We’re pretty lucky.  Not only did we get a house we love, but it turns out that it has an added benefit that we’d never even considered before we moved in… the fruit, veg and herbs from the garden.

We’ve been busy bees harvesting all sorts and using or freezing the produce.  I do feel a bit like I’m a pretender this year and hoping that feeling will go by next year when the garden’s more our own.

I started with using mint and chives in some dips and it’s grown from there. Our most recent haul was plums, grapes and rhubarb – and there’s far more than we can eat.  I’ve frozen bags and bags of rhubarb, given bunches of grapes and punnets of plums away and frozen more.  Not too sure on the use of frozen grapes, but we’ll see – I hear they’re great for chilling wine!

With the plums, I made a plum cobbler which used a whole kilo up and I got to try a recipe I’ve never made before.  Really lovely with ice cream after a Sunday dinner!

We’re still waiting for the pears to ripen, they’re rock hard at the moment, but I’m biding my time for a pear tatin.

The few vegetables that Barry’s had a go at planting haven’t taken too well, although I think the later summer has had an impact on the growth.  All the same, we were very happy with the flavour of our three pea pods and two baby beets!

The onions and carrots he and Scarlett planted still need a bit more time to grow, but they look a bit more plentiful!

We have six planters made from railway sleepers, which I think we’ll fully clear this autumn, and make a plan for the year for that area and the greenhouse.  With pretty much any veg we eat at the moment, we have a false sense of confidence that we can grow it next year (“padron peppers?  Of course we can grow these!”).

We have a few gardening books now, so I think we just need to make a list of what we’d like to grow in the veg patch, and then consult the books, plan it out for the year and see how feasible it really is.