Big Bunny would like to announce...

Drumroll please! I'm skipping with excitement about the launch of my brand new shop on Felt. Big Bunny's seed range has hit the market! Pop over to my shop and have a look.

bigbunny.felt.co.nz

It's been a hard day's work filling seed packets (go on, you try filling envelopes with furry paws!) so I'm off for a nap in the burrow...

Tomatoes!

I had a lovely time at a local market last night, hopping to it and selling my super range of spring tomato plants. I had so much fun I'm going to do it all again next week - you'll find me and my plants at Anissa Victoria's Vintage Market in that temporary architectural wonder, the Pallet Pavilion (corner of Durham and Kilmore Streets, central Christchurch). See you there on Friday 1 November, 4-8pm!

I have a super range of heritage varieties (all grown by my fair paws) in organic potting mix and raised from untreated or home-saved seed.

So, what have I got?

Beefsteak types

The heavyweights of the tomato world. Fry 'em up, sauce 'em up or enjoy a slab on toast.

Black Krim - Deep purple, man. Huge and known for doing rather well in pots.
Black from Tula - similar looking to Black Krim but with a smokier flavour.
Brandywine - available in a range of colours.
Greek beefsteak - the classic red, round, big tomato.

Mid-size all-rounders

Use 'em in salads, sandwiches or lightly cooked - however you like really!

Campari - golfball sized red tomatoes which grow on pretty trusses. Excellent in salads.
Orange Roma - low acid and a gorgeous deep orange colour. My favourite!
Purple calabash - the baby sister of the Black Krim. Mid-sized fruit with deep flavour

Sauce tomatoes

Want to make and preserve sauces? These are your go-to toms.

San Marzano - the classic Italian sauce tomato. relatively dry flesh makes for thick and flavoursome sauce with little boiling-down to do.
(Any of the beefsteaks and Orange Roma also make great sauce.)

Cherry tomatoes

Sungold - voted River Cottage's tastiest cherry tomato. A sunny orange colour and a sweet, intense flavour.
Broad Ripple Yellow Currant Cherry - small yellow fruits in prolific abundance.

Dwarf cherry tomatoes

Grow 'em in pots or hanging baskets! There plants stay compact and need no staking.

Minibelle - cute bright red, slightly teardrop-shaped fruits. Early to fruit and stays the distance over summer.
Henry Harrington's dwarf bush cherry - classic round red cherry tomatoes on a compact and sturdy plant.

Whatever you grow, enjoy it and experiment with it! Find out what you like best. The great thing about all these heritage varieties is that, being non-hybridised, you can save the seed of your favourites for next year!

Who'da thunk?

I had a bumper crop of perfect pumpkins (if I do say so myself) last Autumn, and I still haven't used them all up. I adore a piece of roasted pumpkin to nibble on, and my sweet pumpkin soup is a regular lunch or dinner favourite in the burrow, but I wanted to try something a bit different. So I went digging around, and found this recipe for pumpkin scones on the River Cottage Australia site.

Bless my cotton-tailed behind, but they're very good! They're a bit sticky to shape compared to a classic scone, and they take rather longer to prepare (and they're also a quite startling shade of yellow) but they are light, fluffy and absolutely delicious. Since they contain an egg, I suppose they're almost a cross between a scone and a muffin, but they are wonderful with a bit of homemade jam and cream.

Do try them, they're worth the effort! And while you're at it, give my sweet pumpkin soup a go too. This family recipe has no chicken stock in it, so it's a great one for vegetarians.

Big Bunny's family sweet pumpkin soup

You'll need... (no measurements for this one, you'll just have to trust your instincts!)

Some pumpkin
Some onion (one large onion for an average butternut or buttercup pumpkin, or 2-3 for a big crown pumpkin)
Cooking oil (rapeseed/canola is good)
Milk
Salt
Pepper
Nutmeg
Sugar (if your pumpkin isn't very sweet)

1. Peel and cube your pumpkin. (Be careful! Trust me, when you're a bunny and you don't have opposable thumbs you realise how great they are.) Peel and chop the onion coarsely. Feed the peels to your hungry compost heap.
2. Put the chopped onion in a large soup pot with a wee bit of oil. Fry on a gentle heat until clarified but not brown. You just want to sweeten it up a bit.
3. Add the cubed pumpkin to the pot and fill to about 2/3 the height of the veg with water.
4. Cook, lid on, until the whole lot is nice and soft. Drain thoroughly. (I keep the pumpkiny, oniony water to add to other soups, stocks, stews etc.)
5. Blend it all until it's smooth in a blender or food processor (or use a stick-blender to pulp it in the saucepan - saves dishes!)
6. Add milk, stirring, until the mixture is the thickness you desire for soup and heat gently. Do not allow it to boil.
7. Season to taste with salt and pepper and lots of freshly-grated nutmeg. If your pumpkin is not very sweet, add a little sugar until the flavour comes to life - you'll be able to taste the difference when you've got the salt and sugar balance right.

Enjoy with buttery toast.

Spring?

I'd like to say that Spring has sprung like a happy bunny, but really, this year it's flip-flopping like a fish out of water.

Honestly, we had better weather in my neck of the woods for most of winter than we're seeing this Spring.

Today I dragged my baby tomato plants back well into the shelter of the burrow, because we've got an overnight temperature of -1C forecast and possible snow on the hills! In October! I'm so confused my fur doesn't know whether to shed or stay. My dear friends the chooks are laying diligently, but their poor feathers are thoroughly ruffled by the southerly blasts.

It's always a bit iffy at this time of year though. The warm days make us want to get our gardens underway, but we have to remember that tender tomatoes, potatoes, sweetcorn, curcurbits, basil and beans will be severely set back by even one night of frost, so keep them cosy and tucked up. Getting these in early won't necessarily get production of the starting blocks any faster anyway, even if you cover them on frosty nights - cooler temperatures will slow down growth rates so much that later plantings will soon catch them up in the warmer weather.

Still, my radishes and peas are up and the broad beans are safely supported. A tasty crop of self-sewn mizuna, giant red mustard, lettuces, rocket, New Zealand spinach and miners' lettuce is keeping me in greens. I think I'm going keep my paws off any more seed sowing for a bit longer though - at this rate any poor wee seeds out there will just wash away...

Oh well, I'll just have to keep my whiskers dry in the warmth of the burrow. Time for some tea and marmalade toast I think.

I'm blue (da ba dee)

Actually I'm a bunny of pretty cheerful disposition, really. What's blue around here are the eggs of my lovely lady friends the Araucana chooks, who have just started laying again.

Aren't they exquisite? They're such a delicate colour, softer even than the classic duck-egg blue. Well done girls!

Limey goodness, part two

I'm one net-savvy bunny, I can tell you, and I must admit that, quite often these days, the internet is my cookbook.

Y'all remember I made some lime marmalade and lime curd recently? I've had (ahem!) limited success with marmalades in the past, so I did my research on how to get a good set and came up with a gem of advice from Dan Lepard of The Guardian. Apparently it's the acidity levels that are the usual suspect when your marmalade won't gel, and a good way to tweak this at home is with good old baking soda. Who knew? (Well, he did, apparently.)

Marmalade's a bit of a kerfuffle but this one was worth the fuss - and no, you can't taste the bicarb.

The lime curd recipe I used was a bit of a bunny original. I've always rather liked the local habit of referring to this stuff as lime honey, and I was curious (a bunny, curious? Quelle surprise!) about whether I could actually add some truth to the name. So I subbed-out some of the sugar for honey in my usual recipe, and I think you can taste it in the result.

Lime Honey (Lime Curd)

4 egg yolks
1/3 cup sugar
2 tablespoons honey
zest of 6 limes
1/3 cup lime juice
80g of room temperature butter, cut into cubes. If your butter is unsalted, add a wee pinch of salt.

1. First find a saucepan and a heatproof bowl that you can plunk in it, which will allow enough room for about 6cm of water to simmer away under it without touching the bowl. If you have a double boiler, lucky you!
2. Pop the saucepan and its water on the heat and bring it to a simmer.
3. Put everything except the butter in your chosen bowl, and whisk to combine.
4. Put the bowl into the saucepan, double-checking that the simmering water isn't touching the bottom.
5. Whisk your mixture constantly until it thickens (this takes up to ten minutes). Make sure your water doesn't decide to boil during this time!
6. Remove the bowl from the saucepan and whisk the butter into your curd, a couple of cubes at a time. Wait until each piece is melted before adding the next lot.
7. Now strain your curd, gently pressing on the zesty bits to make sure you get the most out of it.
8. Bottle in sterilised jars. Don't keep it for more than about a month (because of the egg yolks) and refrigerate once it's opened. I find it tends to disappear rather fast anyway...

Enjoy! I love to nibble mine on toast, scones or pikelets. You can also use it as a dessert topping or, if you want some zesty party treats, bake spoonfuls in little short pastry cases. Just keep an eye on them - the curd burns quickly!

You put the lime in the coconut and drink it all up

I have limes! And, no, I don't need to go to the doctor for that.

I'm quite ridiculously proud of this. Christchurch, you see, isn't exactly the best place to grow citrus. I'm a bunny who likes cooler weather, but unfortunately some of my favourite fruits don't.

However, I've had a certain amount of success on the lime front - I have a standardised Tahitian lime in a pot on my burrow's porch, which is north-facing and very sunny (and beautifully dug if I do say so myself), with an eave to protect my lovely limes from frosts. This year it had a stupendous twenty-five limes on it - on one tiny tree! I'm so happy I could skip.

I also have a kaffir lime on the same porch which is doing equally well, so this bunny might be dabbling in Thai cuisine soon - vege stir fry I think!

My favourite way to consume limes is a simple splash of juice in cool soda water, but I've been making use of the bounty in other ways too. I couldn't resist making some lime curd (or lime honey as we tend to call it around here) and some lovely jars of lime marmalade. Such a productive bunny, I am!

Nibble of toast, anyone?

Get yer garlic in!

I love garlic. I sometimes wonder if there's an Italian bunny in my (of course enormous) family tree.

Garlic is easy to grow, but it does have a couple of foibles. It doesn't like wet feet (who does?) and it likes a nip or two (of frost, that is). It thrives in well-drained, well-fed (but not too rich) soil, with a good dose of winter freeze - and sun - thrown in.

It's pretty easy to remember the basics - tradition has it that you plant on the shortest day, and harvest on the longest. That's because the bulb development of garlic is triggered by the length of the daylight hours. Personally, I harvest my garlic a bit after midsummer as I think it benefits from a bit longer in the soil in my garden conditions, particularly if I'm going to store it.

In reality you can plant garlic anything up to a couple of months either side of midwinter - but you probably should get your garlic-planting skates on soon.

So, first catch your garlic! It's best to buy seed garlic or organic garlic from a local supplier. Imported garlic, which is most of the stuff you'll see in the supermarket, is usually treated to stop it from sprouting - so it's not much use if you want to grow it. Break your bulb into cloves, and select the nicest, biggest, fattest cloves from around the outside of the bulb - these will give you your best, healthiest plants. (Don't waste the rest - you can of course cook with those!)

Plant the cloves into your prepared beds, pointy end up, at about a finger's depth and 20-30cm apart. Then wait! My first lot, planted in May, has been up for a couple of weeks now:

I've got some New Zealand purple garlic in (my favourite) and, for the first time, some enormous cloves of mild elephant garlic (which is actually more closely related to leeks than garlic - go figure). I'm very excited about them!

You can consume garlic as "wet garlic" once the bulbs develop but before the outer layers dry out and become papery. It's gorgeous roasted whole. (At this end of the world that's around late November to early December.) If you want to store them you'll need to leave them be until after Christmas (I usually wait for some nice dry weather in mid January) and then lift them gently (don't just pull the top, it'll probably break off!) and leave them to dry in the sun for a few hours. Clean them up by gently rubbing off the outer layer.

Then you can eat them, store them, save some to replant next winter or even plait them! Just try not to breathe on anyone after a garlic-fest. :-)

Nor'wester

I poked my nose out of the burrow in the pre-dawn this morning to find very different results to my exploratory sniff than I've had recently. It's warm (by that I mean twelve degrees celsius, compared to the minus threes and fours we were having last week). No frost, no ice.

Here in Christchurch our temperatures are very dependent on wind direction. Last week we had southerlies. They don't have to be howlin' a gale to make things pretty icy. This week the wind has turned nor'west, and it's enough to make me start shedding my winter coat. I know better though - this won't last forever.

So I shall enjoy it while it does last, and keep my paws busy doing some of that garden tidying I mentioned. Beautiful days like these in winter are there to be enjoyed, and I'll make the most of the sun in my sleepy winter plot.

On winter and hibernation

Bunnies, of course, don't hibernate. I will admit, however, to a certain lack of energy in the winter months. I've come to recognise over the years that my energy levels are very much in tune with my garden - when it slows and sleeps, so do I. How Zen-bunny is that?

It used to bother me: why didn't I feel like leaping out there and getting those waiting garden jobs done? Had I suddenly morphed into the world's laziest lagomorph?

These days I know that very soon after mid-winter I start to feel the energy waking in my paws - and by early spring you can't stop me from getting out there and digging.

So I don't worry about it any more. After all, there really isn't any other time in the garden year when you can just let things be for a while and know that it's all resting, just like you.

I can make sure I pop out and plant my garlic and broad beans on a sunny day. I know the brassicas won't go over the top if I don't eat them today, because they're chillin' with me and doing what they do slowly in my "natural fridge." If I don't clean the bean frames off, or if I leave the corn stalks standing in a fallow bed, it's not a problem: it may not look the neatest but it's protecting the soil and providing homes for some of the wee overwintering bugs that share my world. Best of all, I can enjoy the warmth of my burrow while plotting and dreaming about the spring and summer months.

By the time it's prudent to start thinking about early crops like peas, spring onions and carrots (mmmm, carrots) , my enthusiasm for getting my paws into the soil is well up and growing.

Thumpthumpthump!

I'm so excited to welcome you to Big Bunny's Garden! I'm really looking forward to the coming garden year and all the great garden goodies I'll be growing.

I can almost taste the spring carrots already...