Concerned not so much with canning, drying, etc but fresh use. I love tomato with white cheap bread and hellman's mayonnaise with salt and pepper. But the basil is ready and a simple tomato salad and oil is great. Then the basil with oil and pine nuts says add a carb. Then the dill says add cucumbers and heavy cream and add to the store bought herring and ... What do you do with real fresh jewels ?
Bruchetta
baguette sliced length-wise horizontally fresh ripe tomatoes basil leaves, fresh, chopped
1 large clove garlic, cut in half Extra virgin olive oilBroil the sliced side of baguette until light to golden brown. Rub the toasted side with cut garlic clove, while the bread is still warm. Drizzle lightly with olive oil over the garlic rub, and sprinkle with chopped basil. Slice very ripe plum tomatoes and place slices the length of the baguette. Top tomatoes with grated parmesan. Return bread to broiler until parmesan starts to brown.
Good warm, or cold.
I have the benefit of having four sons who LOVE fresh vegetables! Last year I meant to make tomato sauce from the fruits of our 60+ plants, but there were never enough tomatoes left after the kids got through with them to amount to anything! At least half of our produce never even makes it into the house. Whatever they don't devour gets made into daily salads. It's nice to take a handful of greens and mix it with whatever veggies happen to be out there at any time. I also love some mozzarella on a bagel with fresh tomatoes and basil, and olive oil and balsamic.
--S.
Darn yours looks like an addition to yakatori for small family meal this Sunday afternoon.
We had the same good problem. Who could ask for more.
Eat them, of course, or save them 'til later; what else? Any more gets frozen or otherwise preserved. If there's "extra", I compost it and investigate growing less in future. I try to keep the garden and its (adverse) impact on the environment minimal so when I find myself with repeated surpluses, I know it's time to make some adjustments. The only neighbor that I know and who cooks has carte blanche but helps herself only to a few fresh herbs, for some reason. Don't plant very many tomatoes, for example, because neither DW nor I is really big on fruit and, as fruit goes, tomatoes aren't all that special. We have difficulty obtaining ripe fruit because, on the whole, we must prefer tomatoes green because we certainly seem to eat them up.
Simply display the true flavour of the vegetable.
- Use it while it is absolutely fresh
- Don't overcook it
- Don't over-fancify it and obscure the flavour with too many other things. Your produce has not been degrading in a cool room for weeks so you don't need to make up for that.
Other than in vegetarian households vegetables are rarely the centre of the meal in western countries. With good produce you can change that. I still love my meat but I have grown towards veges. Which is cheaper and better for my health.
David
David, you still going to be able to grow a garden, after the Americans buy up your water rights?
"Australia has privatized its water totally, and basically it¹s now for sale. And there¹s a big American investment firm that¹s actually buying up water rights. It was supposed to be, originally, just to get the farmers of the big farm conglomerates to share, to trade, but now it¹s all gone private and international, so they¹re hardly going to support something that says that water, is a human right, when they¹ve commodified it and said it¹s a market commodity."
Yes
This is a complex issue. The rights to the water that falls on the catchment to public water supplies is broadly not for sale, the Government holds onto that by excluding most of it from being a tradeable commodity. In a city/suburban situation you can do whatever you like with the water that falls on your property (and the grey water you generate provided you don't poison people with it) but you cannot sell it.
In the rural situation (which is me) every property owner has a "harvestable right". Roughly speaking you can impound and use 10% of the water that falls on your land but not from permanent waterways. Additionally you can extract from permanent waterways an unlimited amount for no cost for "bona fide domestic purposes". So I could use that to grow whatever I like provided it is not a commercial venture, this last constraint does in practice limit how much you can extract. Neither of these rights are saleable.
In addition I own a water licence which permits me to extract a specified amount of water from permanent waterways per annum for a fairly nominal cost. This licence is saleable but only applies to the specified catchment so it is not possible to buy up water licences and use them wherever you like.
It is essential for proper long term water management for water to be given a genuine and realistic value at least in commercial quantities. In the past it was pretty much free in all circumstances. What do people do with a resource that is "free"? They over use it. I think you are familiar with the phrase "the tragedy of the commons". So we have the absurdities of growing rice and cotton in dryland areas by massive (and wasteful) irrigation and more water being allocated from the Murray-Darling than is actually available except in flood years. The sooner this water is given a sensible value the sooner this kind of abuse will be gone.
As you can see the above quote is very misleading regarding the ownership of water in Australia. As for the motivation of the Gov to not want to vote for water as a basic right I have no clear idea but Oz does vote with America on many issues for reasons that may have nothing to do with the issue itself.
David
Agreed for cotton given the overproduction of it and its thirst comparable to other fibre plants (e.g. hemp). Rice (and maize grown in the same general area) is a little different, I reckon. Or at least, it has the potential to be so, given an assumption of a fair price for irrigation water. This is because it can be planted opportunistically, e.g. when there's good flows in the rivers, and just not planted when there isn't.
Contrast that with all the MIS-backed plantations of fruit and nut trees, and grape vines, along the Murray-Darling system -- trees that require water to keep them going and thus demand water even when there is a drought. That was one of the big issues during the latest drought, with lots of water bought up by (tax avoiding) MIS plantations and little remaining for anyone else, leading to lots of fruit trees being grubbed out or bulldozed.
Malcolm Turnbull (yes, him!) covered this quite well (for a mainstream politician) on Insiders some time back:
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, that's not actually true, Barrie. In fact, that statement is obviously wrong. Let me explain. Everybody says that the conventional wisdom is that you shouldn't grow rice in Australia, you shouldn't grow cotton. Now, there are areas where there is over- allocation and there are areas where cotton is grown and rice is grown that there are -- it's no doubt over-allocation. But if everybody grew fruit trees, or almonds or olives, grew permanent crops, which obviously have a higher yield per megalitre of water, we would be in a terrible jam because the key thing to understand about our rivers is that the flows are very volatile. And so if all of your plantings are permanent plantings how do you sustain them during the dry years? You need to have a mix of crops and you need to have annual crops so that when there's water around you plant them, and when there isn't you don't plant.
You see, the problem we face in the basin at the moment is not with rice and cotton because it's not being planted because there isn't any water. The problem we face is keeping alive the permanent plantings, the horticulture which need to get a drink whether it's a dry year or a wet year.
BARRIE CASSIDY: But isn't the problem that rice and cotton is grown in areas where there are water shortages, quite regularly?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: But that's well, OK, I'll start again. Because our water is volatile, because some years you get a lot of water and some years you don't get any, it's important to have annual crops that you can plant opportunistically when there is water, but you don't have to plant, you don't need to plant when there isn't any water. If all of our crops were horticulture, were permanent plantings, then in dry years we would have an even bigger problem than we do now.
So you see, if you go to Deniliquin where they grow a lot of rice, there is very little rice being plant this had year, virtually none. Why is that? Because there isn't any water. You go down to Mildura where it's mostly horticulture. The same trees and vines are there, Barrie, in this very dry year as would be in a wet year and they will be struggling, if this coming season is as bad as the last one, to get enough water to keep those trees and vines alive. So annual crops are a very important part of the mix.
You see, you've got to recognise that the key, sort of, feature of our river system is its variability. The range of the ratio between high flows and low flows on the Murray, over since records began, 100 odd years ago is 30 1. So you could get, in one year, 30 times more inflows than you got the year before. And that means you have to have an agricultural mix that meets that.
BARRIE CASSIDY: Well, at the risk of having you to start again, when Senator Bill Heffernan says that cotton and rice is better suited to the north where it does rain then he's on the wrong track?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: No, that's not what I'm saying at all. Bill is right if I mean, I know - Bill Heffernan's a very good friend of mine, and I talk about water all the time. The point that Bill is making is there is a great deal of water availability in northern Australia and there are a number of crops, water intensive crops, that can be grown up there that where -- in circumstances or in situations where there isn't a lot of agriculture at the moment. Certainly we will have more agriculture in the north as time goes on because there's more water available there, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't have any annual crops in the Murray Darling Basin. Because if I get back to that fundamental point if -- you'd really need to have a mix of crops and it's not for the government to tell farmers what crops to plant. I can tell you, farmers have enough trouble making the right decisions with all of their experience and insight. The idea that you'd have some central crop selection committee sitting in Canberra telling people what to grow is just too ludicrous for words.
BARRIE CASSIDY: Yeah, I suppose not a question of forcing them but to encourage them.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Barrie, the world, the market encourages them. Farmers change their crop decisions all the time. They react to markets. You know, the do you really think that a group of politicians and bureaucrats are better able to determine what to grow than farmers, people who've spent their whole lives working on it, who've got access to all of the science and meteorological information? I mean, come on, really, this is a it's a crazy idea.
You've got to let farmers make their decisions, let water trade, let the market sort it ought, and have a mix of crops that reflects the variability of our weather.
We live in Australia, we don't live you know, we live in Australia, we are the lands of droughts and flooding rains. We get bad droughts, then we get floods and you've got to have water management practices and agricultural practices that reflect that and if you don't you'll get into a great deal more trouble than even the problems we have at the moment, believe me.
[... continued]
That, and removing the silly tax subsidies affored to MIS, which greatly distort the agriculture scene by encouraging corporations to establish land, water and nutrient hungry plantations that have little to no chance of turning a profit in their own right and exist simply as tax scams for the filthy rich (and those who'd like to be).
Nice of you to come and help with the heavy lifting sometimes.
As I said when I started this: water in this country is a complex subject, I didn't cover more than one quarter and that was superficial. If they can stay out of the local political issues those who read Turnbull's extract here may get some more of an idea of the complexities. El Nino (La Nina) can twist your life any way you didn't want it twisted if you live in eastern Oz.
Turnbull (who is OUT incidentally) has a brain and uses it unlike most of the current crop from both sides of the parliament.
David
It does appear misleading. I can only hope that they are wrong about the following as well.
At the global level, approximately one out of every eight people do not have drinking water. In just one day, more than 200 million hours of the time used by women is spent collecting and transporting water for their homes. The lack of sanitation is even worse, because it affects 2.6 billion people, which represents 40 percent of the global population. According to the report of the World Health Organization and of UNICEF of 2009, which is titled "Diarrhoea: Why Children Are [Still] Dying and What We Can Do," every day 24,000 children die in developing countries due to causes that can be prevented, such as diarrhea, which is caused by contaminated water. This means that a child dies every three-and-a-half seconds. . .
Brand new World Bank study says that the (water) demand is going to exceed supply by 40 percent in twenty years. It¹s just a phenomenal statement. And the human suffering behind that is just unbelievable. And what this did was basically say that the United Nations has decided it¹s not going to let huge populations leave them behind as this crisis unfolds, that the new priority is to be given to these populations without water and sanitation.
Good read Ross. Thank you. There must be a series of dams to store the rains, so that a farmer can tell whether it is a good year for annuals or not.
Front page of the local paper heralds the planets human population as reaching the 7 billion level. There is certain to be tension between resources and needs.
To me it just seems so bloody damn stupid that we have supported these profane wars, which cause people to hate us, when a fraction of the money would have given clean water and sanitation to the worlds underprivileged (previously colonized), and they would have loved us.
g'day david,
not sure about other states in australia? but imagine they won't be far different. under the new water regulations the gov' owns 90% of the water that falls on you property that's any property. and now with the setting up of the ready to be sold water districts in sth/east qld, and once sold to profit takers these factors will come into play. i would imagine that te gov will ahve ways say via sattelite imagary to determine how much of the rain that falls on you property that your garden and you might use, so then they would levy you against that above 10% usage.
those of us who put in a tank and claimed the rebate (that makes us known on records, so even those who didn't claim will come under the spell of the water owners) are likely to be levied with an annual fee for having a tank.
the irresponsible irrigation of unsuitable crops has little to do with water ditribued in the cities, that's the side of agriculture that runs incontrolled, they simply say if you want food this is what we must do. and any charges levied against them gets added to the cost o the food produced.
lots of controlling of whether people can put dams in or how many they can have and fees being paid for a license to put a dam in etc.,. already happening and has been for over the alst decade here in qld and from what i've head victoria as well.
utilities should never be turned into commodities they should e retained by teh people and managed for the people, and having the right to use fresh wate responsibly should remain that a rite. once commoditised it then can become too expensive for the poor to afford.
a person move to a property west of ipswich and wanted to start a native plant nursery and where not allowed to as they has no water of their own for irrigation, and also where not permited to put in a dam, so teh rules are already bitting someone somewhere, saw about a decade agao a victorian farmer wanted to put in a dam and was prevented from doing so until he paid the approprite fee. also a bloke west of the downs out in teh middle of the scrub put a dam in without seeking permission, thinking out here no one will drive by and see it, the local council paid him a visit armed with sattelite pics which they produced when he told said office he didn't have a dam.
water is a rite to every person on the planet as i see it, yes that we must use it wisely is another story. our usage here is less than 50 litres per person a day, the control target is 200 l/p/d, to us that encourges waste. the gov does not own any water as such.
and in time as they tighten up for profits sake what you do with grey water will come under the light.
On Fri, 30 Jul 2010 14:42:16 +1000, "David Hare-Scott" wrote: snipped
But does that apply to non-rural areas? I doubt it.
and now with
That's not how it's done in NSW and I suspect alsewhere. The 10% is approximated by a formula which arrives at a rate per hectare depending on the rainfall of the district, this multiplied by the number of hectares you have then determines the maximum volume of water you can impound.
I think this is just speculation.
The crazy thing is that most of the cotton and rice I mentioned is for export. The situation is different in the MIA as Ross said.
There is no license fee for a dam in NSW
Len with respect you have this completely backwards. We have had 150 years of treating water a "free" and that has got us into this mess. Any time you are doing a business case the cost-benefit analysis will lead you to over use any resource that is too cheap. To ensure that water is put to good use it must have a realistic price at least for commercial situations.
I would like to know the details, I suspect there may be more to this.
saw about a decade
The local council is not responsible for enforcing water laws it will be a department of the State Gov. But they do use satellite images to check up on dams.
More speculation
David
I know less about this topic but I suspect that it is true.
David
Indeed. And you'd have a far better grasp of that than I would, living off tank water and what you're allowed to water your veges and trees with. It is much easier for me to pontificate when connected to a steady municipal supply :)
Yes, and that would be why he's unpopular with the current crop of knuckle-draggers in his party. That, and being told to dump him by the anti-ETS lobby groups. (The issue that has knobbled two Prime Ministers and two opposition leaders... so far)
There is a complex arrangement of water catchment authorities that monitor rainfall, plus local and state authorities that monitor river flows. The information they gather helps formulate whether the already- sold water allocations can actually be "delivered" to the irrigators. Overselling allocations (especially to tax-avoidance-based MIS plantations) has meant that irrigators who did the "right thing" and put off drawing on their allocations until later in the season actually got no water, and thus had paid for an abundance of nothing.
The current fiasco^H^H^H^H^H^H government effort is an attempt to establish water allocations based more on actually how much water is likely to flow, and allowing for some to come out at the ends of the system too.
But the OECD world needs to secure the oil and the gas pipelines! I mean, bring peace and democracy to the middle east and expunge terrorism from the planet!
Sadly, there seems to be a connection between the oil and gas pipelines, and peace and democracy. None of the countries involved drew their own borders (with the exception of Iran) which was done primarily by the British, and to a lesser extent, the French, with an eye towards keeping the new states unstable. At the request of Britain, the US overthrew the democratcally elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran. We really haven't been modeling the appropriate behavior for the Middle East. Then we have
US 'biggest global peace threat'
I wanted to say, that's a beautiful bay you have next to Toronto :O)
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