Tag Archives: passionfruit

What I Do

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It is nearly a week since I last posted and you are probably been wondering what I’ve been doing.  Some days I wonder the same thing.  My full-time job keeps me pretty busy and t here is always plenty to do when I am at home.  So much so that I barely have enough time (or energy) to blog about it.

Here is a sample of one of the things I did today.

GMan picked up a large bucket full of passionfruit that had fallen from the vine.  The easiest way to store passionfruit is to simply scoop out the pulp and freeze in ice-cube trays.

Some of the fruit ready to cut.

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Work in progress.

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Ready for the freezer.

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Despite the fact that the garden gets minimal attention we still manage to harvest a range of produce.  Over the past few weeks we have picked passionfruit, pineapple, mangoes, zucchini, cherry tomatoes, lettuce and raspberries.

No Waste

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One of the challenges of growing your own food is dealing with the gluts of produce which invariably occur.

The issue today was passionfruit.  We planted a passionfruit vine about 18 months ago and in now covers a large section of the perimeter fence of the chicken run.  For several weeks now I having been collecting and eating passionfruit almost every day but today I decided to store some for when there are no fresh ones available.

001My efforts yielded 2 trays of passionfruit pulp to be frozen and stored for later use.

The vine appears to have 2 different types of fruit on it.  One of them is a common purple passionfruit but the other are much larger and are yellow when ripe  and the pulp is a very bright orange and has a somewhat different flavour.  You can see the different skins in the compost bucket in the following photo.

002These will go back in the compost and eventually be added to the garden beds to grow more food.

Fruit and Flowers

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We planted the new blueberry bushes on Sunday.

Blueberry patch

We bought 3 each of 4 different varieties that seemed appropriate for our climate.  I collected enough rocks to create a border around the new patch.  At the moment there is residual grass but we are planning to mulch the entire area.  We will order a load of pine mulch which is acidic and suitable for the blueberries.  Underneath the mulch we will place several layers of newspaper to suppress the grass.

The passionfruit vince which we bought at the same time as the blueberries has been planted next to the chicken run so that it can grow on the fence..

Passionfruit vine
Finally, I wanted to show you one of the ornamental plants in our garden.  It is a gorgeous apricot hibiscus which was here when we came.  The shrub is nothing to look at but the flowers are stunning.  Here is one that managed to escape under the old sleeper which is placed to stop the chickens escaping under the fence.  There are lots more buds on the plant and soon it will be covered with beauties like this.

Hibiscus
We are considering planting the garden bed infront of the verandah with a selection of hibiscus shrubs.  There is a display at Woombye (Sunshine Coast) on Saturday so we are hoping to go and get a few ideas.