A Table in the Orchard
Michelle Crawford
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0857983628
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Organizing cocktail parties at the Sydney Opera House sounds perfectly glamorous, and for a while it was for Michelle Crawford. But once she became a mother, the yearning to find her own little slice of heaven in the country could no longer be ignored. For years she had been daydreaming of a little farmhouse, with smoke curling out of the chimney, where she could slow down and grow her own food. Last but not least, she was hungry for a new adventure. An old farmhouse nestled in Tasmania’s lush Huon Valley offered the chance to make that a dream come true—and adventure in spades, from her first doomed attempts at planting a veggie garden to raising a bunch of chickens with attitude, discovering the joys of a wood stove and foraging for treasure to make sloe gin, jam, and bake cakes. Lots of cakes. Warm, down to earth, and inspiring, and lushly illustrated with lip-smacking images and recipes, A Table in the Orchard is breathtaking proof of how seductive a taste of slow living in one of the most beautiful valleys in Tasmania might be. Like Michelle, you might be tempted to make your own crumpets—or run away to the Apple Isle.
At Home in the World: A Memoir
Potatoes as a winter vegetable, they actually come into season in early summer in Tasmania. The glorious green foliage and pale purple flowers are a comforting sight to see in summer garden plots. The local sandy black-loam soil is perfect for growing the most beloved of the Tasmanian potatoes, the Pink Eye 舑 a tasty, waxy little spud with pinky purple indentations. When freshly dug, steamed and served with a little butter and salt (or maybe quite a bit of butter and salt, in my case), they are.
Of spuds in no time. When the plant starts to flower, you can try a little bandicooting. That舗s where you carefully dig around the base of the plant, looking for a potato or two to steal. Only take one or two and the plant will continue to grow until you舗re ready to harvest. When the tops of the plant die down it舗s time to harvest the potatoes, and you舗ll need to pull out the entire plant. Some potatoes will be clinging to the roots, but some will remain in the soil, and that舗s where the fun.
Own. What, I thought, would our yard舗s honey taste like? Our ramshackle garden full of lavender, lupins, apple blossoms and capeweed. That was a flavour I was curious to taste. Our own house honey, a golden nectar made from bees that worked at our place 舑 the essence of our garden captured in a jar. Who wouldn舗t want that? But keeping bees is no easy task. It involves investing in equipment like a bee suit, tools and an actual hive filled with bees. Then, of course, there are the nerves of steel.
Slipstone peaches and the stone is easy to remove. Rather than battle those pesky clingstone peaches, where most of the fruit stubbornly, as the name suggests, clings to the stone so you have to eat it off with your teeth. The cook舗s treat. When the cook has had enough, the rest of the stones are fed to the chickens, who squabble over the juicy sweet treat. In the evenings, when the sun has lost its fierceness and it舗s safe to head outside, I sometimes grab buckets and maybe a ladder and pile.
Favourite. Beans are not only easy to grow, but they don舗t need too much space because they can grow vertically up a trellis or support. If you want to dry them for the winter you need to give them plenty of water as they grow then just leave the plant in the ground until it舗s finished growing and dies back. Then rip out the entire plant and spend a pleasant hour sitting at an outdoor table, picking off the pods. I usually throw the pods whole into a basket until I舗m ready to shell them later.