MARCH 2019

Garden watering continued unabated. When would we get some decent rain?

However, the warm and dry summer weather had resulted in a bumper harvest for John’s first Bendigo tomato crop.

From this…

Every couple of days there was another basket full. We ate chilled tomato soup, tomato salads of various descriptions and complexity. I froze containers of tomato soup and bags of chopped tomatoes for later use. And still they came…. John does have a tendency to get carried away in front of nursery plant displays…

Back in October, there had been no obvious places in the kitchen area to put the two freezers that moved here with us: one upright, one chest. My solution then had been by a power point in the garage. By early summer it had become clear that the less insulated garage was going to be too hot a place to keep a working freezer or two. The upright was moved to the laundry.

I’d had hopes that we might dispense with the chest freezer altogether. The scale of the tomato harvest, though, saw it pressed back into use. Although I didn’t like the visual of it residing in the dining part of our big living area, couldn’t see another option. We got used to it.

The apricot tree, that was here when we moved in, presented us with a surprisingly large crop of fruit. Large, plump, totally delicious apricots. Of course, they all ripened at once, so batches of cooked apricots found their way to a freezer.

We looked forward to the crop from the peach tree – a larger tree than the surprisingly abundant apricot. But – much disappointment, and a new encounter… Fruit fly. We had not had these pests in our plum and fig trees in Melbourne. The peaches ripened, but when we started to pick them, we found that, despite a normal outward appearance, inside was rot – and maggots. Not a single untouched peach could be found. We picked the whole lot, put them in black garbage bags and left these sitting in the sun for a week, before consigning the lot to the rubbish collection.

Research was needed on how to prevent fruit fly infestation next season.

The tomatoes kept coming…

…to this