Thursday 21 March 2013

Passionfruit and Nashi Pears


I'm showing off fruit of the season again. The Black Norfolk passionfruits, all four of them, have been converted into goat's milk and chook egg passionfruit custard tarts. There are another four waiting on the vine for a similar fate.
The nashi's are eaten raw at regular intervals.

Tomorrow I'm going to have a go at nashi and vanilla bean preserves. After a day of making tomato paste while listening to it rain outside it will be nice to deal with a different product.

Yes, finally it rained! I know that's not a cry of joy elsewhere in the country, but it certainly is in bone dry Tasmania. We came to Tasmania because it rains here. Only it's stopped, and Queensland, where we came from, has barely been without a flood in the past year.

2 comments:

narf77 said...

Another bewildered soul...we came here from Western Australia, the far flung dry arid land at the edge of Australia where not even Aussies venture to because it was DRY and HOT and we get to Tassie and suddenly we brought the weather with us and this summer is the driest summer I have EVER experienced. Couple that with the hottest March weather that really sealed the deal for a lot of our plants and I have never been so happy to see the rains :). I love reading about your preserving endeavours just like I loved reading your first book that brought me to your blog in the first place. Resilience is something that you bottle with every single preserving event. I won't be kyboshed by our apparent dry state of being. If global warming is going to hand us longer seasons and drier seasons I am going to learn from it. I will be planting out some previously unconsidered food crops (tepary beans, macadamias and mangoes) as a trial. I will be spending winter researching water wicked garden beds and how to get the best out of an arid garden. We can and will deal with these problems. All we need is a rainwater tank to drop out of the sky with our name on it! ;). I think that the government should allow people on lower incomes (lets face it, most of Tassie is unemployed or aged...) to access no interest loans to allow them to buy water tanks and solar hot water systems (good ones, not crap mass produced cardboard systems hurried in to make the maximum profits from stupid government schemes...) to allow them to be more self sufficient and less of a drain on the economy. Might have to take it up with our local NRM and see if they think it's worth taking the idea somewhere higher. Anyway, more rain pelting down and I am blissfully happy. Might even light the fire today! Have a great weekend Linda and cheers for the wonderful book and blog :)

Chris said...

Isn't the weather funny? I live in Qld and was considering transplanting to Tas for the very same reason of access to reliable rainfall and climate to grow food.

We didn't move, but ever since we've gotten floods nearly every year, lol. My poor heat and rain deprived plants, got inundated and I'm constantly trying to figure out what to plant in their place!

There are worse things to stress about in the world though, and I just keep plugging away at the garden. It's great to hear you may be able to make a living with a market garden (former post) and that you do at least get some fruit to eat, in reward for your labours.

We got one mango on our 3-4 year old tree, one pumpkin because the bees had a hard time pollinating in the wet, and now a couple of hands of bananas I hope will be ready to eat before the frosts. I'm not liking our chances though, lol.

Oh well, the joys of gardening. ;)