Winter tomatoes...

Hmm, tomatoes... lovely fruit, isn't it?

Native to South America, where they are grown as perrenials...

Imagine, tomatoes as perennials... how nice it is to be just harvesting and harvesting the fruits year after year without having to grow them anew each spring...

I have tried growing tomatoes from seeds...

This coming season, think I shall just 'cheat' and buy a tomato seedling or two...

I can then try to propagate them by plucking off the ''babies' that develop from the main stem...

Tomatoes are supposed to be very rich in lycopene...

Lycopene? huh? as I mumbled to my missus... 

This is the first time I am seeing such a word, as with the term anthocyanins...

You don't know? She said, looking quite surprised... All Japanese people know this... she joked, and added that she first learned about the lycopene about 30 years ago... 

Yeap, I am still learning... and apparently, lycopene is one of the most powerful natural antioxidants... among the medical effects are that they have anti-cancer properties and they help to improve the skin's ability to protect against harmful UV rays, among others... 

Anyway, harvested the last of the tomatoes during the early part of January just before the frost came in...

The ripe ones were delicious enough, and the green ones, weighing about a kilogram, turned into exquisite chutney at the snap of my missus' fingers...

Cloves, mustard seeds, cinnamon, brown sugar, a tinge of salt... cardamon, dry as well as fresh chillies, and of course how can we leave out the vinegar... hmmm, lovely...

Am linking this post to Harvest Monday...

Clearing granite stones from the garden Part 2

This is actually the second part of a post I did here...

Our property is partially situated along a gradual slope... 

When the developers opened up this place more than three decades ago, they probably brought in loads of granite to construct walls to level and hold the soil as well as to prevent land slides...

The excess granite stones were probably too heavy to remove and I presume the developers took the easy way out and just buried the stones here and there...

The granite stones are huge, according to my standards... many are in the 200 to 300 kilogram range... 

When I was digging the potager to make the beds three years ago, I had to take out many, many stones of different sizes...

So, finally, you can imagine how glad I am to have them removed from our property... 

According to my stone-mason friend who came to assist me, this biggie probably weighed about a ton or so...

And so was this one...

He had this rather small looking transporter that could squeeze its way through our Japanese garden... 

The transporter had a width of merely 60 centimeters and I could never have imagined that such a small machine could move such a huge boulder...

He brought four machines... the spider-crane... the transporter as shown in the top two photos... the truck-crane which is shown in the following pictures, lifting the big stones up into the air onto the dump truck...

He came on three occasions, each working half a day... and on each occasion, I worked as his assistant, carrying chains and gadgets at his prompt...

These pictures were taken on the third occasion when the sky was really clear and crisp...

For the smaller stones, he had this metal container...

I was to pick up all the stones that I could manually lift, and drop them into the container...

Each time the container was filled up, he used the truck-crane to lift it up...

The stones from the container were then emptied into the dump truck...

And when the dump truck got filled up, it was time to transport the stones to his workshop...

All in all, we made three trips, and my friend estimated that each truck load weighed about two tons, which means six tons in total weight...

Pheew... now that more space is opened up in our garden, I am planning to plant the delicious raspberries while my sweeto haato... more flowers, perhaps?

The powers of purple corn...

Harvested about 7 ears of purple corn a few days ago...

Yes, seven teeny weeny corns... 

It is a big achievement for me as the previous crop was destroyed by a typhoon... 

These plants were grown from the last of the seeds given to me by a former student from Peru... 

If I had failed, there would be no more seeds left for me to try... phew...

Being the curious me, I did a search on the net and found some interesting information from this site. 

There are apparently few purple plants found in nature, and purple corn is one of them. 

How many can you name? 

Blueberries, mulberries, purple eggplant, purple sweet potatoes, prunes?
The purple corn is considered a Peruvian crop which is grown in the highlands of Peru.

The exciting thing about the purple corn is that they are packed with 'phytonutrients'.  

This include large amounts of 'phenolics' and 'anthocyanins'... 

Hmm, pretty bombastic terminology for me, I must say... :)

Anyway, crops having high phenolic and anthocyanin elements are deemed to have high antioxidant activity.

And purple corn is believed to have higher antioxidant properties than blueberries...

 

 

I am drying the corn now and planning to consume it bit by bit...

My missus had tried putting a few kernels into the rice pot to cook with the rice, and what beautiful colors the cooked rice turned out to be...

Tonight, I have requested my missus to make me some purple corn drink... 

I understand that this purple corn drink is called Chicha Morada in Peru, and that it is their 'national softdrink'... 

For sure, there will be more 'experiments' with purple corns in the potager in the future...

This post is linked to Monday Harvest...