Come dine with me

Come dine with me – or not when it’s so hot. After a busy week working the last thing I want to do is spend ages in the kitchen so at the end of last week we just had salad – no ordinary salad mind you as I had plenty of salad leaves in the garden courtesy of The Seedbed Roll an ingenious method of growing. The seeds are impregnated onto a rather bright blue matting which you just lay down onto well cultivated soil and then water it. But what I really like about it is that it has its own miniature polytunnel built in – brilliant - as I found all my yummy leaves were clean, slug free, and not nibbled by the countless rabbits that seem to congregate in my garden until my lazy cats decide to chase them away. And you can just cut it to size to fit into a planter or small space.

So here is the finished result,


looking rather delicious if I may say so, with the addition of some spicy chicken courtesy of good old M & S, crispy bacon, new potatoes, broad beans (from my garden of course) plus cucumber, peppers, tomatoes, celery – basically anything decent found in the bottom of my fridge. Just add salad dressing of your choice and tuck in.

I love this time of year in the garden when all my hard work is coming to fruition – picked a few raspberries yesterday for breakfast, had broccoli for Sunday lunch and have had broad beans galore (– a favourite dish with these is to fry a chopped small onion with crushed garlic if desired, and bacon lardons, lightly cook the beans, then stir it all together and serve piping hot.)

Luckily I’ve always been able to grow some veg or fruit even when I only had a postage stamp sized garden – growbags were the norm then. It can be time consuming I suppose but at this time of year it sure is worth it.



My veg patch!