Wormwood for the vexed

The garden is slowing down and it is the perfect time to trim back the herbs in the herb garden. It also provides me with the perfect opportunity to dry some. I started with the wormwood and after shaping the plant for the new season, I tied the cuttings into bunches to dry.

Dried Wormwood

With a fresh batch of dried wormwood, it was time to refresh the wormwood sachets that I have put down in the wardrobes and in the bookcases to keep moths from destroying clothes and books.

Fresh Wormwood

Dried Wormwood

I read that among the magical uses of wormwood, is one of relieving anger. It allows the vexed to vent in a more peaceful way. I can attest. I used to be so angry when I discovered my rare books had been eaten by fish-moths. I dried wormwood, venting my anger while stuffing the dried wormwood into organza bags; this, in order to keep the fish-moths at bay. Since then, I am a lot more peaceful; in the knowledge that my books are safe.

Wormwood is also used as a digestive bitter. I am investigating how to make my own bitters from the plants and fruit in the garden. For now I will use the wormwood as a moth deterrent and enjoy the herbal aroma they introduce to the library.

Quince cordial and sorbet

The abundant harvest of quinces brought with it the luxury of experimenting with different ways of using them. I made a quince cordial. It does not only look beautiful, but is also a surprise on the palate, like a sweet memory of autumn.

The taste reminded me of the quince slices preserved in syrup and dished up with luxurious servings of homemade custard. The cordial tastes like the preserve before one adds the custard. It is a flavourful drink to serve with lunches on the lawn in the pale winter sun. 

The other delicacy I could make with them is a quince sorbet, with its exotic taste and colour. This year my experience of the different fruit and their uses, expanded opportunities for very brave experimentation in terms of use and preparation. All to the delight of guests keen to partake of the delicacies of the garden.

It is a luxury to offer the joys of Towerwater in jugs, bowls and on plates. One gets the opportunity to taste the seasons through the prepared fruit that graced the orchard throughout the year.

Friends and foes

On a Saturday morning Keith informed me that there was a creature in the guest bathroom. I am the official creature re-locator of Towerwater. Sometimes I think Keith is the official creature spotter of Towerwater. I don’t mind the creatures but agree they will have a much better life outdoors.

I don’t like ‘daddy long leg’ spiders. They can be embarrassing. Especially when I have planned a dinner party and with my final inspection of the table settings, spotting a fresh cobweb in the chandelier above as the guests arrive. The whole evening I am then painfully aware of that one intrusive cobweb introduced by my friend the long legged spider.

A dusty frog

Expecting a creature of the spider kind, I walked into the bathroom with a brush and dustpan to make a quick extraction of the intruder and release it into the garden. To my surprise it was a very pale frog sitting on the basin, nearly completely camouflaged against his background.

I felt sorry for him, thinking that he had lost his colour due to an extended stay in the darkened house. I am used to toads coming into the house in the evening when they are initially attracted to the insects clouding around the outside lamps before taking the opportunity to slip into the house.

The small white frog on the basin was clearly not impressed with the newfound interest that I was showing in him. When he started to move I had another fright because his feet were red. I thought he might have hurt himself, but I soon discovered that this was his natural appearance.

“Oh Lord, I have an endangered poisonous frog in the house,” was my first thought. How does one handle poisonous frogs? Well, it was time to Google this one. A quick search for ‘white frog with red feet’ did not only give me a picture that matched the creature in the bathroom, but I was informed that what I had in the bathroom was an Arum frog.

I discovered that it was endemic to South Africa. Found in the southern coastal plains of South Africa from Cape Town to Port Elizabeth. They are not endangered. I was happy that at last I had a frog for my arum lily patch that was just sprouting for winter.

They apparently like to hide in arum lily flowers where they can change colour to perfectly match their surroundings. This makes them virtually invisible to predators, as well as to their insect prey.

Now I was ready to relocate the frog to the perfect place for him in the garden. Back in the bathroom I discovered that the frog was gone. After searching the complete floor and not finding him I looked up and saw him crawling up the doorframe like Spiderman.

I let him jump into my slipper and carried him off to the corner of the garden where the arum lilies were sprouting. I left him happily sitting. Later in the day he was not to be seen. Happy that I have a new friend in the garden, I hoped that he had found a spot where he could be happy.

A few mornings later, I found him sitting on the gate to the garden office but decided to let him be. He obviously knows where he wants to be. It suits me as long as it is not in the house.

Homemade grenadine and Shirley Temples on the lawn

With a prolific harvest of pomegranates this year, I had the luxury of squeezing our own delicious pomegranate juice. Fresh raw pomegranate juice is so delicious. With a couple of bottles of juice to spare, I decided to make our own grenadine for use in cocktails.

The colour and flavour of grenadine adds excitement to any cocktail. Grenadine was originally made from pomegranate juice, sugar and water but lately the store bought syrup is made with artificial ingredients like fructose, corn syrup, water, citric acid, sodium citrate, sodium benzoate, natural and artificial flavours. If you want real grenadine do read the label before buying. Even high quality grenadine will contain some artificial ingredients.

Having the ingredients to make real authentic grenadine made me decide to add this luxury to our cocktail supplies. A ‘high tea’ on the lawn with our friends the Wolff’s, made me decide to treat the family to cocktails on the lawn to kick-off the festivities.

The Wolff pack enjoying Shirley Temples      (photo:Heinrich Wolff)

And on a sunny Sunday afternoon, I could treat the whole family, even 2 year old Jasper, each to a Shirley Temple, a cocktail made with grenadine and ginger ale and garnished with a Maraschino cherry. We proceeded to sip our cocktails savouring the flavour of concentrated pomegranates. Some of the boys drank as fast as they could to announce “it’s nice, can I have some more”. 

As the story goes, a bartender in California invented the drink to serve to the child actress, Shirley Temple. She herself was not a great fan of the drink created in her honour. She described it as a “saccharine sweet, icky drink”. I wonder what she would have said if she could taste the ones I made with authentic grenadine made from Towerwater pomegranate juice.  

Have teapot, will travel

When friends invited us to visit them in France, we decided that the best time to do so would be during winter. In winter the garden slows down and there is not much to harvest, bottle or preserve. With the garlic, onions, potatoes, purple peas, mange tout and ‘green feast’ peas, rainbow carrots and rainbow beetroot all at different stages of growth, it was clear that most would only make their demands towards the end of July and during August. This being the state of affairs, we could leave the garden, satisfied in the knowledge that we have put most of the vegetables to bed.

The trip follows an intense year of home renovations in Cape Town. We are looking forward to spending time with friends and taking a well-deserved break. Keith’s big problem with travel in Europe is the unavailability of proper tea made in a proper teapot. So, we decided to pack a teapot and tea-cosy. This will ensure that any problem encountered on the travels will be overcome with a good cup of tea.

On the Sunday before we left, we bid farewell to Towerwater with a celebratory Bon Courage MCC. This Bon Voyage will give us ‘Goede Moed’ (the original Dutch name for the farm which has the same meaning) for the duration of our absence from our beloved Towerwater. 

After a final stroll through the garden, and admiring the rosarium we had to say ‘Au Revoir Towerwater, Bonjour Paris’, Au moins, nous allons boire un bon thé (At least we will drink good tea).

Gardening in a time of drought

This year gardening at Towerwater was constantly overshadowed by the threat of a serious drought in the Western Cape. One had to look at the garden and make a priority list of what to stop watering when the serious water restrictions were implemented and there was only enough water left for drinking.

My list for withdrawing the water would follow in order commencing with the lawn, the herbaceous border, the herb garden, the vegetable garden, the rosarium and the orchard. That is basically in order of importance to us. The time and money that it takes to establish each part of the garden was the big influence on deciding in what order the watering will stop for each part of the garden.

We were spared that decision to date but it is still a real threat until we start receiving substantial rain in the dam catchment areas.

We have always been conscious of saving water. We changed from the open furrow and flood irrigation system many years ago and piped the water to the areas where it is needed.  We did this instead of allowing most of the valuable water to evaporate, or ending up in places where it is not needed, like pathways and so on.

The result was that we never used our full water allocation. We were satisfied that we always had more than enough to turn the garden into an oasis. In a countryside where water is worth more than gold and water rights a constant source of conflict, our approach must have seemed very strange at the time.

The charm of watering the garden the old fashioned way was never a consideration for us even though one could feel like a ten year-old again, chasing water in furrows and guiding it all over the garden. Letting the mud curl through ones toes as you run behind the water with a spade building obstructions to let the water flow to where one needs it.

With the possibility of severe water restrictions in the valley, where we will not have access to irrigation water for the garden, we have to think about everything that we plant. The seasonal vegetable garden is the one part of the garden that is foremost on my mind. The other parts of the garden are established and only need maintenance.

Every bed that becomes vacant opens up the debate. Do I plant for winter and risk losing the seeds if it does not rain, or do I leave the beds vacant and lose a whole season if it does rain?

I made up my mind to keep sowing and hope that nature plays along and brings the rain in time. This year, I have to plan around our extended visit to Europe. Everything that was going to ripen during this period in a normal season has to be planted four weeks later to avoid the possibility of vegetables not being able to be harvested during our absence.

The pruning of the roses and fruit trees will have to be delayed by two weeks this year. But I am sure that it will not impact too much on the fruit and flower season at the end of the year.

The garlic, spinach and onion plants should be okay. I might miss the best of my black carrots and yellow beetroot, but I hope to harvest some before we leave for Europe to experience the novelty of the new varieties.

Gardening, negotiating the possibility of an extended drought and international travel is a new combined experience that will shape my approach to gardening in the future. Hopefully I will learn from this year and worry and agonise less when faced with the same challenges in years to come. 

The sweet potato harvest

The raised mounds of soil under the eight sweet potato plants in the vegetable garden were a clear indication that the sweet potatoes were ready for harvesting.

I had started picking some sweet potatoes from under the plants, much like collecting eggs from a hen on a nest of eggs. But Friday was the day for the big harvest. Fungai and I each scooped a big bucket of water from the canal with which to wash the potatoes after harvesting.

Fungai started by cleaning the soil from each potato with a hand-held garden fork before he picked them. That was far too slow for me. I just dived in with my bare hands. Wriggling each potato, I pulled them upwards and out of the soil to avoid any breaking-off of the sweet potatoes in the soil.

We were so excited. Each sweet potato that was pulled up was admired and discussed, but not for long, because there were more waiting under the soil. One plant provided a yield of 19 sweet potatoes.

The only one that was not impressed with our harvesting was a raucous toad that had made his home under the sweet potato plant foliage. He gave us a very disapproving look before climbing over the freshly harvested sweet potatoes and jumping in the direction of the strawberry bed.

We harvested three large containers full of sweet potatoes. After this, Fungai harvested another bucketful by digging over the whole bed to make sure that we did not leave any behind.

The cleaned sweet potatoes looked fresh and delicious. They are a pink colour that my brother-in-law informed me is Rhodamine Red. I will not argue with him because he is an ink colour expert.

Fungai was super proud of the harvest of sweet potatoes that he has cared for, for about six months. He was very impressed with the size of them. He informed me that I was far too conservative with the eight runners that I had planted and that we could easily plant 15 in the same bed.

With the sweet potatoes harvested and cleaned, Fungai eagerly appropriated some of the fresh sweet potatoes before I took the rest up to the loft where they will cure for the next two weeks.

The fresh sweet potatoes are delicious. However, their real flavours develop as they cure. This is apparently because the starches in the tubers turn into sugars during the curing process. This in turn intensifies the buttery sweet flavour and texture of the sweet potatoes.

Curing sweet potatoes is important if you would like to store them for a longer period of time.

We have swopped potatoes for sweet potatoes in most of our meals. It is much healthier and they are a good source of vitamin A, B1, B2, B6, and C, manganese, copper and pantothenic acid. They are also a good source of potassium, dietary fibre, niacin, and phosphorus. This makes them not only versatile and delicious but super healthy as well.

Fungai, one proud garden manager

With Fungai fired-up, we are now looking for different coloured sweet potatoes to plant.