Roasted beetroot divine!

Happy weekend folks!

To celebrate weekend eve, we made the yummiest dinner. Every single ingredient except the olive oil and the feta was grown right here at Daylesford Organics and everything except the garlic was picked less than an hour before it was cooked.

Four colours of heirloom beetroot. From left: Detroit, White Blankoma, Golden, Chioggia.

Eshallots

Tossed together with some garlic and olive oil, baked for an hour and then served with a lettuce and fetta salad.

It doesn't get much better than that. Simple, colouful, fresh, seasonal, organic, delicious!

We hope you have the most wonderful weekend.

Day trip.

Early this morning we hit the road and took a drive to visit a couple of our newest customers.

First stop Colliban Food Store in Trentham. A gorgeous and glamerous new restaurant and food store just off the main street.

Paul the owner, came to see us about a year ago to tell us of his vision for the store and talk about what produce we could supply him. It was a sunny Autumn day and we stood around in the farm stall and chatted. It was a fantastic feeling today to see him and his team and his dream come true.

You can buy our eggs and seasonal vegies in the store to take home or you can have them cooked for you in the restaurant and eat them there.

Then we drove on to Kyneton and to deliver eggs to organic patisserie, Inner Biscuit.

That's Mara there at the coffee machine. Inner Biscuit is her gorgeous cafe. I love everything about her place. I love the way she's decorated it, I love that all her ingredients are organic, I love how friendly her and her staff are and I loved our coffees, lemon cookies and almond croissants. Yum!

I bet I'm not the only one to leave that place and consider starting an enamel tea pot collection.

All in all a wonderful day and some fabulous coffee. I think we might have to do a tour of some of our Melbourne customers soon.

Have a wonderful week.

Crimes of Farm Fashion Part 1.

I'll be back as soon as I get over those fluoro vests to tell you about the other fun stuff that's been going on here at Daylesford Organics lately. There's been honey collecting and spinning (possibly another fashion crime), preserving, 600 baby chickies, carrots, apples, beetroots and all sorts of other fun farm stuff.

See you soon.

ps stay tuned for baby chicken live cam.

Rainbow carrots are back!!

Hooray for the very first bunch of rainbow carrots of the season.

I know they are small and not all that impressive but we are thrilled!! This bunch got three cheers. We've been waiting a very long time for our own carrots this season and because of all the floods they are two months later than usual.

Late but still delicious. This bunch were gobbled up less than a minute after the photo shoot.

Actually, that's not entirely true...some were set aside a few minutes to decorate lunch.

The top orchard.

Ten years ago we bought this farm off a guy called Tom and his wife Lois. When Tom and Lois first moved here about 15 years before that, they hadn't been too sure of what to do with this place, so Tom made an orchard up near the house and planted one of every fruit tree he thought might do well and then watched them to see what would happen.

He planted a few varieties of plum, lots of different apples, some pears, a quince, cherries, apricots, lemons, mulberries and peaches.

After a few years he saw that this area is not suitable for growing peaches and apricots and lemons because it gets too cold but he also saw that the apples thrived.

So Tom set about planting an apple orchard and while they lived here he grew and sold certified organic apples.

In the ten years since we have been here we have planted about five hundred more apple trees and lots of other fruit trees too. These apples are the working apples. The farm fruit trees. But the top orchard is a bit like the home orchard. It doesn't always get as well maintained as the other orchards and often the fruit doesn't look as good and the birds and kangaroos get a lot but its always worth a walk through in Autumn to see what's around.

Today we found lots and lots of apples. Most are spotty and starchy still but we'll keep checking them now and pick them as they ripen.

We picked the last of the plums, including this love heart one.

A crate of quinces.

A crate of Pepper.

Jazzy upside down fruit.

And loads and loads of pears.

Its been a horrible year for the farm apples with the humidity and mould, but somehow these fruit trees on the top of the hill haven't done too badly. I'm not going to question why, I'm just going to enjoy them.

Have a wonderful week.

Puppies.

I know I haven't posted on this blog for a month, far longer than I had intended.

But do you mind if I start from here? Is it OK if I skip over the past few months that should have been full of vegies and harvesting and colour and excitement but weren't and start again from now?

The puppies are almost twelve weeks old now.

At six weeks old they moved from our back deck to an enclosure on the other side of our house. A couple of chooks and then some roosters were introduced bit by bit.

And then when their Mum Willow looked exhausted all the time and couldn't escape them, they took their first car trip down to the paddock and joined their Dad Nick and a flock of 500 chookies.

They have been running and chasing and playing and wrestling ever since.

They are getting a bit rough for Miss Pepper though, bowling her over and scratching her face. They must sense that we call her Puppy and want to play and wrestle with her too.

But for now its safer to play from this side of the fence.

The first puppy to leave us last week was a girl. The new owner is a ten year old boy who has started his own chook business. he decided to call her Joey which made me happy as that's the name we gave her sister when she was first born.

Its exciting and a bit sad to think that one day the others will be off on their own Maremma journeys. I hope when the time comes there will be less tears from the Farmer girls than last week.

So that's it, I'm back.

See you soon.

Garlic bulbils.

Do you know what this is a photo of?

These are garlic bulbils or garlic flowers.

They grow from the top of the stalk of the hard neck varieties of garlic.

They start off white and as they dry out they become more and more purple.

Many farmers of hard neck garlic remove the bulbils as they are forming to promote the growth of the bulb below the ground. At Daylesford Organics we believe in allowing a plant to grow in its natural form so we leave the bulbils on the plant. Cutting them off is like cutting off its reproductive organs.

The advantage of not removing the bulbils is that we harvest them as well as the garlic cloves when they reach maturity.

There are several things you can do with these flowers.

You can replant them. This is an economical way of building up your planting stock. It will take two years of replanting for the bulbs to reach a decent size. Alternately you could plant the bulbils in your herb garden and harvest them as spring garlic, like spring onions.

The other use for the bulbils is the one we are most excited about and that is to eat.

Over the past few weeks we have been sprinkling these gorgeous seeds on salads, bruchettas, stir fries and eggs.

They look gorgeous as a garnish, they give that delicious garlic kick and all without the bother of having to peel them or prepare them in any way.

Can you tell we are excited!!

If you buy some garlic bulbils from us over the next few weeks, we would love you to share your own personal bulbil recipe with us. Please leave a comment on this blog or email us at kate@daylesfordorganics.com

See ya.