Introduction | Wombat News | Hairy Nose Day
Books for Kids | Recent Awards
Book News and A Day to Remember
Schedule for the next 10 months
The April Garden
Gardening on a Budget
A Few Recipes:
Hairy Nose Truffles
Apple Jelly
Chocolate Beetroot Muffins
Grape jellies
Tomato Sauce
Tomato Jam
Intro
6 am. Woken up by tree crashing down on the hill behind the house. Realise that 1 litre of water = 1 kg = heavy tree tops after summer’s rain.
6.05. Go back to sleep.
6.10 Bryan gets up. May as well get up too.
6.20-8 am. Lug fallen branches to the avocado trees and mulch. The soil under the trees ‘eats’ even big thick trunks, helped by the lyrebirds who scratch it all up to help it break down. The lyrebirds aren’t trying to be helpful – lyrebirds don’t do helpful. They are looking for grubs and other goodies in the rich soil
8 am-9 am. Mooch around the bush a bit. Lots of new wombat droppings on the front stairs. A big owl pellet on the track. A Little Eagle glares at me till I stop staring at it. (Fair’s fair – I don’t like people staring at me when I’m having a break either).
9am. Shower. Breakfast. Pick veg and make soup for lunch.
9.30 am. Answer emails. Work.
1 pm. Lunch – the soup with Matt’s bread from Dojo bakery up in town. Eat fourth slice. Probably shouldn’t have.
1.30 pm. Work.
5.40. Pick avocadoes. Put dinner on.
6.30. Begin dinner. No Mothball wombat.
6.35. Still eating dinner. No wombat.
6.40. Have eaten half our dinner and no wombat has arrived, with perfect wombat timing, to interrupt us.
8 pm. Crash at the front door! It’s Mothball!
8.05. No it isn’t. It’s the possum sliding down the steep roof and landing on the top veranda then clambering down the pergola.
9 pm. Take a torch and search the orchards and the flat. A couple of strange wombats gaze at me curiously.
No Mothball.
It’s been four weeks now since Mothball last bashed the front door. I’m worried.
She’s an old wombat, about 17. I’ve never known a wombat here to live longer than 14. But the others all looked old when they died, loose droppings, skinny butts. Mothball still looked like a sumo wrestler, massive shoulders and big firm droppings and a temper that scared any wombat or wallaby at least 50 metres away.
But Mothball is also a wild wombat, even though she was reared by humans. When she was about eighteen months old she vanished into the bush for almost three years before she returned in a drought. She’s made daily visits almost every day since, but there have been several times when she’s been away for more than three weeks, especially as one of her favourite holes is over the creek.
The creek flooded – just a small flood – the week I last saw her. She waded through it, damp and annoyed, for a couple of days. The creek rose higher, the rain kept pelting down, and Mothball didn’t appear. Well-fed wombats like Mothball can sleep for sleep days and nights when it’s wet, emerging grumpy and hungry on night four.
But the creek is down to its normal level now- normal for when it’s flowing, as it’s dry apart from the deep pools much of the time.
Mothball has waded through large floods before – even leaving a wombat dropping on the rock sticking out of the froth and foam. Had she tried this time, and lost her footing, not realising she wasn’t as strong as she had once been, able to overcome the strength of the water with her unstoppable wombat charge?
Maybe, she is still across the creek, happily munching the lush grass, with no need to order humans to give her carrots or wombat nuts. The creek is still higher than normal, running cold and clear. Perhaps, when it’s colder, and the grass loses its nourishment, she’ll remember us.
There’ll be a scratch at the back door, and then a Thump! Whump! Screeeech! when she blames us for all the weeks – or months –that her humans have failed to give her dessert.
I hope so. Every night I’m waiting for the shriek and crash at the front door. Maybe one night we’ll hear it.
Books for Floods
Floods wash away so much that is loved. If you know a school, or a child, who has lost books in the recent floods, and think that a few books might help, please let me know at jackiefrench72@gmail.com and I’ll do what I can. Gifts can’t replace what’s lost, but can sometimes help by letting people know that our thoughts and hearts are with them.
Recent Awards and Shortlistings
It’s been a magic month for shortlistings – Nanberry: Black Brother White and Flood (with Bruce Whatley) have been shortlisted for the 21012 Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year awards. Flood is in the picture book section, and Nanberry in the Younger Readers. Both Nanberry and Flood are Notables, too. Flood has also just been awarded an International White Raven Award. Bruce’s The Littlest Refugee was also shortlisted.
Both Christmas Wombat (with the glorious Bruce of course) and Nanberry have been shortlisted in the Australian Book Industry Awards. Two books in each shortlisting is a bit like eating both the top and the bottom layer of a box of chocolates.
Book News
A Day to Remember, created with Mark Wilson, is in the shops now. It tells the history of Anzac Day decade by decade, which in a way is the history of Australia too.
Mark’s work is always extraordinary. This time it was so powerful that when I received his first thoughts I was unable to work on the book for three days, till my eye and heart was used to them. The faces of the children as they look at the Memorial, of the old man and his grandson, the despair and memory on the face of the woman in 1930, so that you know she has lost lover, brother, father perhaps, the image of the man in body armour cradling the body of a child.
My father-in-law landed at Anzac Cove, too. He never spoke of it. Every year he marched, increasingly bitter, with friends unemployed because of the Depression or with lungs or eyes rotted from mustard gas. The marches were mostly men-only affairs back then, as were the dawn services, in case crying women disturbed the silence.
My childhood saw the battered and weary of World War Two, men scarred in body and mind from Japanese prison camps or the Thai-Burma Railway, the mothers of my friends and my violin teacher, who had survived concentration camps.
Boys of my own generation marched away as conscripts to Vietnam, while I walked in anti-war demonstrations. As an historian I came up against determinedly uncooperative bureaucracy as I tried to check a list of places where Australian troops have been sent since the 1970s. While newspapers talk of Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan, few Australians know our defense forces serve as peacekeepers in places like Tonga, Cambodia, Somalia, Rwanda and Haiti. Peace is not easily won, or kept. But many do the best they can.
I’ve seen Anzac Day change from the grim-faced marchers of my childhood, to the years when it seemed as if Anzac Day might vanish except for a dedicated few, or when the Anzac Day marchers faced anti-conscription demonstrations and women with placards who demanded the right to march too. In the past two decades our reawakening sense of history has recreated Anzac Day yet again and each year the marches are larger, the commemorations broader. Anzac Day itself has been a catalyst for many people to discover Australian’s history, too.
Last Anzac Day I stood with friends in Braidwood’s main street. Children marched wearing their grandparents’ medals. A poodle sat next to us, a sprig of rosemary in its collar. A kid called out, ‘Daddy’ as her father passed. Most of us, I think, wept a little as the Last Post played.
And we remembered.
For some it was a celebration of military tradition. Others in the crowd were pacifists or felt that Australians shouldn’t be in Afghanistan. It didn’t matter. There are many different memories that make up Anzac Day now. We remembered fathers, husbands, aunts, sons, daughters and grandfathers; those who our country sent to war and then forgot, when they returned home damaged; the starving and tortured who struggle towards refugee camps; all who suffer in war, or give their lives to try to make things better.
I wrote A Day to Remember because by honouring the suffering and sacrifice of others we find the gift of empathy ourselves. On this one day of the year, it is good to stand together, and remember not just the past, but why we need to remember, too.
PS The first edition of A Day to Remember sold out before it was released. If wasn’t not in the shops when you looked before, it should be back there now.
Other books
Have just finished the final pages of Pennies for Hitler, the companion volume, rather than the sequel, to Hitler’s Daughter, and Dingo, the story of a bony boy, a rubbish dog and Australia’s first dingo from whom possibly all other dingos are descended. Pennies will come out in June, Dingo in August.
Christmas Wombat seemed to vanish from the shops the week after it hit the bestseller list, which I hope means that they have all sold. I’m not sure how soon it’ll be reprinted, but I’m sure it’ll be well in time for next Christmas.
The last novel to hit the book shelves was Nanberry: Black Brother White – the story of four extraordinary people in the early NSW colony: Surgeon White, who hated Australia, loved a convict girl, a loyal father not just to his white son but to the black one he adopted; Rachel, who escaped the gallows to become the richest, most loved woman in NSW; Andrew, their son, who became a hero of the Battle of Waterloo, finally coming back to Australia; and Nanberry, orphaned by the smallpox, who would stride between the white world and the black, as a sailor in the Merchant Navy and a Cadigal warrior and leader of his people.
It’s as accurate as I can make it, two hundred years after it all happened. But it did. They were heroes, incredible and they need to be remembered.
Other books: A Waltz for Matilda (perhaps my favourite book) came out about eighteen months ago, as did A Year in the Valley, a book (for adults) about life here with the wombats and the trees and garden and friends. Queen Victoria’s Underpants is the (almost) true story of how Her Majesty’s underpants led to freedom for women.
The revised Chook Book is in the shops too now – twice as big as the original edition and much changed and updated. It’s all you ever wanted to know (and probably a bit more) about how to keep chooks in your backyard or at school.
Schedule for the Year to Come
This is what the calendar has so far, but there are already another half dozen trips pencilled in, as well as many other commitments. There are always last minute things I have to do too. It’s unlikely I can add in more school, library or community talks in 2012, unless they are near to somewhere I’ll be already. I’ll also be ACT Library Ambassador for the 2012 Year of Reading.
April 21st: Launch of A Day to Remember in Brisbane, 2-3.30 pm at the MacArthur Museum, Edward Street, RSVP to info@booklinks.org.au. Bookings essential.
April 28th: Dinner and talk at Moruya to celebrate the new mine conditions. It’s on Saturday, 28th April, 5.30-10.00 pm at the C.W.A. Hall, Queen Street, Moruya. Cost: $30.00/head. Tickets will be available from Moruya Books, 9 Church Street, Moruya Bicycles 10 Ford Street and Rustic pantry, Vulcan Street, Moruya.
Or contact Anne Marrett on 44737530 or at eurobodallagreens@yahoo.com.au.
May 5: Opening of Monkey Baa’s new theatre at Darling Harbour, Sydney, with the first night of the play version of Tim Winton’s The Buggerlugs Bum Thief. Susanne Gervais and I will be there dressed in our glad rags.
May 7, 8, 9, 10: Talks in Brisbane. Contact Helen Bain at Speaker’s Ink for bookings. Helen Bain helen@speakers-ink.com.au
Friday May 11: Brisbane, 9.30 National Hairy Nose Day and launch of the new Hairy Nosed Wombat educational web site, at Bunyaville Environmental Education Centre, Queensland. I’ll talk for forty minutes to an hour about endangered species; why helping one species can help others; what ‘help’ can mean, from fundraising to science to politics; and all about wombats.
The talk will be suitable for students aged eight years and upwards, including high school students. All Queensland students are asked to become Hairy-Nosed Heroes in three simple steps:
- Put on a Hairy Nose and take a photo.
- Write a Wish for Wildlife.
- Send the photo and wish to The Wombat Foundation (using the email address: enquiries@wombatfoundation.com.au).
Photos and wildlife wishes will be placed on The Wombat Foundation’s website to commemorate the first Hairy-Nosed Day. The Wombat Foundation is the not-for-profit organisation dedicated to saving the Northern Hairy-Nosed Wombat, Queensland’s most endangered mammal. The Foundation’s website is: www.wombatfoundation.com.au.
May 17: Workshop at Marymead, ACT.
May 18 ABIA Awards, Sydney
June 4. Talk and video chats with regional schools from Taronga Zoo, Sydney. Contact the Zoo for more details.
June 5: Talks at the Australian Jewish Museum, Sydney.
June 13 and 14: Adelaide Writer’s Festival, S.A. and other talks at schools in the next couple of days.
Monday 9 July: Keynote lecture at the Australian Literacy Educators Association Conference, Sydney.
July 21-25: Curtis Coast Literary Carnivale, Gladstone, Queensland.
August 12: In Perth/Fremantle for the West Australian Association of Teacher Assistants Conference and possibly doing a few other talks once I’ve gone that far.
August 20-23 (Book Week): Talks in Brisbane. Contact Helen Bain at Speaker’s Ink for bookings.
August 25-30: Melbourne Literary Festival, including two family days on the 25-25th. .
September 3, 4, 5: Three days’ talks in Melbourne. For details or bookings contact Simon O'Carrigan at Booked Out simon@bookedout.com.au.
October 2-4: Possibly a conference in Perth – still to be confirmed.
October 24: Children’s Day, ACT.
October 25-27: Fremantle, WA for the Fremantle Children’s Literature Centre’s Celebrate Reading Conference.
November 10 and 11: Four Open Garden workshops here. Bookings and details are from the Open Garden Scheme though, not us.
November: A couple of days in Lithgow, NSW – details still being worked out. Contact the Lithgow Library if you or your school would like to be part of the visit.
The April Garden
I am writing this with a mild case of flu, with a fuzzy head and a novel that’s at draft stage and is yelling for me to get back to it. (You know a novel is working when you’d rather revise it than read the book by your bedside.)
So here is an old ‘April gardening’. That is one of the perks of garden writing – there’re may be seasons of wet or dry that take years or decades to pass, but within them, April is still April.
So here it is.
April
I love autumn: blue sky and purple shadows and a gentle, gold light. In autumn the soil cools down and things start growing. Autumn flushes are as marked as spring flushes. Fruit swells as much in a week as it did in the previous month and new soft shoots appear all over the place.
Don’t clean up the garden. Leave those corn stalks, radish-going-to-seed and patches of weeds alone. The weeds probably won’t seed or run about till spring anyway – and they’ll protect the soil and help insulate your plants.
Gardeners who recommend you spend your peaceful winter months ‘tidying up the garden’ just have a fetish for straight rows and nice chocolaty, bare earth. This may help their spirits but it won’t help the garden. Gardens are wasted on people with a passion for sweat and blisters. Gentle pottering and a bit of contemplation are more effective than maniacs with mattocks.
Autumn is the time to prepare for the hungry gap. The hungry gap is spring to early summer. It’s the time when you have eaten most of the surplus from last autumn – the apples, pumpkins, old carrots and parsnips in the garden – but the new season’s crops are still months away from maturing.
A few hundred years ago the hungry gap was the starvation time, the scurvy and plague time, when the weather was warming up but people’s diet was still poor.
If you don’t have enough crops in by now you will either be hungry or you’ll have to go shopping at the supermarket in spring.
Anything you plant now must either be quick-maturing, or the sort of plant that will go quickly to seed as soon as the weather heats up: like peas, cauliflowers, and broccoli – the sprouts and pods you eat are the immature seed heads. Plant to eat them in spring. Start putting in brown-skinned long-keeping onions now. If the soil is still warm enough to sit on, put in winter lettuce, winter radish, Chinese mustard, kale, corn salad, mitsuba, mizuma, Japanese turnips and swedes in temperate areas.
The carrots, celery, silver beet, etc. you planted last spring will have to last you till the next one, the pumpkins and melons ripening on the vine will be stored through winter, the cauliflower and other brassicas should be steadily maturing. Plant pots of herbs and artichoke suckers. Coriander rushes to seed in hot weather – try it now! Plant seedlings of broccoli, Brussel sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, Chinese cabbage, lettuce, leeks, mustard, silverbeet, spinach, seeds of broad beans, onions. In frost-free areas you can also plant beans, capsicum, parsnips, carrots, beetroot, scorzonera, burdock and potatoes.
Plant evergreen fruit trees. Start checking catalogues for the deciduous fruit trees you want to plant in winter – or you may have to stick with the nursery selections.
Harvest. All the ‘year-rounders’ (like celery, silver beet, carrots and beetroot) plus Chinese cabbage and the last of the summer vegetables. Chokos will be fruiting now, even in cool areas. Dig up kumaras, occa, cassava, taro, yacon, or Jerusalem artichokes. Potatoes should be ready too.
Now is the time to dig up ginger root, native ginger roots, turmeric roots, orris root, galangal root, arrowroot and horseradish. Stir fry the first mature chilacayotes with garlic, ginger and soy sauce.
In colder regions autumn is the harvest season, frantic with bottling. Where I live, most harvests are in summer. Autumn harvests are gentler: late apples, late pears, pomegranates, medlars, quinces. The fruit is full of summer sun without that almost frantic, fermented sweetness that crops get in high summer.
This is the time for gathering whatever will be spoiled by winter cold: green tomatoes to make into green tomato pickle, and immature cucumbers and pumpkin to slice and stir-fry.
Pomegranates, medlars, pears, Valencia oranges, lemons, early limes, olives, late figs, quinces, Granny Smith and other ‘medium late’ apples, passionfruit, tamarillos, late grapes, chestnuts, walnuts, persimmons, grapefruit, guava, feijoa, strawberry guava, carob, chestnut, fig, Brazilian cherry, pomegranate, guava, Jakfruit, early calamondins, lillypillies, olive, kerriberry, late strawberries, raspberries, bananas, avocados, Irish strawberry-tree fruit, melons, pistacios and pecan will all be ripening now.
Ripening immature vegetables. Pull up tomatoes, capsicum, vines, etc. with as much soil as possible. Hang them in a shed or under the verandah. The crop will continue to ripen.
Even green tomatoes will keep ripening on newspaper indoors – check for bad ones often. Don’t dig root crops till you’re going to use them – they’ll be sweeter for the cold. If the ground may freeze, mulch over them or try to shelter them with tall plants around them. Move some potted plants next to them – I use a prolific climbing geranium in pots to protect small vulnerable plants.
Other jobs. This is the time to think about last-minute seed saving. Transplant any carrots, parsnips, etc. which you may be saving for seed into a less used part of the garden should they be in the way where they are.
Transplanting them now will only make them go to seed quicker. Stake them well: they’ll get top heavy when the seed heads form and may fall down, causing the seed to rot or sprout prematurely.
Think about green manuring unused ground to prepare it for spring – clearing weeds, fixing nitrogen, and adding humus: lucerne, broad beans, peas and field peas.
Gardening on a Budget
Gardens needn’t cost the earth. In fact a garden needn’t cost you anything at all.
My garden has grown from seeds and cuttings from friends’ gardens, given and grown with love and memories. It mostly feeds itself, weeds itself and does its own pest control. And even though these days I love buying new plants to test how they grow, I know there is no real need to ever spend a cent on my garden
And you needn’t either.
Free Plants
Plants grow from seeds or cuttings – and neither need cost anything all. As long as your vegies and flowers aren’t hybrids (check the label) you can plant their seed. The result may not be exactly the same as the parent, but in all my years of growing flowers and vegies from seed I’ve only ever had one melon that tasted … well, of nothing much. Everything else has been pretty true to type. And if you don’t mind even more fickle outcomes you can also plant the seed of hybrid plants – it’s just that the result may be even less predictable.
So when your flowers fade on the bush, wait for them to produce ripe seeds – and plant them. Let your best vegies go to seed too. The easiest seeds to collect are beans, peas, pumpkin, melons, lettuce, carrot, sunflowers … just give them a try. You have nothing to lose but a few minutes growing time. After all, they’re free.
Even fruit trees can be grown from seed. Deciduous trees, like apples or maples, will need ‘chilling’ first – i.e. to go through winter before they germinate. Cheat and put the seeds in the fridge for a month before you plant them. Evergreens, like citrus or wattles, can be planted straight away. Once again, not all will be exactly like their parents, but they’ll still be good. And despite the myths, after growing many hundreds of trees from seed I have never had one fail to fruit – often earlier than a grafted tree.
Seeds instead of seedlings
One packet of lettuce seed will give you about 2,000 plants. One punnet of lettuce seedlings will give you about 12 lettuces – and cost more than the seeds. Plants grown from seeds don’t suffer ‘transplant shock’ and so often produce or flower earlier than seedlings anyway.
I know it feels good to have a nice neat row of seedlings instead of a bare patch of seeds. But within three weeks your ‘seed’ patch will look better than the ‘seedling one’.
Cheap places to buy plants:
Try garden stalls at fetes, fundraising stalls. Join a garden club or a society for growing native plants – they often run seed banks for their members, where you can get cheap or even free seed, and members often swap plants or give away surplus plants too. Sometimes ‘Open Garden’ days have plants for sale as well.
Try Googling up the plant you want, too. There are now many online nurseries, or specialist nurseries that have a web site. Plants for sale are usually much cheaper than those at your local nursery, even with postage – and you may find some rare and wonderful darlings for sale too.
Warning: don’t buy ‘end of season’ throw-outs from nurseries or hardware stores or supermarkets. The plants are usually unthrifty, root bound and light-starved and may never do well. Often, too they are ‘bloomers’ whose flowering days are almost at an end. Always buy the strongest, most healthy plants you can find. Otherwise you may waste your money.
Breed your own bulbs and perennials
One bulb like daffodil or freesia (or a rhizome like iris or ginger lily, or a clumping plant like agapanthus) will produce two to six plants next year. Those two to six plants will produce two to six plants each of their own the year after… if you invest in just one daffodil, one agapanthus, one ginger lily, in a decade you’ll have a garden full – as long as you keep separating them as, if they grow too closely in a clump, the innermost may die.
For most of my gardening life I have only bought one of anything – one rambling rose, one hydrangea, one peppermint geranium/pelargonium. Now I have dozens of some, and hundreds of others, all grown from cuttings, seeds or division. That bank of dahlias was once a single tuber; the forest of tree dahlias, a single cutting; the hundreds of agapanthus around our trees once only four plants, the beds of hydrangea a single plant that gave a heck of a lot of cuttings. My red geranium was given to me by a neighbour; I’ve given away about 500 cuttings over the past 20 years, and it’s now growing from Norway to Tokyo.
Free fertiliser
My garden was once orange clay, and I was far too broke to buy fertiliser. It took years of scavenging everything from autumn leaves to old sawdust to make it the rich chocolate soil it is now. I grew green manure crops too – peas, beans and lupins that have bacteria on their roots that harvest nitrogen from the air and give it to my soil to feed my plants.
Turn all kitchen and garden waste into compost, either in a commercial fly-proof bin (rotary ones work best) or cut the bottom out of an old garbage bin. Wedge it firmly on the ground – if necessary dig around it – to stop pests or rats getting in, and use that instead. And you can also dig a ‘compost pit’, adding scraps then a 30 cm layer of dirt every day till the hole is full then plant a tree there next season.
My favourite free fertiliser though comes from backyard chooks – a perfect way to turn kitchen and garden scraps into fertiliser as well as the most delicious eggs you’ve tasted. We feed our chooks home-grown avocados, sunflowers, maize and amaranth seeds and greens. The chooks are given all day access to laying pellets, but they eat very little – there are too many other goodies like leftover last night’s lasagne and gone to seed carrots.
Free Mulch
Run the mower over weeds, garden prunings and autumn leaves to shred them and mix them with lawn clippings. Lawn clippings by themselves can form a close-knit mass that won’t allow moisture to penetrate; they can heat up too and kill young plants.
Offer to rake up neighbours’ autumn leaves too, and remember that every pile of weeds is really a pile of free mulch and plant tucker.
Free water.
You don’t need a tank to collect garden water – even a garbage bin and a small storm will give you enough to water your vegies the next day. Remember too that you don’t ‘use’ water when you bath or shower – you just borrow it. The recycled water from two baths or showers a day is enough to keep most gardens thriving.
Free pest control.
I grow masses of native grevilleas and year-round blooming salvias to attract birds and insect-eating predators like hoverflies. I don’t spray – I just let some members of my garden community eat the others
Free weed control
Weeds need space to grow. Cover all bare dirt with mulch, or plant it out AT ONCE with ground covers. I plant alyssum between my vegies, or pansies… both grow fast and don’t let the weeds get a foothold.
Plant to save money
Every time you decide to plant out that bare fence or bare patch in the garden, consider growing something that you want to eat. Many edibles are stunningly gorgeous too: a row of blue flowered garlic chives to edge the garden, a red leafed plum tree, red stemmed rhubarb, frilly red lettuces instead of flowers, or a ferny froth of Italian parsley.
Many years ago I decided I could never think I was truly broke as long as I had armfuls of flowers to fill the house, and to give to friends too, as well as baskets of limes and avocados.
Almost free pavers, cement pots, gnomes and garden furniture.
Yes, you can make them all. A single mum friend and her two under-ten sons made enough pavers to do their backyard in two days – and had lots of wet and grubby fun doing it. Second-hand materials bought at a recycling centre can be refurbished into garden sculpture or furniture or crazy pots. Work out what you want, pop down to the (free) library to get a book or two to tell you how to do it, then scavenge the materials.
Once you start THINKING about recycling it’s amazing what you can come up with. Our bird feeder is made of an old plastic pot and saucer; our light fittings are old baskets or cream containers. I’ve made compost in an old bathtub; our chooks lay in recycled 1990s computers. My fruit picker is made from an old broom handle; my plants are tied up with old stockings – the green ones look particularly fetching – or old lengths of hose.
Gardening brings you close to the earth. And growing your own plants instead of buying them at the nursery, recycling everything from bathtubs to compost to autumn leaves, brings you even closer to the rhythms and the friendship of the seasons.
A Few Recipes
Hairy Nose Truffles
100 gm dark chocolate
2 tbs cream or coconut cream
2 tbs butter or margarine
1¾ cups icing sugar (not icing mixture)
1 cup ground almonds
¼ cup cocoa
1 pack slivered almonds
4 strips of licorice or other whiskers to taste, cut into thin 10 cm strips
Optional extra: 3 tbsps of rum for adults-only hairy noses; half a cup chopped glacé fruit for rich fruit truffles.
Place chocolate and butter in the microwave for 30 seconds. Take it out and press – it should be just melted but hold its shape. (If you overcook it will turn gritty and horrible.) If not melted try another 20 seconds.
Stir in icing sugar and almonds and rum or glacé fruit if you choose to use them. Roll into balls, and roll each ball in cocoa.
Place the balls on a tray. Add two slivered almonds side by side for the giant nostrils, with whiskers on each side.
Store in a sealed container in the fridge.
Makes about 20 small or 15 large hairy noses.
Apple Jelly
1 kilo apples (any variety, including crab apples, but red-skinned ones give a clear red jelly)
white sugar
water
Slice but don't core or peel apples. Cover with water. Simmer till soft. Strain. I bung mine through a strainer, then pour that juice through a clean old stocking – the more finely you strain out the pulp, the clearer your jelly will be.
For every cup of juice add 1 cup of sugar. Simmer, stirring often, till a little dabbed on a cold saucer turns into jelly. Pour into clean jars at once and seal.
Blackberry and apple jelly: Replace half the apples with blackberries, or loganberries, mulberries or raspberries etc.
Rose petal, lemon leaf, mint or other herb jellies: Add mint leaves, rose petals, scented geranium/pelargonium leaves, lemon or lime leaves, lemongrass stems, a few dried cloves, hunks of fresh ginger root etc to the final stage of jelly simmering. Use a slotted spoon to hoik them out before you pour it into jars. This technique will give you exquisite and very interesting jellies – the savoury ones are good with cold meat, the sweet ones stunning with scones et al.
Chocolate Beetroot Muffins
Very rich and chocolatey!
1¾ cup SR flour
2 large beetroot, cooked and peeled, and either pureed or grated (or carrots or pumpkin)
1/3 cup cocoa powder
1 cup brown sugar, well pressed down
2 eggs
1/3 cup buttermilk
1/3 cup canola or safflower oil – some blandish oil
Heat oven to 200C before you begin mixing, or your muffins may not rise well. Mix all gently. Place in greased muffin trays or cups. Bake for about 12 minutes or till they bounce back when you press the tops lightly. Don’t overbake. The cooking time with vary according to the size of the muffins- large ones will take longer to cook.
Grape jellies
These are delicate and incredibly good.
Take several bunches of grapes and boil them with a very little water until the grapes begin to burst. Take off the flame, press the grapes through a sieve, and reduce the pulp by half through rapid boiling.
Weigh what’s left and add the same weight of sugar and 250 g of apple pulp for every kilogram of grape juice. Cook this mixture until it begins to thicken and you can see the bottom of the pan as you stir. Pour it into a greased mould, and take it out when set. Dust with icing sugar, and store it wrapped in greaseproof paper in a sealed carton. These jellies can be sliced, or eaten whole with cream.
Tomato Sauce
6 kilos tomatoes
1 litre white vinegar
1 kilo chopped onions, sautéed till soft in a little oil
150 grams sugar
10 cloves chopped garlic
teaspoon ground ginger
pepper and salt to taste
Boil for two hours, strain through a sieve. Bottle. A little melted clarified butter or lard (the traditional sealer) or olive oil on top before sealing will help it to keep longer and keep the colour brighter.
Tomato Jam
Tomatoes are a fruit too and make wonderful jam.
1 kilo tomatoes
1 kilo sugar
grated rind of three lemons
12 peach leaves
Boil all except the sugar till soft and mushy; add the sugar. Boil till thick and a little sets in cold water – about half an hour. Bottle and seal.
This is lovely – like a very dark honey, quite unlike tomato. It's good on bread or crumpets; also good with cold meat or hot roasts.
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