I’m not growing bananas

I know I said I would grow, cook and eat my way through All Things Herbal. And it truly was my intention to grow all the herbs required for these recipes. But when I said that I was unaware that bananas are herbs. I knew they were pretty cool plants that sort of ‘walk’ (they don’t really ‘walk’ like on two feet, they put up new shoots when the old ones die), but I did not know that they were herbs.

I’m not going to grow bananas. I live in Wellington, New Zealand and bananas don’t grow that far south; it’s just too cold.

I do eat bananas, though, and I can buy them in the shops now while the herbs in my garden are riding out the winter.

 

They're herbs

 

I don’t really like mayonnaise, so I approached this recipe with some trepidation. But it seemed easy enough to make, and it was an interesting combination of ingredients.

I thought just getting all the ingredients out of their wrappers and mixing them together would be a bit of cop out, so I  did toast my own sesame seeds.

 

Toasting Seeds

 

I didn’t make the mayonnaise, but I did squeeze it out of the bottle.

 

Mayonnaise

 

 

 

And I cut up the bananas …

 

Sliced bananas

 

… rolled them in mayonnaise …

 

Mayonnaise covered banana

 

 

.. and covered the whole pile in toasted sesame seeds.

 

The end product

 

It was .. okay.

Not great, not something I’d cook again, but also not as bad as I feared.

Worm Farm Update

Some things in my garden have slowed down for the winter. But not the worms.

That's a fine Tiger Worm specimen

They are ploughing through  the scraps and churning out what is delicately known as ‘worm rum’. It’s pee. Worm pee. And it’s great for plants.

'Worm rum'

I got three of bottles full of the stuff and poured it over anything still alive in the garden.

Some things in my garden have slowed down for the winter. But not the worms.

Worm Farm

My parents gave me a worm farm for my birthday and it is awesome. The worms eat organic scraps and excrete worm castings and ‘worm rum’ that is great for the garden. And  it’s pretty cool to have an  army of worms.

Opening the box

It’s cold and dark outside, so I set the farm up in the hall to start with. Now that it is all set up and smelling of sweetly rotting kitchen scraps, I’m planning on moving it out  to the shed.

Soaking the bedding block

The first step is to soak the bedding block in water. Apparently, the worms will happily eat the paper wrapping so it went in the bucket as well.

Bedding slurry

The bedding block absorbed all the water, turning first into a muddy slurry, and then into a damp hummus which I spread into the lower tray.

Bedding layer

The worms are tiger worms.  They were much smaller than I imagined they would be. They come in a mix of dirt and shredded newspaper, which I spread out over the bedding layer. There are worms in the picture below, but they’re hard to see. Worms hate the light so they all fled into the dirt when I turned them out of their bag.

Can open, worms everywhere

The next tray sat snugly on top of the bedding layer. I spread some  delicious rotting kitchen scraps on the tray to lure the worms up through the holes in the tray.

Food for worms

Then I covered the food with wet newspaper, put the lid on and left the worms to work their magic. I did sneak a peak under the lid later in the evening, and one brave little worm had blazed a trail to the food layer and was wriggling around in it. I have high hopes for my worms.

The first step is to soak the bedding block in water. Apparently, the worms will happily eat the paper wrapping so it went in the bucket as well.

Mum and Dad to the Rescue

There haven’t been any updates for a couple of months. I hit a rough patch with my mental health and spent most of my time just flopping listlessly about and sleeping all the time. It wasn’t a very bad spell; I was still going to work, although I pretty much stopped brushing my hair and wore the same clothes for days at a time.  While this was going on the garden was slowly getting more and more overgrown and the plants I had left were going to seed. Luckily for both me and my garden, Mum and Dad packed a weed eater and an inflatable mattress into the car and drove down to the rescue.  They arrived on a Thursday afternoon and by the time they left on Sunday morning the garden had been whipped into shape and I was feeling much much better about everything.  

Unfortunately, it’s now May and not great weather for gardening. But, I have my little greenhouse to grow things indoors and All Things Herbal has a lot of recipes’ that use the herbs I have already planted, so there should be enough to be going on with.

I didn’t take any photos of the parental working bee, but this is a butterfly I saw on a fence while I was walking to the shops with my Mum.

Butterfly

Squatting Cat, Furious Woman

Furby has taken his vendetta against my plants to the next level and I am not at all happy about it. He wasn’t brave and I’m not secretly proud.

Apparently, the difference between his litter tray and my tray of nettle seedlings is that there is no difference. So he dug a hole and relieved himself in my brave nettle seedlings. This puts me right back to the beginning with the stinging nettles and I’ll have to go back to the butterfly people and get some more seeds. I’ll probably tell them that I over watered the first lot.

I didn’t take any pictures of Furby disgracing himself. Here is a butterfly on a fence.

Butterfly

Taters

A couple of nights ago I harvested my first crop of potatoes and served them up with some mint from the front garden.

Straight from the garden and into the pot

Fresh mint

Mint and Potatoes Together

This means war

My garden has a lot of other inhabitants in it, and I’ve been pretty pleased about that up until now. It’s good to have worms in the soil and bees in the flowers. The slaters are eating up all the dead stuff and haven’t had a go at my vegetables yet, so they can stay, and although I’m not really keen on spiders, I can see that they have a place.

Spider in the front garden

But some cat has been using an empty patch of my vegetable garden as a toilet and I’m not having it. No cats allowed! And that’s not all. I have caterpillars eating my cabbages and broccoli and a possum has been nibbling on the leaves of my trees (and crapping all over the front porch). So, I’m fighting back.

Devastation wrought by caterpillars

I got some Skunk Shot cat and dog repellent for the garden. It reeks, which I guess is the point, and so far it has kept unwelcome critters off my vegetables. I also got some Derris Dust for the cabbages and have been getting up early once a week to apply that. I’ve seen the odd white butterfly floating about, but the cabbages are looking much better. I got the council to drop a possum trap off, but the little hobgoblin hasn’t shown its face since the trap arrived.  Hopefully this is the end of the interlopers.

A bee

Flowers

My garden is in bloom.  It’s still raining almost every day, but there are flowers.

Pansy

Dandelion

Nasturtiums

Potato

Zucchini

Cranberry

Lemon

Back into the garden

The weather has been nasty for the last week or so, but today it came out nice and I finally got back into the garden and caught up on all my weeding. My garden seems to survive my bouts of uselessness and carry on without me. The potatoes are coming along and so are my cabbages. I don’t want to push my luck though and I’m trying to get outside more often (especially since I found some little caterpillars munching away on one of my broccoli plants).

Lush potato plants

The coriander had gone to seed and had to be pulled up. As the seedlings I had inside also died, that leaves me with no coriander. It’s possible some of the seeds from the plant have landed somewhere good and started sprouting, but with the wind we have they’re probably two or three houses over. Now that I know I can grow seedlings, I will get some coriander seeds next time I’m in town and start again.

I will also be getting some sun block because while I was weeding and puttering about I got sunburnt. I don’t think I’ve been this badly burnt since I was a kid. I’d forgotten how much it hurts.

A lot. It hurts a lot.

Come November’s Pesto Lasagna

This recipe doesn’t come from All Things Herbal. But it comes from someone else’s project, and it looked like a good way to use up some more of the parsley.

This is Come November’s Pesto Lasagna, from his site The Recipe Vault Project, which has heaps of great recipes.

Because this recipe comes from chefs I thought it would be hard so I gave myself heaps of time. But the pesto was surprisingly easy to assemble. And, unlike the parsley soup, I managed to keep the ingredients in the blender and off the bench.

Pesto

The recipe called for tomato sauce and I guess a proper chef would have made one from scratch. I used a can of Watties pasta sauce as a base and added the other ingredients to that.

Tomato Sauce

I didn’t make my own pasta either.

Draining the pasta

The recipe called for creamy creamy havarti, thinly sliced. This cheese is delicious but being creamy it doesn’t slice easily. I pretty much butchered the block I bought. It is also quite expensive and if I make this again (which I almost certainly will) I will probably just use whatever cheese we have.

Once all the elements were ready I built it up in layers.

Layering it on up

I messed up the layers a bit, it should have been pasta on top of the cheese and then tomato sauce. But I went straight to the sauce after cheese.  I has some left over sauce and so I just added another layer. Then it went into the oven for forty minutes.

In the oven

And came out looking delicious.

Lasagna

So I served it up …

Ready to eat

and ate it.

I've eaten and eaten well

This recipe was a total success. It was easy to make and very tasty. It’s a good way to use up the parsley and  I will be making it again.