Trying to restrain myself...

But its so hard!

This....



is staring at me all day. I am waiting for a few more to ripen and then we can have them on waffles or flapjacks with breakfast!

I'm so happy, oh so happy!

When my children were very little (3 and 1) we moved into a small home so that I could stay at home with them and not worry about high overheads from mortgages and other payments.

The house we moved into had a guava tree and a granadilla vine. My earliest memories of my son as a toddler was him sitting under the vine and biting the tops of the granadilla's off, sucking out the inside and then discarding the shell.

When I planned this garden in June 2008 one of the first things I did was make sure there was space for the vines. We planted 4 in between the raised beds.



The first two died, and were replaced this year. However the ones at the end have now filled the trellis and are climbing the top one.

Yesterday when I was watering the strawberry baskets, I found this peeping out at me....



Obviously I then searched the vine for evidence of more of the passion flowers and lo and behold did the happy dance because there must be at least 30 of them.

According to my veggie book, I need to increase the watering until the fruit is set to make sure they don't drop off...but either way...I am happy, oh so happy!

Memories of my grandma

One of the things I regret most in life is that I never got to know my Grandma more than I did. She was always there in my memories but I think being the child I was I kept her at arms length.

However as mom with my own children now I think of her more and more. Little things will remind me of her. How she used to make toffee with me, how she used to grow geraniums and her lemon curd.

Yesterday we had an over abundance of eggs as our new girls are laying aswell and 6 a day is more than we eat. So I decided to make my grandma's lemon curd. It's such a simple recipe, maybe a bit fattening and has too much sugar, but it is truly delicious! The nice thing with this recipe is that it uses the whole egg not just the yolks.

You need:

The juice and rind of 1 orange and 6 lemons
3 and a half cups of sugar
8 eggs well beaten
500 g of butter cut into blocks

Melt all of this in a double boiler until the mixture coats the back of a spoon.



Pour into sterilized bottles.



We ate some on our toast for breakfast, I sneak a spoon of it here and there, or you can use it as a filling for lemon meringue pie.

Like I said: "Delicious".

Beautiful Borage

Around my garden I have lots of borage growing. There were a few reasons for planting so much of it. The first is that bees love borage flowers...and the second is that I think they produce the most beautiful flowers.



The other reason is that the borage leaves, when spent, are a great accelerator for compost heaps.

And yet another reason is that they are one of the best companion herbs for strawberries.



Yesterday my daughter made cheese cake from some of my cream cheese and we decorated each slice with borage flowers.

They are completely edible as are the leaves, well, if you can get past the spikes! They can be cut finely and added to cream cheese to go onto crackers or even batterred and deep fried. We haven't tried that yet!

Either way I love having their beautiful dancing flowers in my garden.

Home Made Soap Costing

This morning the first thing I did was check on my soap. It was completely set and came away from the mould easily.



I then scored it and cut it into blocks which fit into the palm of my hand. There were 24 blocks. We average 2 blocks a week between the 4 children and 2 adults.



I don't normally do cost analysis of items that I make at home but Superman has asked me to do it for this and my home made dog food.



This is the analysis:
We normally use Dove soap which is R30 for 4 blocks. That is R7.50/1.

For my home made soad I used:

Local Olive Oil (which was crazily more expensive than imported!) R89.99
Coconut Oil (Creeds) R85.95
Rice Bran Oil R36.99
Caustic Soda R16.99 (used half)
Essential Oil R59.95 (used ten drops)



Considering that I have 1/3 of the oil left and 1/2 the CS, each bar works out to about R8.00...which is then 50c more expensive than Dove....I think that's still fine. So does Superman :-)))

Doing the victory dance

One of the things I wanted to learn this year was how to make soap. I have read books, surfed the net and still felt nervous about this. But slowly over the last few months I have been collecting my ingredients and tools for this and today was the day.



I used Rhonda-Jean's recipe from Down To Earth Blog and it has worked like a charm.



Tomorrow I will cut the soap and then store it to cure...I hope to add some homegrown loofah's to each soap and give them as Christmas gifts.

Community Pride

I am blessed to have domestic help at home. My domestic worker is not only my "cleaning lady" but a dear friend. She lives in a very humble community on the windswept, dry, sandy Cape Flats.



A few doors down from her live a family I have known for many years who have chosen to minister into this community. Their latest project is transforming the circle of ground outside their home into a food garden, a place for the children to play and older kids to enjoy a bit of sport.

I have been in an out of this cul de sac for years and today the transformation I saw, even though it is an ongoing project, is heart warming.

The unemployed, employed, young mums, dads and children have started to put in physical labor by digging, weeding and other work. They have planted donated plants, made walkways, upgraded play equipment and started to make this space a community project instead of a windswept wasteland.

There are many obstacles to overcome, particularly poor soil (it's more like beach sand) and the wind...but what a wonderful thing to see a change! People from other streets pop in to see what's new and I bet down the line more of these food/play gardens are going to spring up in this area.

Well done Ivan and Amy and the rest of you at Woodwind Circle! I applaud your efforts.