Food glorious food

Although we are yet to harvest much of our own home grown produce, we have been able to start brewing and preserving type activities over the last month or so.  To date, we have made our own:

• bourbon
• rum
• gin
• stout
• lager
• rhubarb fizz (supposedly alcoholic)
• tomato sauce
• passionfruit cordial
• worcestershire sauce
• curry paste

We have also made a very yummy passionfruit curd - not shown in the photo because we ate it all.  The only thing that would improve these items, I think, is using our own home grown produce.

What we do have already growing on the property are

• tahitian limes
• lemons
• lychees
• mangoes
• mulberries
• mandarins
• walnuts
• black sapote
• native finger limes
• and lots of other bush tucker trees that we can't remember all the names of, including lemon aspen, davidson plums, some sort of cherry, lilly pillies. 

And there are a few other things that are too young to bear fruit for a few years yet (pears, oranges, apples).  The limes will be mostly put to lime marmalade (saving some for Michelle's G&T of course) and once the lemons are ripe I think, lemonade, preserved lemons and lemon curd will be next on the pantry shelves.

You might be thinking that's quite a lot of fruit trees, and combined with the vege gardens will be a fair amount of work.  But, you can never have too much of a good thing, and so we will be planting raspberries, blackberries and grapes in the near future.  In fact, we have already ordered the berry canes, and here is the site we have chosen, quite close to the house in what we call the 'Septic Paddock' because that is where the septic trenches are.

Septic Paddock looking towards house.  Grass is longer on the soakage trenches.

We've also completed the second vegetable growing area, and now need to fence / bird net the area before we can plant.

First vege beds installed are under the shade structure.