Jurassic Broccoli, Batman!

Our broccoli patch threatens to block out the sun if you stand in the right spot. The plants are HUGE. My father, who has grown veggies for most of his life, glanced at them on a ‘tour of the estates’ as we call it, did a double take and went over to peer at them and ask, “What’s THAT?”

Now that they have gone to seed, they are even taller and more imposing. They’re covered in bees all day, look spectacular, but smell hugely sulphurous when they’ve been in the sun awhile. Ick.

This particular veggie patch is quite close to a neighbour’s house, so I’m planning to put them out of their misery soon and haul these babies out. Not before making a careful assessment and saving some seed though! Broccoli this big, that fed us for two whole months, needs to be continued.

Who is threatening who, exactly?

…and then there was Beetroot

There was beetroot to harvest just a little while ago, and they were all lovely and big, too!

I got just over 1kg of it (that’s 2 pounds for my US friends), which was just enough to try out a pickled beetroot recipe I’d had my eye on for a while. Of course, the beetroot pickling happened at the same time as the cooking of the dinner, as well as some preparation for outings for school etc: why does so much of my canning happen when I’m just so busy I can’t stop to scratch myself? Why not on a sleepy Sunday when not much is happening?

Anyway, after everyone was in bed, and the canner finally got to 94 degrees and stayed there for half an hour, I produced these:

Let me tell you, beetroot pickled with cloves and cumin seed are to die for. There was also a half jar that we’d already hoed into too, but that’s not in the picture… I believe that someone was standing just out of the frame, making noises of appreciation. Yum! We’ve all been gorging on the stuff, and are almost through another jar. Just one to go!

Now we’re trying to figure out where to squeeze in some more beetroot in our bursting veggie patch, because such tasty treats weren’t in our minds when we planned it all out. We were thinking of tomatoes and basil… but that harvest storm is yet to come.

Now what?

As you can see, we’ve brought the pumpkins in from the cold, and are keeping them cosy by the fire. We don’t want a re-run of last year’s Pumpkin Slowly Rotting From The Inside (what’s that funny smell near the piano) Disaster, so we have our work cut out for us.

We tried to ‘cure’ them outside as recommended by Jackie French, but the method requires several sunny days… and all we had once we got them off the vine was RAIN! Here they are in various states of ‘trying to be cured’ for storage:

So far, the good things have been: pumpkin roasted with whole garlic cloves, pumpkin soup with African spice swirl, pumpkin… um yes, I believe that’s it. I’m thinking of just roasting a whole heap, mashing it and freezing it for adding to soup/stew as a thickener of sorts, but apart from that I’m out of ideas. The great Stephanie Alexander in The Cook’s Companion is not particularly forthcoming either, with only 3 pages devoted to the large yellow things, but some good ones to try, perhaps: Pumpkin and Amaretto Tart (savoury!), Pumpkin pie, and pumpkin and ricotta filling for ravioli.

Wish us luck: we have 2 children who don’t like pumpkin.

Ooer. It’s a chestnut.

…or several hundred. The I-man and I were trying to plan the next couple of weeks this morning, because it’s the Easter School Holidays, which means Events! And potential Trips! Yippee!

Unfortunately, we kept being interrupted by two small fry who just couldn’t wait to show us things/tell us about things/ask us to play games Outside, In the Garden despite all entreaties that if we were left alone, we would be planning things that included having Fun. It was to no avail, so we sent them on a mission, expecting them to get distracted and begin playing, after which we would not see them for a good long time.

We were wrong. We sent them down to the bottom of the block with a basket each, and told them to check if there were any chestnuts ready for gathering. Well… within ten minutes they were back, with this:

The chestnuts had taken them a nanosecond to gather, and that was a miniscule portion of those already on the ground. Our children are terrific gatherers. We are very proud. Unfortunately, they haven’t moved on to the processing side of things yet.

The gathering of figs, melons and quinces were a later, collaborative project called, “Harvesting for All the Family: a mandatory, participatory workshop.”

After that, we mowed the paddock, tore out all of the tomatoes and hung them to ripen in the greenhouse, pulled out the spent cucumber plants, planted sugar snap peas and podding peas in their place and planted oodles (metric measurement) of spinach, silverbeet, pak choy and beetroot seedlings in where the tomatoes were. I can barely move, I’m so sore!

We certainly know how to spend a Sunday.

Harvest Storm!

We have been harvesting such a lot from our garden lately.

This pic above was taken when the bounty was just beginning; when there were small zucchinis, and scant handfuls of beans. When I could pick a bunch of lemon verbena leaves and know that I would dry them carefully, not touching each other, and turning them often before laying them in a glass jar and screwing on the lid with a maternal satisfaction. A leisurely stroll in the garden meant picking a bunch of flowers, too, for the sheer joy of it, and for having beauty sitting about the house.

Now, however, our kitchen table more often than not looks like this:

What you see there in the pic are lebanese x parisian pickling cucumbers (we’ll cover that little slip up in another post…), mini white cucumbers, scarlett runner beans, avocadoes, nashi, baby corn, grapefruit, rhubarb and gadzooks. Or at least that’s what you say when a zucchini that size is suddenly sitting in your well-kept and genteel zucchini patch. These beauties are lebanese zucchinis, and we’re thinking of making a dugout canoe with the next one we find.

So that volume sitting on the table? That’s EVERY DAY, folks! What do you do with so many cucumbers?! I know, I’m totally blessed. This is what we always wanted, a garden that can feed us… but the learning what to do with it, and the total non-plussed feeling I get sometimes when I look at the combination of things coming into the kitchen and wonder ‘what do I make with all of THIS for dinner?’ is a little overwhelming sometimes.

That pile above is still sitting on my kitchen table as I speak, astounding me with the beauty and abundance that it represents. But also, a little guilt has started creeping in. What if I don’t get to it in time?

Harvest Storm, we’ve dubbed it, and to keep up we’re running as fast as we can.