pay extortionist prices for beer or poo ever again.

Next week, we will give you a tour of our funky frontyard garden, and look at some crops in more detail, such as the our super spicey chillies, purple carrots, and blueberries which are all wonderfully high in anti-oxidants. We might even share with you where to buy such rare heirloom vegetables right here from your very own computer.