Harvest Monday, November 19th 2012

The other day I asked on Twitter whether people could recommend me some good food blogs, and among all the others there was Suburban Tomato, who’s a neighbour of mine (or at least, “northern suburbs of Melbourne”, which is my area), and who participates in this weekly Harvest Monday thing, hosted by Daphne’s Dandelions. It looks like a good idea, so I’m on it.

There’s not much of a harvest this week at our place, because the garden more or less died down over winter and we didn’t really start working on it til I came back from my trip mid-October. So things are really only just starting out around here. Still, there are a few bits and pieces! Most of these are this week’s but I think a couple might be from the weekend before? Not sure! Hopefully I’ll get into a rhythm with this in future.

So without further ado, what we got from our garden this week…

Mulberries. We have a tree by our driveway, which is a special favourite of the Indian mynah birds that infest our street. Sigh. We still manage to pick a good handful every few days. We’re freezing them as we go, and will probably make some jam or something when we’ve got as many as we’re going to have. Pretty sure this pic is from last week, but we’ve had another similar bowlful this week as well.

We get about this many each time we check the tree, then rinse them and freeze them.

Herbs for a salad. Mint, lemon balm, and nasturtium.

In the background: roasted beets and their fresh, destalked greens.

I chopped them up with beet greens and a diced cucumber, then topped them with slices of beetroot, toasted walnuts, and a dressing made of greek yoghurt and preserved lemons.

The light was fading as I took this photo. It looked and tasted great, though.

It went with the roast chicken we had for dinner last night. My housemates seem to approve!

Approving housemates, Emily and Connie.

A few nasturtium seeds. Some of last year’s nasturtiums were in hanging pots and are now all dry and dead. I gathered these before we chucked them. The remains went into a huge terracotta pot that came with this house, and which has just been messing up the backyard til now. We’ve put it under the clothesline and we’re filling it with garden scraps and the dead, dry dirt from other unused pots. It’ll get a little layer of decent potting mix on top, and then a few nasturtium seeds deliberately planted. With any luck we’ll have a huge, sprawling, edible nasturtium display pretty soon. They’re tough little beasts, so I reckon they won’t mind the haphazard collection of stuff we put in their container. Fingers crossed.

I suspect a lot more fell in the dirt and we’ll have some surprise nasturtiums in due course.

The last of the lavender. This is some sort of drought-tolerant variety that our landlords planted, and I’m just getting the last, kind of sad flowers off it to dry and use. They’re not as fragrant nor as purple as they would have been back in September/October, but they’re better than nothing. I keep them in bowls on my desk and mix them around and turn them over with my fingers every day or so, and they dry out in about a week, while making my work environment a tad more pleasant. When they’re dry I’ll be putting them in sachets amongst my woollen clothes in the hope that they’ll help deter moths. Meanwhile, we’ve chopped back the lavender bushes pretty violently, and pulled out the dead one, which we’ll replace with a rosemary bush.