My Kitchen Garden Harvest

This last weekend I happily grabbed a good few hours, to get stuck into some much needed garden maintenance, ensuring my garden beds would cope with being neglected for the next three months, while we are off on our road trip.
As much as I love my crushed granite pathways between my beds, they have proved to be very efficient seed raising beds for a multitude of weed varieties. So up came the weeds once again, and this time down went the organic sugar cane mulch, in an attempt to keep 'them weeds' suffocated for as long as possible over the coming summer. (Summer really is coming people!)

The weather has been just a little crazy lately hasn't it? You could say 'four seasons in one day' seems to be the 'new season' for now. The upside of the early summer conditions we had a month or so ago, followed by much needed rain over the last couple of weeks, has meant quite tropical conditions in the garden. The early summer crops planted in my vege patch are performing incredibly well already!
This basil was only planted six weeks back from one punnet of seedlings, with the help of some fierce sunshine, abundant rain and only one application of an organic liquid fertiliser, it is looking very happy! Clearly time to make basil pesto today!

I also had great joy in harvesting my small crop of garlic over the weekend, which should see us covered for garlic for the road trip and some!

Although my tomatoes have only just begun, and are nowhere near harvest. I managed to pick up some over ripe organic tomatoes, just perfect for cooking, from one of my organic suppliers this week. So that meant cooking more tomato sauce today as well, so handy for an easy meal, both for the camp kitchen for our road trip and the home pantry for the offspring remaining behind!   

Recipes for my tomato sauce and basil pesto are here!

A simple dinner followed my afternoon of cooking and bottling, using some of the fresh basil pesto, wholemeal spelt pasta, garden peas and some pan fried Australian seafood (peeled by the lovely Mr G of course)!
Pesto Pasta with peas and prawns....a delish reward from the kitchen garden!