Adventures in our garden

In the past week, our asparagus has started to sprout. I've never know much about how asparagus grows and in our current abode I don't need to - it just does. It seems that every October when the weather starts to warm, spears of asparagus just start to pop up out of the ground in the flower/weed bed in front of our kitchen window.

There is also a patch which grows underneath the washing line, and another in amongst the mint. They grow so fast - every evening you can go out and pick a new bunch which seriously did not exist the evening before. Crazy.

Whilst fossicking in the garden tonight for asparagus, I had a hunt around to see if there were any winter vegetables still loitering, or wild vegetables which seem to appear at this time of year. I was delighted to find some silverbeet (some leaves looking like they may have been recently munched by slugs):

..and even more pleasantly surprised to see that some sorrel had reared it's head for spring:

I had some fresh fish in the fridge (say THAT 7 times without getting tongue tied!) and so scouted out some herbs from my newly planted potted herb garden:

Turns out the placement of my original herb garden wasn't particularly clever as when we had our floods in winter the entire garden was submerged in water and remained so for over 3 weeks. Bad news for the herbs, but now it's less wet the clover and twitch have thrived!


So I picked some dill, chives and parsley and harvested some chervil from the kitchen window (which is looking super in my plant pot from bison that Matt brought back from his trip to Sydney).

These I baked with the fish, squeezed over some lemon (picked in Kaiteriteri during our recent visit) and here you have it - cod baked with fines herbes, fresh silverbeet and asparagus, garnished with sorrel leaves.

The perfect Sunday supper. Matt was suitably impressed.