Mid Week Fresh Cooking: Broccoli Leaves Pesto Fettucini, Chickpea Garden Salad Sandwich and Lentil Daal.

Our mid week fresh cooking last week was super quick and simple to prepare.

I used the last harvest of broccoli florets and leaves from the front garden and made pesto for a quick vegetarian lunch. 

For the next day, I soaked some dried chickpeas and boiled them before crushing them with a bit of canned chopped tomato, lettuce leaves, parsley and mayo. I paired that with lettuce and kale leaves from the garden for a quick sandwich.

The majority of the canned chopped tomato went into this yummy vegetarian dinner of lentil daal. I used lots of onion and ginger for this to support our immunity during the cold blast in Melbourne during that time.

Mid-Week Fresh Cooking: Lentil Bolognese, Vegetable Pancake, Broccoli Carrot Tuna Stir Fry and Spring Rolls.

Our mid-week fresh cooking this week was based on cabbage and broccoli. I usually save the green vegetables for fresh cooking during the week instead of processing and freezing them earlier on the week 

The first meal was Lentil Bolognese that I cooked and froze last week. I paired it with the available pasta that we have at home and sliced cheese to add a bit of creaminess.

The recipe is a simple Bolognese recipe with red lentil replacing the minced meat.

We bought half a cabbage from the store and I used half of it to make a simple vegetable pancake.

Our quick lunch was a simple stir fry of broccoli, carrot and canned tuna. I paired mine with quinoa as I love the combination of tuna and quinoa.

The remaining half of the cabbage was transformed into spring rolls. 

My five year old loves spring roll and I thought to train his fine motor skills and asked him to help out rolling the spring rolls. 

He did pretty well. Only a few spring rolls came undone during the frying process.

For the spring rolls filling, I fine diced a slice of bacon leftover from last week, lots of cabbage and carrots and a bit of black fungus.

Collecting Broccoli Seeds

The broccoli seedpods are finally ready for harvest and their seeds collected. We're so excited!! This is the first time we collected the broccoli seeds so I hope the seeds are good for planting.

There were quite a few seedpods, so I picked the best looking ones, the chunkiest looking 🙂. As can be seen from the photos, they have the visible bumps which indicate good size seeds.

For the past few weeks I have been peeking inside a few pods to see if the seeds have turned brown in colour, so I'm happy to finally see brown coloured seeds.

There are lots of seedpods, so my 5 year old helped me to peel and collect the seeds. 

We have lots of mature brown seeds. Yay!! Fingers crossed they are good seeds and can grow into awesome Broccoli plants.

GentleSoulGnome July 2020 Garden Update

Our garden grew significantly over the last few months despite the lack of maintenance as I battled the all day pregnancy sickness and gardening aversion. I was so relieved when the pregnancy symptoms finally subsided and I can return to the garden. Since then I had managed to complete a few priority maintenance in smaller quantities and shorter time as tiredness seems to be the major hurdle at the moment.

My first priority was to clean up the weeds growing at the front garden because the Tulips and Daffodils had started to grow new shoots. I wanted to clear the area of weeds to give them lots of growing space and minimal nutrition competitor as possibly can. 

Asahi Tulips

Daffodils Tete-a-tete

The Cos Lettuces and Strawberries that I planted at the front garden seemed to thrive and we had since harvested a few of the lettuce leaves.

I have been waiting for the Broccoli seedpods to mature to collect their seeds, but they're taking so long. So I let them be for the time being and besides they are still sprouting, so we've been harvesting them as well. I left quite a few of the yellow flowers for the bees. They love them, I thought I share a little bit happiness with them.

As for the back garden, the Snow Peas and Shelling Peas had grew so tall and a few flowers had blossomed. So, we're hoping it won't be too much longer until we get some harvest.

The leafy vegetables are taking so long to grow from seedlings. Next year I will try continual planting as growing the plants from seedlings are too slow when the temperature dropped. Some of the Kale are looking promising though, I hope I can harvest some soon.

The root vegetables in the third garden bed seemed to be doing well as well. The White and Purple Garlic are looking good. I never successfully grew garlic before, so fingers crossed they will produce this time.

I also never managed to get a single harvest of radish and these ones are not looking promising either. The leaves are bright green and bushy, but I can't see any bulb growing underneath it.

We moved our Lemon tree from the half wine barrel to the ground a few months ago. They survive the move but only time will tell if they will produce better in the new spot. The new spot has more sun exposure which I hope will be more suitable for the tree.

Some more strawberries plants underneath the Lemon tree. They were also transplanted from half wine barrel and survived the move. Some of the plants are showing flowers, so hopefully we have lots more strawberries this year.

I absolutely love our Bay Tree. It obviously survived the big move from Sydney to Melbourne a couple years ago. The tree has reached new height and growing lots of new branches and good looking leaves.

Lastly, we planted 4 bags of potatoes in grow bags. We keep adding more soil as the plants shoot up. It's very exciting indeed, they seem to be growing taller and taller everyday.

Spring 2019 Planting Stage 1

With the weather (finally) warming up in Melbourne, I decided to transplant some of the seedlings that look ready.

First are the pumpkins, the below photo was taken 1 week ago. They have grown more true leaves and the roots have grown very long.

They are now at the front garden where they should get ample sunlight during the day.

Second, the cabbages, cauliflower and lettuce seedlings have grown enough number of true leaves, so they were planted at the front garden as well this morning. Also on the photos are lettuce and spinach seedlings.

Photo from 1 week ago. Cabbages (back right), cauliflower (front right), broccoli (back left) and lettuce (front left)

Photo taken yesterday.

The cabbages and cauliflower were planted around the poppies bed where they will get lots of morning sun.

Some of the lettuce seedlings were planted at the front garden as well, since they were doing well on that section last year.

Third, lettuce, spinach and broccoli  seedlings were ready.

The big lettuces were from last winter and new seedlings planted in front of them.

Broccoli also occupy the same spot this spring as last time.

The remaining of lettuce and spinach seedlings were planted in garden bed 3 this year.

Lastly, the tomatoes that I planted in August 2019 were finally ready to meet the outdoor weather.

Garden bed 4 were cleared yesterday to make space for the tomatoes.

New occupants of garden bed 4, with some space left on the right hand side for cucumber, capsicum and beefsteak tomatoes.

All of the seedlings have been covered with with pea straw mulch since the photos were taken.

Garden bed 2 filled with broad beans, long beans, anak beans and all sorts of beans.

Photo taken 2 weeks ago.

Photo from this morning.

With new beans seedlings popping out.

Raspberry bush is back and growing new branches. There are a few flowers already showing and I hope there will be walls of raspberries soon.

Cranberries have grown it's leaves back.