Monday Harvest – Mar 19th 2012

I’ve just gotten back from a long weekend on the Bellarine Peninsula, staying in Queenscliffe.  We had a lovely time; paddling in the sea, exploring rock pools, eating fish and chips and generally enjoying what the weather people say might be the last warm weather for a while.  The few days away meant I didn’t harvest as much as usual, except that is for chillies – I harvested a fair few of them.

As you can see in the above photo I am also still harvesting passionfruits.  The kids & I eat them as quickly as they arrive so I haven’t made anything new with them for a while.  My fig thief seems to have moved on so I am enjoying a few figs at the moment, I haven’t been doing anything more exciting than simply eating them either.  I harvested another eggplant and have quite a number of the bushes almost ready, including some of the Lebanese type which I will probably include next week.  The final item in the basket is a capsicum from the second round of fruit from one of my 2 year old plants.

After the assault on the eyes of my first harvest I thought the second I wrote about should be a soothing green.  These spring onions, mint and chilli went into a mint relish I served alongside a chicken curry.

As you may have noticed in my previous post I am harvesting rainbow chard at the moment.  This bunch went into a smoked trout quiche that I managed to overcook and thus it wasn’t nearly as delicious as it should have been.

I am continuing to harvest cherry tomatoes.  I have slicing tomatoes forming but none are ready to harvest at the moment.  The Black Cherry, Tommy Toe and another cherry variety are still bearing fruit – most of which gets eaten straight off the plants by the kids.

Also in the bowl are a fig, a passionfruit, one of the few strawberries not to be eaten on sight and a tomatillo.  The first tomatillo I’ve ever grown in fact.  I’m not really sure what to do with it.  I’m presuming it is ripe, the outside casing went all papery like a Cape Gooseberry does, but it seems quite hard to me.  Perhaps I’ll look at it for a while and eventually taste it.

My final harvest I forgot to photograph (actually I often forget to photograph things but this I remembered I’d forgotten earlier than usual) so I photographed what it made.  Basil pesto on spaghetti.

To have a look at other harvests from around the world hop on over to Daphne’s Dandelions.