Monday, May 04, 2015

Autumn Harvest

We're only a few weeks off the official beginning of winter here and although things are slowing down a bit there's still quite a bit of food to harvest from the vegetable garden. These are yesterday's pickings.


The butternut squashes are the last of them - there are already a number in the store cupboard - but the small tomatoes are still coming with each day producing a decent size bowl full and a mass of small green ones on the vines. I'm not too sure how much longer the basil will survive now it's cooling down but if the winter is mild it can keep going until it's almost Spring. This bowl of it made for a delicious pasta and pesto lunch and there's enough left over for someone's evening meal. See.


This isn't all there is in the vegetable garden. Even now, when most of the summer crops are finished, there are spring onions, snake beans, lettuces, nasturtiums, garlic chives and parsley - both flat leafed and curled - and I noticed this morning that we have Chinese gooseberries coming up - although they are more fruit than vegetable.

Even so it's time to get planting for winter so there'll be a visit to the local plant nursery for seeds and seedlings this week. It might sound very late compared to many other parts of Australia but our summers are long, hot and dry here and any earlier and we'd risk losing them.

2 comments:

Jo said...

Now I am celebrating the beginning of the asparagus season. I had my first helping this evening. Bliss. I don't have a garden of any kind although I do grow Basil, right now I have a plant indoors but soon it will be outside as it is getting rather large and the weather is improving. I've often speculated about growing tomatoes on our balcony, maybe this year.....

Helen V. said...

I love asparagus, too, Jo, but it'll be a while before we have it available here and my vegie garden is one of the reasons I'm so resistant to moving to a smaller place.