harvesting has begun

On the edge of Sun week and we have begun harvesting from our garden beyond the daily salad, spinach and silverbeet pickings.

We had our first meal of the Lisette potatoes in the weekend and today I pulled 1.3 kg from under one plant.
We now have the list on the fridge tracking the amounts we harvest and the scales at the ready. Each time the girls come in from the garden with an armful of potatoes they weigh them and add them to the list.

Then there are these beautys (King Seeds, brocoflower). A few of these are growing in a spot where there was driveway 3 months ago. At the beginning of Spring we dug the bed with pick and spade, dumped a bucket of bokashied vegetable scraps and planted on it straight away.

We started experimenting with Bokashi a couple of years ago when we were renting and didn't have an active compost on the go. Now I choose to put all my cooked food scraps through the Bokashi system and either dig a hole and bury it or use it as an activator in the compost. With cooked scraps dealt with in this way it minimises rodents in the compost and is an easy way to boost a tired vege bed.

A bag of Bokashi costs $6 from the local Council Service Centre and lasts for about 4 months. We use a couple of paint buckets sitting inside each other, with holes drilled into the base of the top bucket and a snug plate turned upside down on top of the scraps.
Then there is the ever-growing collection of Cabbage Tree leaf bundles piling up around the back of the house. At a rate of about 3 bundles every couple of days we will easily get through the Winter months using these as the best firestarters we have ever come across.

Even when they are thoroughly soaked through, they catch fire quickly and add enough heat to the firebox that we didn't need to use kindling all last Winter.

And just waiting for me on the kitchen bench is 2.5kg of strawberries and some rhubarb in the fridge for me to magic together our first batch of strawberry jam for the season. Perfect timing since just this morning Sky licked clean the last jar from the last season's store.
Happy Summer.