Saturday's Backyard Bounty

Each week I am going to aim to post about what we have harvested from our garden, and how we have used our harvest. I will also aim to write about a couple of things we have learnt.

Our harvest . . .

Today Dave dug up two buckets of potatoes. Elnathan enjoyed transferring them from one bucket to another!

We also harvested beetroot, carrots, lettuce, radishes, zucchini, spring onions, parsley, chives, our first tomato for the season, and basil.

Food from the garden . . .

Salads with fresh lettuce, radish, spring onion, cooked (boiled) beet, grated raw beet, carrots, and our first tomato! We are enjoying salads much more since I devoted a couple of meters exclusively to salad crops and began growing a variety of lettuces.

Risotto with beetroot and zucchini. Beet risotto is one of our favourites, and adding some zucchini was an experiment. We liked it!

Pizza with zucchini and basil as two of the toppings.

Potato salad this evening with our new potatoes, fresh eggs plus chives and parsley - yum, yum!

We also harvested some patty pan squash and enjoyed them on the braai tonight.

We planted . . . 

Seeds for carrots, turnips, spring onions and broccolini.

What we learnt . . .

Dave discovered that sunflowers are highly productive but susceptible to drought. They use water continually as they do not shut down their stomata. We must keep them well watered if we want them to be productive and produce seeds for our chickens. Our first sunflowers opened this week. They are behind the corn in a long row, so we hope it will look amazing soon.

I learnt to plait garlic and hung it on a hook near the back door.

Slugs have probably been responsible for the destruction of many of our seedlings. We laid snail bait and snared many. We thought grubs were cutting our seedlings off at the base but now think slugs may be responsible.