Beans!

 

My first broad beans of the season:

 

They're a little bit late. I know this because my neighbour has picked, podded, frozen and dug the remains of hers back into her soil already and planted out tomatoes on top of where they were. I only have a small patch, mainly because I don't like broad beans all that much. Until now. My experience of broad beans in the past has been giant beans with the outside a kind of grey colour and boiled to a soggy mass. I have decided that if you pick the beans really young, they are sweet and delicious!

 

For dinner the other night we has this delicious broad bean bruschetta, an adaptation of a Donna Hay recipe. We brushed slices of sour dough with olive oil, grilled them, then rubbed them with a clove of raw garlic, like you would for bruschetta. Then spread on some soft fetta, topped it with beans quickly blanched in boiling, salted water and then sprinkle dover some gremolata (finely chopped parsley with lemon zest). It was really tasty and the beans were delicious;

Even Mustard thought it looked pretty good and insisted on watching us eat every single bite with a mournful expression on his face!

 

I'm now watching closely for the next lot of beans to grow to the right size for picking!

Tree cucumber?

Like my wonderful fig-sharing neighbour, I too have been sharing the food garden bounty! As the tomato plants have started to die back and I pulled out the dead corn stalks (it was just too hot this summer to grow the beans up the dead corn stalks) some of the other vegetables are just coming into their own. Like these Lebanese cucumbers that are so vigorous, they're climbing our bottlebrush tree:

Now we have cucumbers hanging out of the tree!

Cucumbers are a bit like zucchini in the way they like to hide and secretly grow into giant monster vegetables. I can monitor their growth from my kitchen window and when I see one is the perfect size for picking, I go and hunt for it. Do you think I can find them, though?? How do they do that?!

Consequently, we're eating a LOT of cucumber, which is great because it's such a tasty vegetable. We eat it in chicken and salad wraps, I make it into salsa, I make a chunky tzatziki by mixing cucumber cubes with Greek yoghurt, fresh mint and crushed garlic, it makes a wonderful side dish for bbq lamb cutlets, another recipe with yoghurt, I mixed diced cucumber with halved cherry tomatoes in yoghurt with some chermoula spice mix. Yum! Of course there's always cucumber in vege stir fry, salad and of course, the jug of Pimms. But a family of two (the beagles don't like cucumber as much as they like other vegetables) can only consume so much cucumber. So I have been leaving a few specimens with my (non-food growing) neighbours with the last of the cherry tomatoes and an invitation to help themselves to basil or herbs from the herb patch to make up a salad.

A place to rest

Remember my asparagus? How I said it was a long-term commitment? And that you had to leave it in the ground for several years before you could start to harvest it? Also, how I dug the poor things up from my previous house and brought them with me to give them a permanent place to rest in my new home. Well... I have a confession to make. I had to dig them up AGAIN. Yes, I've just added another year on to my harvest time frame, right there. The problem was, you may remember, that I only had a matter of hours to dig them up and plant them at my new house and that was well before I had designed the layout of my food garden. It turned out they couldn't have been in a more inconvenient spot. Even after the landscapers went to so much trouble to rope them off with fluorescent orange construction webbing so they didn't disturb them, I came along and disturbed them all. They were right at the top of the stairs. Oops.

 

So today's job was to prepare a new patch of soil and plant the crowns out (again) and hope for the best. That's me in the photo with a margarita, toasting their future success. Now I might mention the limes in the Margarita are not from our lime trees. (Thank you Laina for supplying them). We had a potting disaster with the lime tree recently, and while it's coming back with a vengeance, it did lose most of its fruit in the process. I went to re pot it because the potting mix had become hydrophobic and worn out, but when my husband pulled the tree out of the half wine barrel, the whole bottom of the barrel came out too! There was a mercy dash to the nearest garden centre to get a new wine barrel, some caster wheels from the hardware store and some gravel for the bottom of the barrel, to go with the new potting mix and compost that was waiting! Now that you've all waded through that tedious story, I think you deserve a drink too! So here's a recipe, perfected after many, many trials...

 

Nat's best margarita recipe

 

To a cocktail shaker add:

 half a dozen ice cubes

2 parts gold tequila

1 part Triple Sec

1 part freshly squeezed lime juice.

- Shake and serve in a salt-rimmed glass.

Tomorrow is a big day in the garden too... a big load of pine bark for the verge. This begins the transformation of the verge from highly compacted sand and scruffy patches of lawn, to an attractive (I hope) native strip! Stay tuned.