May '13 Lime Harvest

 

 

This is the bowl I used last year. It holds enough finger limes for a cheesecake. You couldn't even tell that some were missing from the tree.

 

 

 

 

 

Total 2013 Finger Lime Harvest: 5.5kg of fruit. YUM!

 

In contrast, the other tree produced zero fruit. Drought periods saw it suffering from brown scale, which I treated with Pestoil and a prune of the most seriously encrusted branches. We'll see in spring whether it recovers or dies, I guess. There was also scale on the mandarin and the Tahitian limes but they seem to have fruited regardless, which just goes to show that pests are a symptom of unhealthiness (no water, clay soil, sloping position, etc) rather than the cause.

What Summer Tastes Like

What summer tastes like.

 

It tastes like guavas...

 

 

 

 

 

 

...like mandarins...

 

 

 

 

...like apples...

 

 

 

 

...blueberries...

 

 

 

 

...fresh mint in yoghurt and fresh oregano in bolognaise...

 

 

 

 

...addictive lilli pillies...

 

 

 

 

...tabbouleh...

 

 

 

 

 

...pomegranates for breakfast...

 

 

 

 

 

...tahitian limes grilled with salmon for dinner...

 

 

 

 

...and the promise that there will be more Davidson's Plums when I eat the last of the jam...

 

 

 

 

 

...(not that I made jam with the crab-apples or anything).

 

 

 

 

 

Summer sounds like lorikeets and blue-faced honeyeaters fighting with the friarbirds over grevillia nectar...

 

 

 

 

...and it smells, of course, like roses :)

 

 

What To Do With Australian Finger Limes

Crush 100g hazelnuts and 100g chocolate tiny teddies in a mixing bowl. Add about 2 tbsp of melted butter - just enough to make it stick - and press into the bottom of a 20cm diameter cake tin to form the base.

Take your 250g block of not-in-the-fridge philly cream cheese and beat it in another mixing bowl with 400g melted white chocolate (don't bother about fancy double-bowled chocolate melting, just chop the stuff into a saucepan and heat it on the lowest possible setting until melted). Add 1 cup caster sugar, a 300mL tub of sour cream, and keep beating until the sugar's dissolved.

Squeeze out the insides of a bowl of Australian finger limes. These are the pink variety but they come in yellow, green and red. This sized bowl gives you about 1.5 cups of finger lime "caviar" (read: tiny sacks of sweet-sour lime juice)...and is a great workout for your fingers.

Stir the lime pulp into the white chocolate mixture. Add 3 egg yolks one at a time, beating well in between each one. Whip the whites of those 3 eggs in another bowl before folding in gently. Pour this mixture into the tin.

1 hour in a 180C oven did the trick for me, but others have had this set (firm and brown on top) in as little as 35 minutes, so keep an eye on it. Serve with whipped cream.

(Cor, bLimey!)

Apple Harvest 2011

So! The results of the Great Fruit-Fly Experiment are at hand!

As you recall, I bagged about half the apples with fruit fly bags that were supposed to be for tomato plants:

...and this worked out pretty well. When I took the bags off today, voila! (These are Dwarf Annas):

Of course, the half that wasn't bagged was a dismal failure. Not only did the unbagged fruit have fruit fly stings on it, most of them were half-chewed. I suspected fruit bats (there is a large colony near here) until Action Man reported seeing a pair of King parrots making their morning visit at daybreak for a bit of an apple snack attack:

Apparently they were there at daybreak every morning for a couple of weeks. I don't mind sharing with King parrots, especially. But the harvest was only 6 or 7kg this time, instead of the 20kg we got last time. (Dwarf Golden Dorsetts):

Yay!

Start of Summer!

Some pics to show where everything's at for the (almost) start of summer.

After an amazing waterfall of pink blossoms, there are actual cab apples on the crab apple tree:

Finger limes are getting bigger:

And the mandarins are holding their ground, despite the loss of all the limes (again) from the two espaliers:

State of the espalier, finger lime

As you can see from the weeds, there has been zero maintenance. Not even weeding.

Luckily for me, neither of the espalier limes have died. Indeed, they are actually flowering and little limes are appearing. None of the fruit has ever ripened, but then, none of the trees have ever been watered and they are on a slope of pretty much pure clay.

Finger lime gets ever larger and happier.

Baggies on the apples

Green Harvest has, not very helpfully, stopped stocking the mesh that I used last year to protect my apples from fruit fly.

I put them in tomato fruit fly bags. I'll let you know how that goes.