Home grown is so tasty!

The Internet, and a Tablet, has changed cooking so much, with a bit of help from Evernote.

Rach told me she had lamb chops out for dinner.  I was in the mood for something a little tasty, and we have a bazillion tomotoes and even more cherry tomatoes from the garden at the moment, so 10 minutes before leaving work I "GoogleBinged" a recipe for lamb chops. The first hit included plenty of herbs and as luck would have it, cherry tomatoes on the side - pure luck I promise. A quick view of the recipe, using the Evernote's "Clearly" Chrome add in, a web clip, and I was off.

So I stopped and bought some fresh garlic and a couple of lemons. The rest we had - home grown tomatoes, herb and shallots.

At home, I flick on the tablet, pick some herbs and shallots, let Evernote Sync and there's my recipe for dinner. And how good was it!?

Zucchini Results!

Just four weeks after the "artificial insemination" and just look at the results.

Zucchini IVF

Did you know you could artificially insemminate Zucchini's? I am what could be described as a hobby gardening novice. I plent stuff, I water it, when I can, and I get a kick out of eating what grows in my vegie garden. Last year I grew a feww zucchini plants and was chuffed to eat a few fruits. I heard the other day that you should give your zucchini's a hand by "hand pollinating" - a job the bees should do for you.

It turns out this is not exactly true - you should only need to do this, if you have some problems with only a little fruit. My vegie patch does okay for attracking bees, so I should be fine, but I am keeping this in mind, should my crop be light on this year.

My own private greenhouse effect

Quite off topic for this blog so far, but here goes... I live in Victoria, the southern most state of mainland Australia. The weather gets quite cold (by Australian standards) in the winter. I like to grow my own vegetables - strictly hobby stuff, the family could live for more than a couple of days on what I grow, but it's good fun.

Most years though, I wind up planting seeds around August, just prior to the southern hemisphere Spring, and in our cold Victorian winter they struggle along okay, by the time I get them in the ground, I don't get much of a yield, in particular capsicums, a fruit I love, and have had very little success growing.

So this year, I decided to get started earlier - but winters are just so cold down here, that no seeds will ever germinate this time of year. So I decided that a little shelter was required. I got the idea from the planter boxes you see in more hardware shops, but being a cheap-skate, I thought I'd make my own. So I hacked together a few old pieces of chip board into a kind of half box shape - then thought, "if I can cover the rest with some clear plastic, the sun will still get in, but the budding, would be seedlings will be protected from wind, rain, frost etc.

Great idea, I tried some old clear plastic I have lying around, but it just didn't cut it. So I splashed out and spent 15 bucks on some more heavy duty plastic from a hardware store close by, and with the help of some velcro tabs, managed to come up with the creation you see below - a planter box, covered with clear plastic, I can open to water any time I like.

We had a couple of quite cool - 12 degrees celcius, but quite sunny days here. I noticed quite a bit of condensation forming very quickly in the box, and decided to grab a thermometer we had lying around at work. To my surprise, after just half a day in the sun - 12 degrees outside mind you, the temperature inside the box, was tipping 40 degrees!! (Celcius). I was amazed, and pleasantly surprised. I left a small container of water in there, and after just a few hours, the water was really warm to touch.

I shouldn't be surprised I guess, but how good is this?!? Anyway the seeds went in just two days ago, and I'm expected nice early germination, meaning I can get the capsicum seedlings transplanted nice and early, and hope to be eating juicy, home grown capsicums, tomates and zucchinis, all summer.