Our kitchen bench in summer

The kitchen bench is the centre of our kitchen. There is always something cooling, fresh from the oven, or our yoghurt is sitting there and doing its thing.

Come summer, it is havoc, though. There are times when you can't see much of the bench surface. We constantly plonk something on there, freshly picked from the garden.Here we have a basket of Gala apples, a colander full of plums, a big pile of tomatoes (waiting to be processed), some zucchini, an Austrian Hull-Less Oil Seed pumpkin, one lone pear (the only one on the tree this year), some Physalis "Aunt Molly" (related to the Cape Gooseberry), a chilli, a capsicum, a rock melon, a few autumn raspberries, some garlic. AND you can see a loaf of bread cooling and in the background are our jars of yoghurt.