Natures harvest.

We've spent a bit of time since moving into our new house doing some gardening. It's soo lovely to have a proper garden again but much of the "border" area is overgrown with bracken so as a quick fix I've planted up some tubs with herbs, tomatoes and pea plants to get us underway. A small area near the house that was fairly easily weeded out has been the recipient of some courgette plants, known here as zucchini, and some strawberries are going in there too when I get organised.

Lettuce and tomatoes.

Sugar snap peas.

The boys always love to get involved in digging and planting, especially when there's the promise of some food at the other end of it.

Whoever originally planted out this garden must have been a person after my own heart as there are fruit trees galore here, which I find very exciting. As well as the very normal (for these climes) lemon and orange trees, of which we have several, there are also a couple of more unusual ones. At the far end of the garden is a large Mulberry tree which is currently laden with fruit and which I'm ashamed to say I only discovered last week as it's a bit overgrown down there.

Lemon tree by the pool (which you couldn't miss!)

Mulberry tree (which I nearly missed).

 There are also two large bushes of a fruit that we couldn't even start to identify. It looked as if it should be edible, but in the absence of an ID, we didn't dare try. So today went to the garden centre laden with a branch of fruit and leaves and immediately met a man who proclaimed "Oh lovely loquats, lucky you."  "What?" said we. "Could you write that down please?" - so he did. And now we have yet another great source of fruit from the garden.

Apparently it's also known as a Japanese plum -I'm going to need to google search some recipes though if we're to use all this bounty well.

Oranges from the trees

Big bowl of mulberries.

But for now we're managing to enjoy it in a very simple way. Fresh fruit pancakes with vanilla yoghurt for breakfast is surely one of the best starts I can think of to a day.

Yum.