Father’s Day Harvest

Down here in southern Australia, the first day of Spring (1st of September) fell on Father’s Day, and the sun shone over our warm garden. Crops planted last autumn and grown over winter are producing at last, and all those weeks of wet weeding seem suddenly worthwhile.

The asparagus is shooting and there’s lettuce aplenty for salads, to which we add nasturtium flowers for colour and piquancy and slices of yellow capsicums (peppers) that were planted a year ago. These have survived the mild winter frosts of the Adelaide plains and are bearing fruit that they’ve carried through the winter.

The cook’s skipping about the place harvesting stuff for bottling – red Russian kale, purple sprouting broccoli, the first broad beans, beetroot for kvass, Daikon radish and fielderspitzkraut cabbage for sauerkraut and kimchee.

Nor is the gardener unhappy – he’s breathing a sigh of relief that the Lady Finger banana palms felled in late winter (to cut the pathway for possums from local trees to house roof) have ripened satisfactorily in their shiny blue and silver ‘banana-ripening’ bags. The stern eye of the cook has beamed away elsewhere…