The never-ending feast

It's been a while since I wrote about our garden so that's where we are today.  Most of you know that Hanno and I have been gardening for many years but I have to tell you there is always something new to learn.  It's a never ending feast - both in culinary and intellectual terms.  It keeps us on our toes, it gives us delicious organic food fresher than anything we could buy and it's part of the mosaic that makes up the work we do in our home.

 

Above are just some of the many passionfruit we've had this year.  These are a black variety that I think are Misty Gem.  At the moment we have about 20 ripe passionfruit sitting on the kitchen bench.  I hope to use them to make curd this coming weekend.  It's the same recipe as the lemon curd I make, just with different fruit.  It's delicious on toast or scones, in little tart cases, or a couple of cups in a pie shell under a blanket of meringue makes a terrific alternative to lemon meringue pie.

Newly planted lettuce and bok choy.  You can see snow peas and kale in the background.

The last of the first crop of cabbages.  A new batch was planted two weeks ago.

This is the lettuce and bok choy again but here you can also see the garlics planted a couple of months back and the last of the potatoes.  They are flopped over and waiting to be dug up, there are still a lot of them inside waiting to be eaten.

We used to grow blueberries here but they never really did very well so we dig them up and planted tomatoes.  Tomatoes are something we eat almost every day.  We need a lot of them.  Whatever excess we have I turn into tomato chutney and sauce. 

This sorry sight is what is left of a crop of tomatoes planted about four months ago.  You can see the brown leaves - that's tomato wilt.  It doesn't affect the tomatoes at all but it weakens the plant a lot.  We aim to get about four kilos (9lbs) from each bush and then we pull them out.  Tomatoes are always a difficult crop for us to find new space for.  Once we've grown a crop we like to leave that spot for a few years before planting tomatoes - or potatoes, capsicum (peppers) or eggplant - there again.

And this is what we did with our blueberries.  They are planted up in my antique baby bath and bread bin.  :- )  I've just noticed that Hanno's planted a couple of marigolds in there too.  We'll watch them in this space and if they fail to thrive, we'll find a better home for them.

I suppose many of my northern hemisphere friends will be up to their necks in vegetables and fruits right now.  I hope you're enjoying your gardens and learning the things that will help you next year and 30 years from now.  Once gardening gets you, you're in it for life.

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