Good Afternoon everyone.

its been a while since I have written for my blog. I just got the urge to do it today and feel like it may be the beginning of something .

i think the key is consistency so i will try to keep the content exciting and full of information you can use to improve your gardening journey.

this months post

February is a wonderful time of year as it when most of the vegetable planted in spring start producing well and if its nice and warm then the plants can produce a lot and then you have to think of ways to use it all up.

i have discovered lots of new recipes simply by the wonderful abundance nature provides.

All gardeners would know that alot of produce has imperfections and as a grower, i know a lot of work goes into to getting the maximum amount of yield for your effort and expense. So it would be wasteful to throw out something you have just freshly harvested due to a small defect. Even if I do have to throw anything out like a rotten tomato, I make sure I let the seeds ooze out onto the ground so next year I get loads of free seedlings.

So this month i have been busy harvesting and preserving.

i wanted to introduce you all to Tomatilo......

Here is a link that describes everything about them.

Essentially they are a greenish /yellow tomato and they are Mexican. They are used to make Salsa Verde.

https://www.webmd.com/.../what-are-the-health-benefits-of...

I was gifted by nature thousands (or it seems) of Tomatilo plants that I did not plant. They even got zapped with the frost and all came back ok to produce kilos of fruit.

I was attracted to the Tomatilo plant as its fruit looks like lanterns and i just had to grow it. Its wonderful that it grows here and its almost a weed as now after three years of growing it its everywhere I look.

I did take some time to look into the health benefits of this wonderful plant and the information is in the above link. i think the benefits pertain to its raw form but i could be wrong.

the benefits i took note of are that they are good for eye sight and also may aid in the prevention of cancer. Read for yourself.

Here are a few pictures of my veggie boxes and some Salsa i made with produce that has little defects.

I'm loving this simple yet rich life that is hard work and toil, but oh so worth it. i would trade it for anything.

let me know if you want to order a box , or just a few things or flowers or seeds. I have a extensive range and adding every year with new plants.

this year i will have red velvet and lime sunflower (huge flower) as well as normal sunflower seeds. I can post them.

until next post happy Gardening.

if you want to order a box , send a message to my Yarralina Produce face book page. thanks

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Our Garlic Achieved 1st and 2nd prize at the Royal Canberra Show

Prize winning Garlic

Hello everyone and thanks for reading my posts.

We are happy to have won first and second prize for our Australian garlic. We also sold out this year and this encouraged us to plant double the amount we planted last season. We are hoping to achieve even better result this year weather permitting and combined with our growing experience ( which get better every year due to learning from our mistakes).

Our Garlic has a strong flavour and is of the hard neck variety. I still have some bulbs left and they have kept well and still look and feel fresh. I think I have saved enough to last until the next crop is ready for harvesting.

Did you know garlic has many health benefits . Some of these benefits include improving our blood pressure, lowering our cholesterol and even preventing Dementia or lowering the risk. Here is a link to read more about the health benefits of garlic.

If you would like to order some of our garlic you can contact us on Zanil.design@bigpond.com.

It is the time to plant garlic if you want to have a try to grow it yourself. There are many useful sites to get information on how to grow it.

Prize winning Garlic- Our back breaking work pays off

The harvested and processed Garlic



Bunches of garlic ready for sale

2018 Garlic harvested and Processed- Phew

Welcome to our Blog

About our Garden and little plots that we hope to inspire you with  and grow into a market garden.

This year we planted about 320 bulbs of Australian Garlic in April 2018. We watched it grow with anticipation and it gave us great joy to see it doing so well. In early November the scapes started appearing . It was a dry season and we had to keep the water up to the crop.

I cut some of the scapes as part of a little experiment to see the effect on the harvested bulb size and to also sell and educate people what they were . People were interested and one interested person even asked what effect it would have on the bulb. Well the scape is the flower of the garlic bulb and it contains granules that can become seeds and be planted. A garlic bulb can be grown from it , but it would take a long time for it to grow into the bulb size we are used to seeing at the supermarket. You can plant the scape and use the chives that grow in cooking. You can also use the scapes instead of the garlic as they taste the same. If you plant the largest cloves you will get large garlic bulbs.

We harvested the garlic early December at the correct time , before all the rain came . Luckily as it if had rained it would have been ruined. We also were in the middle of processing it when huge storms came over and all of it had to come inside , so the house had garlic smell and boxes everywhere. I am not sorry as it was harvested and it looks like the best crop we have had in the 4 years of growing it.

I had to pickle some of it as some of the bulbs were water damaged and were beginning to rot. I have carefully selected the best garlic for sale so my customers get the best quality.

I plan on entering our best bulbs this to see if we can get another first prize at this years Royal Canberra Show. It makes us so proud.  Anyway who wants to buy some locally grown Australian Garlic that's chemical free.

Harvesting the Garlic

 We ended up with Two wheel Burrow full!

 








 

Garlic has be processed , dried and bundled , it looks great and is firm and fresh

This is some of the Garlic after it has been processed.



Harvesting complete. Its quite labour intensive as we hand harvest it using pitch forks.
 



For Sale. Selling in bundles of $10.50, $7.00 and $4.50 ( not pictured).

 

 

send me an email if interested in joining our email list to get our fresh produce delivered to your home. Only Canberra North side customers sorry. Or if you lace an order you can come and collect it from Dickson.

 

 

 

 

Hello Everyone- Welcome to my Gardening Blog.

We have decided to give our market gardening dream some serious time and start making it happen. It has long been a dream of mine to be able to grow vegetables efficiently to  sell some of it, to pay  at least for the soils, nets and seeds etc. Its starts to get a little costly when you start buying tonnes of soil and metres and metres of netting.

 

Anyway we thought we are not getting younger and we seem to be getting busier and there never seems enough time or the right time  to begin our market garden dream. There is no time like the present so we have begun. Now that we have decided it will be a steep learning curve as there is more to it than just growing plants as I have learnt by reading a few articles on market gardening.

Would you believe there is lots of maths involved, with marking out garden bed sizes , rows , yields , number of plants for the space and the list goes on.

I am so excited and so is Steve. He will be doing all the heavy work and I will too off course , but there are limitations especially since I am much smaller than him. We are starting with what we already have except for the new soil and netting that we need.

We have marked out a new large area that we will get new soil and start planning where what we want to grow will go.

We are going to learn so much and add to what we already know , as well as gain skills on planning and marketing.

We are going to be Chemical Free and use our own Chicken manure and try to grow a mix of vegetables in winter and summer. I will be doing lots of record keeping , this is the part I hate. I usually start out enthusiastic, but then lose interest , or lose the record book. I will have to be more vigilant.

Our idea is to be able to offer our customers fresh vegetables ( and Fruit- we have some   fruit trees) in a vegetable box package as well as sell at markets and perhaps to a select few restaurants.

 

And so it begins , this wonderful dream of ours to build a market garden on our YarraLina  property and work together . I am sure we will find our strengths and weaknesses, but most importantly we will be putting our ideas into ACTION.

 

This winter we are on growing  Garlic, Broad Beans, Sugar Snaps, Snow peas, Kale, Broccoli and a few other plants ( once we work it out). We are also using this winter to record yields etc to gain a better understanding how we can make it all work.

 

 

In the Garden  

Planting the 2018 Garlic

Monaro Purple

Planted 320 cloves in 14 Rows 21/4/18 

 This is an older picture- I am going to try to still be creative with my vegetables

 Kent Pumpkins - 2018 - this pumpkin weighed 5.7 kilo. This vines were transplanted from seeds that fell and there were lots of them so I picked the strongest ones and nurtured them until the rain came on Feb 24th and then the plants exploded with female flowers, much to my delight.

Snow pea Bed

1m X 2 m bed

planted 86 seeds.

Also planted some Ice burg Lettuce seed.

Garlic Harvesting December 2016

Hello Everyone

Greetings from YarraLina Farm ( our property), a humble few plots of garden beds that give me endless pleasure and where I escape to think things through. I also marvel at the wonderful things that nature has to offer and how its so amazing that form a small seed you can grow kilos and kilos of food.

I started this blog over 5 years ago and I just got so busy to keep updating it, but I am going to keep my inspiration going and keep updating interesting items, such as this post and hopefully turn our humble plot into something that I can eventually do full time and rely on a source of income. Well you have to start form somewhere and as they say from little things big things grow.

Here's to giving it a go!

The process of Garlic growing.

So here are some photos of our Australia Garlic harvesting. Thanks to all the people who bought our garlic, Thank you so much for supporting us as its this support at the beginning that gives us the confidence to try and make it work.

 

I initially started growing garlic about 3 years ago and bought some seed from a local farm ( keeping it local) and planted about 240 cloves. I did have a few issues at the beginning as I thought I would just grow it and see how it went. It wasn't until I was not getting much success that I decided to do some research.

There are so many varieties to grow, we decided to grow the hard Neck Australian Purple, and may grow another variety as times on. We have had some great feed back about this variety and I love cooking with it, it has a strong flavour and hot as well.

• The ground is prepared with a rich manure and cloves planted in April.
• Then it is watered and weeded ( or you can mulch to prevent the weeds) until late October , early November.
• When the scapes form, they are cut off ( can be used in cooking) so all the energy goes into forming a large bulb.
• then after a period of about 2 weeks of dry weather the bulbs can be harvested, cleaned and dried.

 

 

A wheelbarrow full of fresh harvested Garlic

In the Garage , cleaning the Garlic and removing excess dirt

The cleaned Garlic

.

Look how beautiful and firm and purple it looks.

 

Want to buy some. we have some left.

We are selling them in $12, $15 and $20 bunches

Send us an email  and we can post it to you. Postage of $9.50 applies

zanil.design@bigpond.com

 

Cheers and happy Gardening