Making the most of our produce
February already - the last month of summer and the garden is booming and blooming.
We've had a lot of meals based around zucchini and runner beans as that's what we've had a glut of. BUT Lizzie has been very inventive as far as recipes go and we have hardly had the same meal twice. You'd be amazed what can be done with a zucchini......legally I mean!
Having said that, you can have too much of a good thing so we decided to blanch and freeze the extra beans and to cube up and free-flow freeze the extra zucchini.
(Zucchini cubes - batch one - freezing down ready to be bagged.)
We've had a busy day preserving produce today. I have pickled some more jars of lemon cucumbers
and have been helping Lizzie to prepare/make bottles of tomato passata (5.5 kilos of cherry tomatoes went into that).
We've also made jars of tomato/chilli jam and prepared/sliced 4 trays of German striped tomatoes which are currently being dehydrated.
After that, we sat in the garden and toasted our success with some home made slightly sparkling Feijoa wine....which was absolutely delicious. My Facebook friends may remember a post I put up a while ago about some less than palatable plum wine I found in the garage from 1999.....well this one was a success.
We also had crackers with cheese, slices of tomato, slices of pickled cucumber and tomato/chilli jam. Absolutely delicious and frankly bloody marvelous to eat what we grow.
The early runner beans have been a great success but are coming to an end. We were also plagued by the New Zealand Green Stinkbug which sticks it's beak like feeder into the beans and sucks the living daylights out of them leaving a shrivelled hull. I have just planted some more runners down the side of the house and they are already up almost a metre, so things look promising for a late crop of beans provided that the bugs keep away.
We have had a ridiculous amount of zucchini from our three plants. They seem to morph over-night from petite zucchini one day to monster marrow the next.
Having tried out several different meal recipes and chutney featuring zucchini/marrow we have finally admitted defeat and begun freezing the remainder of the crop. We can use it in soups and stews later.
Our 22 tomato plants have been amazing as you can see from the photos on this post, their output has been prolific. The cherry tomato plants have been awesome as usual, but I've been most impressed by the Striped German Tomato plants. They keep giving and giving. The tomatoes produced are large and tasty.......and striped orange and red. We're also growing some called "lunch box tomatoes" which are sized midway between the cherry and German Striped, are quite firm, pinky-red in colour, but are slightly lacking in flavour compared to the cherry tomato.
We've been eating tomatoes in salads, fried tomatoes, tomatoes in a variety of meal recipes, tomato/chilli jam, tomato relish, making tomato sauce and bottling some.... even dehydrating them and preserving in olive oil.
Our peas and potatoes are finished. They were nice while they lasted, but I'll plant more of both next year.
Beetroot has also been a success for roasting, pickling and grating raw into salads. I must plant some more to ensure continued picking.
The lemon cucumbers which grew extremely well in the back garden last year have not done so well there this year......but have thrived in the front garden and once again given us a great crop. We've picked and eaten a lot of cucumber and there are more waiting to be picked.
I had been hoping for a good crop of melons, but so far can see only three or four on the vine.
The pumpkins and other squash are doing well in various parts of the garden so we're hopeful of a good crop for eating and storing. I've seen about eighteen or nineteen good sized ones so far and more are budding.
I really need to start planting for our upcoming winter garden - Brussel Sprouts, Red Cabbage, Peas, Onions, Spring Onions etc. but have to clear some space for them first. Once the weather clears up I'll get on to it.
Our early crop of raspberries were excellent and we now have more flowers on the canes and the new crop of raspberries are forming which will be our autumn crop. Our strawberries have been good, but the few that are growing at the moment are only half the size of the earlier ones....and our peaches are still a couple of weeks away from being ready to pick. I need to find another type of fruit to fill the gap between the berries finishing and the peaches starting.
We occasionally do gardening for other people and were recently given a supply of Black Doris plums by Pauline from Farmhouse Kitchen. Some of them went into our breakfast of fruit, muesli and yoghurt but most were turned into the yummiest Plum Jam....by Lizzie.
Life is good.
