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Archive for the ‘Gardening’ Category

I was excited to get some celeriac seedlings from a friend back in the spring, but they are rather disappointingly small. I wonder if I’m harvesting too early, if it wasn’t a good spot for them, or if they just haven’t been getting the right care?

Today I dug up the first few parsnips.  This monster weighed in at 950 grams.  It will accompany our roast chicken tonight.  Yummy!

Our neighbours have two rabbits that are allowed to roam free around the neighbourhood during the days. They stopped being cute though when we started finding nibble marks on our vegetables.

Next year we may have to issue an ultimatum: if the rabbits eat our veg, we will just have to eat the rabbits.

We harvested 11 pumpkins this year: 4 baby bears, 5 butternut squash (from seeds we saved from a supermarket squash), and 2 mystery grey-green pumpkins, from plants that self-seeded in the compost.

Ok, I can’t really come up with 101 things.  But we have now harvested over 32kg of zucchini, so I’ve been getting a bit inventive in the kitchen.  Here are a few ideas.

Moussaka – replace aubergine slices with zuke slices.  You don’t need to fry them first.

Lasagne – replace pasta sheets with zuke slices.  Makes it a lot like a moussaka    A good choice for low-carb or gluten-free dieters!

Zuke noodles – I read about this on the Stonesoup blog, and we now eat zuke noodles quite often.  Another good one for pasta avoiders.

Grate them – and have them raw in a salad or hidden in a casserole … a la The Cottage Smallholder.

Zucchini chocolate cake – I made this for Linus’s birthday cake and it went down a treat.

Throw them in an omelette or quiche.  I am considering a crazy idea involving replacing quiche pastry with overlapped zuke slices.  It could be genius, or it could be a kitchen catastrophe … watch this space.

Ask Google – search for “zucchini glut” and you’ll find a million other suggestions.

Or, just fry them with bacon.  Because bacon makes things good.

Zukes with bacon

We like to add boiled potatoes to a standard greek salad, to make it more of a meal. This one has homegrown potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers and oregano. Shame we have to buy the olives and the feta – we really need some goats!

I don’t plant much that is ornamental, but I do love these tree lilies (thanks Kinna!). They are beautiful and have a wonderful scent too.

Photo taken with the “retro camera” android app on my mobile

This is my first year growing zucchini, and I have to ask myself why I waited so long. We have 4 plants, one of which lives in a pot and one of which was the runt of the litter. These two are only mildly productive, but it doesn’t matter much since the other two are keeping us well fed.

So far we’ve harvested over 4kg of zukes and they don’t look like they’re slowing down. This monster alone weighed 1.2kg. I had left it to get big so I could have big slices for a moussaka. As it turned out, I only used a third of it for the moussaka! Which was delicious, if I may say so myself.

So, how did we manage to pick 23 kilos of cherries in one day?  Well, here’s the trick.

First, you need a lumberjack.

Lumberjack lurks beneath the cherry tree

Then it’s just a matter of …

Down ...

... she ...

... goes!

Then you send in the pickers.

Lumberjack of all trades

Little picker

It’s a bit of a shame to lose the largest of our cherry trees. But the lowest branches were so high, it was impossible to get any fruit from it, so only the birds were getting any benefit.

To answer Kathleen’s comment:

“and then did you pit them all?!”

we pitted a lot of them, by a variety of methods.  Some were cooked and then mushed through a grid (for jam), some were cooked for wine making, some were pitted by hand and made into pies.   We have thirtysomething jars of jam downstairs, some dried cherries going into our muesli, some fruit leather, some cordial, and some cherry wine that is getting very promising.