Rosa bianca eggplant, beets, carrots, sweet peppers, button squash roasted with lots of oregano, and steamed green beans, topped with a garlic yoghurt dressing, all of it bar the powdered milk used to make the yoghurt with about 10 steps of food miles. There is something very decadent about dinner shopping like this.
I go on a picking walk most days, picking what needs to be picked, and then thinking about what to do with it (and what else I need to pick from the herbs and perennials to go with it). What’s for dinner is always led by what needs to be used. This has the useful side effect that what needs to be used is pretty nearly always what’s at the…
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.
Come with me on a picking walk as I pick dinner out of the garden.
Summer is a much harder gardening season than winter in Australia. Most years there’s a set of frizzle days sometime over the summer – days when the temperature is up around 40ºC for a few days in a row. It can be really disheartening. Your garden can be looking good one day, then a few days later it’s all fried.
I don’t get frost in my sub-tropical garden, so winter is a good growing season here. It is the frizzle days of summer that are the challenge, when a whole garden can be wiped out in one brutal day. But just like gardeners in frost-prone climates, you develop a range of strategies to work the odds.
Madagascar beans are a tropical semi-perennial bean – they kinda take the niche occupied by seven-year beans (aka scarlett runner beans) in more temperate climates. Reliable, prolilfic, versatile.