Saturday's Backyard Bounty: Radish Eating Babies and more!

We harvested radishes, lettuce, our first butter beans, parsley, chives, basil, oregano, rosemary, carrots, patty pan squash, zucchini and spring onions.

One of my most precious memories from the week is from yesterday afternoon, when I brought Nate into the garden with me to play nearby while I planted. First he had lots of fun feeding me lettuce! Next I showed him how to pull up some radishes and he immediately wanted to eat one, eating a lot of dirt in the process. I took it inside to wash and he ate narly the whole radish for afternoon tea! After finishing all but a segment he asked for the carrot that was on the bench, and proceeded to eat a lot of it. You can see the progress in these pictures. I was surprised and how much he ate of these raw vegetables.

We also had an impromptu lesson about how roots draw water from the soil, with the radish as our teaching tool!

More ways we used our backyard bounty . . .

Grated beetroot with mayonaisse. We still have beets in the fridge from last week's harvest.

Salad to take to dinner at a friends, with 100% our own vegetables

Baked potatoes harvested last week with topping of 500ml sour cream, grated beetroot, grated carrot, some lemon juice, and lots of chopped parsley. We have enjoyed this sour cream topping with other vegetables included in it, but this was the first time with beet. We like it!

Pizza with zucchini, carrot, parsley, spring onion and basil as some of the toppings (weird, I know . . . but we liked it!)

Eggs for breakfast a few mornings, boiled, fried and scrambled. This is the main way we eat the eggs from our chickens.

Potato salad and squash on the braai, like last week.

Bean salad with butter beans, fetta cheese, olives, olive oil, parsley and chives. This is a favourite from last year, and it was lovely to enjoy our first beans in this way tonight.

It was also fun to see the bean tendrils from our two teepees at the front of the garden finally meet in the middle of the string Dave put up between them over the entrance of the garden. You can see the chairs we sat on for an outdoor Bible and prayer time this evening . . . making precious memories! You can see the net which goes all the way around the garden and seves to keep out chickens.

This picture was too cute not to include! Dave put up the swing a few weeks ago.

We learnt that our snail bait may also have killed a worm. I found a dead worm on the soil near some bait. We are still using the bait though, as slugs have destroyed so many of our seedlings.