Leanne Shawler, Artist

You may have noticed that passionfruit has been on my mind a little bit . As we have a lot of it, with still more to come, I think. On Sunday, I made jam from the passionfruit.  This required unearthing all the jam-making equipment that my mother-in-law had given me and washing everything. The passionfruit was cut open and the skins were left to soak in water overnight, and then boiled for 30 minutes (I should've done it a little bit longer) ... And then the jam making began in earnest. The result being two and three quarter pint jars of pink-colored (from the skins that were boiled) passionfruit jam. And then to wait for 24 hours to see if the seals took. The recipe I used came from here . I had some passionfruit skins left and I really liked the color of the jam in this guy's recipe , so I tried that next. First boiling the skins for 1.5 hours boiled down the water (guess my pan lid wasn't close fitting enough?) so I felt if ...

It seems like I'm finally going to be pushed into making jam -- something I've wanted to do for a while  but have put off -- because our passionfruit vine is overflowing with lots of fruit. So, I thought I would share about passionfruit ... We decided to grow this because my husband and I both love passionfruit. For me, it's a reminder of home: of passionfruit folded into whipped cream which ended up on the top of pavlova. Yum. The vine is in danger of taking over the front yard (and shades our vege garden more than I would like). overgrown passionfruit vine. yes, the trellis it is on has developed a lean, but the raised garden bed is doing a good job of holding it up The flowers are pretty, but small. The name passionfruit comes from the stamen of these flowers that look like Jesus' Cross, aka the Passion. We've harvested two large containers of these. So far. We froze some of the fruit, which is basically slicing them in two and scooping out...

Because I know you want to see all the pictures I've taken. (Or if nobody else, my Mum does.) All the flowers come from Annie's Annuals . Except for the foxgloves: they're from Home Depot. Papaver rhoeas "Falling in Love" Papaver hybridum "Pink Heirloom" Papaver setigerum "Poppy of Troy" "Black Gem" Bachelor's Button Dianthus "Inchmery" Papaver hybridum "Sugar Plum" foxgloves Nigella "Curiosity" all the poppies -- too bad the yellow tree rose is not in bloom too!

Harvested a bunch of tomatoes yesterday. I've lost count of how many Black Pearl Hybrid Cherry Tomatoes we've harvested, but its a lot. Unfortunately a lot of them fell off the bushes last weekend while we were gone, but as you can see, we're still doing all right. No thanks to this guy. I caught him gorging on a tomato. He was so big, he was shearing off the side of the tomato, down to the seeds! Yes, he's been eating well. I put him in a nice place for a bird to snack on.... although knowing my luck it crawled back into the garden.