2019 Kitchen Garden Guide

 

Hooray for rain; the sound of it on a tin roof at night, the approach of it across the hills and waterways, the feel of it on my face when I pop out to feed the chooks and the comfort it brings to gardeners and their gardens, from the worms and microbes to towering trees. Rain in autumn means everything is going to be ok.

Autumn is a wonderful time for harvesting mushrooms, kale, French sorrel, salad leaves, early broccoli, rainbow chard, bok choy, wasabi greens, the last of our summer vegetables, the first of the edible, winter weeds and a myriad of fabulous apples, pears and quinces. Many kitchens are bulging at the seams with preserves. Bring on winter and cosy nights by the fire with some home-made cassis and quince paste served with a delicious, local cheese.

The many moods of compost making

I recently attended two fabulous and innovative sessions which included information on making the most of compost preparation. One of these was at Government House in Hobart where the compost maker, Jimmy, took us through current thinking which challenges the aerobic, or lasagne, heap we are all familiar with. Fermenting, which is anaerobic, as a way of preserving food and increasing its available nutrients is on everyone’s lips, so to speak. But fermenting is also useful for improving the diversity and numbers of microbes in our compost. Here are his guidelines.

Gather your ingredients as usual. Green (leaves etc), brown (hay, dry leaves etc), high nitrogen (fresh manure/ seed meal).

Spread all green material in a thin layer, spraying with fine mist of low concentration compost microbes (available locally). Then spread all the brown/carbon thinly on top and spray another fine mist on as much material as you can, but without wetting it too much. The material is actually fairly dry on the whole but seeded up with microbes across as wide a surface area as possible. The microbes inhabit and colonise that film of moisture on the organic matter as he understands it, and the greater the concentration and diversity of microbes the greater the water retention will be, it will create and hold on to moisture as the fermentation happens.

Then spread horse or other manure and he also adds some neutrog seamungus. If they have some food scraps from the bokashi bin in the kitchen he will throw them on too. This is only small volume but could do way more if they get more from kitchen.

 

The ratio he works to is normally 3 Brown (carbon): 2 Green: 1 High Nitrogen - the idea being a higher carbon makes the biology of the compost more fungal dominated.

 

He sometimes ends up with more like a 3:3:1 which is good too - probably tips the compost to a more bacterial dominance. 

 

Once all material is spread out thinly (300mm ish deep) and sprayed/inoculated, I push it all together in a heap so it's all mixed thoroughly. Compress it down as much as you can, cover it with a tarp and secure it down. It can be turned anytime after a couple of weeks. At first turn I spread the pile out and re-apply EM in 50% less concentration. 

 

He finds that one turn at 3-4 weeks then another in another 3-4 then take off cover and in a couple of weeks its ready to go and full of worms.

How I pickle olives:

So many people have asked me so here is the answer….

3 kg black olives, firm but black all over (I have never done it with green)

3 Tbl salt

12 Tbl olive oil

600mls white / cider vinegar

1.25 litres water ( boiled and cooled)

optional : 1 clove garlic / jar

1 small red chilli (or less)/ jar

dried oregano or other herbs

 

After picking, wash then slit each olive on 1 or 2 sides (depending on how big the olives are. If small, omit this step). Place in a large, ceramic bowl and cover with ordinary tap water. Try an olive, so you know what you are starting with. It will be shockingly bitter!

Change the water daily for 10 - 14 days, until you can bite into one and not spit it out in disgust! It should still have flavour but not be unbearably bitter nor bland. Strain.

Sterilise some jars (I find 3kg olives makes about 12 medium jars). Place olives into jars. Putting in some / all / none of the optional  ingredients as you go. (I usually don't use any now because I prefer the real olive flavour)

Mix the boiled water, vinegar, salt and olive oil in a bowl. Pour into the jars making sure you cover the olives completely. Put on well-fitting lids.

Wait at least 2 weeks before starting to eat. You will find the flavour changes with time - some people prefer them with the 'fresh' taste you get after 2 weeks, others prefer the more mellow flavour after 6 months or more.

They should be stored in a cupboard but when you open a jar put it in the fridge if your kitchen is hot. I always put open jars in the fridge in summer or they go mouldy, but I never do in winter as I eat them pretty fast and I don't use huge jars.

 

 

Sow in the garden now	Plant in the garden now
Broad beans Bok Choy Mustard greens esp. frilly Miners’ lettuce Corn salad (mache) Shungiku (edible, Japanese Chrysanthemum) Radishes Salad and spring onions Coriander Chervil  Stinging nettles (for teas and pestos all winter)	Leek bulbils Garlic cloves Seedlings of Asian veg. Flower bulbs Sow in the hothouse to plant out: Lettuces Kales Broccoli raab Red onions Sow to stay in the hothouse or outside in frost-free areas: Sugar snap peas

How to make soil and compost with no work

When it comes down to it, I am either lazy or clever….. probably lazy! As well as that, unlike many people, I don’t like buying things much, especially if they are in plastic bags and come from far away or if I have to get in my car to go and get them. I like staying at home and using what is around me which means I also like to sit on my verandah with a coffee and think about how not to have to go out, but still have things I need!

I like sowing seeds I have saved and I often need to have plants in pots for a while until there is room in the garden and I like compost; I just LOVE the feel and smell of beautiful compost. All this means I need something to put into my seed trays, something to put in my pots and something to dig into the garden….. and here is how it gets done at my place.

My chooks live in a kind of man made forest….. well, some of it is man made intentionally, some of it is a consequence of people living here. Some years ago someone planted two oak trees and a few fruit trees, all very much too close to one another, if you ask me, but they were there so I left them there when I moved here. Someone crazily planted 2 buddleias, which are now massive, one of which the chooks have chosen to roost in at night, instead of in the funny little tin and apple crate structure which they now lay eggs in, mostly. Then, unintentionally some mallow “tree” seeds probably blew in and a few wild plum trees grew on the neighbour’s side of the fence and some other weeds and plants got a hold and now it is quite a lovely forest for chooks. Add to this a lazy woman who throws most of the weeds from the vegetable garden and elsewhere, into the chook yard for them to deal with.

Next, the oak trees lose their leaves in winter and half the chook yard becomes literally 30cms or more deep in oak leaves. I keep tossing weeds on top, the mallow sheds its leaves too as do the  fruit trees, the other plants come and go and for months and months the chooks turn it all over, pecking at insects and edible bits and pieces, which they turn into eggs for me. Sometimes I can hardly open the gate because the chooks ALWAYS kick and scratch everything towards the gate! Oh lalalala, maybe the gate faces Mecca or something but I tell you what they NEVER kick it away from the gate!

So, one day when I was again in there with my spade trying to reclaim my desire to easily enter the chook yard through said gate I noticed how fabulous was this mound, how good it smelt and, kneeling down, how beautiful it felt running through my fingers…. I had discovered gold; a free, easy, continuous supply of beautiful, rich soil, hand made by a flock of assorted chooks of all ages who had been throwing it towards me for years and for which I had cursed them up until this moment.

All set to sift some gold for seed sowing	Now I have raked the area and the chooks are back to see what I have revealed for them!
4 buckets filled. The back right is sifted.	Here are the buckets, now by my potting bench which is next to the chook yard. All very convenient.

Now I can easily gather up a wheelbarrow of soil, which I sift well if I am going to sow seeds into it. If I want it as compost for the garden, I dig it in, acorns, little sticks and all (but I do curse those innocent acorns when they turn into oak trees faster than a speeding bullet!). If I want potting mix, I take the middle ground (like Goldilocks) and use the stuff that is not too fine and not too coarse and sometimes I mix it with some cheap potting mix from some of those wretched plastic bags I hate!

It does take some management because you have to get at it before the next lot of leaves fall and not just after you have dumped a load of the world’s worst weeds on top! Sure, a few grass seeds etc germinate but chooks have very beady eyes and do not let many seeds go uneaten!

All in all it is a brilliant system and allows me more time to sit on my verandah and contemplate other ways to avoid going out and buying stuff.

The Chicken Feed Dilemma

I have been recently thinking about animal feed; for chooks in particular but all farm animals, in the bigger picture. Let’s think about my situation where I have 6 chooks, for eggs. Every morning I give them 2 cups of mixed grain, Australian grown, then in the afternoon I give them more grain, this time organic, Australian feed wheat (ie complete with some chaff and unwinnowed). This make about 3 cups of grain / day and keeps me in eggs all year round, plus I have plenty to give away to son Hugh and even a friend or two, at times.

Using our agricultural land to grow food for animals is worth thinking about carefully, when there are people without enough food, land cleared means native habitat destroyed and then there are the fertilisers, machinery and fossil fuels used to grow, harvest, package and transport it all.

I am feeding grain to 6 chooks and getting eggs, so I think that is a good use for 3 cups of grain / day. However, what about when my chooks get older and are no longer laying? Is it right, on all levels, to keep feeding them? Multiply that by the number of people who have chooks just in Tasmania and we can see that tonnes of grain would be going to old chooks (never mind to old horses and donkeys and alpacas and goats and so on).

Most people stop at the edge of thinking and say “Oh I don’t kill anything and my chooks can live for as long as they like (and therefore I am humane and a nice person).” However, just think about this in relation to native animal and plant survival, CO2 production, fossil fuel usage and a myriad of other, deeper concerns.

Is it ok for you to be “kind” but at the same time be killing wildlife somewhere else, where your chook grain comes from? Is it ok to be “humane” but at the same time be adding to climate change, peak oil, mining and transport problems?

I don’t think we can continue to stop thinking at our property boundary. I think that is precisely how we got into this climate change and earth destruction dilemma in the first place; putting our personal desires before the good of the whole. It may sound harsh to some, but it is far more humane, nice and kind to put old chooks into the stock pot or even into the compost heap.

Pears, Eggs, Mulch and more

I love cool days; I can get so much done. I love where I live; it is rarely brown and dry and the creek through my garden mostly trickles and tinkles all summer long.

I had a problem with my mulcher this morning so, while I thought about how to fix it I took to the lawn mower…. then I had a bright idea, which worked and I felt very pleased with myself as the mulcher once again roared into action.

After I had reduced the whole pile of sticks and prunings to a nice heap of mulch to spread on my paths, I decided to continue my fix-it session and move the latch on the chook yard gate to a more ergonomic place. I also took out a large, spiral steel rod I have and, over and over again, screwed it into the compacted stuff in the cut-off rain water tank where I throw garden waste for the chooks. That is very satisfying as, when I pull it up, it loosens up the lovely composted waste below and puts it on top of the new stuff. The chooks have been in there with their bottoms up and beaks down, ever since, finding all the grubs and worms that have made it home since I last aerated it.

On my way inside for lunch I collected eggs, picked another armful of pears and dug up a huge, self-sown parsnip that had grown up through the debris that I had mulched. I have never had one that big in my garden before. What a great morning.

I will have been here 5 years on March 10th…. and only now am I ready to make some changes to some parts of my garden. Up until now most of it has stayed more or less the same, except the makeover I did early on to make a vegetable garden, herb garden and chook area.

After lunch my brush-cutter and I make short work of slashing the retched grass that is the curse of the Tasmanian gardener as it grows a mile a minute and forms thick clumps with hundreds of small nodules that are impossible to eliminate, if you leave it for even a few weeks. At least slashing it makes it look nice for a while!

All today’s work has been in one area; a particularly secluded spot which gets full winter sun and very little wind…. and up until now has been entirely ornamental. This was such a pretty, shady, ferny area when I came here but a couple of years ago the beautiful willow tree fell into the creek, removing all the shade. At first I was horrified and it became unkempt and ugly until I realised not what I had lost but what I had gained.

Oh lalala wait until you see what I have in mind to make it a key part of my food garden! What I discovered as I removed a temporary, chicken wire fence I constructed to let the chooks in to dig it over but to keep them from wandering further, involved tall, lush grass tangled in the whole length of the bottom of the fence…. and that the soil there, at the bottom of the slope, was fabulous. I know only too well how dry and barren the soil is just a few metres further up the slope…. so…. brain ticks…. terrace it along the contours…. with straw bales of which I have plenty…. like the slope of my vegetable garden in Adelaide.

The reason I need more food garden is that the oak tree near the chook yard has roots that have crept into some beds of my irrigated vegetable garden, turning them to dry dust, no matter how much compost and water I add. So I will have to think about what to do there…. maybe a few big pots…. or something!

Sadly there are no before and after photos to brighten up this monologue!

 

 

I love lacto-fermented vegetables…. Here is a jar of radishes well on their way and a jar of zucchini pieces and fennel seeds being made.

 

 

 

 

What a wonderful group of people come to the Cygnet Community Garden on Thursdays. I especially like the food each of them brings to share at the end of the gardening session!

A gorgeous day in the winter garden

I still get just as excited as ever when I spend the afternoon in my garden and see self-sown things coming up, others growing tall and strong and still older plants regrowing unexpectedly for another season. It sounds corny but it soothes my soul and brings an inner peace that I find hard to feel elsewhere.

Every year at this time it is the red cabbage that makes me smile most. It is certainly the colours and texture of the leaves but it is also the fact that several of them are approaching forming their third crop of red cabbages, with odd branches draped here and there like a small tree, and one is even older. I cut most of the side shoots off and just leave those that look most likely to form a heart. The oldest of them now only has one cabbage forming so this may be its last year. I will be sad to see it go as it has been here almost as long as I have!

The late afternoon light in winter is soft and casts long shadows through the garden. When a flash of sun appears from behind a sea of dark clouds it highlights whatever catches the late rays. Sometimes this is a deep red chard leaf or a bright yellow chard stem or the fine leaves of the lime green frilly mustard. Sometimes it is the bees on the brilliant yellow flowers of the bok choy flowers.

The sky seems enormous in winter here; I think because there are many layers of clouds; some white and shooting across the sky, others dark and menacing and sitting down on the mountains while still more sometimes seem to be going in the opposite direction, all at once. Being in the garden, feeling the breeze come up and being aware of the sky as I potter about is one of my greatest joys. I love the feel of mizzle, that unique cross between drizzle and mist that happens in Tasmania, and the way its chill feels on my lips and cheeks.

This chilly, damp air is what I came here for, from the dry air of South Australia. Mizzle brightens your cheeks, settles on your eye lashes, turns your hair frizzy and softens the light but is not quite wet enough to have to put on a jacket, which is perfect for gardening.

Everything old is new again in the red cabbage patch	Marigolds seem to flower all year round
I love miners lettuce and let it self-sow	The darkest of the red chards
	This self-sown bed is now clear of weeds, fertilised with mushroom compost and chicken manure pellets then covered in straw to let the worms and microbes enjoy turning the soil for me.
Self-sown lettuce amongst the new coriander	Tools of the trade + a bucket of leek seedlings removed and ready to take to the community garden tomorrow.
Straw bale chook house I made for 2 new chooks I am getting soon	I love this wooden bucket of water for the chooks. It has azola growing in it to keep the water fresh.
Why is she taking photos of us?	Chicory would have to be one of the most beautiful and varied winter vegetables in my garden….
	In winter it is brilliant in salads

Take what you need: Dealing with the stress of over-abundance

I hear it all the time…..”I have too many zucchinis / apples / plums / tomatoes…. I don’t want to waste them but what am I going to do? I don’t have time / energy / space / to make jam / bottle things / make preserves / visit my neighbour and give them away!”

Growing food is step 1 of sustainable living and dare I say it but most people never graduate past it because of the stress it can produce. They want a job AND children AND acreage in the countryside AND a food garden AND chooks…… etc.

So, if this is you, how can you remove some of the stress of over-abundance in your food garden? Bearing in mind that this is stage 1 of sustainable living and we are not asking you (yet) to change how you do things, we are just trying to stop you giving up growing food and make you more relaxed so maybe you will think about moving to stage 2.

My suggestion is to take what you need and let nature have the rest. Giving things back to the earth is simply recycling. Putting 10 zucchinis in the compost is wonderful. I recently tipped a large bag of plums that someone had given me, into the compost. I could have gone through it and picked out the good ones (most had gone soggy and some were all mouldy by then) but I thought “No, I am really too busy to deal with this, this week” and in they went. In a few months they, along with the rest of the compost, will be returned to the garden. Problem solved, stress released, move on.

Silver beet rules the whole of my vegetable garden if I let it, so I take what I need for myself, one meal at a time, and feed the rest to the chooks. There is always some that gets away and goes to seed, flopping all over its neighbours. So, I grab what I can and tie it up to a stake. Then it is out of the way and I can go on gardening around that 1 plant. Problem solved, stress released, move on.

In the photo above, my garden became overgrown with 2 massive, self-sown pumpkin vines and, at the time, I could not store them all so I swapped 98kgs of random pumpkins for other produce at a local organic grocer. (7 years later I still love this shirt!).

In this photo, I am taking my over abundance of greens to the same shop to swap for other things. (7 years later, that is still my favourite gardening shirt!!).

I have a wonderful, weeping Lady in the Snow apple tree with the most delicious apples you can imagine. Now it is laden and many are falling. I keep looking at it from the back door and remembering the year I did not waste a single apple. My chooks roam under that tree (keeping it free of coddlin moth) so they peck at them on and off but there are too many even for 5 chooks. Today it is raining (so I won’t be gardening) and I will collect a basketful and juice them for the freezer (my freezer loves apple juice ). I will take some to the friends at the community garden. I will pick one every day when I am gardening and stand there and enjoy it. I hope to wrap lots in paper and save them for later. The native honey eater birds love them too. Still there will be many dozens “wasted” but they will all go back into the soil and feed the tree for next year. That is the cycle of life and how it should be. You could rake them up and put them in the compost if you like. Problem solved, stress released, move on.

Think cycles. Then there is no such thing as wasted food from the garden (or wasted anything, really). The consumer is encouraged to think in lines: buy new, use, discard waste then buy again, etc. Nature revolves in cycles such as seasons and the recycling of living matter. By buying something from a friend or secondhand shop (or tip-shop or gum tree if you are in Australia) you are moving to stage 2, where you are re-using something perfectly good that someone else has thrown out because they are still thinking in lines and they want the latest model or fashion.

After my secondhand microwave stops working, I will use it as a seed storage cupboard out on my porch (with the parsley I wrote about on facebook today!). Then I will find another second hand one in perfect working order and, because it will only cost about $20, I won’t be stressed about it when it stops working after a few years, or if it is the best one! This is permaculture principles 10 (use and value diversity) and 12 (creatively use and respond to change). See below.

Permaculture principles in this post:

3. obtain a yield

 

5. use and value renewable resources and services

 

6. Produce no waste

 

10. Use and value diversity

 

12.Creatively use and respond to change

 

Permaculture ethics in this post:

Earth care, people care, fair share

Gardening Australia gets to the core and soars to the stars….

"Meet Joost Bakker - artist, florist, inventor, architect, builder, landscape designer, restaurateur and eco-entrepreneur. He's a big ideas man."

 

I have been getting a little tired of Gardening Australia but this week hit the spot for me, with some amazing innovations that really are world firsts. Honestly, each segment was not just interesting but so inspiring and creative that I wanted to jump up out of my chair and go and join in. If you can, watch it on iview.

 

It started with this wonderful man…. Joost Bakker…. who has ideas and just gets them done…. "I just believe that we don't need to generate any waste in any of the things that we do in everyday life," says Joost. "We can live in a world that is sustainable and doesn't need to have an impact and we don't need to put anything in landfill. Everything endlessly reusable and recyclable - that's my philosophy."

Sure we’ve heard that all before but Joost is a BIG ideas man…..he designs recyclable houses, he recycles buildings, he turns 100% of his cafe waste into compost on site. He is just simply wonderful!!

"In this cafe, we don't have any rubbish bins," says Joost. "We don't accept anything in cardboard, we don't accept anything in glass - so our milk comes in stainless steel vats, our whiskey comes in wooden barrels, all the produce comes in black returnable plastic crates.

And there’s so much more!

"Well, if you look at Sweden, they've decided that by 2020 they're going to be totally self-sufficient in fertiliser. So every new house that gets built there has a urine-harvesting toilet with a tank and the government comes and empties the tank once a year. Urine is sterile*, so you can store it for a long time and they have equipment that injects it into the soil," says Joost. "So, rather than using chemical-based fertilisers they want to use natural fertilisers."

And I bet he gets this one done….

"I'd love to put a farm on top of an office tower in Melbourne. That's my goal. I actually want to show how much food we can grow with the waste that the restaurant generates. I want to have a restaurant, a farm, a composter and use things like olive pips to generate energy and have a completely enclosed loop of a supermarket at the base, where people can buy the produce that we've grown. Anyway, I'm working on it. It's a big dream. It'll happen. I'll make it happen!"

Suddenly the rest of the world seems so small.

Sharon and Scott’s Garden

Our April SeedSaveUs get together was like being in a dream, where the setting and the food gardens combined to produce a paradise that a dozen or so avid gardeners drooled over and investigated, right down to the last worm.

It seems to me that this fruit and veg garden is powered not only by enthusiasm and knowledge but by alpaca poo too. How convenient that alpacas poo in neat piles so collecting it in a wheelbarrow, to make a new compost heap, is a breeze.

Sharon dyed some of the alpaca wool, using totally natural dyes made from  various native plants, after it had been spun and turned into skeins. These are for sale, so if you’d like her to send you some, leave a comment below and I will put you in touch.

 

Scott runs the compost zone and makes enough rich compost to feed the 800 sq. m. garden, plus he uses Steve Solomon’s recipe to make a COF mixture (complete, organic fertiliser) and the system is obviously working.

Sharon’s favourite tomato from the Botanic Gardens selection was Aunt Gertie’s Gold, an enormous and very flavoursome tomato which is still producing its bountiful crop.

As usual the table was laden with goodies brought and shared by the members, including magnificent cakes, a delicious garden veg frittata, fresh sourdough bread and olives, South African rusk (a kind of spiced biscuit, with a texture a bit like violet crumble), apples freshly juiced that morning, a beautiful quiche and more…..

We shared seeds, plants and produce, all of which I forgot to photograph in my excitement to look through them all and hear the stories about them!

A family new to Tasmania joined us today and I look forward to getting to know them better and helping them get started on their adventures in food growing.

Foraging for Food Walk

All night it poured with rain. All through breakfast it continued. I was sure there would be cancellations. I checked my emails and listened for the phone.... then they started to arrive; early, happy, laden with home-made food and drinks to share. Before long the clouds lifted and as we stood in my lawn, while Jilli gave us her introduction to the world of weeds and herbs through human history, I thought to myself how wonderful it is here.... how lovely the people are..... how they turn up prepared for any weather...how generous they are..... how lucky I am to have Jilli as a neighbour.

We set off to Jilli's and spent a good hour and a half delighting in her amazing knowledge of English edibles which now run rampant in our gardens. Jilli's garden follows the same creek as flows through my garden and on the banks of it she has naturalized what we generally call weeds but are, in fact, the staple foods of the peasants of England for thousands of years. Here we all are, walking beside the trickling stream and looking for the little orange markers Jilli had used to mark the plants we were learning about.....

Telling the difference between Dandelion and....	Cat's Ear, for example....
Jilli's newest composting method is this  woven design from Suweto.	Then back at my place for a shared lunch....

Jilli had made stinging nettle soup, using the large, English nettles from her garden but I have the smaller, Tasmanian nettles in mine. The soup went so fast that this is all that was left on the hotplate of the gas BBQ for a photo!

I made a dip which started out being chickweed pesto but, oh lalala, I had an embarrassing number of disasters while making it and thought it was ruined..... but people loved it and even asked for the recipe!

Amanda is a blogger who came all the way from Hobart and brought this fabulous elderflower cordial (quite different to Deb's divine nectar but equally as delicious), amongst other things. She has a great blog called Gourmet Gatherer. Since she is new to blogging, do call in on her and say hello. I was lucky to get this photo of Fern and John with the cordial because it too disappeared in no time!

We finished the afternoon with coffee and Judy's soft and perfect scones.

Jilli provided us with handouts for the weeds we happily now call friends, and even recipes to make sure we enjoy them in our everyday lives as well as a comprehensive reading list.

 

This kind of knowledge is invaluable for we Australians who have no tradition of eating from our own wild places, having scoffed for too long, over the last 2 centuries, at the Aboriginal people who knew the land and Australia's own wild edibles. We must now learn to eat weeds from other countries, gathered in our own gardens, and to find what knowledge we can about edible Tasmanian plants.... including a native elderberry and a raspberry found in the forests.