Doggy days and Zucchini cakes

Crispy and Samson turn five months old today! Haven't they grown? In the first photo they are just four weeks old. Thank you to Matron for her wonderful Dog Blog!






I've been so slack with writing a new post, no excuses. I prefer reading other peoples blogs to writing my own. But now it's really been too long, so here it is.
The dogs are great. They ate/chewed/pulled up all of my sweetcorn plants that I planted along the fenceline of my veggie garden. But I still have three on the inside. I really don't think I'll get any corn from them as I planted them so late. The weather is already much cooler too (we've had the heating on at nights this week). My zuchhini plants have been the heroes of the season. Yesterday I harvested six zucchinis and they were all huge. They're still producing flowers and there are still quite a few small zukes on the plants. I've never grown them before so have been pleasantly suprised at how easy it is. I've made two zuchhini cakes this week which were/are scrumptious! I'll include the recipe at the end of this post.
I've been baking like mad. For a cousins party I made three batches of chocolate chip cookies which covered half the kitchen table.



My tomato plants, which along with the whole veggie garden, were planted late, have so many tomatoes on them but nearly all are green. I hope I get some red ones before it really does get too cold. Even my peppers (capsicums) finally kicked off and each have two to four peppers on. On the other hand, my cooler weather loving plants are also growing well. I picked a small bucket of pod peas and snow peas, the bush beans (I thought they were runner beans) should be ready for picking in two to three weeks, and my carrots need a few more weeks too. I also picked my first cucumber yesterday. It was prickly! I never expected that. One of the problems of not speaking the language very well is not being able to buy exactly what I want. I think next time I'l
l order my seeds online. Brocolli seedlings are doing really well too. Maybe I'll be lucky enough to eat some!
So here's the recipe for Zucchini Cake (very simplified)
Beat together 3 eggs and 250g sugar. Add the following ingredients:
300g grated zucchini
300g self raising flour
100g ground hazelnut
tspn ground cinnamon (to taste)
150 ml oil
50 ml water
Mix them all together and bake at 180 degrees Celcius for about 35 minutes. From experience, if you put more than 300g zucchini in then the cake is very moist.

Finally, the garden is ready!

Completing the fence

My husband adds the finishing touches to his self-made gate.

Soil to plant in at last!

Doggies are very tired after their Helpful input

It's Sunday afternoon. My husband is about to start the BBQ. I've had a very fullfilling weekend in the garden! It was great, I've even been dreaming about vegetable gardens (that's a little sad!). So my vegetable garden is finally complete! We made a no-dig garden with two beds each 1x3 metres. We finished the frames and fence last week. On Saturday we filled the beds with lucerne hay, old cow manure, straw and compost. That was the best method I used at school when I studies horticulture, worked a treat. My hubby made the gate.

Today we topped up the beds, as they had sunk a little. I expect they will settle quite a bit more, especially after todays added worms get to work. I think I should wait a week or so before planting, just to let everything settle down, but I'm too eager to see my plants grow. So I'll plant some of the tomato seedlings that the naughty dogs chewed on a bit. They may die anyway but the leaves are still green, so I'll give it a go. I know my whole veggie patch is really late, but I'll try it anyway. At least next year I'll be ontime and expecting a load of vegetables.

Today some of my green beans sprouted. If all goes well, I should have beans to eat by the end of August. I wish we didn't have such a cold winter here otherwise I could grow something over winter. But last winter we had very little snow and it was still three feet deep at times.