Dahlia Profile - Floret Bee's Choice Flowers
Hello friends,
Today's dahlia profile is for my Floret Bee's Choice flowers. I bought dahlia and zinnia Floret flower seeds from Emerden in New Zealand last spring, and sowed them in October.
From Floret's Website: "Floret Bee's Choice was collected from all of our different dahlia breeding patches on the farm and includes a wide range of shapes, sizes, and colors—no two plants will be the same! Most of the flowers will have open centers, which will attract lots of pollinators to your garden. If you discover a variety you love, tubers can be saved and planted out the following year." Planted in full sun, plants will reach 48 to 72 in tall.
Floret 1:
Floret 2:
Floret 3:
Floret 4:
Floret 7:
Floret 8:
Floret 10:
As you can see from the Floret Bee's Choice dahlias that have flowered so far, dahlias 1, 2, 3, 4, and 8 all have yellow/orange colouring, with a range of petal numbers, with dahlias 3 and 8 having extra frills. Dahlias 7 and 10 are shades of pink, with dahlia 7 has curled inward petals, and dahlia 10 being pretty plain.
In terms of choosing which dahlias to keep at the end of the season, the only one I definitely want to keep is dahlia 3, with it's yellow/apricot colouring and pretty frills. I'm also kind of tempted by dahlia 8, but I'll see how it looks as the season goes on.
I have really enjoyed the process of dahlia growing from seed, watching the process from germination, to flowering, and I'll definitely collect seed from them in autumn.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
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Processing Damask Rose Flowers For Rose Water and Essential Oil
Hello friends,
And welcome to 2025 on my blog. I did a bunch of stuff over the Christmas break, so in the coming weeks you'll see what I got up to crafting and gardening wise during that time. One of the things I got up to in November and December, was to harvest, and then process my own damask rose flowers.
Damask roses hail from Syria, and their flowers have been used to make rose essential oil and rose water for thousands of years, for use in both perfumes and food. In New Zealand, damask rose plants are hard to come by, and it took me a few years to get hold of two rose bushes from small, specialty rose growers. The two varieties of damask rose bushes in my back garden are Duc De Cambridge and Isapahan.
Duc De Cambridge.
Isapahan.
Damask roses only flower once in spring, and their flowering happens over the course of a month. After some research, I found a scientific paper which said that the damask rose flowers could be stored at -20˚C for a month without losing any rose essential oil, in order to collect enough rose flowers to process them by steam distillation. From mid-November to mid-December, I went out into the back garden each morning, and collected flowers from my damask rose bushes, and them stored them in our chest freezer.
When flowering finished in mid-December, I defrosted my damask rose flowers and placed them inside my Air Still pot still for distillation. After filling the still with enough water to cover the roses, I began distilling the rose essential oil and rose water.
After about twenty minutes of heating, the strong scent of rose essential oil gases began filling the kitchen. A minute after that, the combined liquid of rose essential oil and rose water began exiting the pot still.
The distilling process took about an hour, and I was left with 700 mL of combined rose essential oil and rose water afterward. The amount of rose essential oil was tiny compared to the rose water, so I decided to leave the two combined for storage. I split the resultant rose water into two 350 mL containers, and gave one to my sister, who likes to make natural products for her home.
I'm really pleased with the resulting rose water, which smells lovely, and in the coming years as my rose bushes grow, I'll get bigger harvests of rose flowers each year. My plan with the rose water this year is to use it in my cold-processed soap recipe later on this summer.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
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Making Lime Syrup With A Glut of Limes
Hello friends,
As it's now winter, it's peak citrus fruit season for our lemon and lime bushes. The lime fruit ripened on the bush first, so we've been using them in various baking and cooking recipes for the last couple of months (wherever citrus is needed), and I've even been giving away limes to anyone who comes to visit us...
But even after doing all that, we still have too many limes sitting on our kitchen window sill and also on the bush, so I searched the internet for ideas for what to do with all the limes.
After searching for a while, I settled on making some simple lime syrup. It uses up a lot of limes, and it means I have homegrown syrup for hot and cold drinks, and also for using in baking recipes.
Simple Lime Syrup
Ingredients
1/2 Cup of Fresh Lime Juice
Zest of Those Limes
1 + 1/2 Cups of Water
1 Cup of Sugar
1/2 Teaspoon of Citric Acid (citric acid makes the lime syrup flavor more intense)
Recipe
(1) Zest limes one by one before you juice them, aiming to have 1/2 a cup of lime juice, plus the zest from them at the end. This step is not exact, depending on how much juice is in the limes. As I had a lot of limes, I just kept juicing them until I had enough juice and zest. It's always easiest to zest the limes first before cutting them in half and zesting them.
(2) To a pot, add 1 + 1/2 cups of water and heat to a simmer, add the sugar and citric acid, and mix until the sugar is completely dissolved. Add in the lime zest and juice, and cover the pot, and simmer for 15 minutes.
(3) Remove the syrup from the heat and allow it cool. When the syrup is cool enough to handle safely, strain the lime syrup to remove the zest and any stray lime pieces. I used a dexam strainer that I got from Moore Wilsons when we lived in Wellington. (The dexam strainer is very useful for many cooking, bottling, juicing, and jam making projects, as the strainer is super fine.)
(4) Collect the lime syrup in a container, and store it in the fridge, where it will last for up to a month.
You can also use this recipe to make a simple syrup with other citrus fruit like lemons and mandarins and oranges. I've found that the lime syrup is great for making a hot citrus drink, similar to making a hot lemon, and you can add honey to it as well. It's quite refreshing and warm on a cold frosty day.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
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Tomato, Capsicum, and Lime Soup Recipe
Hello friends,
Happy winter solstice, soon the days will become much lighter again!
We're heading into the coldest time of the year, so I thought I'd share with you my favorite soup recipe, which is Tomato, Capsicum, and Lime soup. The ingredient list is pretty small, and most years I've grown my own tomatoes, lime, garlic, onion, and chilli for the recipe. I've had a bad run of growing my own capsicums, so I buy frozen capsicums from Frozen Direct for the recipe, as it's much cheaper and it comes pre-chopped.
In this recipe you can choose whichever stock you want, we usually use a salt reduced chicken stock, or if you want a vegetarian option, go for a vegetable stock.
Tomato, Capsicum, and Lime Soup
Ingredients
1 tablespoon Olive Oil
1 large Onion
1 clove of Crushed Garlic
1L Chicken Stock (Vegetable stock works great also)
4 Red Capsicums deseeded and chopped, OR
600 grams frozen Red Capsicums
1 small red Chilli or ½ teaspoon Chilli powder (this is approx, it depends on what heat level you like)
3 tins of tinned 400 gram tomatoes OR
one 2L ice cream container of frozen homegrown tomatoes
1 Tablespoon of tomato puree (This is purely optional. It depends on how tasty the tomatoes are in the recipe. My advice is to do the recipe up to step 4 without the tomato puree, and do a taste test, and if it’s not tomatoey enough, then try adding tomato puree by the tablespoon)
1 Lime – Juice + Zest
Salt and Pepper to taste
Recipe
(1) Cook chopped onion and garlic gently in olive oil in a covered pot for approximately 5 minutes until softened, stirring occasionally.
(2) Stir in chopped capsicum, chilli, tomatoes, and chicken stock. Bring to the boil and simmer for 20 minutes.
(3) Puree the mixture with a stick blender until smooth.
(4) Do a taste test once the soup is at a smooth consistency, to see if tomato puree needs to be added. Add the juice and zest of the lime.
(5) Simmer for 10 minutes, and then do a taste test to see if salt and pepper is needed. Add salt and pepper and simmer for 5 more minutes.
(6) Enjoy the soup straight away, or freeze if you have any excess. This recipe gives approximately 4 - 6 serves depending on how big your soup bowl is.
This soup recipe, is my favorite of all time, and I look forward to eating it each autumn and winter. We usually have it with toasted ciabatta and a sprinkling of Parmesan cheese, but it is wonderful just on it's own. I usually also make a double batch, so that we have plenty of this soup over winter whenever I have a hankering for it. I hope you give this wonderful soup a go, and please let me know what you think of the recipe...
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
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or Mastodon or Bluesky.
Milling and Baking Our Own Homegrown Bread
Hello friends,
After harvesting and processing the 2023/2024 season's wheat, we were ready to mill our grain, and then bake our own homegrown bread.
The first step was to mill the wheat grain using our Mockmill Stone Mill which attaches to our Kitchenaid stand mixer. You can find out more information about our Mockmill milling set up in last year's blog post.
It only took a few minutes to mill all of this year's grain into flour (and some of last year's leftover grain), in the stone mill using a fine milling setting.
The next step was to separate the white flour from the majority of the wheatgerm and bran. Last year we used the sieve we have at home, but the sieve was too coarse, and most of the wheat germ and bran still got through. So this year we invested in a super fine manual flour sieve from Flour Power Mills. When sieving was completed we were left with a light brown super fine flour, which still contained some fine wheatgerm and bran. The coarser wheatgerm and bran is now stored away for other baking and cooking projects during the year.
All that remained was to bake a loaf of bread. After milling we had 4 cups of flour, which we used in our standard wholegrain bread recipe.
Wholegrain Bread Recipe for use in a Bread Maker
Ingredients
1.25 cups of hot tap water
1 teaspoon of salt
1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon of sugar
2 tablespoons of vegetable oil (canola or any other neutral seed oil)
1/3 cup of milk (can be from milk powder, but the liquid volume is important)
1/3-1/2 cup of 7-seed-mix, whole-grain, or other similar tasty grains (we get ours from Bin Inn)
3 cups of strong/bread flour (or in our case homegrown and milled flour)
2 teaspoons of supabake yeast (i.e. mixed yeast with bread improver)
Recipe
(1) Place in the baking tin in the order above, it is important to have:
* The grains *in* the liquid (to soak)
* The flour on top of the first 6 ingredients
* The yeast on top of the flour (so it's not in the water, or in contact with the salt or sugar until it starts mixing)
(2) Place the baking tin in the bread maker, and set the bread maker to the "wholegrain" program in your bread maker. Start baking your bread.
(3) We have a 10+year old Sunbeam bread maker, but we have reports this recipe works well in others. The bread maker should have a first period where it keeps the water warm to soak/soften the grains (which is why you do not want the yeast in the water, with warmth and sugar it'll activate far too soon).
And two hours and twenty minutes later our homegrown bread was out of the bread maker. It wasn't quite as fluffy as commercially grown bread, but the bread had a wonderful nutty flavor which was great fresh, as well as toasted.
We've found that growing our own wheat, and then processing and milling our own flour is a very fulfilling thing to do. It's nice to see how processed food is made, and to appreciate the hard work that goes into making flour and bread.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
Want to discuss my post? Feel free to chat with me on Instagram or Mastodon or Bluesky.
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