Green Tomato Chutney

As the weather cools and the tomato plants start to die off, some tomatoes never get a chance to ripen on the vine. I'm always secretly pleased when this happens because I love all kinds of tomato preserves, especially green tomato chutney.

I really do...

Red Tomato Relish

With the fantastic abundance of tomatoes at the moment, I can't just make pickles with yellow tomatoes, there are red tomatoes to deal with too! So I've been making this sweet, aromatic tomato relish.

Yellow Tomato Pickles

There are many different tomato varieties in various different colors. Lately I have been harvesting lots of yellow varieties, Waspinsicon Peach, Yellow Taxi, Beams Yellow Pear and Yellow Tommy Toe. They are so lovely, I decided to invent a yellow pickle recipe just for the yellow tomatoes.

Saving Tomato Seeds

I've written before about seed saving. It's something that I think is really important for gardeners to know about. It's often very simple and can be done without a great deal of information. It also allows you to capture and develop great varieties that work really well in your garden.

In this case, I'm saving the seed of some self sown cherry tomatoes that came up in the garden where I work (not Malmsbury). They were really productive, delicious, beautiful and interesting, all good reasons to save the seed.

Sparkling apple wine

To finish off my three posts about making celebration drinks, let me tell you about my sparkling apple wine.

there are lots of apples around at this time of the year

Rhubarb champagne

Lately, a few different people have offered me a sip of their home made rhubarb champagne and I've found it really delicious and unusual. So for my month of making celebration drinks I decided I'd have a go at making rhubarb champagne too.

Ginger Beer

It's been an interesting month for me. Very full and very busy, it's been a time of harvest and change in the garden, so there has been a lot of work to do (there is still). It has also been a month of celebration for me, celebrating the success of my little garden and also my birthday!

So I've been making celebration drinks, starting with ginger beer.

Evaluating the season gone by

With the end of summer, there are some significant changes underway in the garden.

We had our first rain in over 8 weeks, a long heavy rain accompanied by strong winds, making the garden suddenly vibrant. The soil is now soft and friable, worms have begun to appear everywhere, little weed seedlings are popping up and many tomatoes have literally burst!

Not this Black Russian though

Vegetable stall at Clay Fine Food and Health

Over the last four weeks, I have been selling my fabulous produce to Tom over at Clay Fine Food and Health. I spend Friday afternoons out in the garden harvesting and then deliver the produce to the shop on Saturday morning. These last two weeks we've set up a little stall in front of the shop especially to display Malmsbury Kitchen Garden produce and I've spent a few hours in the morning meeting some of the people who buy and eat my produce! 

Clay Fine Food & Health
719 Rathdowne Street, Carlton North