Mareeba and Atherton tablelands

Yesterday, Thursday we took a drive up through Kuranda to Mareeba and visited the Coffee Works, coffee, chocolate and tea. They have lots of different coffee to taste, if you like coffee, which I don't, and a chocolate shop, they make the chocolates there, as well as a cafe where we had lunch.  I received a sign and felt the strong desire to follow, especially when it came to the chocolate Pete bought; salted caramel, lemon myrtle, rocky road, dried mango dipped in dark chocolate, I had to sample a bit of each, I had no choice, honestly.

We then drove on towards Atherton and stopped at Tolga Wood studio. Amazing woodwork on display and for sale. Just needed a few thousand to spend. I really want to take the burl home, see below. That's my Mum standing beside it, she's about 5 foot high, so gives you an idea of the size of this one. Burls are made when an insect damages the tree and the tree is attempting to heal itself, the insect keeps secreting and chemical which causes the tree to keep healing, thus causing these amazing burls. They are mostly found on Eucalyptus.

Mum, Dad and Aunty in front of the Curtain Fig

From there it was on to Atherton and down, down, down the range to Gordonvale, where my Aunt lived 47 years ago for 3 months. She hated it, the humidity, cane toads and mould growing on all her clothes. On the way down we stopped off at the Curtain Fig - an amazing tree that has grown ginormous over the years. Nature is truly incredible.

2 comments Atherton tableland, Chocolate, Coffee, Curtain Fig, Holiday

Trinity beach holiday

My husband, myself, my parents and my Aunt have come up to Trinity Beach for a 4 day holiday on Wednesday evening. My Mum and Dad arrived over from New Zealand on Saturday night to stay for 2 weeks. We decided to have a 'mini' break during that time when my husband, Pete was home from his Fly In, Fly Out job and chose Cairns/Trinity Beach for the sunshine and warmth at this time of year. Yeah, Right. Have yet to see the sunshine and while it isn't cold, can't say it is sun bathing weather either.

We are staying at the Vue Apartments and it is wonderful. Our apartment has everything you could want, except for a spa bath, four bedrooms, three bathrooms and a well set out kitchen. The apartment pool isn't heated though, but considering it should be between 25 and 28 degrees at this time of year, I can see why it isn't. 

We have walked on the beach both mornings so far. The first morning we got rained on. It wasn't cold, so didn't really matter, even if I did look a bit like a drowned rat and had difficulty seeing through my glasses which were covered in rain drops.  The sand is quite gritty underfoot and that, so Pete tells me is because it is "coral sand", made from ground down coral, I guess off the Great Barrier Reef, which goes up passed Trinity Beach.  Pete had great fun jumping off the rocks onto "untouched" sand. 

On the way up to the apartments from the airport we stopped off at the supermarket and bought provisions - cooked chicken and salad with a loaf of fresh bread for tea and cereal etc for breakfast. Simple fare, but wholesome and tasty and as good as any restaurant dishes up and a fraction of the price. 

2 comments Holiday, leisure, Trinity Beach

First tomato truss of the season

I picked the first truss of tomatoes the other day. Only the bottom tomato of the truss was showing good colour, the other three had some colour and the fifth none, but the truss was so heavy, it had pulled the whole plant down the stake and was resting on the ground. There are another 8 trusses on that plant, 5 already bagged to protect them from insect attack and 3 more still setting tomatoes. I'll bag them soon. Unfortunately I have lost the tag on that bush, but I'm pretty sure it's called Mortgage Lifter, a heritage tomato. The truss weighs 1026 gm and the largest tomato, the one in my hand is 260 gm. I'm very happy with them. I think feeding them weekly with the worm "wee" from my worm farm is the secret to growing good strong plants that are then able to bear good large flavorsome tomatoes.

I picked another single tomato off another plant tonight and have two more trusses colouring up on another bush. Soon I'll be swimming in tomatoes. I'll half and freeze a number of them, make a batch of sauce as soon as I have three kilo's ready to go and give some away.  in total I have 10 plants, a lot less than I used to grown in New Zealand. My record was 21, mostly heritage types, including, white, yellow, black, pink, green, striped and red. Next year, I'll grow a bigger selection.

3 comments garden, Tomatoes, vegetable

View from the Balcony

I am very fortunate to have access to my Aunt's wonderful apartment on the Sunshine Coast where I can sit on her balcony and watch the ever changing view.  I stay there with her once a week and two mornings I go to her place after my Animal Flow classes to have breakfast and shower on my way to work.  Today I took my Mum and Dad up to see her and her apartment - the first time they've visited from New Zealand since Aunty moved there. She is my Dad's youngest sister.

                                                                                                    The sunrises are different every morning I am there to view them. Some are through the clouds, others on clear sunny days. The reflection of the sun rising in the water is stunning. The camera does not do them justice.  I find each and every one beautiful and marvel at how beautiful nature is.  There is something magical about watching the sun rise and greeting a new day.  


Pelicans, Stand-up Paddle-boarders, kayakers and double canoes are regular sights that I get to see, when sitting on the balcony.   I intend taking my SUP up there when the weather warms up a bit more. I just need to get a trolley to pull it on to where I can put it in the water - it's a bit heavy for me to carry on my own too far.

Changing tides alter the view and at the moment a sand dredge is working away, taking the build up of sand from the                                                                 river to the open beach.                  

Stand-up Paddle-boarding

A Pelican gliding by. 

Leave a Comment Beach, family, leisure, Sunrise

Beach Exercise

Yesterday morning, as I do most Friday morning's I attended a HIIT style on the beach exercise class. The sunrise is gorgeous to watch happening, however, the sand is rather cold and our feet, well for those of us who go barefoot, hurt madly and then went totally numb. I'd like to point out that mine are the bare feet :)


The warming up process at the end of the session is a tad painful too. Enjoy the photos of the beauty of a sunrise.

People enjoy walking their dogs on the beach and often the dogs come and visit us as we do run up and down, do planks jumps or whatever else our PT instructor directs us to do.  The sun is just beginning to peak above the horizon. I had to stop exercising and run and get my phone so I could take photos of the sun ascent. 

I love the reflection of the sun on the sea. The dog below was having a wonderful time running in and out of the waves, trying to catch them as they came up to the shore and then stop them retreating. 

A panorama of the view from the car park.  

2 comments Beach, Exercise, Sunrise

Early morning in the garden

This morning I allowed myself a day off from exercising and stayed in bed until 6.30 then got up and went out into the garden to water and look. Have you ever noticed that climbing plants in the Southern hemisphere always twine counter-clockwise. This, google tells me is because they follow the path of the sun. My Purple King beans are proving this correct.

I am very pleased to see that my hand pollination of the pumpkins is working and that baby ones are continuing to grow, instead of falling off when they reach a certain point. I love looking into the pumpkin  flower and seeing the intricacies of the pistil in the female flower and stamens in the male. To hand pollinate, I pick the male flower and strip the petals off it and then upend it into the female flower, twirling it around and around the outside of the pistil and the inside as well. It isn't difficult to do. The other day I went to pick a flower and found a bee deep inside with pollen on its back, very pleased to see nature doing the work, I just wish more bees would leave my perennial basil flowers and visit the pumpkins and banana passionfruit. I guess I'll have to terminate the vines on the pumpkins soon and only let two or three pumpkin develop on each, so they get to a decent size

.


The carrots I transplanted out on the weekend, watered and then forgot about have survived - luckily we've had a shower of rain on Tuesday night and it has been overcast most days, which was the saving of them. I gave them a good water this morning. They are purple carrots. I admit, I bought them in a punnet instead of growing myself from seed. However, I have planted seed in the local community garden.




Developing banana passionfruit are peeping out of some of the flowers on the vine - unfortunately not all the flowers are getting pollinated. I must make more of an effort to get out each morning I am home once the sun comes up and do hand pollinating.  I use a very small soft child's paint brush and brush it over the stamen's then transfer the pollen that is now on the brush to the pistils. Sometimes I take pollen from one flower to another, other times, I just transfer it within the same flower. The flowers I attempted to do this morning didn't have enough pollen on the stamens, so they must be older flowers, I couldn't see any pollen on the pistils either, so looks like I've missed the boat with those flowers. Plenty more forming though. Unlike the pumpkin flowers, both male and female parts are on the same flower in the passionfruit family.

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Animal Flow

Animal Flow is a type of exercise that combines elements of yoga, and body weight strength training, ground movements, increasing mobility and body movement control. I love it and am fortunate enough to have my Personal Trainer be qualified to teach it.

Animal Flow was begun by Mike Fitch - here is the link to his website:- https://www.animalflow.com/ .
Please visit it and watch the video. There are numerous videos on youtube as well, by lots of different people. I recommend watching Mike's before others, as everyone has their own take on it and some are not performing the moves in their true form.

I have found AF has increased my mobility, and strength. A 30 minute session has me dripping in sweat and muscles certainly know they've been used. My PT instructor combines AF movements into my regular PT sessions, so I have a mix of weights and AF. I'm not sure which is hardest. I also attend 3 weekly classes - one is a "flow" class where we mainly do small drills, adding on to them to form a "flow", the next is a beginner class, which I find important as it takes me back to the basics and ensures I am correct in my form and the third a class which is mainly about drilling certain movements which aid our AF - such as doing AF movements while attached to a Bungy Cord, or doing squat jumps using a T-rex to allow the squat to become deeper. We always end this class with a flow - my favourite part. Sometimes we have a Saturday morning class at my local gym too or a group of us get together and just flow.




Animal Flow can be used for cardio, strength and mobility training. I don't have to do anything other than AF if I don't want to, however I choose to do other forms of exercise as well, such as yoga, weights and a weekly beach group workout session.




By building my body strength, and core stability I am now able to do a handstand again, something I haven't been able to do since I was a teenager - a long, long time ago. 

3 comments

Meal Prep

In an attempt to keep on track with my healthy eating, which I have to say hasn't been going so well lately, I spent three hours this morning preparing meals for the first half of the week.

While it is a pain in the butt to do, it certainly makes it a lot easier during the week for work lunches, snacks and night time meals - especially as I leave home by 5.30am most weekday mornings and twice a week don't get home until 7pm or later.

So today I have made two different chicken breast parcels - one with lemon and thyme, the other with dukah, sage and apricots - I add a tblsp of oil to each foil parcel and bake them in the oven for about an hour.


     The chicken breasts are large enough that I can get two meals out of each one. I'll just cook green beans, broccoli and maybe a small sweet potato to have with it, or a salad. I rather like a salad during winter to make as a change.  While these were cooking in the oven, I also roasted a dish of pumpkin, sweet potato, capsicum, garlic and onion to make soup.

I used the vegetable scraps plus some other older vegies from my fridge to make stock, which I added to these roasted vegetables and blitzed up in the food processor. I had too much stock, so I have frozen the rest of it in 250 ml lots which I will use for another batch of soup, or when cooking rice or mince. 

I also cut up carrots, leeks, celery, capsicum, mushroom, zucchini and broccoli which I bagged up ready to make stirfry with - I might add that to one of the chicken breasts one night.

I also made pumpkin hummus to have with carrot, celery and capsicum 'sticks' and snap-peas as snacks, which I have cut up and put in Tupperware containers, so I can simply pack some of each into my lunch chilly bag every night, ready for the next day. Hopefully this will help me control the sugar cravings. I roast the pumpkin first and then add it to a normal hummus recipe. It really is delicious, but doesn't keep as long as plain hummus does. The chickpeas make this a very nutritious snack, full of protein and fibre. 

Lastly I made my take on Napoli Sauce. I freeze this in cup lots and keep some in the fridge to use over the next couple of days. It's nice over chicken, lamb or pasta. I tend to add extra vegetables to mine, such as carrot, zucchini, leek, capsicum as well as fresh basil and chives from my garden. Once cooked I blend it up roughly, as I like to have a few pieces of vegetable still visible. I don't skin the tomatoes, I'm far to lazy for that, which is why I use a blender to process it. I buy cheap overripe tomatoes to make this and am looking forward to when my own tomatoes ripen so I can use them instead. 

4 comments Meal Prep, Stock and Soup

Kombucha

I began making Kombucha last year when I was given a scoby. The person who gave me the scoby also gave me a drink of her Kombucha – it was delicious and I was hooked. She bottled hers in 1 litre glass bottles and put fresh ginger root with it for the second ferment. It reminded me of old fashioned, homemade ginger beer. So, armed with the scoby and some started liquid, hastily scribbled instructions I was off, brewing my own.

I started off with one 3 litre glass jar, bought from a “cheap” shop. In went my strong black tea brew, ¾’s of a cup of sugar, topped up with water and then the scoby lovingly lowered into that liquid and a muslin cloth (well, actually, a new chux multi dishcloth) was put over the top of the jar and secured with elastic. That stops all the little fruit flies and ants getting in as it ferments and grows a new scoby. I left my first brew for 7 days and sure enough, a new scoby had formed across the top. I removed it and ½ a cup of liquid, strained the rest and bottled it with cut up fresh root ginger and into a cupboard for 3 days before hitting the fridge and then my stomach. It was yum, but not as fizzy or strong ginger flavor as the lady who I got my starter from was.

Since then I have played around, graduated to a 5 litre glass jar with metal tap in the bottom, which I make continuous Kombucha from. I now put frozen blueberries in the bottom of my bottles for the second ferment and leave them for a lot longer than 3 days before consuming. The Kombucha goes a pretty burgundy colour and the flavor is subtle but delicious. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on which way you look at it, no-one else in my household likes it, so I get to drink it all myself. I start every day off with a glass of it.

               

Trial and error has led me to only buy round bottles. While the fancy square ones are pretty, the pressure as the brew ferments can cause a buildup of pressure, resulting in cracked or completely broken bottles and Kombucha leaking out the cupboard onto the floor – not a pleasant surprise when returning home from an evening out.

I have found out that SCOBY stands for Symbiotic Colony Of Bacteria and Yeast. A Scoby isn’t pretty by any stretch of the imagination. Depending on what research you read, Kombucha has many health benefits, including aiding of digestion, due to the probiotics that occur naturally in it; detoxification of the liver; boost immune health and help with joint care.  To be honest, I don’t drink it for the health benefits, although I have to admit my digestive system has certainly been a lot better behaved since I have been, but for the taste. 

1 comment Kombucha

Tomato growing

Growing tomatoes here on the Sunshine Coast has been a learning curve for me. Back home in the Waikato, NZ, we start our seeds off in late winter, under glass and then potted them up, keeping them in a glass house until all chance of frost has gone, sometimes this can be in late September, early October. Over here, I tried growing tomatoes like that and they did not like the summer heat of January and February, so now I grow them in winter.



This year I have grown some seed myself, but struggle to find the heirloom varieties I grew back home. One year I had 21 different varieties growing, including a white tomato. At the moment I am growing, Black Russian, Apollo and Rouge de . I grew them on it pots and them planted them deeply into a raised garden bed that I had built up with grass clippings, shredded paper, cow manure, compost and bagged garden soil. I discovered tomato cages at Bunnings that I am very pleased with so far. I have four plants in the raised garden, 4 in big pots, and the other 4 in another garden bed.  I'm using the tomato cages on 6 of them and traditional staking on the other 6.

The other issue I am struggling to contend with is fruit fly and a nasty caterpillar that eats its way through the tomato, even when it's still small and rock hard. I have had to invest in fruit fly exclusion bags and mesh. The mesh covers the raised garden and the other tomatoes I am putting the developing truss into the bag once the flowers are pollinated and the toms beginning to form.  Even with having to do this, I still prefer home grown tomatoes to store bought ones. The flavour of plant ripen tomatoes far out classes that of the flavourless store bought varieties.








The other trick I have is to feed my tomato plants with worm wee once a week. I collect that from my worm farm. The toms love it and the size of the trusses and toms on them is testament to that.

5 comments

Vegetable garden

The soil, if you can call it that, in our yard is compacted, lacking any hummus and is, I think more subsoil than soil, hence making built up gardens. I reckon when they developed this subdivision 10 years ago, they removed all the topsoil and sold it – rotters!

My husband kindly built me a raised garden bed, about 8 m's long and 1 m wide. We filled in with "super soil", purchased from a local garden supply business - it is terrible and I'm not at all impressed with it and certainly won't be buying it again. I think it has too much clay in it, as it forms a crust on the top that water does not penetrate.  Certain plants will grow in it, like spring onions, beans, cucumber and tomatoes, but not much else. I have been digging in mulch, compost and animal manure and predict I will have to add a lot more of that to make it into a "good" soil.

I grew Blue Lake and  Purple King climbing beans along with Snake (or yard long) beans. Unfortunately black aphids decided they loved the snake beans and as I'm not a fan of using sprays on the food I am going to eat, gave up the battle and ended up pulling them out. I'll try again later with them, but grow them up a trellis instead of a teepee structure this time.

The next raised garden I am developing I have been putting grass clippings, shredded paper, hedge trimmings, animal manure and bagged compost into, in layers and now I’m letting it settle before topping it off with more bagged compost and garden soil before planting into it. I’ll have to keep topping it up after each crop until the decomposition of all the grass clippings etc finishes.

I’ve also started a “lasagna” vegetable bed in another area that used to have an above ground pool in it (previous owners of the property). I drenched the soil with water, then put down two layers of heavy cardboard, soaked that and put animal manure, mushroom and normal compost on it, a layer of rotted grass clippings and then lucerne mulch.  Pete (husband) isn’t keen on me converting that area to a permanent vegetable garden as it is right by our outdoor sitting area and he has plans for it – a fire pit and such like. Although why we need a fire pit to sit around on the tropical Sunshine Coast beats me! I’d much prefer putting in an in-ground pool.

The Banana Passionfruit is finally flowering, however they don't seem to be getting pollinated, so I will have to get out with a little paint brush and give them some assistance. I did find two small developing fruit peeking out from dying flowers - success. This is a fruit from my childhood in NZ. It brings back many happy memories of time spent with Uncle Rob, stopping on the side of the rode to pick banana passionfruit on our way to Kai Iwi Beach, and climbing up onto the ute shed where a vine grew all over it to gorge on the delicious smelling fruit – summer scents! Amazing how a scent or sight can take you back to childhood, a person or memory in less than a blink of the eye.

Leave a Comment Vegetable Garden

Bone Broth

I love making my own broths and stocks. Last Sunday I made a beef bone broth. I buy soup bones from the local butcher and on occasion, I ask him to cut up a marrow bone into smaller pieces for me to add to the soup bones. I have a big stock pot I put them in and then cover them with cold water and a good pour of Apple Cider Vinegar, and leave them to soak. The vinegar allegedly helps leach the minerals out of the bones and must be done before the bones are heated up and left for at least an hour. I then add onion, celery and garlic and put it on to simmer for several hours. Depending on my mood, I will often add carrot, leek and any other vegetables in my fridge that need using. Once cooked enough, I leave it to cool on the bench, put it in fridge overnight and then the next morning take all the fat off the top and then strain the broth. The cooked vegetables get "whizzed" up and fed to my worm farm. The bones are frozen until rubbish day.

I use the bone broth as a “cleanse”/”fast”, drinking only it for one or two days.  I can easily drink a litre or more of it on one of these days along with lots of water. It’s a good way to give the digestive system a rest, while still providing good nutrients so the brain and body can still function. I don’t usually feel hungry while doing this and even go to the gym and exercise, although I have to admit, I’ve been know to eat a small protein meal at the end of day two of “fasting” if I’m doing a hard workout the following morning.

I always freeze at least 1.5 litres of the broth in 500 ml portions and keep the rest to drink, and use in any beef dishes or soups I'm making in the next couple of days. Using my own broth means I know exactly what has been used to make it, has no salt, other than what occurs naturally in the vegetables, and is full of nutrients that are very good for "gut" health. It adds a wonderful flavour to mince, soups and stews. 

2 comments Broth, soups, stocks