You dill you!

I am on a mission to use up some of my dill before it all goes to seed.

 I will let it go to seed - now I have more space in the veggie patch I can allow things to self propagate  - saves time in saving seeds and replanting them yourself right?

But dill is such a wonderful herb that it would seem a waste to not take advantage of the mini glut.

My dill grows in a corner of my central bed. It's a bed that holds lots of herbs and in which 'Pothead' my Scare Cockatoo stands or rather slopes. She may look pretty pathetic for a Scare Cockatoo but she works!

So the other day I made a pretty nice smoked salmon and dill pasta but today I made Liz's Bread and Butter Dill Cucumbers.













I pretty much followed her recipe, except that I used pickling spices instead of just mustard seeds and I made the recipe at double quantity because I had enough cucumbers. The cucumbers were bought ones unfortunately, but soon I will have my own!

Here is the result -  one of the 4 jars made.

The best part? It makes the kitchen smell heavenly.  You know one of those smells that makes your mouth water?

The worst part? Well I only needed 4 teaspoons of chopped dill so it didn't put a dint in the dill at all!

Thanks Liz.  I might not be able to wait very long before sampling them...

Lemon, dill and pepper

It's been a lemon, dill and pepper sort of week.

I've been on a mission to use up a stash of lemons kindly given to me by a neighbour and I also have a good crop of dill. And the pepper?  Well of course I don't grow my own pepper (although I wonder if it's possible here?), but it's just one of my favourite spices, no, it's my favourite spice -  the only one I can't do without.

What have I been making? I'm making limoncello,

Lemon peel steeping in vodka

I've made a lemon cake,

and I've marinated some home-made feta in lemon, dill, pepper and olive oil.

 I'm making pecorino cheese, unfortunately the pepper seems to have clustered!

Curds before being weighed down

 and tonight's dinner is a lemon, dill and smoked salmon pasta dish.

Yum.

Potting, raising, inspecting

The weather here has been a bit crazy lately.  We went through a patch of beautiful spring-like days in their low 20s and then, last week, that changed.  The wind blew in and brought winter back, trees came down and the new seedlings that had emerged during the warm spell, shivered in their soil.  They did - I could see them moving and could see their goosebumps too!

Across Sydney trees came down and branches snapped off and leaves blew. We had no damage here, but I hope other Sydney bloggers kept their trees and electricity. While it's still coldish today, the wind has dropped and the forecast says we are to return to warmer sunniness.

Today I potted up, raised seeds and inspected the progress.

Potting up 
I potted up some mint and some curled parsley. I also moved some self-seeded violas around.

I always have violas in the vegetable patch.  I just think they are so pretty and, because they self-seed so easily, they just keep coming back sometimes in slightly different colour combinations than last year.

The self-seeded violas invariably pop up in odd places -  little corners and cracks between the patch boarders, in the patch pathway, or in the middle of the patch where you'd want to plant your veggies.

So digging them out and moving them around or potting them up becomes pretty essential.

I must say that one of my favourite things to do in the garden is dead head the violas... strange hey?  There is something very meditative about removing the spent flowers to make sure the flowers continue. Do you like dead heading?

Raising seed
I also started raising some basil, long cayenne chillies, lemon balm, dill and zucchini.

I must say I have grown fond of zucchini (is that a pun?). They can take up a huge amount of space and can be almost scarily productive, and you can wonder what to do with them... but last summer I decided to get into finding  zucchini recipes I liked and had some success ( and it wasn't that hard).

I am kind of looking forward now to the next zucchini glut so that I  can make make those recipes again and perhaps find others I like (any suggestions of your favourite zucchini recipes?).

Being such an easy vegetable to grow, once you do find things you like to eat with the glut, for me including them in the patch becomes essential. But I know others feel differently.

Inspecting
I also looked around the patch a little... things are happening.

The espaliered Tahitian limes are flowering like crazy.  I can see that, if some of the limes don't drop off, I am going to have to take some fruit off.

My relatively recently purchased blueberries first fruit are starting to swell.  The bees love these plants and are doing a good job of pollinating!

And the pests are turning up -  sorry for this blurry photo, but amongst the blur you can see the black aphids on my chives. I spent some time squashing them with my fingers.

That's where I am up to, what is getting going in your patch - fruit, flowers, pests?