CookingMO
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Impressive setup!
KIG's Garden
- Thread starter KIGardening
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- #62
After months of unexpected renovation work (termites in a house) I finally can get back to my garden, which is now a weed paradise 
The front garden is almost weed free except for a bit of verge and side path. Run out of bin space
This morning exercise was to get some chilli seedlings on the go.
Varieties sow are:
The front garden is almost weed free except for a bit of verge and side path. Run out of bin space
This morning exercise was to get some chilli seedlings on the go.
Varieties sow are:
- Early Jalapeno
- Padron
- Sante Fe Grande
- Habanero Mustard
- Maui Purple
- Red Cap Mushroom
- Carolina Reaper
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- #63
Blasted termites. They're horrible. We're lucky the house is steel-frame, but we've had furniture munched up (plus the wood stockpiles in sheds. All gone).
Looks like you're going right for a good growing season! I like the variety of peppers.
As for the red cap mushroom, which variety are you growing? As a kid I was always told that they were poisonous (but maybe just the wild red ones).
Looks like you're going right for a good growing season! I like the variety of peppers.
As for the red cap mushroom, which variety are you growing? As a kid I was always told that they were poisonous (but maybe just the wild red ones).
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- #64
Red Cap Mushroom is a chilli variety 
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- #65
you to me.
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- #66
I won't be that harsh on you..... just as a good lesson to pay attention is to weed my backyard
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- #67
The chilli seedlings are starting to pop their heads up and can't wait at the end of the season for the goodies.
I checked my fridge this week and discovered that I was almost out of smoked cheese. We can't have that happening when the festive season is in reach. So I am using the current cold temperature to good use as it will be probably the last opportunity to smoke before it gets to hot and create food poisoning
. In this smoking session we have Colby, Tasty and aged Cheddar that will be infused with Hickory 
.
The light in the image doesn't do it justice but the cheese has actually a darker tone to it, but still have to go for another 4-5 hours before it is finished.
After it is smoked I will vacuum seal the blocks and their ready for wine/cheese platters or as I'm known for at work, the gourmet toastie chef....
I checked my fridge this week and discovered that I was almost out of smoked cheese. We can't have that happening when the festive season is in reach. So I am using the current cold temperature to good use as it will be probably the last opportunity to smoke before it gets to hot and create food poisoning
. In this smoking session we have Colby, Tasty and aged Cheddar that will be infused with Hickory .The light in the image doesn't do it justice but the cheese has actually a darker tone to it, but still have to go for another 4-5 hours before it is finished.
After it is smoked I will vacuum seal the blocks and their ready for wine/cheese platters or as I'm known for at work, the gourmet toastie chef....
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- #68
Ooh! I love it when the seedling start popping up! 
It's gonna be a good year!
As someone who literally knows nothing about smoking... how do you keep the cheese from melting/going rancid?
It's gonna be a good year!
As someone who literally knows nothing about smoking... how do you keep the cheese from melting/going rancid?
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- #69
And the end product looks like this 
Basically you have two types of smoking food. Cold smoking and hot smoking.
1). Cold smoking is where you want to add smoke flavour to your food without melting/cooking it. Temperatures and flames here are kept to an absolute minimum. When I do a cold smoke I keep the maze out of the firebox for about 30-60 seconds while I have my flame on the dust (very small wood particles) so that the material has a fire starter and then insert it into the firebox. This should be enough to keep the temperature and burn going until it runs out of material. A full maze in my cold smoker can do 10-12 hours, but you can always fill it up to whatever time frame you like.
What is important with cold smoking is that the outside temperature is as cold as possible, but never let it exceed over 15°C for cheese, dairy and raw eggs, 21°C for fish, meats, poultry and vegetables. In my smoking session the outside temperature when I started was 12°C and went down to 8°C. Further to note is that I have my cold smoker under the carport away from direct sunlight! This avoids direct contact with any sunrays that might heat up the metal smoke room.
2). Hot smoking is where you cook the food. This is where there is a big flame burning big chunks of wood, cylinders with pellets etc. Temperatures will be high to make sure it cooks. Usually you will have overnight marinated meats where you finish the meat with a glaze after a few hours of smoking. In this process you will have to accept you will smell after smoke since you will be exposed to it due to being more intense.
Hot smoking can be done in a cheap weber BBQ or in a reverse offset smoker as in the image above. Smoking can be an expensive exercise as you will need to buy the wood. So if you ever have the chance to grow a part of it yourself you can go crazy. So for example I grow my own apple, peach and almond trees and harvest branches from those trees, season it and in the fire it goes.
Woods used for smoking (cold and hot) are the fruit woods like apple, peach, cherry etc. or hardwoods like oak, hickory or mesquite. Keep in mind that not every wood is suitable for smoking. If you want then you can experiment with soaking the wood in a red wine or port to create another flavour. Oak and port go well, but don't use an over expensive bottle.... they are better to be drunk.
It is a great party excuse like BBQ but it takes a bit longer so you might have to start before the hungry guestsarrive.
Basically you have two types of smoking food. Cold smoking and hot smoking.
1). Cold smoking is where you want to add smoke flavour to your food without melting/cooking it. Temperatures and flames here are kept to an absolute minimum. When I do a cold smoke I keep the maze out of the firebox for about 30-60 seconds while I have my flame on the dust (very small wood particles) so that the material has a fire starter and then insert it into the firebox. This should be enough to keep the temperature and burn going until it runs out of material. A full maze in my cold smoker can do 10-12 hours, but you can always fill it up to whatever time frame you like.
What is important with cold smoking is that the outside temperature is as cold as possible, but never let it exceed over 15°C for cheese, dairy and raw eggs, 21°C for fish, meats, poultry and vegetables. In my smoking session the outside temperature when I started was 12°C and went down to 8°C. Further to note is that I have my cold smoker under the carport away from direct sunlight! This avoids direct contact with any sunrays that might heat up the metal smoke room.
2). Hot smoking is where you cook the food. This is where there is a big flame burning big chunks of wood, cylinders with pellets etc. Temperatures will be high to make sure it cooks. Usually you will have overnight marinated meats where you finish the meat with a glaze after a few hours of smoking. In this process you will have to accept you will smell after smoke since you will be exposed to it due to being more intense.
Hot smoking can be done in a cheap weber BBQ or in a reverse offset smoker as in the image above. Smoking can be an expensive exercise as you will need to buy the wood. So if you ever have the chance to grow a part of it yourself you can go crazy. So for example I grow my own apple, peach and almond trees and harvest branches from those trees, season it and in the fire it goes.
Woods used for smoking (cold and hot) are the fruit woods like apple, peach, cherry etc. or hardwoods like oak, hickory or mesquite. Keep in mind that not every wood is suitable for smoking. If you want then you can experiment with soaking the wood in a red wine or port to create another flavour. Oak and port go well, but don't use an over expensive bottle.... they are better to be drunk.
It is a great party excuse like BBQ but it takes a bit longer so you might have to start before the hungry guests
arrive.
- Admin
- #70
Ahh fair enough! Thank you for eplaining.
Since I live in tropical QLD, that's probably why I've only ever seen hot smoking. Even at night, temperatures still hang at around 24C. My brother-in-law has smoked some food in the past on a home-built smoker out of old gas bottles.
Since I live in tropical QLD, that's probably why I've only ever seen hot smoking. Even at night, temperatures still hang at around 24C. My brother-in-law has smoked some food in the past on a home-built smoker out of old gas bottles.
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- #71
Got two solutions to your cold smoking problem in the tropics while I was walking the dog this morning 
Get a fridge and modify it by taking the inner shelving out so you can place a separate smoke room inside it. Then have a pipe running from your firebox through the fridge entering the smokeroom at the bottom and another pipe at the top that will allow the smoke to leave to the smoke room with a pipe going through the fridge. The pipework entrance and exit will need to be sealed so that the fridge cooling function is not compromised. Also the smoke room will need to be properly sealed so that the fridge doesn't fill up with smoke. This is the high-tech version
Alternatively you can have a just a normal cold smoker box and use ice blocks (like frozen water bottles) in the bottom to keep the smokeroom cold during the hot days. I the end you want to keep the temperature down in the box where the food is is so it doesn't spoil. This is the low tech version
Actually
while I'm typing all this stuff I should try the later one myself since I only need to get some water bottles to see if it works on a summer day. This will sort out my cold smoking problems for the summer out. Why didn't I think of this earlier.....
Get a fridge and modify it by taking the inner shelving out so you can place a separate smoke room inside it. Then have a pipe running from your firebox through the fridge entering the smokeroom at the bottom and another pipe at the top that will allow the smoke to leave to the smoke room with a pipe going through the fridge. The pipework entrance and exit will need to be sealed so that the fridge cooling function is not compromised. Also the smoke room will need to be properly sealed so that the fridge doesn't fill up with smoke. This is the high-tech version
Alternatively you can have a just a normal cold smoker box and use ice blocks (like frozen water bottles) in the bottom to keep the smokeroom cold during the hot days. I the end you want to keep the temperature down in the box where the food is is so it doesn't spoil. This is the low tech version
Actually
while I'm typing all this stuff I should try the later one myself since I only need to get some water bottles to see if it works on a summer day. This will sort out my cold smoking problems for the summer out. Why didn't I think of this earlier.....
- Admin
- #72
I like using large frozen water bottles (the 1.5L ones) as they seem to defrost a lot slower than icecubes. Works a charm in the Esky. Keeps stuff cold all day long.
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- #73
It's almost bang on 2 years since you started this thread! How's the garden going? Did you manage to plant out all those seedlings you had November?
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- #74
Well the garden is still there in some sort of form. Last weekend I decided to try to take control back of the jungle.
The front yard is pretty much back under control, be it with some small weeds to be removed during a cool morning/evening session or 2.
Due to being late with my seedlings I was surprised to only to have lost 1 pumpkin seedling so far in this weeks blasting heat.
Now lets hop to the backyard and admire a sample of the jungle.
Somewhere in this jungle is a garden bed (it's not the one on the bottom right corner of the photo) and path that needs to be discovered. I feel a bit like Indiana Jones and the Lost Golden Garden Bed movie.
So last weekend I started to clear a path to the garden beds in the photo below, which took me two days of slashing and chopping. However never let an opportunity go to waste to get some more organic material to decay into beautiful soil.
Unfortunate no compost bin space left.
So this weekends job was to top up the soil and add some dung to it. And before you ask.... I did got high on it
I topped up the beds improved it with poultry manure this time and had to wait till the late afternoon to plant out the seedlings (pumpkin, zucchini and capsicum), since it was hot by the time I was ready to plant. Timing is off essence as there a few cooler days for the seedlings to settle in and for me to work on a temporary shade cloth structure to protect them.
My other seedlings are slowly growing and so far have survived the heat. Hopefully with Christmas I can plant them up/out in the ground depending on the weather.
Time for me to make another
and slash and chop around. 
The front yard is pretty much back under control, be it with some small weeds to be removed during a cool morning/evening session or 2.
Due to being late with my seedlings I was surprised to only to have lost 1 pumpkin seedling so far in this weeks blasting heat.
Now lets hop to the backyard and admire a sample of the jungle.
Somewhere in this jungle is a garden bed (it's not the one on the bottom right corner of the photo) and path that needs to be discovered. I feel a bit like Indiana Jones and the Lost Golden Garden Bed movie.
So last weekend I started to clear a path to the garden beds in the photo below, which took me two days of slashing and chopping. However never let an opportunity go to waste to get some more organic material to decay into beautiful soil.
Unfortunate no compost bin space left.So this weekends job was to top up the soil and add some dung to it. And before you ask.... I did got high on it
I topped up the beds improved it with poultry manure this time and had to wait till the late afternoon to plant out the seedlings (pumpkin, zucchini and capsicum), since it was hot by the time I was ready to plant. Timing is off essence as there a few cooler days for the seedlings to settle in and for me to work on a temporary shade cloth structure to protect them.
My other seedlings are slowly growing and so far have survived the heat. Hopefully with Christmas I can plant them up/out in the ground depending on the weather.
Time for me to make another
and slash and chop around.
- Admin
- #75
Oh goodness,that looks amazing! Good on ya.
The work may be back-breaking at the start, but by golly; it was worth it!
Assuming the organic matter doesn't have weed seeds in it, you could use it as free mulch that decomposes into your bed/garden over time
I'm pleasantly surprised that your seedlings are surviving the heat. I always struggle keeping them watered and alive in such small pots - especially if they are in the sun.
I believe you live "near" a friend of mine who has just started a small garden himself. He's got tomatoes en chilis planted, and some potatoes. I don't know how the potatoes will fare through Summer, but I figure it's worth a shot if he had them anyway. Or maybe I'm just more used to the extreme heat up here. Our recent heatwave neared temperatures of 40C.
Back home in The Netherlands I used to enjoy making my way through "jungles" like that. But here there's too many creepy crawlies
and danger noodles 
.
The work may be back-breaking at the start, but by golly; it was worth it!
Assuming the organic matter doesn't have weed seeds in it, you could use it as free mulch that decomposes into your bed/garden over time
I'm pleasantly surprised that your seedlings are surviving the heat. I always struggle keeping them watered and alive in such small pots - especially if they are in the sun.
I believe you live "near" a friend of mine who has just started a small garden himself. He's got tomatoes en chilis planted, and some potatoes. I don't know how the potatoes will fare through Summer, but I figure it's worth a shot if he had them anyway. Or maybe I'm just more used to the extreme heat up here. Our recent heatwave neared temperatures of 40C.
Back home in The Netherlands I used to enjoy making my way through "jungles" like that. But here there's too many creepy crawlies
and danger noodles .
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- #76
Some of the organic matter probably does contain weed seeds, but that is not to much of a problem. More organic matter next season, as long I dot let it get to seed again
Beside that I rather have weeds than bare soil that erodes! Building topsoil is a though job.
I have positioned the seedlings strategic so I don't forget them. Also they are not in the full sun all day. During the hottest part of the day they are shielded by shade.
Potatoes go well in summer. One of the beds in the front yard has potatoes in it.
Beside that I rather have weeds than bare soil that erodes! Building topsoil is a though job.
I have positioned the seedlings strategic so I don't forget them. Also they are not in the full sun all day. During the hottest part of the day they are shielded by shade.
Potatoes go well in summer. One of the beds in the front yard has potatoes in it.
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- #77
The Christmas days have been used to the maximum to get the garden in better shape. The entire front yard has been weeded out from Dandelions as there is currently a massive outbreak where I live. The council is cruising around and spraying all the parks and verges. So to avoid having my verge sprayed, everything had to be removed. I'm not waiting to have some spray crap floating in the wind ending up in my veggie beds. Beside the bonus was that it was green bin collection this weekend so everything went straight of the property. To avoid any overheating of the blasting sun this was done in the early mornings and late afternoons.
During the heat it was kicking up the legs and rest a bit as one deserves. I also preserved some cherries in the form of cherry jam. We bought some cherries for Christmas, but one of the neighbours gave us a Christmas present in the form of cherries, so to many cherries to eat.
I have preserved the pits as well for a project for spring. I want to try to grow cherry trees from seed. So I soaked the seeds in water, gently rubbed them in between my hands before I soften up the remaining flesh attached to the pits with hot water a bi-carb solution before I dried them by having them in the blasting heat of the sun.
Further I have been working on the archaeological dig to free my overgrown garden bed. I have slowly chopping away in the cooler mornings and afternoons. The clippings are being used as mulch to protect another cleared and soil improved garden bed. Still a bit to go but it is starting to look good. Once I have finished clearing the garden bed I will start to implement a irrigation system, so I don't have to water by hand and have more time to do other things.
During the heat it was kicking up the legs and rest a bit as one deserves. I also preserved some cherries in the form of cherry jam. We bought some cherries for Christmas, but one of the neighbours gave us a Christmas present in the form of cherries, so to many cherries to eat.
I have preserved the pits as well for a project for spring. I want to try to grow cherry trees from seed. So I soaked the seeds in water, gently rubbed them in between my hands before I soften up the remaining flesh attached to the pits with hot water a bi-carb solution before I dried them by having them in the blasting heat of the sun.
Further I have been working on the archaeological dig to free my overgrown garden bed. I have slowly chopping away in the cooler mornings and afternoons. The clippings are being used as mulch to protect another cleared and soil improved garden bed. Still a bit to go but it is starting to look good. Once I have finished clearing the garden bed I will start to implement a irrigation system, so I don't have to water by hand and have more time to do other things.
- Admin
- #78
Looks like a lot of work, with reward!
I actually love dandelions, haha. My parents considered them a weed too, but I always thought they were pretty. Plus, I had learned that they are in fact edible.
My dad would pick the flowers right after they turned to seed, but just before they would open up and spread. Our birds (canaries) absolutely loved eating them.
The cherry jam looks great! What a lovely colour too.
Are you going to try growing your own cherry trees?
I can definitely see the improvement around those garden beds - well done!
I actually love dandelions, haha. My parents considered them a weed too, but I always thought they were pretty. Plus, I had learned that they are in fact edible.
My dad would pick the flowers right after they turned to seed, but just before they would open up and spread. Our birds (canaries) absolutely loved eating them.
Health & Wellbeing The Medicinal Garden - Dandelion (Taraxacum)
Image by macrovector</a> on Freepik
Dandelions grow in many places over the world, and is often considered to be a weed. However, since prehistory it has been gathered for food and it's medicinal purposes. The most common variety of dandelion is called taraxacum officinale, of which all parts...
The cherry jam looks great! What a lovely colour too.
Are you going to try growing your own cherry trees?
I can definitely see the improvement around those garden beds - well done!
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- #79
I don't mind Dandelion in the garden and a cheeky tea. But when it becomes a uncontrolled pest by taking over something must be done to make things a bit more pleasant.
Yes, I want to try to grow my own trees. I have been reading up on these things and want to see if I can do it. If that is the case, then I know how to do it whenever I get to the opportunity to scale up in property size
Yes, I want to try to grow my own trees. I have been reading up on these things and want to see if I can do it. If that is the case, then I know how to do it whenever I get to the opportunity to scale up in property size
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- #80
How has the garden been going? Did you manage to implement a watering system, or is that still in the works?
How are the seedlings you showed last month going?
How are the seedlings you showed last month going?
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