(Happy) New Potato

Rooting up potatoes

potato head

Happy 2014! At Rumpty Doo we spent the first day of the year with the  family Farrugia rooting up our potato patch on a drizzly South Gippsland day... and weren't we in for a surprise! After largely neglecting the poor paps (I think I may have watered them about twice) you can imagine our astonishment when we started to uncover some enormous specimens of Solanum tuberosum. In fact, after weighing up each variety we found we had close to 40 kilos of potatoes from two small patches, with very little work! We're now entertaining fantasies of a career as potato farmers, or at least thinking we might try saving seed this year, although we have had people warn us against such a technique as it can lead to the spread of disease.
We grew six heritage varieties - Royal Blue, Nicola, King Edward, Pink Eye, Kipfler & the flamboyantly named Mozart (which yielded far less than the other varieties so we're hoping it makes up for its low yield in excellent taste).
With such a bounty there was nothing more for us to do than crack out the peelers and start making a batch of gnocchi! We used our bumper crop of Royal Blue (weighing in at 9.9kg) and they made a pleasantly soft gnocchi. Their deep blue skin gives way to a creamy yellow flesh when peeled, so, sadly our gnocchi was not purple!

NB: When making gnocchi the Family Farrugia swear by Stephanie Alexander's recipe.

Royal Blue

gnocchi chop

Broadly speaking

A dinner harvest

We have broad beans. So many broad beans. Can you ever have enough, we thought, way back in Autumn when we planted out four large beds of Vicia faba? Broad bean pasta, broad bean dip, broad bean salad, broad bean felafel... the possibilities were endless, or so we thought. But, used to crappy inner-city Melbourne soil we weren't quite prepared for what would happen to the seeds we've saved faithfully for the last 5 years when we planted them in South Gippsland.
In short: they went mental. Our garden is now home to huge, towering bean stalks of jack-and-the-giant proportions. And of course, now they're fruiting. But as well as providing a bountiful (if tiring) source of food for us humans, the beans are providing much needed nectar and pollen for our bees and shelter for our chooks who have created little hidey-holes amongst them (without, amazingly, totally destroying them). Not only that but I have found an ingenious way to trick people (N) into eating lots of broad beans, and this is: pick them early (when pods are no longer than 12cm) and use the tiny beans as "peas".


Our hen, Bean, investigates her namesakes, while I misbehave with a bean.

Maude's Broad Bean Pasta

200g wholemeal pasta, cooked until al dente

1kg small (>12cm) broad beans in their pods

1 small onion, diced finely

1 tbsp butter

Handful of fresh greens (silverbeet, sorrel, spinach)

Lemon juice

Parmesan

Salt to taste

Cracked pepper

Olive oil

Method: lightly sautee onion in butter. Shell the beans, and add to the pan cooking for a minute longer. Add greens and sautee a further minute. Turn off the heat, squeeze through lemon juice, drizzle over olive oil, cracked pepper and salt to taste. Toss through pasta and serve with grated parmesan.

Wormholes

As bare-root season comes to a clattering halt we've be doing our darndest to get as many fruit trees as we can in the ground, which naturally has involved digging many, many holes. Digging holes, while exhausting work, is also kind of fun. You get to dig up all sorts of exciting things like the charred remains of bush fires from the 19th century or giant earthworms. Yes, giant earthworms are a bit of a South Gippsland "thing", or so we've discovered lately via Melita Rowston's new play which we saw last week at the Malthouse.  Melita's play "digs up" the zany and slightly unbelievable history of the Giant Earthworm Festival held in Korumburra during the 1970s and 80s (think hundreds of tiny school children carrying a giant pink plastic earthworm puppet ridden by Daryl Somers down Main St kind of zany and you're halfway there).
But I digress.
Back to fruit trees. So far we've popped in half a dozen varieties of heritage apples, a couple of figs and some lovely red mulberries which have been bursting to go into leaf. If you're new to planting fruit trees it can be somewhat of a daunting task. Here's how we do it, the way that was shown to us by Jo from Kahikatea Farm, and so far all fruit trees seem rather happy:

Step one
Dig a big square hole, twice as wide and deep as the diameter of the roots on your tree. You want to encourage the roots down and outwards, which is why a square is better than a circle. Keep your topsoil in a separate pile to your subsoil.

Step two
Pop most of the subsoil back in the bottom of the hole. Cover with a layer of topsoil and then shovel in a good few lashings of nice compost (we used well composted pig manure). Mix a little so that the compost integrates with the topsoil.

Step three
Add more topsoil, and build it into a conical mound - you don't want the roots touching any of that compost or they'll burn. Sit your fruit tree on top of the mound and see if its about the right height at ground level.

Step four
Spread out roots into the corners of the square gently. Remember, roots don't really like being handled that much.

Step five
Fill in your hole with remaining topsoil. Gently stamp down the soil around the tree - you want the soil to be compact around the roots so that they don't oxidise - this is what kills young roots more than anything else.