Monday Harvest – 12th November 2012

I had a little taste of summer this week as I harvested a few of the cucumbers.  Admittedly I harvested them very small, more to promote the growth of the plant as to eat really, but they still tasted good in Tzatziki.

I sometimes make my tzatziki with mint but on this occasion I made it with dill – the first dill I have harvested this year.  Here it is along with some spring onions and herbs I used for corn fritters.

The final home grown ingredient in my tzatziki was garlic.  I pulled quite a bit of my garlic crop this week – all of my hardneck ones were sagging and the stems looked like rotting so I yanked them.  Disappointingly none of them had flowered so I still haven’t tried garlic scape pesto but despite that I did get a few decent sized heads (and a few not so big ones….).

Here is another batch:

My softneck garlic is still growing (reasonably happily) – I will be very interested to compare the head sizes etc.  I am trying to use my newly harvested small heads up quickly before the skin around the cloves dries and they become more fiddly to peel.  To this end we are having garlic in everything.  My favourite dish of the week was with some broad beans, mint and feta.  There are more broad beans in the bottom of the basket than is apparent here.  As you may have guessed I also made salad.

Speaking of salad my wild rocket is doing particularly well at the moment.  This lot went on top of a simple tomato and salami pizza along with some shavings of Parmesan.  Appropriately the thyme pictured is called ‘pizza thyme’.

I have so many lettuces in the garden that I am pulling the occasional head rather than treating them all as cut and come again.  This ‘Freckles’ lettuce I took out to give my zucchini more room to grow into.

I find that when my silver beet bolts I can still harvest from the plants but in much reduced quantities.  I cobbled together this lot from all the flowering plants around the garden.  I haven’t pulled the plants as this variety has done really well in some pretty shady places so I am keen to save its seed.  An added bonus is still getting the occasional bunch to make gnocchi with.

As always I advise you to head over to Daphne’s Dandelions and check out who else is harvesting what.  Its always fun!