If you want a real talking piece, try growing strawberry spinach, an heirloom vegetable that is more than 400 years old. <\/p>\n
It is a unique vegetable with red berries and spinach-like leaves. <\/p>\n
Sow the seeds in early spring and harvest the edible leaves and berries throughout the growing season for fresh salads and garnishes. <\/p>\n
Some vegetables just love spring, and if you are impatient like me, you will want to start having a few salads and fresh salad greens you can harvest.<\/p>\n
Now is a wonderful time to plant some radishes, as they are ready to harvest after only about 4-6 weeks. <\/p>\n
Another is Pak Choi (Bok Choy), which thrives in the cool weather.<\/p>\n
It is great to plant and harvest before the heat arrives, and it decides to bolt. <\/p>\n
If you plant now, you will be harvesting in 60 days.<\/p>\n
To prevent that bitterness you sometimes get in lettuce, try planting this month. <\/p>\n
The moderate sun and moist soil are to its liking, and you will find it far tastier.<\/p>\n
Silverbeet is one hardy vegetable; it tolerates frost and will keep growing through spring into summer. <\/p>\n
The small leaves are great in salads.<\/p>\n
You should plant spring onions all year round; they are such a handy vegetable to use in a broad range of dishes, especially when you have no onions on hand.<\/p>\n
There are a lot of herbs that prefer the cool spring air, and coriander is one of them, as is dill.<\/p>\n
This is the time to plant coriander before the heat of the summer sends it sky high.<\/p>\n
Do you know that your carrots are sweeter when grown in cooler weather, as the sugars tend to build up while the roots are doing their thing underground. <\/p>\n
I find it great to use the thinned-out carrots in salads, leaving room for the other carrots to develop.<\/p>\n
If you are like me and have an abundance of parsley at the moment, then make some chimichurri sauce. <\/p>\n
Perfect over meat and chicken, and you can use it as a marinade or to just top your cooked meat.<\/p>\n
Or you can use it to top your baked potato, pop a blob on your poached egg or drizzle some through your rice or polenta – delicious.<\/p>\n
Recipe: Chimichurri sauce<\/p>\n
Ingredients<\/p>\n
1 cup tightly packed chopped parsley leaves, either curly or Italian<\/p>\n
1 cup tightly packed chopped coriander leaves<\/p>\n
\u00bd a red onion, coarsely chopped<\/p>\n
\u00bc cup red wine vinegar<\/p>\n
4 cloves of garlic<\/p>\n
1 teaspoon coarse salt<\/p>\n
1 teaspoon dried oregano<\/p>\n
\u00bd teaspoon chilli flakes. more if you like more of a kick<\/p>\n
\u00bd teaspoon freshly ground black pepper<\/p>\n
\u00bd cup extra-virgin olive oil<\/p>\n
Method<\/p>\n
Combine parsley, coriander, red onion, red wine vinegar, garlic, salt, oregano, chilli flakes and pepper in the bowl of a food processor; pulse a few times. <\/p>\n
Pour the olive oil in slowly, while pulsing a few more times, until the chimichurri is chopped, but not mushy.<\/p>\n
Leave in the fridge to marinate for a few hours, so all the flavours fuse.<\/p>\n
The variations of this recipe are endless; just adjust according to what you have in your herb garden, but parsley should be the star.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you want a real talking piece, try growing strawberry spinach, an heirloom vegetable that is more than…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21145,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[2851,95,138,2841,22189,337,8589,8597,8596,8587,2882,111,139,69,8595,8588,193,22188,6180,22186,6921,22185,1361,1961,22187,21980,6212,686,1965],"class_list":["post-21144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-also","tag-and","tag-business","tag-country","tag-embracing","tag-features","tag-garden","tag-gardener","tag-keen","tag-kem","tag-love","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-ormond","tag-ormonds","tag-other","tag-seeds","tag-shes","tag-spinach","tag-spring","tag-strawberry","tag-that","tag-this","tag-unusual","tag-vegetable","tag-vegetables","tag-week","tag-writer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21144\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}