Garlic Planting, More on Mustard

A big day in the garden today. Jean is the chief Garlic planter - I'm too rough and ready. While she was away last week three panels of one of the garden beds was prepared with chopped green manure and compost. Now Jean adds Lime and Sulphate of Potash as recommended in one of the gardening books. Then the bed is gone over with a small hand fork to ensure a finer tilth. She measures out distances and lays down the first grouping of bulbs to see how they will fit without crowding. We plant a little closer than most. The soil is rich and the closeness will reduce the weeds.

There are 13 groups of Garlic to plant. The first four groups fill the three panels with 177 cloves. Jean takes a break to wash the dogs while I chop green manure in another two panels and fork in loads of compost. With the dogs done she returns to perform the final preparation and continue planting. It's obvious that she will need more panels to complete planting all 450 cloves. There is some spare space at the other end of the bed. It gets a good weeding and a really heavy application of compost. Later in the day she found herself a foot short of a finished task and dug over the last little bit herself. It was a big job this year and we are both very pleased to have completed such a large and important task.

Almost the entire bed devoted to Garlic.

When the garlic is reaching maturity the watering needs to be stopped to enable the corms to fully set. Having an almost full bed of Garlic will make it easier to stop automatic watering and hand water the couple of panels that hold other plants.

In the mean time the Broccoli needed attention. The plants had grown sufficiently large enough to allow the pesky Peacock to continue his leaf pruning over the existing mesh guards. resurrecting some tall mesh panels from storage an exclusion zone is installed.

Chewed

Protected

The Orchard and Vineyard are heavy with Autumn growth and the ride on mower is given some exercise. While out and about one of the large silage one ton bales which we chainsawed into four sectors is broken up and various garden beds get a heavy application of mulch. All part of the plan to reduce watering needs next Summer.

MUSTARD.
When making mustard always use cold water/verjuice/wine/vinegar when adding to Mustard powder. There is a chemical reaction that occurs producing the pungent odour and sharp taste. If  using warm or hot liquid the burning sensation remains bur with a slight bitterness and complete lack of flavour. If you cook Mustard the pungent overtones are lost.

Dijon Mustard, Dungog Excursion, Mushrooms

Using a recipe from The Compleat Mustard I compounded a Dijon Mustard minus a few things that weren't in the pantry like Tarragon and Chervil. Its been soaking in Verjuice for about 48 hours. Yesterday it had absorbed all the juice and a little more was stirred into the mix.

Today it went into the Kenwood Chef blender. It's pretty thick and a little more verjuice was added to get the mix rolling nicely. It was left in the blender to soak for another 4 hours absorbing more liquid. A little more was added until the rolling pattern returned. After some minutes the texture became smooth although the mustard seed shells make it look like there are tiny seeds. A taste test proved it to be very smooth except for one small problem. It doesn't taste like Dijon. It does taste like a really good English mustard. The recipe now calls for it to be sieved through progressively fine cloths but I'm not going to bother. It's great the way it is.

Dijon

We went to Dungog this morning to see if the Dump Shop had any scissor jacks. Scissor jacks use a screw thread called Acme (Imperial) or Trapezoidal (metric). Our very small wine press is broken because the threaded screw is damaged again after only a few uses since the previous thread was replaced. The beauty of the Acme thread is it is low torque and should take the higher pressure turning. 

The Dump Shop did not yield a scissor jack but it did supply a large Furi knife and an armful of other treasures which put us out of pocket by $10.

The local church hall was having its weekly op shop and again provided some $3 unused cotton t-shirts and heavy duty $9 work pants for me as I've converted a few to workshop rags of recent.

Jean managed a couple of very nice tops and wait for it ... hipster pants. It took some convincing on my part to get her to buy them. Her two reasons for objecting were firstly hipsters are uncomfortable and feel like they are going to fall down. And secondly there was the mutton done up as lamb comment. My arguments were it was a lovely colour, they fitted perfectly and made her look sexy. And she only had to wear them around the house for me if she was that worried.

Not many 58 year old women have the figure to fit a pair of stove pipe legged hipsters - a by-product of our swimming and eating regime.

A day or so ago I was listening to a podcast on mushrooms.  We've bought mushroom kits in the past which produced very few mushroom compared to the cost. This podcast got me inspired. One of the ingredients needed to start is coffee grounds. Picking the largest and busiest coffee shop in Dungog Chillbillies Jean purchased a coffee and made the request for some used grounds. Eureka! Returning a few minutes later with a 20 litre bucket she collected a goodly amount to start our venture. Next step is to purchase some Oyster mushrooms to start the process.

Coffee Grounds

New Cheese, Hot Sauce, Mustard and people who can grow seedlings

About every five days we collect milk from a local dairy in a 20 litre container. Usually we bottle between 5 and 9 litres for drinking ourselves, the cats and dogs. That leaves between 12 and 16 litres for something else. If you do the math it doesn't seem to add up but that's because the container holds 21 litres when absolutely full.

Sometimes the excess is used for yogurt but mostly it goes towards a cheese. The standard inventory in the cheese fridge is Fetta, Haloumi, Parmesan, soft Blue and a variety of hard cheeses. Most of these  hard cheeses are Cheddars or Havarti. Occasionally (as time permits) we experiment with a flavoured cheese such as peppercorns or caraway. While making wine in February some grape marc was used to store an existing cheese to observe the results. This turned out well with the distinct winey flavour permeating the Havarti. The Hispanico from three months ago was OK but a bit dry. A Colby from last year was tasty. Yesterday being a bit short of time and in the experimental mood a hard cheese was knocked out using a combination of starter cultures selected on the basis that they hadn't been used much and the process was a mix of the Havarti steps and whatever fitted into the day's schedule. The curd looks good and it will be an interesting cheese to try when it matures.

Pressing



Brining

One of the milder Chilli bushes was loaded with large red chillies and finally while Jean was away the harvest was turned into a chilli sauce. Or will become a chilli sauce. The recipe calls for a pureeing of the chillies with a little salt and allowing it to ferment before adding vinegar to taste for storage. Just an interesting experiment.

Fermenting Chillies

The MP3 player has been working overtime playing podcasts of Radio National's First Bite. The episode on Mustard struck a cord and fortunately having a large container of Brown Mustard seeds worked in well with the recipe which was just seeds soaked in Red Wine Vinegar for a couple of days and then run in a blender for a time. The blender didn't completely puree the seeds leaving a gritty mustard. After a couple of days to age the tasting was impressive. Strong full flavoured mustard nothing like a shop bought product. Last night it went well with the Falafels.

First Mustard attempt

Falafels of a sort

Being impressed by this first result and just by chance having a book on mustard in our home library another recipe is being attempted. A fully fledged Dijon. Now this is the difficult part, the herb and spice cupboard didn't quite come to the party. We didn't have Chervil or Tarragon but the cupboard yielded the other dozen or so ingredients. Some of the items used were freshly grated as there was no dried equivalent but in the end we have a batch of stuff soaking in the last of our Verjuice from a few vintages ago.

Dijon of a sort soaking

A friend down the road rang to say she had too many late season Tomatoes and would we want a few. "Yes please". She is organic and has a large greenhouse where she raises her vegetables. We called in for the obligatory morning tea before collecting the Tomatoes.  Then we noticed her seedling raising bench groaning with every type of Autumn vegetable. Including two large trays of Onion seedlings.

"How do you do it".

"I just chuck them into the tray with some soil mix".

Of course we left with a few seedlings as well.

We all seem to have strengths in different areas. Raising seedlings is not one of ours. I wonder if she would be interested in taking payment in wine for more seedlings?

A selection of seedlings

Just realised what a full day we had. A trip to the pool in the morning. A quick drive across the river to move cows, after morning tea Jean went harrowing while I mowed the lawns and then went down to the pool for a second time to annoy the pool manager with 40 more laps and a busy afternoon in the kitchen. Some days are just really productive.

Slept well.