Harvest

This basket of goodies came out of my veggie garden - oh, and the reason the side of the basket is missing is because my cat had his head over it and that didn't seem relevant to this post although I'm sure he would have thought it was. As I've mentioned before - or perhaps that should be moaned about before - the summer vegetables have generally not been great this year thanks to rats, disease and some as yet unknown bug which denuded whole swathes of plants of their leaves and left only forlorn sticks. The capsicums, basil and cherry tomatoes were the few exceptions. The tomatoes have just about finished now but the basil and capsicums are still going strong which brings me to these beauties.

With too many to eat at once - although a few have been kept to eat fresh in salads - I needed to find a way to use them. I settled on charring them under the grill because I love the smokey sweetness that develops when they're cooked this way. The smell, on the other hand, while they are cooking under the grill is not so appealing. I guess you can't have everything. After they were cooked, skinned and cut up - and samples nibbled on in the process purely for quality control you understand - I ended up with a nice big pile of delicious pieces. Some are now sitting in the fridge liberally bathed in extra virgin oil, garlic and white wine vinegar and the rest are packed up in serving size containers in the freezer, joining the large bags of pesto - five in all - that I’ve already made over the last few weeks. I'm sure there’ll be more of both, too, before the summer garden is finally finished.

And that reminds me it’s also time I started thinking about cool weather crops. This means I need to check out what seeds I already have and look into buying any extras I need. It also means I need some seed raising tubes. I make these out of newspaper and it’s a pleasantly repetitive task for when it’s too hot or windy outside - both of which are common enough here in March. Looks like I’m going to be busy.