Monday Harvest – 18 Jun 2012

I feel like I’ve spent ages composing this post.  This is partially because my first draft somehow got lost in the cyberspace….damn you WordPress.  It is also partially because I’ve done two silly things today.  I’ve drunk slightly too much red wine with dinner and listened to altogether too much talk back radio whilst preparing dinner.  I do find that both red wine and talk back radio have the uncanny knack of both numbing the brain slightly whilst adding a slightly anxious edge to day to day life.  For me the anxious response to talk back radio is pretty immediate (do people really think like that????) but the red wine one is more delayed – generally striking sometime between 2:00 and 4:00am.  So with the prospect of some wakeful hours in the early morning ahead of me, I bring you the totally unrelated topic of this weeks harvests.

I harvested much of the remaining tamarillo crop this week.  I want to give the tree a good prune as I’m running out of washing line.  Its winter and things can take days to dry so I need to liberate some line from the tamarillo branches.  My spreadsheet suggests we’ve had about 200 tamarillos from the tree this year (with a few unreachable ones still remaining).  Last years harvest was under 10 so I reckon 200 is pretty good.

Also on the fruit front I harvested another couple of oranges.  My daughter decided one of them, along with a capsicum she picked, would be perfect in her camping chairs drink holder.  Why not I guess….

She did eventually eat it and the capsicum was stir fried with some beef and black bean sauce.  These spring onions went into that same stir fry.

Other greenery harvested this week included large quantities of parsley and a lot of silver beet.

This lot of silver beet went into a chicken saag which is the only dish I cook at the moment that the whole family happily eats.  Arrrggggh I live with too many picky eaters……

3 out of 4 will eat broccoli though so its a shame this head wasn’t bigger – I was going to pretend it was then I realised the presence of my finger in the photo ( I really must stop biting my fingernails….) gives you too much of an idea of its scale.  That is, pretty small really…

I also harvested a beetroot or two this week.  This one I made into a dip which although it tasted fine I found it very weird as its flesh was white.  My brain does tend to struggle computing a beetroot flavour with a white dip, no matter how good the flavour might be I still struggle with the concept.

My final harvest was to me my most exciting.  Parsley always excites me and I do enjoy lemon thyme but its clearly the Meyer Lemons that I’m talking about.  My first Meyer Lemons from my dwarf tree.  Hopefully the first of many.

And that’s it from me for this week, if, like me, you want to see more veg then head on over to Daphne’s Dandelions where you’ll find harvests from around the world.