Time to pick the olives

A big hello to the students at EPPS and the lovely ladies I met last week at TAFE.

A few weeks ago the olives over the fence were again ready for harvesting.  As we needed to trim the branch back a bit we decided it was easier to simply put an old sheet on the ground and collect the olives that fell off as we cut the branch off.  The olives didn't want to make things easy for us and stubbornly hung on so we had to pick them off by hand.  After quite a bit of bribing I finally had my two little helpers assisting me (in between playing games under the branch) and by the end of the day we had harvested a very large pot of olives.  Then we preserved them (see post from February 2011) as well as freezing some (haven't done this before but I ran out of jars to preserve them in brine so I thought I would give it a try).  I still had heaps of olives so I deseeded the rest of them to make 4 jars of olive tapenade (details in post from February 2011).  One of the jars of olive tapenade went with me on a girls weekend and was part of a cheese platter along with my fig and walnut roll and quince paste (see previous posts if you would like to know how to make these).  Our fresh walnuts also appeared on the girls weekend in a pear, parmesan and walnut salad as well as in an apple crumble.

I also had quite a few cherry tomatoes that had ripened up so these have been dehydrated and put into a jar of chilli oil.

Not much is happening in the garden at the moment as autumn is over and winter is about to set in.  Himself is planning to fence off the back part of the garden so we can have a vegie patch that the rabbits won't attack when they are out of their hutch free ranging in the garden.  They have eaten both of my heirloom minature chocolate capsicum plants as well as the beetroot leaves and anything else that stands still long enough to be eaten.  Himself wants to eat them to teach them a lesson but that is an absolute no no.  He calls them "Barbie" and "Stew" (I don't think the kids fully understand why he calls them this which is a good thing).

Till next week......