I continue to be astonished at the quantity of food we can produce on our little suburban block. We harvested over 20kg of tamarillos today, and this is the third pick of the season, with another to go. here’s a huge bunch of Cavendish bananas ripening on the back deck, and a smaller bunch of Ladyfingers. The lemon tree in the verge planting has its first real crop just starting…
It’s Shrove Tuesday. Good excuse for pancakes. What better, this time of year, than bunya nut pancakes.
The catbird, for some reason only known to its birdy mind, doesn’t like the teepee as a perch nearly as much as my vertical or arched wire trellises. So I have accidentally solved the problem of growing pole beans in the garden. Which I am very happy about because these beans make an excellent cannellini bean substitute.
Someone asked me in a comment what I do with the Madagascar beans. So … Beans feature in many traditional (and blue zone) cuisines. They’re hugely healthy. Madagascar beans adapt to most Mexican, Tex Mex and Central American recipes – which is one of my favourite cuisines. Madagascar beans also adapt well to most Mediterranean recipes – which is another of my favourite cuisines.
Come with me on a picking walk as I pick dinner out of the garden.
It is year three of this retrosuburbia challenge, and most days now we are eating substantially what can be produced from this little, 500m2 suburban block. No food miles, no packaging, no energy loss through processing or storage. With important gaps – cooking oil, dairy products, flour – but also with some surplus shared with neighbours, and at least in spring of a la Niña year and not taking our…
I’ve posted about my fruit bowl many times before. Brett Hamlyn gave me this handmade fruit bowl, as a Yule gift, back in 2016. One of my treasures. I’ve posted pictures of it full of winter, spring and summer harvests of fruit, and here it is, mid Spring, full again. (It actually had a nice little bowl of strawberries in it too, from the north wall garden, and a bowl of…