A crop worth its weight in gold

The castle garden

A crop worth its weight in gold

If we were to describe the events in our castle garden in sports lingo, we could say that the grand finale is behind us and this year we received a silver medal - the quality and taste of the produce could have won us gold, but the summer drought slightly reduced the quantity of the crop. Therefore, a silver medal, which is worth its weight in gold!

Vivid colours from the island garden even in late autumn

The warm and sunny autumn allowed us to harvest radicchio, carrots, spinach, chard, parsley, nettles, borage, kohlrabi, chilli, cabbage and even strawberries, as well as lamb’s lettuce and winter lettuce in the organic garden in Otočec.

An excellent vitamin salad

We prepared a colourful salad from the produce, rich in vitamins and incredibly full of flavour. We’ll share the ingredients with you: lamb’s lettuce, red radicchio, spinach, grated carrot, a few hot peppers, and yellow and red chard. For the dressing, we mixed olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and we decorated the salad with edible lilac and purple borage flowers, which taste a bit like pickles. We could have used garden strawberries in the salad, but this time we chose to add them to the dessert, a homemade Christmas pudding.

Hand-picked and naturally dried herbs for winter tea

We also collected herbs in the garden all through summer and even in late autumn. As with all other crops, we didn’t use any artificial fertilizers or crop sprays to grow our herbs, and we dried them completely naturally. We’ll use them to prepare our dishes and a fragrant winter tea, which will pleasantly warm you up on winter days, its strong aroma evoking a homely atmosphere.

The tea mixture is prepared in a mortar. We gently crush the herbs and then steep them in boiling water. We create the Christmas scent with the addition of fresh cloves. Can you smell it already?

A delicious healthy snack

We also collected and dried nettle seeds, baked whole grain buns, spread them with butter and sprinkled them with nettle seeds. What a delicious snack! And nutritious, as these seeds contain plenty of vitamins (A, B2, C, K1) and minerals (iron, sodium, calcium).

There were fewer crops this year because of the summer drought, but they’re nevertheless of excellent quality, full of flavour and smell and also beautiful to look at, despite growing and ripening completely naturally, organically, without artificial aids. In the photo: the morning crop, prepared for our Otočec kitchens.