A surfeit of lemons (and 16 mostly-savoury things to do with them)

Outside as I write this the wind is howling - true Brontë-sisters-story-style howling - around the house. Rain is whipping sideways into the windows, the dog inside is shifting on his chair and can't seem to relax.

Yesterday the beautiful old rose vine that had been clambouring over our front verandah for more decades than I could guess fell down, tumbling loosely over the little front garden and spilling over onto the pavement outside. I tried to pick it up and tie it back but all the tendrils have latched on to our front fence and it is impossible to shift that heavy, thorny mass. So I guess I know what we will be doing on the weekend. Also yesterday the little green patch of synthetic grass I put down out the back for Madeleine to play on lifted right up off the ground and flew onto my little veggie box.

And so it goes. While I sit and type in ugg boots and an old jumper and heating and sip a warm cup of tea, outside, you will find Winter. Deserving of the capital W.

But in one small spot in our back yard, no matter what the weather throws at it, you will also find a joyful patch of sunshine. Our lemon tree, once intended to be espaliered along the courtyard wall but long since left to branch out and flop over and do any darned thing it wants, is positively dripping with fruit. There is so much fruit we can't pick it fast enough, and it is starting to rot on the tree. Does anyone want any lemons? Hit me up! And I'm not trying to boast or anything (ok I am a bit) but these are the BEST lemons you'll ever taste. I'm not even kidding. They are sweet and juicy and not at all pithy. The skin is an almost luminous yellow, it doesn't quite look real. Except it is.

But what am I going to do with them all? Mr B has put a spanner into the works by not liking lemon-flavoured sweets. Crazy right? I know! So no lemon meringue pie or lemon butter or lemon slice... because I can't make it all for me, can I. (Can I?) Last night I cooked this recipe for our dinner, mainly because it used the zest of a lemon. I thought it was delicious but Mr B gave it a "Meh," so it won't stay on rotation. What would you do? Here are some (mostly savoury) lemon ideas I've gathered so far:

* Home-made lemonade (we love this recipe), although it's more of a summer drink

* Have you ever tried this handy tip for freezing lemons?

* Charred broccoli & tofu stuffed avocados with sweet lemon curry sauce

* Roasted lemon potatoes sound pretty delicious

* 5 natural beauty remedies using lemons

* Lots of great ideas in this Lemon Love  post, not all of them sweet

* Grilled lemon chicken

* Preserved lemons, to be used in dishes like these

* This one pan spicy lemon chicken pasta looks tasty and easy

* How about a lemon garlic vinaigrette?

* I think this lemon flatbread looks interesting

* Spaghetti with lemon, ricotta and spinach

* One of these days (!) I might try this detoxing lemon water, to be taken with whole foods

* Cheese ravioli with lemon basil butter sauce

* This creamy lemon poppyseed salad dressing looks tasty

* The next time I cook a roast, I may try this oven-roasted lemon parmesan broccoli

How about you? Do you know any tried and true non-dessert uses for lemon you think I should try?

First harvest

Once upon a time, our remote hunter-gatherer ancestors figured out that they could improve the quality and quantity of their food supply if they helped it out a bit, by adding a splash of water here, a spot of compost there, and keeping the weeds and predators away. And so it came to pass: the first vegetable patch. Fast forward several millennia, to February 14, 2014: I received a vegetable patch for Valentine's Day. And ever since, this little patch has given me so much pleasure. We live in a terrace house with a pocket-handkerchief sized, fully-tiled courtyard out the back. Not exactly plant-friendly. So to grow my vegetables, we turned to the Little Veggie Patch Co for a no-dig, organic garden crate. If you want an easy, affordable, space-efficient garden, I highly recommend these guys. The veggie crates come in different sizes and, if you want to, you can have them delivered with organic soil, compost, worm-poo and anything else you need.

I really like the idea of everything a garden can teach Madeleine and Harry. At its most basic, the garden will teach them where food their comes from. You hear all these stories about children not knowing that apples grow on trees. My children will understand the whole process from paddock (or crate) to plate. The garden will also teach them about patience, about waiting for sunshine and rain, and about the slow rotation of the seasons, the time it takes for good things to grow. They will learn how to nurture and care for something, by giving the plants food and water and weed-free space to breathe. And they will learn about caterpillars and butterflies and snails and ladybirds.

That's a lot to learn from one square metre of dirt, wouldn't you agree?

I harvested my very first produce from this new garden on the weekend: baby heirloom beets. People have been growing and harvesting vegetables for tens of thousands of years. It's not exactly rocket science. But I was incredibly proud as I pulled those baby beets out of the warm earth. It's just so satisfying to grow your own food. Something else I'm glad my children will have a chance to learn.

Last night I steamed then lightly-sauteed the beet leaves in sesame oil and a splash of soy sauce, to go with our beef gyoza for dinner. Do you eat beet leaves? They taste mostly like spinach, with a hit of the earthy sweetness we associate with beetroot. Delicious!

As for the beets themselves, I paired them with baby Dutch carrots (not mine: I did plant some but they're not ready yet) and roasted them with orange and thyme. Those home-grown beets were some of the tastiest roast vegetables Mr B or I had ever had. Next time, I think I'll add some steamed green beans, and perhaps some dry-roasted almond slivers over the top for crunch.

How about you? How does your garden grow?

Favourite things - five botanicals

I've been all about bringing green back into my home lately. It's been a long time since I lived with house plants, and I can't quite think why. Here are five of my favourites. 1. Sky Planter

Have you seen these Sky Planters from Boskke? Our local organic food store has them hanging from the ceiling, and they look fantastic. My brother and sister-in-law gave me one for Christmas. I can't decide where to hang it. The kitchen, maybe? The play room?

2. Calendar

This year, we have a wall calendar in our house, one of the kinds you hang from the wall in the kitchen or hall. I feel like my mother. I think I was about 15 the last time I lived in a house with a calendar, but it seemed the only way to keep track of what everyone in the family is doing. I ordered this one from NZ shop Toodles Noodles on Etsy. I just love the botanical design on the cover (also March), but each of the designs is quite lovely. I may save some to frame at the end of the year.

(I always said that about calendars as a child. I never did get around to it.)

3. Dinosaur planters

We purchased two of these plastic dinosaur planters (one hot pink and one neon yellow) from Etsy shop Plantcycled, for the nursery. I'm yet to buy plants for them but I think that when I do, they will look fantastic on a high shelf where the children can enjoy them but not touch them. On that note, I may also need to purchase some additional bright, plastic dinosaurs for them to play with, since already Madeleine cries "Roar! Roar!" whenever she spots these little fellows, and loves to carry them around the house (and in the bath once or twice).

4. Vine-covered pergola

Ever since I was a teenager, I've nurtured a fantasy about a pergola, shading an outdoor table setting, with a mixture of grape and wisteria vines growing over it. I sat under just such a pergola on a farm visit way back when, and the mix of green leaves and bunches of purple flowers and purple grapes overhead was sublime. When we renovated our house we couldn't afford to do the back courtyard, but the one thing we splashed out on was a pergola so that I could make that dream come true. Assuming we can find the plants this late in the summer, it all begins this weekend!

(Photo from here)

5. Home-grown vegetables

Madeleine and I filled and planted our new Little Veggie Patch Co crate with seedlings last weekend. It's the end of the season so I don't know how those strawberries she's holding will go - there might be quite a wait for fruit. But we also planted out some root veges like carrots and beetroot, among others, so I'm hopeful we'll be able to start harvesting in winter!

How does your garden grow?

When I was in high school we all had to do a couple of stints of "work experience," which essentially meant unpaid internships in fields we were considering for our careers. Since my career goal was "author," I was a little bit stuck. As far as I knew, there weren't any successful authors in my little country town who were willing to let me come along and write a couple of chapters of their book (or make their tea) for them. In classic teenaged-girl style I left things to the very last minute, and so I ended up doing my work experience with a park ranger who was a friend of my parents, simply because they agreed to have me. I showed up on Day 1 expecting to do some bush-walking and perhaps save a wild animal or two from extinction. Instead, we rode around a summer-yellowed picnic area on the back of a 'ute, jumping down every 100 metres or so to empty the garbage bins amid swarms of flies. Work experience as a park ranger was highly successful in strengthening my ambition to become an author.

But at some point during the week, they asked me to help pull up a kitchen garden next to a historic house that was part of the park. The garden had been planted by the lady of the house more than 150 years earlier. Some of the plants there, through seeds and propagation, were the great, great grandchildren of those first plants. I was allowed to take them with me, so each day I would return home with my arms full of lavender, rosemary, comfrey and verbena.

Herbs became a new passion for me. Not just how they looked and smelled (beautiful!), nor the way they filled out a cottage garden (rampant! lovely!), but also the ancient histories, mythologies and healing stories that herbs carried with them through the centuries. I loved how the botanists of the past considered the behaviour and qualities of herbs inseparable from the behaviour and qualities of the planets.

Take sage, for example, a herb I happen to enjoy fried up all crispy in butter and served with pumpkin ravioli. Nicholas Culpeper, on the other hand, preferred to use sage to heal diseases of the liver, for curing itchy testicles, and to turn hair black. Among many other things. "Jupiter claims this herb," he wrote in 1653, and, "Sage is of excellent use to help the memory, warming and quickening the senses." That's something I might need to try, given that my brain seems to be leaking both knowledge and memory at an alarming rate ever since I became the mother of two very small children. I wonder if the memory serum will turn my hair black.

Anyhoo... what all this has been leading up to is to say that I really love gardening, ever since that fateful albeit mostly crappy work experience week. Particularly gardening that has a practical side, like fruit and vegetables and herbs you can eat, and flowers you can pick for the table. But we have been renting for a long time, so building a garden just hasn't been an option. Add to that, the courtyard space out the back of our new house is fully tiled over. One day, we plan to rip up the tiles and turn it into a proper walled garden, but the budget doesn't stretch that far just at the moment!

Last week for Valentine's Day, Mr B gave me the best present I could have asked for. A crate from Little Veggie Patch Co, complete with organic matter to fill it up, so I could start a little herb and vegetable garden in our back yard, tiles and all. I'm really excited to start growing some of our own organic food, and to teach Madeleine and Harry about the whole where-food-comes-from process!

After dropping Madeleine off at day care yesterday, Harry and I took a walk to Ceres to buy some plants. With summer drawing to a close the seasonal pickings were a bit limited (I really wanted heirloom cherry tomatoes but they were a no-go until next October), but we found some lovely seedlings of rainbow beetroot, carrots, kale, green beans, strawberries, sage (!), and one very hot chilli plant. I bundled them all into a box underneath the pram and hurried back home as storm-clouds gathered overhead.

Meanwhile, in our little courtyard, we already have lemon-grass, basil, mint, thyme, oregano, rosemary and a lemon and an orange tree all eking out an existence in the narrow border beside the tiles. My parents are coming to visit in a couple of weeks and bringing with them parsley and Asian greens. There's still more I want to plant, especially next spring, but I think that is a pretty good start.