Sunday 3 July 2011

Garden Delights

My parents' allotment has been featuring rather frequently on here lately, even though I don't know anything at all about gardening.
Without that garden, I would miss out on a lot of wonderful and delicious things, such as the cakes, salads, jams, jellies, chutneys and liqueurs my mum makes from their own produce, sometimes adding bought fruit.

The other day, I received a veritable bounty of garden delights when my parents came to my place for Sunday dinner:

Some calendula and other flowers (sorry, don't know their name; one is a corn flower I think); they lasted all week and looked even prettier after one or two days;
in the jars: strawberry and apricot jam, black and red currant jam, rhubarb chutney, gooseberry jam, strawberry and elderberry jam, and more currant jam. The rhubarb chutney is delicious with meat and even fish, while I use the jam mostly to stir it into pure yoghurt or put one or two teaspoons on my muesli. 

What's in the round glass bottle, you may ask?

Strawberry liqueur! Pull the stopper, and you smell summer bottled-up - it is wonderful!

Thanks, mum, for all these garden delights - how good is that, to reap the benefits without having done any of the actual gardening work? :-)

6 comments:

  1. I know just how you feel. My Dad is a great gardener and he gives me canned jellies, tomatoes, potatoes and his own vegetable soup with all vegetables from his garden! All of this...and I have done nothing of the work! He also has chickens so, yes, I always leave with at least two dozen eggs.
    That strawberry liqueur LOOKS wonderful!
    Kay

    ReplyDelete
  2. Kay, when we will open the liqueur, I will have some especially for you :-)
    Vegetable soup - now that sounds truly wonderful! At my parents' allotment, there are some goldfish in the pond and some lizards live there, too, not to mention all the birds, but they don't have any animals there like chickens or rabbits or so.

    ReplyDelete
  3. You are lucky! Even luckier than that because you are aware of your blessings.....The blue flower is Nigella sativa. In English it's often called Love in a Mist. Corn flower is Bachelor Buttons, or Centaurea cyanus. They are both beautiful!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thank you, Kristi - "Love in a Mist" sounds just as pretty as this flower is!

    ReplyDelete
  5. The blue flowers are here called "Jungfer im GrĂ¼nen", that means "Virgin in the Green", or also "Gretchen im Busch". I do love them!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Thank you, Anonymous, for telling me the German name(s) as well. They fit, don't they!

    ReplyDelete