From the Garden

Tonight's Dinner

Despite the lack of care in the last few months, the garden is still quietly producing away. I ducked out to pick these to add to tonight's dinner. The pumpkin is self sowed up near the fruit trees, the corn has been looking after itself since it was planted (probably not going to get much out of it, but looks like we should get at least a little), and the zucchini plants are taking over the front garden (along with the watermelons and more self-sowed pumpkins).

I'm trying to develop a liking for zucchini, but so far it's not going well. They don't taste exactly bad, but I can't find anything to actually like about them yet, so I'm making do with hiding them under other vegies (mashed potato works well) or in other things, like the delicious pasta sauce below. Because no matter how bland they taste, there is one thing I can say about zucchini's, they sure are easy to grow in large numbers!

This is the pasta sauce I made yesterday completely from our home grown tomatoes. Actually, this is the leftover sauce that I put into the freezer after using the rest of it to cook up enough mince and sauce to do 3 meals, plus leftovers! Tomatoes, like zucchini's, are something we can easily grow plenty of. In fact, I really must go out and pick the next lot to add to the freezer tomorrow morning!

This afternoon I went out and picked a bunch of cow peas. I planted these on the side of the chook run back in the beginning of summer, and have looked at them drying the last few weeks, wondering if they were edible (I bought them mainly for the chooks), and after a bit of research today, it seems like they are. I picked all these in only a few minutes, and there are probably about this many again on the vines.

Shelling them left me with quite a bowl full of dried cow peas (which I'm pretty sure are actually a bean, not a pea!) Not sure exactly what I'll do with them yet, probably add them to a soup, stew or mince dish, but it's kind of cool to have all these when I hadn't really expected it. They are quite prolific (I only planted about 20 or so plants), way more so than other types of beans, and on top of that they are doing a great job shading my chook pen!