Salad season

We harvested the first beans of the season today.  They'll be dinner tonight with our pickled beetroot.  Food metres: about 20.

In a couple of weeks, there'll be more beans from these seedlings.

Before the weather gets too hot, we'll be planting little patches of beans at fortnightly intervals.  So far we have three of 10 plants each.  Shortly they'll need a thick layer of mulch to cope with the Perth summer.

Eating our greens

Here is proof it's spring:  the first broadbeans of the season.

 

In a salad with broccoli and fetta from the local farmers market, lemon from our neighbour's tree and parsley and dill also from our garden.

That's an Alfred Meakin salad bowl c1930s and a silver plate serving spoon we found in an op shop.

It went very well with steak and an earthy shiraz.

Harvest

After a morning helping clear out spent crops and plant new ones at the Urban Orchard in Perth's Cultural Centre with Josh Byrne (of ABC Gardening Australia fame), the reinventors caught the train home full of enthusiasm for the back garden.

The first plot of broad beans has given its all, and left some lovely nitrogen in the soil.  They've come out and been replaced by some beetroot seedlings left over from the morning's activities, and more basil.

The butter beans have produced beyond our expectations, and are ripening faster than we can eat them.

This is what we picked today:

Half of the butter beans went into handmade drawstring bags for two of the reinventors' favourite neighbours.

Into the largest vegetable bed went: kipfler potatoes, corn, onions, lettuce, carrots and more butter beans.  We now almost don't need to buy vegetables.