Abundance

Up till now, we didn't have a big problem keeping up with the produce; sure some of the salads bolted, but in my opinion who doesn't have some bolting salads didn't plant enough of them (besides, I'll let a handful of them until their seeds are dry -- which means I'll have more then enough seeds for next year). However, now the garden started producing in earnest, which means that we have too much of lots of vegetables.

Every second or third day a big courgette can be picked up, we harvest kilos of green mange tout beans and we have more red beets then we ever wished for. The last thing isn't surprising, because they are far from our favorite staple, we plant them to use their foliage to mix in with salads.

I also harvested about a pound of blackberries, I tasted one that was nice and sweet and collected the rest of the black ones -- we were in for a surprise when we ate them after dinner on Saturday, they were not quite as sweet as the one I tasted. I'll leave the rest of them a couple of days longer; if they don't get as sweet as we hope they would get we'll turn them into marmalade. We've got a small apartment, with a small freezer, so conserving fruits & vegetables is not quite an option, but we can always find some space for for marmalade's.

Reading around on different blogs this weekend, I noticed the mentioning of eating purslane, some of which my father-in-law had pointed out to me a couple if weeks ago. I looked around a bit in the garden to collect a couple of hand fulls and and the web about different options to prepare it. This website has detailed information about the nutritious values and how to grow/prepare purslane. We decided to eat it 'as is', mixed in with a couple of different salads and other leaves. We dressed it with a bit of truffle oil (real one, nothing synthetic!) and ate it with some home baked fresh bread.