This time of year in this part of the world (northern NSW), fruiting annuals are all a gamble. I might just squeeze in another round of the summer annuals, especially the faster ones like zucchini and squash and cucumbers and beans. My site is pretty well frost free and with luck they’ll bear into June, but an early cold snap will zap them just as the first fruits are ready…
In my kitchen is …
I post a lot of vegetarian recipes here but we’re not vegetarian. Sometimes we go for ages eating vegetarian, but more because that’s what I feel like cooking and eating and I have all the ingredients I need without going shopping, than for any philosophical reason. If you’ve ever seriously tried to feed yourself out of a garden, you will know that animals – big ones and very little ones…
My favourite variety of beans at the moment – brown seeded snake beans. So long as I can keep water up to them, they don’t mind how hot it gets, and they bear really prolifically over a month or more. They make a great salad, blanched then dressed with a balsamic olive oil garlic dressing while they are still warm. Or, like this, lightly sauteed with lots of garlic, then…
Every year a few garlic plants manage to escape harvesting in early summer. The leaves die off and I lose them in the garden. Every…
I don’t make jam. If I did, I’d just have to eat it and I really don’t need that much sugar. Besides, I am very very lucky in that I live in a place where there is some fruit in season pretty well any time of the year, and making not-jam is so much easier. Mulberry not jam, followed by strawberry, then peach and nectarine and plum, then mango, then…
I’ve just moved the chooks into a new bed, and they are feasting on broccoli that is well past bearing human food. They like the cabbage white moths and grasshoppers on it the best and have lots of fun hunting them.