homelywife.com

I realised when looking at the calendar that this will be my last vege post before Christmas. I think we will have to have a special mid-week version, as I plan to do the shopping a bit earlier this week so I’m not in a supermarket on Christmas Eve.

After complaining about the dry weather we have had enough rain this week to float Noah’s boat. Our tank has gone from 1/2 empty to full in a week. Despite the wet it has been warm, which has benefited the garden.

The good news is that there is now plenty to eat. All I spent this week was $2.50 on mushrooms and $1.95 on tomatoes.

This week we will eat 4 lettuces, spring onions, zucchini, strawberries, raspberries and potatoes. We will eat the first of the beans and the last of the peas. The peas have not coped well with the heat.

I have also grown a very this very large broccoli, by far the biggest I have ever grown. With all this abundance I think we saved about $20.00.

I haven’t been reporting on fruit but this week will eat the first plums of our faithful tree.

I didn’t plant it so I’m not 100% sure what type it is,but I think it is Duff’s Early Jewel. Every year, for the past three years, it has had a wonderful crop of red skinned, yellow fleshed plums starting the week before Christmas. Da Man and I shared this plum, and it tasted very good!

I know, this is a bit late. The merriness of the season has left the homely household a bit overwhelmed.

Despite the extreme rounds ‘bring a plates’, including a BBQ where we were actually supposed to bring a plate to eat off, (I missed that part -we were loaned some plates) we are still eating our veges.

We picked about 500g of strawberries and 250g of raspberries in one go on Sunday. I meant to take a photo of the bowlful, but anyway you know what a strawberry looks like. The other things we have been eating include lettuces, spring onions, peas, and zucchini. If I include the berries I think we saved about $12.00.

I had to buy carrots, for some reason I never grow very good carrots, onions, cucumber, tomatoes and peppers. All that cost about $14.00.

On the bright side our cucumbers are flowering and there is fruit set on both the peppers and the tomatoes. Another boost, particularly to cucumbers, is that our weather has finally turned in to a typical December pattern, humid. Cucumbers love it warm and damp and so do melons. Maybe this year I will bet my record of two watermelons!

This week we’re eating berries and rhubarb.

This is what I picked from our plants, it filled the sink. I froze most of it, but we are also eating it stewed.

We have eaten about three punnets of raspberries and two of strawberries. We still have more to come, but I think that the raspberries will be a bit slower this week, maybe one punnets worth. We are still eat the salad ingredients, lettuce, spring onions, radishes and peas. This week we will pick our first zucchini. This is the earliest we have eat them since we moved to Palmerston North. There are two reasons for this, starting the seedling in the tunnel house and a sunny November.

This week I think we will save about $13, which is great because I only spent $7.00. I bought a 3kg bag of carrots and some tomatoes. This is partly because I did buy quite a bit last week, but also the garden is coming in to full production.

We still have much to look forward to, fresh beans!

Peppers, in December!

We are running late this week. I wrote most of this on Monday but I couldn’t find the camera cable.I located it on Tuesday, but got too busy to work photo magic, so read on…

This week has been about heat. It was 26 degrees at 5pm on Sunday. The Manawatu is usually damp, but we have little rain in November, maybe 3 days.

This hot, dry weather is not good for peas. I’m hoping to start eating our peas this week, raw of course! Why cook fresh peas when you can eat them frozen ones hot at any time. But I don’t think our crop is going to be great, the plants are not really flowering anymore.

But the heat lovers are growing well.

We will eat zucchini before Christmas and we ate 2 deserts with raspberries last week.

We also ate our first new potatoes.

There was 1kg. I decided not to work out how much this kg of yummy potatoes actually cost. I planted 3 kg of seed potatoes so the yield was negative. I think these potatoes suffered from the wet weather we had in September and early October. The potatoes I planted in mid-October have huge tops, that are starting to flower. This is not the first time that my early potatoes have had a poor yield. I think I should learn that our wet springs mean that I should stick to later cropping potatoes.

We are still eating lettuces, spring onions and radishes. Our berries are starting to crop well. I think we will pick about one punnet of raspberries and the same in strawberries. I have also sprouted some more lentils.

It is hard to price raspberries and peas. They are very expensive in shops. The price of lettuces has come down, so maybe we will save about $15.00.

On Saturday the girls and I went to Otaki for a diabetes family camp. On the way we were able to stop at a road side vege shop. They had a lot of beautiful, fresh veges, which we indulged in. I began to type a list but we bought a lot, so much that I’m hoping that it will last us 2 weeks.