Summer fruit harvest with pork and beans.

December brings on the summer and the stone fruit harvest. We have all of the newly planted, now 4 years old. stone fruit trees in the new post fire orchard coming into fruit. We chose to plant all dwarf rootstock, low chill, hot weather tolerant, varieties. They are doing really well and everyone of them has fruit on them this year. Some of them set fruit from year one, but as this isn’t good for the health of the tree, I picked all the fruit off, bar one piece, just get a taste of what was to come. Fruit trees do better if they are left to grow on for a few years and put all their energies into developing a sound, strong branch structure and deep root system. As their first 3 years were all very wet here with the la nina event coinciding with their planting, They grew very well indeed and we hardly had to water them very often.

So now we have a surfeit of peaches and nectarines, on these pretty little bundles of red and green. All the fruit needs to be eaten now or very soon, so we have fruit salad for breakfast.

BBQ’d peaches and or nectarines with dinner, and stewed fruit for desert. There is always a pressing problem with the fruit fly. I was a bit slow in getting all the fruit fly trap and lures re-charged with refreshed baits this year, so there is a bit of fly in the fruit. We cut this out and cook it up to kill the wrigglers. The rest of the otherwise undamaged fruit is stewed for breakfast or desert.

This old fly trap has about 100 dead male fruit flies in the bottom from the early spring flourishing. I empty them out and replace the old bleached white bait with a new bright pink one. We have about 14 of these traps of various ages. I bought a few new ones each year, as the orchard grew. now I just buy refills for the bait.

You can tell their ages by the bleached out colour of their lids.

We picked the very last of the broad beans. I thought that I had picked them all last week, but I only had a boy-look. Janine went back through the crop and found another meal for us. I decided to cook that very old favourite of pork and beans. So called favourite of the cowboys on the trail in the old west. I first became aware of this combination watching old black and white western cow boy movies as a kid. I had no idea what it all meant, but it did cross my mind briefly – very briefly. Why were they eating pig when they were herding cattle?

Why weren’t they herding pigs if that is what they wanted to eat? Fortunately, my nascent and emerging tiny brain managed to accept and cope with this difficult dilemma, and moved on.

Now fast forward to my early interest in cooking and coming across the wonderful Italian recipe of chorizo, beans and tomatoes, obviously with extra chilli and garlic, it goes without saying. It’s become one of our springtime/hungry gap favourites. The beans are usually all dried from last summer, as is the bottle of reduced tomato sugo or passata. As we don’t have our own pig, just chickens. I use what we have in the fridge. At this time, we only have some bacon, so that is what I use. With the shops being a good 50 km round trip away, we don’t drive there frivolously. So bacon it is.

Home grown beans, home grown sweet basil, home grown garlic and home made passata from home grown tomatoes. WARNING! A pig was harmed in the making of this meal.

Desert is fresh picked cling stone yellow fleshed peaches soused with a dash of amoretto half an hour before. Perfection!

These days I’m up in the early mornings from 5.30 and work outside until the sun gets too hot, possibly around 9.00am. Sometimes I am out in the garden working, or more recently. I have been updating our fire fighting capacity with extra sprinklers on the walls of the pottery, barn and big work shed. I have installed the ‘spare’ fire fighting pump that I used to transfer water from dam to dam.

It is now more or less permanently in place to protect the pottery and barn with a high pressure water sprinkler system. This system used to be powered by an electric pump, I found out at my expense that electric pumps are useless in an emergency, even though I have solar power and a battery, when the fire came and burnt the pottery, it shorted out the power to the barn and only then did it catch fire.

So now everything is dual powered. We have electric pumps for hand watering the garden beds and running the roof cooling sprinkler on top of the roof. But for fighting is completely petrol driven and independent. Because you cant let petrol engines sit idle. They need to be started and run regularly. I have every thing in a dual system now, so that I can start up the fire pump when we are both want to water the garden and orchard trees at the same time. The fire pump handle that duel drain on its reserves of power with no problem, whereas the one horsepower electric pump struggles.

Inspired by all the talk of the Roselle spaghetti junction new motorway tunnel. I installed my own water fed spaghetti junction.

Situated directly behind, and close coupled to, the two 25,000 litre water tanks, it should be safe from fire there? Only time will tell. If you look hard at the image of the pottery shed, you will see the water misting out of the wall sprinklers along the verandah and up on the roof.

I’ve been spending the hottest part of the day inside working on the ongoing sgraffito project. I’ve finally run out of pre-slipped, press moulded dished and tiles. I’ll have to get on the wheel again soon and make more shapes to decorate.