Given that this long weekend is the Northern Hemisphere’s Pagan ritual of fertility. We decided to have a few days off from the relentless building jobs and spend a bit of time in the garden to try and resurrect it from the dilapidated state that it has slowly fallen into, we need to restore some of its fertility. We have been so busy building every day that the garden has been a bit forgotten. Luckily Janine has been going in there every day to pick our dinner from the encroaching weeds, and doing a bit of maintenance at the same time. Otherwise it would all be so totally over grown that there would be little to eat. Thank you Janine!
I started by spending a couple of hours fossicking through the tomato patches, filtering out all those tiny little last ditch efforts of mini tomatoes. The effort paid off and I collected about 7 kilos of the little gems. They will keep us in salads for the next week or so. I made all the sub-prime ones into a tomato passata sauce.

There were just so many of the little buggers. I stated off with onion and garlic in good olive oil, boiled down to a pulp.

Ten added sweet basil and simmered again for a little while. Finally passing the whole lot through the moulii sieve, then reducing the liquid down to half its volume and bottling it.

Janine also made some lilly pilli jelly at the same time.

The lilly pilli tree is loaded again this year. The rain has done it good. We pick all the low hanging fruit and even the not so low hanging fruit. I use the 8 foot step ladder to collect what I can safely reach. a couple of baskets full.This will ad to our breakfast toast options for a few more months.
After I picked most of the last tomatoes off the early plantings. They have done well for the past 7 months. I then spend a bit of time pulling out all the old vines and then weeding the patch. 

I also clean up the long row of garden that had all the summer veg. More tomatoes, Capsicum, egg plants, cucumber, chillies and pumpkins.Out they go and I dig over the bed ready for some winter veg.

In the new cleared beds I plant loads of garlic, about 400 cloves. I like to try and grow all of my garlic  for the year if I can. This is a good start. I should have got them in a month ago. But this will have to do. I can’t can’t do everything exactly as it should be. There just isn’t enough time. I may put in another 100 cloves later, if I can find the time. If half of them do well , we’ll be OK for garlic for another year.
While I was at it, I also planted out some lettuce seedlings and lettuce seeds as well as some radishes and rocket.

In the evenings I made bread, a flat focaccia loaf from rye flour and a few bread rolls for lunches.

They didn’t last long.While I was doing all of this Janine was harvesting out potato negra spuds.

She called out to me. She was cock sure that she had found something interesting, I pricked up my ears!

You can’t beat a good root crop!
This was our long weekend. All we have to do now is to think of some sort of pagan ritual involving a potato and a knob of butter.