As we approach the end of the summer season, we are busy both in the pottery making, but also in the garden and orchards harvesting and preserving. The late summer season brings loads of fruit and vegetables to deal with.

Ms King and Ms Kang in the garden considering the sunflowers. We grow sunflowers in a series of staggered plantings all through the summer to feed to the chickens. They get one sunflower head each day to supplement their-free range foraging.

We have made several batches of tomato passatta this summer. This equates to about 2 to 3 jars per week added to the pantry. A basket full of tomatoes, with a few added capsicums and chillies, fills a medium-sized boiler. I add a big handful of sweet basil, few couple of sage leaves and a sprig of lemon thyme. Whatever is on hand, sometimes I add a couple of bay leaves instead, but not this time. Sometimes a dash of red wine.

This concentrated tomato concoction is boiled and reduced until it is all softened and a bit mushy. After cooling, I pass it all through the kitchen moulii to remove the skins and seeds, and then bring the resulting liquid to a soft simmer for another hour to reduce the volume and concentrate the flavour.

I start the day with a full boiler of tomatoes fresh from the garden and end the night with just 2 half-litre jars of concentrated sauce. By filling the glass jars straight from the oven where they have been pre-heated and capping with their lids that have been simmered for a few minutes, the hot sauce is vacuum sealed as it cools. This will keep all year if needed. Precious little for a days part-time work. Very precious!

While I’m finishing this latest batch of passatta, Janine has been preserving plums. We are at peak late-seasons plums. She makes a leek pie for dinner. She makes her special easy pastry recipe that she learnt from a visiting Spanish artist-in-residence here, using wine and olive oil with the flour. She improvises with the wine cold bottle straight from the fridge as a roller and pours us both a glass while she is at it.

We have a lot of leeks coming on just now. We have learnt to eat what we grow and eat it as it matures. Our life here is not so much what do you fancy tonight, but more a case of this is what we will have tonight because its ripe.

These are the simple pleasures of our mundane life.