Willowbrook Park Breakfast...

The morning after the wedding we got to cook the Willowbrook Park breakfast for our guests for the first time. This hearty cooked breakfast is a contemporary take on the classic full English using only home grown and locally sourced produce. We served freshly baked artisan bread, beef sausages and bacon from Willowbrook Farm, and free range eggs from our neighbours (until we get the hens we are after for our farm). It also has roasted potatoes, tomatoes, and basil from our potager garden.

We had several dry runs before the day, including deciding exactly how we wanted to set out the plate. We were very excited to be using our newly completed kitchen for the first time for guests.

I had even found a wonderful bottle of olive oil at duty free on the way out of Sydney, which reminded me more of a bottle of Chanel No. 5 than a bottle of oil...

It makes a wonderful addition to the cook-top, and I think will make a great decanter for our usual olive oil in time to come. We are loving our cooker by the way, and the subway tiles. The splashback was supposed to be quartzite to match the benches, but it never arrived, so we chose the tiles 2 weeks ago to get the job finished, and I think they work well.

Our guests chose to take their breakfast in the dining room, so we started to get that prepared. We served a wide range of wholesome goodies including cereals, homemade breads and preserves, and fruit harvested from our orchard, along with a selection of fruit juices (orange, apple and cranberry), and teas and coffee (I was on Barista duty). I prefer pink grapefruit juice above all other fruit juices for breakfast, but unfortunately our trees have not yet started to bear enough fruit to make a decent amount of juice, and there was no fresh pink grapefruit juice available at the local market. I will have to remedy the situation this autumn.

Above: The morning sun at dawn streaming through the French windows into the dining room as we started to set up the buffet, below.

Please join us again tomorrow when we invite you inside The Gold Drawing Room.

The Olive Grove 2...

The growth in The Olive Grove has been huge!  In the last post you can barely make out the trees they were so small, now they are starting to take off.

Above: The Alders on one side of the entrance to the Olive Grove from the lake. There is a corresponding stand of Alders on the other side (off the photo to the right). We are going to let their canopies grow together and trim out the bottom to form an Alder tunnel through from the lake to the grove.

Below: A vista through the grove to a temporary focal point - a rustic wooden bench. 

We have even got our first crop of olives. I am sure they will bear thicker, and larger olives in years to come.

The olive grove by moonlight...

The Olive Grove...

We have finished planting our little olive grove. The trees are so small you can hardly see them at all, but they should make good progress over the spring.

At the end of the Bluebell walk one arrives at the lake, and passing through a serpentine glade in the lakeside Oak wood, one arrives at the olive grove and Tuscan garden. The olive grove has 12 olive trees of four different varieties, designed to cross pollinate each other (although each variety is self pollinating to a greater or lesser extent. The varieties are:

Frantoio: A Tuscan cultivar known for its excellent oil quality and flavour and moderate to high yields of easy to pick olives. It is frost hardy and a late ripener. Although it is self fertile, its yields improve by pollinating with Leccino. It is the main pollinator for other varieties.

Leccino: Quality and production similar to Frantoio, but more vigorous and higher yielding. Frost hardy. Resistant peacock spot. Late flowering. Pollinated with Frantoio, Pendolino, Picholine or Moraiolo.



Koroneiki: A vigorous, early bearer but late ripener from Greece. It is a small shrubby hardy tree bearing large crops of small fruit, useful as an evergreen shelter. It is self fertile and naturally resistant to Peacock Spot. The olives are OK for pickling as cocktail olives, but it is known for its very high yields of high quality oil.


Manzanillo: This is the world's most popular table olive. It has a high flesh/pit ratio. The tree is small, spreading, early-bearing, and high- producing: well-suited to pickling or oil. The oil has a peppery flavour. It is self fertile but its yield improves with pollination by Frantoio. This is one of the good home garden varieties, with the advantage of early ripening, but the disadvantage that it is prone to Peacock Spot and susceptible to hard frosts.

Hopefully one day the grove above will resemble the grove below...

The fences on the western side have been planted with 3 varieties of grape vines, so one day they will become a verdant border and complete the Tuscan theme. We are currently looking for a press which will handle grapes, cider apples and olives, so we can bottle out own wine, vinegar, cider and oils...


Update 14 January: We now have our first crops of olives and the trees are starting to bush out more...