Green smoothie recipe

For those of you just trying out ' green smoothies' the hardest part can be figuring out how to make one that is palatable! When I started making these I was adding far too much green and was therefore forcing myself to drink it as it didn't taste great! I'm now adding more fruit with less greens and they taste much better:-) as my taste buds adjust, ill add more greens. For the beginners out there, give this ago. This serves 1.
1/2 cup water
1 large silverbeet leaf
1 lime, pith removed
1 apple
Handful of frozen blueberries.
Wizz it all around in a blender until smooth and drink straight away.

As you can see it's not really 'green'. It was before I added blue berries. My 4 year old watched all the ingredients go in and even she polished it off. Can't be that bad!

Australian College of Classical Yoga

So it'd been a couple of weeks since I had done a yoga class and both my mind and body were in desperate need of a class. Recently I've started just attending classes just casually at different studios rather than committing to one place. So tonight I headed down to the Australian College of Classical Yoga www.classicalyoga.com.au and did an amazing class. It went for 1.5 hours and was the perfect combination of savasana, asana and meditation all in one. The class even finished off with a bit of chanting! :) Thoroughly recommend the place. I'll definitely be back :) One of my lifetime goals is to get my yoga teaching qualification and teach yoga...This place I did my class at tonight actually does yoga teacher training so who knows what my practice there will lead to.....

Time to plant

As a busy Mum a had a million and one things to do today...house was a bombsite when I woke up so it wasn't a great start to the day. My to do list today were somewhere along the lines of dishes, cleaning rooms, washing, folding, take the kids to calesthenics, visit my grandparents and the list goes on. Somewhere in there i had my own to do list in the garden :) I was determined to get it done especially as I saw the sun shine after calesthenics! There is always so much to be done in the garden but just for today I really needed to replace my 3 basil plants that had reached the end of their season. Those 3 plants were being replaced with spinach and tarragon. I love to plant things that I can eat, sometimes you just need something pretty to look at in your garden. As I travelled through Paris I always admired the beautiful red geraniums lining the apartment balconies, so I thought I'd plant some of my own in hanging baskets.

Normally when I plant things from seedlings I tended to just use potting mix and top it up with sugar cane mulch. I would always water my plant in the pot first, then water the hole it was being planted into and once mulched I would give it one final watering to reduce stress to the plant. This method has worked reasonable well for me. As I've been reading other people's blogs I keep seeing people mixing their soil with organic matter. This is something I'm new to. I did it with my garlic but am yet to see the results. On the side of the road near my house were some bags of organic matter for sale, $2.50 a bag...bargain! I bought a couple and mixed in it with potting mix so we'll see what happens :)

My 3 basil plants in need of replacing

teeny tiny red geranium plants ready to bloom...hopefully!

hanging baskets

basil plants replaced with spinach x 2 and tarragon...never cooked with tarragon, any suggestions?

Cooking with my husband

So over the past say 5 years I have predominantly been responsible for all meals in the house. My husband doesn't posses many culinary skills. His dinner skills revolve around deciding what takeaway we haven't eaten for a while! So to change that a bit I realised I need to take a step back and teach him how to cook. Tonight we decided to cook an osso bucco stew with mashed potato...yum! As always, I like to include something grown from home in all my meals...even if it isn't much. This is what I came up with today.

Today's harvest included rosemary, parsley and silverbeet.

The final product :)

Red Velvet Cupcakes

My little helper or rather my bowl licker!

On Sunday it is my youngest daughters birthday. She will be turning 2 and we're having quite a low key celebration this year. We have plans to go to the zoo if the weather is nice and if not we'll go to the aquarium.   Since we aren't having a get together where everyone will be there I didn't want to have just 1 cake. Family will just be popping in to see her over the weekend. I decided to do what I did for my eldest daughters birthday last year and bake red velvet cupcakes again! They were delicious; we had our first sample this evening :)

The finished product. Thanks for the recipe Nigella :)

Ready to go in the oven. Look at all that food colouring!

Autumn growing....in my garden :)

Some beetroot that I planted from seed.

So this is my lemon tree that I heavily pruned as it was out of control when I moved in. Everything is starting to grow back now. :)

My little lime tree.

My miniature apple tree. I have two of those :)

This is my orange tree which already came with the property. It gave my 1 orange last year but I've given it a bit of TLC and there should be more next season. Can you see the little green one?

Here are my beautiful herbs: oregano, mint, parsley, rosemary and chives.

Some rainbow silverbeet grown from seed in pot that I found behind a bush!

Some snowpeas :)

Some more herbs: basil (which I going to let flower now and collect the seeds as they provided me with many batches of basil pesto over the Summer), thyme and sage.

Growing Garlic

So here it goes, my first blog!
For a while now I've been waiting for May to come along so that I can plant my garlic :) A couple of weeks ago I headed down to a farmer's market and got myself a couple of bulbs of organic garlic for my planting. I have read that supermarket garlic may work but for my first attempt i'd thought i'd go with the good stuff!

So i'm currently renting and it's made me think harder about how I can still grow food to eat without changing the existing garden. So far I have confined most things to pots. For my garlic experiment I have reused a vegetable box from the supermarket.

Sure I would have liked to have bought a new pretty pot but I thought id be resourceful and save some money while I'm at it.

My next task was to create some great soil for my garlic. I had some potting mix but I want to mix in some nice compost. A few months ago I was given a compost bin as a present :) I thought I'd check it out and seen if I had any...i did!

Next step was to mix in this wonderful compost with my potting mix.
I then separated my cloves from the bulb.

Pointed end up I pushed them down into my soil with the help of my little one :) I covered it up with soil, sugar cane mulch and gave it a good water with some Seasol in there. Let's hope this grows into some beautiful garlic, ready for Summer!

Any tips from anyone who has successfully grown garlic would be most welcome!