I love Kitchen Gardening weeks: the days leading up to a Kitchen Gardening Day are full of planning & preparation – of printing, the putting together of folders, of garden plans and information….as well as making sure the garden is in good order and demonstrating the best possible example of a Kitchen Garden at this particular moment in time….bursting with seasonal produce, and in this instance, the beginning of the crop-rotation process and seasonal change.
Then it’s time to plan what we might eat on the day – I simply love this part too! It’s the garden that dictates just what will be on the menu….and the garden generally knows best. While we’ve eaten almost all the fruit from the Meyer lemon (and those sulphur crested cockatoos finished off the rest – rrrrgggghhhhh!); the Lisbon is in full flight and so it was clear that lemons would take centre stage this weekend. A delicious lemon drizzle cake was baked late on Friday afternoon, to free up my morning for baking bread and preparing the rest of the lunch….
as well as collecting clouds of rocket flowers that made their way into a loose and romantic arrangement, scenting the air with the sweet pepper scent of their leaves….a whimsical, edible profusion.
And there the photographs end….because I was too busy stirring fennel & lemon risotto, picking lettuce, nasturtium and calendula flowers, making sure the rhubarb crumble didn’t burn and, well….chatting with our delightful participants! What a day…what a week….what fun!
ps, now I know that hashtags are fairly irrelevant in these posts, but I just want to say a big thank you to Alex, our apprentice gardener, for doing such a fabulous job on his first Kitchen Gardening Day, as in #washingupwizard #mastersaladspinner #almostneaterthanmefreakwhichissayingsomething #fastlearner :)