Mid-summer – Full Borders and lots to Harvest

One of the things I love about mid-summer are the flower borders full to bursting! They’re simply packed out and filled with colour.

But even more importantly, it’s the most productive time in the kitchen garden.

The food side of the garden is by far the most time consuming, it doesn’t stop with just growing your own food.

At this time of year it’s a constant job picking the fruit and veg, then more importantly preserving the excesses that you can’t eat straight away.

The Greenhouse

In the greenhouse the gherkins have been going mad for a few weeks now.

The best way to preserve these is to pickle them. After a bit of experimenting I’ve perfected the recipe, which you can find it by pressing on the link for pickled gherkins.

I’ve also had to make chilli sauce last week. This is from the chilli plants that were overwintered in the house.

I’ve made my slightly less hot sauce with the milder chillies and next week will be making the silly hot sauce from the Habanero’s. The recipes will be following shortly.

The Raised Beds

In the raised vegetable beds we now have large amounts of courgettes, once the squash start to fruit there’s no stopping them. I recently heard a gardener say, that their neighbours no longer make eye contact with them, in case they are trying to give more courgettes away!

The quickest and easiest thing to do with them, is grill them on a George Forman grill. Whenever the weather is good enough we eat outside, and whenever possible we cook outside too.

If I have a bit more time, I make cake and grate two or three courgettes into it. I mentioned one of the cake recipes the other week. It was for Cherry & Courgette cake.

Now that the Raspberries have just started ripening I’ll be making Raspberry & Courgette cake soon. For the moment though we are enjoying the first few for breakfast. Either simply added to granola or for a treat with pancakes, pistachios cream and yogurt. I do love my breakfast!

The beetroots are a staple now, usually just popped into the pressure cooker and eaten with just about everything.

The Fruit Trees & Bushes

The fig has produced some of the largest figs I’ve ever seen! It hasn’t produced as many as we’ve had before, but they are delicious! We’ve been eating them in warm salads.

The blueberry bush has gone from strength to strength since we planted it into the ground. The volume of fruit is incredible, we’ve already had over two kilos off it and still more to come.

This also gets made into cake, as well as being liberally sprinkled over anything else we’re are having for breakfast.

Despite all of the time consuming work at this time of year, the rewards are high. I just need to remember to sit a while and enjoy the richness that is mid-summer, because as we all know autumn is just around the next corner. Savour the moment!

Stay safe & happy harvesting.