Veggie Heaven

Steve is the vegetable grower extraordinaire of our household. He has his little slice of heaven in a 5 metre square corner of our back garden and he lovingly hauls in bag after bag of sheep poo and chook poo and various other goodies to dig into his ever-enriching soil. He also gathers up fallen leaves from around the garden and rots them down into leaf mould to dig in, and he also shreds up garden prunings to use as mulch. It's a beautiful, natural, recycling system.

He tries very hard to keep things organic and not spray chemicals to control bugs. One of the ways he's been experimenting with this year is to grow things earlier in the season than normal... in the cooler weather before all the cabbage white butterflies and aphids are out in their droves. So, instead of vegetable patch lying fallow this time of year, it is chockablock full of fantastic produce! And barely a bug in sight. It does depend on the weather, luckily we don't often have frosts and our winters are not too cold. Not everything will grow in the winter though, like tomatoes for example... the plants are growing well now but they don't like fruiting until the weather warms up.

Steve had a harvest this morning and look what we're having for dinner tonight!! Nadine potatoes, baby cabbage, red iceberg lettuce, baby carrots, snow peas, purple beans and sprouting broccoli. Yummy yummy yummy!

And the other wondrous thing we are growing, although these are in a box on top of the fridge, are these fantastic portabello mushrooms. We bought one of those mushroom farms in a cardboard box and it's been fun watching them grow... it's amazing how quickly they increase in size. Add these to the veggies above and we have a meal fit for a king!


I spotted a recipe for cornbread in the newspaper the other day, it sounds interesting so I'm going to cook that to have with the vegetables. I get the impression that cornbread is something that is eaten regularly in an American diet (is that right or is that just something I read about in books?), whereas I've never seen it before. Looking forward to trying it!