May 2017 Kitchen Garden Guide

Late autumn is my favourite time of year in the kitchen garden. The harvesting and preserving pressures are finished, seeds have been collected and stored and the sowing and planting pressures of spring are months away. Now is the time to work on the soil, to reshape beds, to make compost, to prune, to make hugels, to protect tender plants and to sit on the verandah in the sun and watch the light as it changes day by day. Brassicas will be flourishing, Chilean guavas and cape gooseberries can be picked by the handful as you pass by, grape leaves are turning and apples arriving. Life is good.

Energy

Energy is everywhere and now is the time to think about how to make your life attuned to capturing and storing it. In a handful of seeds is the energy to start a whole season’s food. In a bale of hay is the energy from a year’s pasture growth, ready to decompose and feed the microbes in your soil, which in turn feed your food garden. In a jar of fermented pickles are the fruits of a plant’s labour and millions of bacteria all working to provide your gut with life and energy. In a brick fireplace is stored the energy from the heat of firewood; trees that have grown for many years, capturing energy enough to warm us all winter. In water is the energy of life, without which nothing on earth can live.
Which is the opposite of wasting energy - by driving cars out of your zone to get food, by draining your land instead of harnessing the water, by burning piles of prunings instead of making hugels, by throwing away your food scraps instead of making compost, by buying food brought from other lands, by using up oil reserves (eg in cling film, disposable bags, foam trays) we should be saving for important uses like saving lives.
We are all worried about climate change. We are all the reason it exists. Therefore, only we can be the solution. By turning our thinking around we can all do it; by catching and storing energy instead of wasting it. Refuse packaged fruit and vegetables. Shop locally, really locally, starting in your backyard and those of your neighbours and friends. Then into your most local market and small, ethical shops. Eat what is there! Read books like The Food Clock by Fast Ed Halmagyi to help bring the joy of the seasons into your kitchen, your life and the future of humanity! It is not an exaggeration, dear reader. No excuse is good enough not to start today. It also brings such a joy of living and relieves so much stress just by changing one’s mindset.

Pumpkins

I think pumpkins must be the most celebrated vegetables in the world because everywhere you travel, there seems to be an autumn pumpkin festival. The shapes, sizes, colours and textures make us laugh with delight and the flavours can vary enormously from the French chestnut flavoured ‘potimarron’ to the sweetest ‘futsu’ and the crazy, knobbly ‘Galeaux d’Eysines’. Competitions for the heaviest pumpkin have brought fame to growers far and wide. I saw some of the most beautiful craft, using pumpkins, in a French pumpkin festival. Check out Victoria’s annual festival at a tiny place with the incredible name of Collector.
And so I hope to encourage you to plan your pumpkin growing area now, browse seed catalogues, buy seed early and prepare yourselves for entering the fun of next autumn’s Cygnet Pumpkin Festival. Schools, clubs, families, individuals one and all, are invited. Details will emerge and grow, now that the seed of the idea has germinated!

Weeds and more

Many people in Europe still forage, not just for mushrooms, but for winter herbs and greens and roots which are native to their lands. Many of them grow wild in our gardens but we silly Australians pull them out, calling them weeds and give them to the chooks, who happily devour them because they are not so prejudiced! There is an excellent Australian book called The Weed Foragers’ Handbook, which I highly recommend. Soon, you will be eating from the garden without planting anything at all!
Luckily, the cooler weather also heralds the end of the cabbage moth laying eggs on our brassicas. If you have not planted brassicas yet, it is now too late as the plants will not have big enough leaves to grow through winter. When spring comes, they will bolt to seed and you won’t get a crop.
Autumn is a wonderful time for harvesting mushrooms, kale, French sorrel, salad leaves, early broccoli, rainbow chard, the last of our summer vegetables, the first of the winter weeds and a myriad of fabulous apples, pears and quinces. Many kitchen pantries are now 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!

Seaweeds

Tasmania is surrounded by sea and yet we tend not to forage the shores and shallows for food. That is a topic I wrote about in May 2016. Seaweed is wonderful for our food gardens too.
As autumn and winter storms in the roaring 40’s send high seas crashing onto the shores of Tasmania, kelp and other sea plants are strewn on the beaches. I heard on the radio that we are allowed to collect seaweed from most beaches at the rate of 100kg / day in Tasmania. Seaweed is heavy, so that is not as much as it sounds. I have some great ideas for using it! Seaweed contains trace elements which we often neglect to think about in our food gardens (and our stomachs).
1. Place tubs or large buckets here and there in your garden. Half fill them with seaweed and fill to the top with water. Cover if you like. Keep a ladle nearby. Whenever you see some plants looking a bit weak or off-colour give them a tonic of 1 part seaweed water to 9 parts water, in a watering can. Pour over the leaves.
2. Completely cover your asparagus patch with a thick layer of seaweed during winter. Leave the rain and the worms to do the work.
3. Seaweed is a wonderful addition to mulch under fruit trees.



Sow in the garden now	Plant 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	Leek bulbils Garlic cloves Large seedlings of Asian veg. Flower bulbs Sow in the hothouse to plant out: Lettuces Kales Broccoli raab Sow to stay in the hothouse or frost-free area: 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.

February 2017 Kitchen Garden Guide

It has been a blustery summer thus far and many days that I intended to garden were instead spent visiting friends, painting my bedroom or cooking up a storm in my kitchen. Nevertheless I have enjoyed myself and my food garden is in pretty good shape.
 

Pear and cherry slug

If you see tiny little black ‘worms’ on the leaves of your pears, cherries, quinces and even plums and the leaves are turning brown and crisp, you have this slug. A simple control is to spray the entire tree with a mist of water then throw ash or lime all over it. Do this a couple of times and they will be desiccated. Try to stand up-wind!
 

Managing wind

Tomatoes: I have not tied up my tomatoes as they do not like wild wind ripping through their foliage. My tomatoes and lying all over the thick hay mulch and producing lots of fruit. There are several myths about tomatoes. Here are the facts: First, they are self-pollinated so do not need bees. Slight air movement is all they require and there is plenty of that! Second, the tomatoes themselves do not need the sun to ripen; they simply need warm air temperature. Mine are ripening beautifully and I am eating even the quite large Black Krim already. Third, you don’t need to bother pricking out the laterals but you can if you want more order. Fourth, if you pick them when they just begin to colour, take them inside to somewhere warm but there’s no need to put them on a sunny windowsill.
Fruit trees: Quince fruit seems to stay on despite summer wind, as do plums, apples, olives and Kentish cherries. Contrary to what you hear, citrus also seem to thrive on my verandah and in my garden despite the wind. Young trees bearing fruit will snap off in the wind so staking is necessary. I espalier my Bramley apple as the fruit are way too big and prolific for the branches. This means that the trellis takes the weight of the fruit and far fewer seem to drop off. If you live in a very windy area, I recommend you espalier the perimeter of your garden with fruit trees, all the way around. Actually this is a wonderful, practical and beautiful way to grow fruit and is common in many English and French gardens. You can find any number of shapes and patterns online.
 

Interesting snippets:

Strawberries: Did you know that strawberries require bees to visit the flowers several times for full pollination to happen? If you have mis-shapen fruit, the reason can be that bees are not visiting enough. I suggest you plant some other bee attracting flowers nearby, or leave some things to flower and go to seed, such as fennel, globe artichokes or chicory, all of which are magnets for bees.
Sage: This deep hay method has resulted in a vast improvement of many of my herbs. Unexpectedly I have discovered a fabulous way to multiply sage plants, simply by piling damp hay over some of the long sage stems and leaving it alone! This is called layering and came about because I am a lazy gardener. I now have a small forest of my favourite, purple sage. If you don’t cook much with sage, you must start! The flavour holds well so is wonderful in slow cooking or even on the BBQ as crisp sage leaves are gorgeous. Chopped and fried in a little butter or good olive oil, then folded into pasta is a quick and easy and totally delicious meal. Put a sage leave in the pot when you are cooking rice. If you have trouble growing basil, grow sage!
 

Hay time

Our Tasmanian soil was never meant to grow vegetables so the things we add to it and do to it cause changes that are not well documented, here at the bottom of the world. Imagine a forest floor, deep in leaf litter, old, fallen trees and tree ferns and dappled light….. now picture a cleared vegetable garden bed in full sun. Hmmmm how can we encourage the soil life, microbes and worms that once did live in our forested soil, to live there again and help make nutrients available to our vegetables?
The answer is deep hay, at least 20cms thick, all year round. I have written about this now for well over a year and, since now is the time to buy hay, I have some tips for you. Hay ain’t hay! Hay is made up of all the plants in a paddock so, watch out for cheap hay full of thistles, dock and gorse. You will curse buying it for 7 years while the weed seeds torment you and you will blame me for suggesting it!! Ask the farmer about the hay. Look at the hay, look at the weeds growing in the ditches nearby and don’t buy hay from a farmer that cannot answer your questions or a farm surrounded with thistles and bad weeds. And don’t buy hay from a farmer that uses chemicals as they also will be in the hay and end up in your vegetables. I can direct you to where I get hay. Email me at katevag@gmail.com
 

Zucchinis, berries and more

If you need some recipes, check out Gardeners’ Gastronomy blog.

Seeds to sow now Broccoli raab Kale Beetroot Shungiku Lettuce Asian greens (late Feb.) Carrots Spinach & silver beet Spring onions Hakurei turnips Tas. swedes Parsnips Radishes

Plant out now, yes now, or before! Brussel sprouts Cauliflower Broccoli – regular, sprouting and raab Lettuce Jobs for February Plant or move citrus Summer prune stone fruits Prepare beds for autumn plantings Save seeds for next spring Give pots and the veg. garden some seaweed and fish liquid feed in a hosable spray.

Microgreens experiment

I have been sprouting and eating lots of lovely things, all winter; the coldest winter for 50 years in southern Tasmania. The days are always short in winter but this winter was so grey and so cold that it was a chore to manage the garden at all. I use a handy little, 4 layered sprouter that is really good, so I always have fresh sprouts, even when it is snowing!

Now spring has arrived with its usual flourish and the garden is bursting with life once more. For some reason I now feel less like eating sprouts and more like eating micro-greens, which I have not really tried growing much before. I normally eat from the garden, not from a pot.

However, our local green grocer was giving away little punnets of microgreens (she called them lettuce sprouts, but they weren’t) she had grown but which had not sold. They were tall and spindly and did not look very interesting but I accepted one and brought it home. It sat, neglected, on my kitchen window sill until one day I clipped it back by half and gave it a drink. Within a few days it sprang to life, thickened up and looked like it might be worth looking after, after all.

That was at least a month ago and it is still going! I trim it and put the shoots in my salad often and still it grows. A week or so ago I took the whole clump out of the punnet to see what the seeds were, that had so much life in them, and discovered lentils. Ah haaa, I sell organic, Australian lentils, amongst other things, in my Garden Shed and Pantry shop, so I took a handful of this and that and headed to my potting bench.

I gathered some punnets and some pretty pots then wondered what medium to use. She had not put much soil in the punnet but had a thick layer of seeds so I did the same. Obviously they would need some good, nitrogenous medium to keep them growing so I used compost, potting mix and a dash of chook poo pellets. The pots required more soil than the punnets just to fill them up a bit but next time I would put less, as the swollen seeds have now pushed it all up and it looks like a risen loaf of bread!

I sowed green lentils, azuki beans, chick peas and buckwheat. Before long, the green lentils were up and growing fast. Next is the buckwheat; not so even germination but ok. The chick peas and azuki beans are slower to send up green shoots but have good roots.

These terracotta pots are cheap and available locally but made in Italy! They come without any holes, so I drilled one but, for these microgreens, I wonder if it would be ok not to have a hole, since the terracotta itself is porous and the life of the greens is not long. I will try that next.

Life is good. Get there fast then take it slow.

No work and all play makes me very happy today!

A friend came by and brought me some of her wonderful asparagus this morning and all day, on and off, I have been thinking about how I would have it tonight….. raw in a salad, steamed as a vegetable, baked in a tart…. or what!

So, about 5pm I wandered out into the garden with my basket to see what was there that would make up my mind for me about cooking the asparagus. (I had already eaten quite a bit raw during the day.)

First there were the chooks to say hello to and some eggs to collect. Next I noticed that one of the chicories was stretching upwards before going to seed, so I decided to cut most of it off, as I really love chicory. The rest of it will shoot again and go to seed which will self sow and give me next more chicory next winter and spring, without me having to do a thing.

Near that chicory is a self sown red cabbage that is simultaneously growing a wonderful cabbage and sending up shoots with flowers, in a circle around the head. I picked one of the flower shoots and it was so sweet that I picked most of the rest of them, leaving the head for another day. I left a few shoots to continue flowering and set seeds which will self sow and provide me with red cabbages next winter and spring, without me having to do anything.

Earlier today I did some mowing and noticed how wonderful the dill is looking. These dill plants were dug up from a self sown clump that was very congested and moved to a more open area where they have done really well. So, I cut some fronds. I am surprised they have not gone to seed yet but soon they will and I will leave a few to self sow so I will have dill next winter and spring without any work at all from me.

There is one enormous frilly mustard reaching to the heavens. This gorgeous, lime green, frilly, beautiful plant is self sown. I am not sure why I didn’t get many this year but I will let this one go and hopefully it will give me more next year, without me having to sow any at all. I picked some of the pretty leaves as I passed by.

I looked over into the paddock next to my vegetable garden, where dairy cows sometimes graze. There, pecking away at this and that, were 3 of my chooks. I opened up the bottom of the chook yard fence a few years ago, just enough for a chook to get under, so my lucky chooks have free range over maybe 20 acres or more but they don’t don’t go that far away. I threw them some snails I found slithering through the perennial leeks and watched them fight over them.

While I was there, I cut some of the leeks which are so dense now that I just cut them at the ground and use them like spring onions, green tops and all. I love this patch which multiplies by growing little nodules around each leek which then grow into more leeks. If I thinned them out it would take me hours so I don’t bother. I love them thin and sweet. Eventually they will go to seed and grow fabulously beautiful heads of flowers that the bees will flock to and next winter and spring I will start picking the fresh leeks again, without having to do anything in the meantime.

By this time my basket was full and dinner was pretty much worked out, without me having to decide a thing. So, I slowly stewed the chopped leeks and most of the rest, in olive oil with the lid on then added the asparagus, s and p, and several beaten eggs mixed with some milk. When it was nearly set I grated over some good, sharpish, English cheddar (one of my ridiculous indulgences!) and put it under the grill to brown a little.

As I sat and ate my dinner I thought of the lovely 20 minutes or so I had spent in the garden, the fun it was tossing snails over the fence and watching the chooks race to get them and how nice it was that Erika had bothered to drop in on her way to work early this morning to give me some of her asparagus. And how I don’t even have to sow any seeds or do any work at all for this dinner to grow itself in my garden and my friend’s garden next year.

Life is good. Let things go a bit and watch them come back.

Look at the colour of that! Red cabbage shoots about to flower.	I love dill.
Fat Bastard asparagus from Erika. Beautiful.	The final result of 20 minutes in the garden and 10 minutes in the kitchen. All of which made me smile! And there’s leftovers!
Punnets of cucumber  seedlings from yesterday’s Cygnet market. Soon to be a summer lunch ingredient. And so the seasons go round and round….

Cream of the Crop Vegetable Gardens

Just dreaming a little….. click on the little arrows at the bottom left of the first photo to see lots more.

Cream-of-the-Crop Vegetable Gardens

Willing Workers and a Little Ingenuity

It was a nice mild afternoon so I thought it would be good to get started on preparing an area for planting out some of my citrus, once the frosts have passed for this year. A beautiful, old willow tree had fallen over about a year ago and turned what was a shady part of the garden into a very sunny part.

The area has been totally neglected ever since so I took to it with my mattock, with the warm sun on my back. All the grass and weeds were being tossed over the fence for the chooks and they were pretty happy about that. It was quite hard work and as I rested on my mattock for a rest, I watched the chooks digging and scratching at the goodies I had tossed at them.

Then I had an idea. How about I get the chooks out here doing the work for me! How silly, I thought, for me to be doing all the work and throwing weeds, grass and lumps of good soil over the fence when, with a little ingenuity, I could put the chooks to work instead.

Off I went to the farthest corner of my acre where, in the dark recesses of an old shed lived a pile of star pickets rolled up with miles of 1.8m  high chicken wire, given to me recently by a friend leaving the state. Perfect! After quite some effort I was not sure this was such a good use of my limited time! However, I was determined to get the job done and the chooks working for me so, after a lot of swearing and heaving I managed to untangle 2 good long lengths and drag them to the desired site.

Trying to erect a fence already partly assembled and then rolled up, on uneven ground, alone is a challenge! While holding a star picket already joined to the fencing wire with one hand and my trusty mallet in the other, the rest of the 7m roll of wire and pickets wants desperately to lie down and threatens to pull it all down into a tangled mess, taking out one of my eyes at the same time.

Patience is not one of my strengths! However, on the chook yard side of the fence the weeds I had tossed over earlier were already disappearing under those well worked chicken legs and beaks and I could imagine the ease with which they would turn my patch of thick, overgrown greenery into eggs and fertilised soil. After getting down to just my t-shirt, unravelling what seemed like 100m of wire mesh, hammering in pickets that seemed very oddly spaced and dealing with an uneven slope it was finally done.

Lastly I cut a hole in the bottom of the chook fence and called the girls through. The first one to take to a new scenario is always the big brown chook and she made those noises a chook makes when she finds treasure. Immediately all the others came running and soon I was sitting outside the fence having coffee, watching the workers.

In a few weeks I will have a new garden area….. as long as the fence holds up and the chooks don’t work the soil so much they end up going under the fence and outside, digging up parts of the garden that should not be dug!

Inspirations: Vegetable Seeds for Cool Growers

There are some amazingly interesting and wonderful people in Tasmania. It really is like another country, rather than another state of Australia. I am struggling to explain concisely what it is that makes it seem this way but it has to do with a history of isolation and necessity being the mother of invention and self-sufficiency.

Up north in the Tamar Valley are a couple of blokes passionate about beans, who have been trialling varieties from all over the world in an attempt to find those which will produce well in the cool climate of Tasmania. Currently they grow over 100 varieties!! The purpose is to make them available for home gardeners to grow and people to cook and eat. One of the newsletters went into the health reasons for eating beans of different colours. What these blokes know about beans is staggering.

Every month they write a newsletter about what they have been doing and when we might be able to buy the new seeds they are producing in quantities big enough to sell to home gardeners. I find it all incredibly inspiring. I have spoken on the phone to the man who runs the nursery and one day I will go and meet them. It reminds me of somewhere I went in France where a man did a similar thing with pumpkin varieties…. but the name of the place has slipped my mind now.

They do all sorts of research into other vegetables too, always with the home gardener in mind.

Tasmania, actually, is not dissimilar to France in the way that it has remained totally itself and has not been over-run by agri-business or any other big business but is full of small enterprises and individuals making the most of what they have in their area. I love this way of life dearly and would not now want to live anywhere different.

Here is the latest newsletter from Inspiration Seeds.

Here is another newsletter concentrating on the health and vitality of beans, fresh and dried.

Life is good.

Growing buckwheat between the vines in NZ

Managing biodiversity when growing a monoculture crop is not something every vigneron thinks of doing but there are benefits for the quality of the crop, for the farmers and for those who drink the final result.

This piece is taken from an excellent website called stuff.co.nz

At Te Whare Ra Estate in Renwick, near Blenheim, (north east of the South Island) owners Jason and Anna Flowerday have found an innovative way to use the space between their vine rows - they've planted buckwheat.

Although a strange sight to visitors driving past the rows on the way to the cellar door, growing buckwheat on alternate vine rows had a range of benefits and was a natural way to glean optimum conditions for grapegrowing, Mrs Flowerday said.

The vine rows had about 3 metres of space between them, about 10 hectares of land.

"For us, it's a big area between the vine rows," Mrs Flowerday said.

"So it's about creating something effective for the best use of the land."

Among other species, buckwheat attracted small native wasps by the name of Dolichogenidea tasmanica, which helped get rid of the leaf roller caterpillar pest.

The technique, adopted from what began as a research project nearby at Seresin Estate, allowed them to avoid using chemicals on the vines, Mrs Flowerday said.

"It's about looking for a natural solution to a problem."

Other plant species did a similar job to the flowering buckwheat. However, buckwheat had increased the abundance and longevity of the wasps, it had a short sowing to flowering time, could be managed to produce flowers over the entire grape-growing season, was relatively cheap, and could be killed by frost, which prevented it from becoming a weed.

Buckwheat also attracted a number of other beneficial species including hover flies, lacewings, and ladybirds.

Mr Flowerday said biodiversity and working with the environment naturally was key to maintaining a good vineyard.

Favourite Food Page

Although I have only put 5 entries on my Favourite Food page at the top of this blog so far, they truly do epitomise what excites me, with food. As soon as I step out the back door I am in my vegetable garden. My clothes line has just enough room to swing and is surrounded by vegetable garden on all sides. To get to the chook yard I walk through it. To get to my green house or little tool shed or the back gate requires walking one of the vegetable garden paths. If you are just starting out growing food, I would highly recommend this set-up!

Not having to deliberately go to the vegetable garden means I see it every day. I can pick things at their most perfect or notice if something is getting damaged by snails, is becoming overgrown by something else or is drying out or about to go to seed.

It is often those unplanned pickings, fresh from the garden, that end up being sensational on the plate. There is no need for additional flavourings when food is grown and eaten like this. I find it hard to explain because if you have never done it, you will just think it sounds a ridiculous claim.

To me there is a lot more to food than just a few seconds of taste.

• There is the experience of growing, picking and preparing it, that swills around in my head.
• To me the enjoyment of feeling its goodness equals or even exceeds the taste, while I am getting it ready to eat.
• Then there is the actual effect it has on my body and mind, sometimes lasting for hours….. all a bit hippy-sounding? I just love tuning my food and body. After all, this is what all other creatures and most other humans instinctively do but we western humans have to learn by listening to our inner workings and trying to understand what they are saying!

Bon appetit!

Liquid feeds from your garden

I find that a regular dose of weak liquid feed helps tiny seedlings grow into strong plants.  I also use liquid feed for my citrus in large pots, for ailing plants, occasionally for fruiting plants like tomatoes and in my hothouse. But which one to choose!

Worm juice

Simply made by watering the worm farm, collecting the liquid, diluting it to a very weak tea look and watering the foliage and soil of young seedlings. My worm juice making device is a terracotta water filter from the tip shop. It lives on an upturned oil tin, in my hothouse. The worms are fed in the top section, with weeds and trimmings from the hothouse. I water it from time to time and this collects in the bottom. I then use the tap to drain some into a small watering can, and water my seedlings in the hot house. No fuss. No carrying of heavy buckets. The job takes 2 minutes.

Bad weeds

Onion grass, weeds carrying seeds, couch / twitch – pack densely into a barrel. Fill with water. You can also hang a kg or so of old manure in it (in old pantry hose or hessian) and add some wood ash and comfrey leaves if you want to. Cover well. Wait 2 weeks or more. Sure, it will smell when you take the lid off. Just before rain is forecast (so it washes the smell away) dip into it and dilute 1:10 in a watering can. Use this on established plants, shrubs and trees. Great for citrus, but don’t be tempted to make it stronger. Rather, use a weaker solution, more often.

Seaweed

Put some kelp or other seaweed in a bucket, fill with water and cover with a lid or something. I use a hessian bag. Keep it in the garden, near your vegetables. Dilute 1:10 and water transplanted seedlings, young fruit trees and anything in pots.

Stinging Nettles

A tonic for any plants looking a bit unwell. The silicon in nettles strengthens the cell walls and helps return vitality (also wonderful for people!) The amount you put in a bucket is determined by how much you have. The more concentrated you make it, the more you dilute it. I stick to about 1:10 for all these liquid feeds. Don’t be tempted into thinking more is better!

Comfrey

An undervalued resource in gardens. Make as for stinging nettle tea and use weekly on all your summer fruiting vegetables, such as tomatoes, cucumbers etc.

When I don’t have anything much at hand, I use Seasol or Marrawah Gold in place of the seaweed and Charlie Carp in place of the weed and manure brew. Charlie Carp makes use of the feral carp from the Murray River and this is a practice I applaud.

Sally’s Chinese Noodle Soup for breakfast, lunch or dinner

Sally and I run separate cooking classes. Sally is Chinese and her classes are fabulous and very popular. I mostly do sourdough bread workshops but a few other things too. We each send out emails advertising our next classes. I forward her emails to people on my list and Sally forwards my emails to her list…… it is all very complicated and sometimes people end up getting the emails several times. So today I went to Sally’s beautiful new house and we combined our lists.

Then Sally made us a quick lunch. It was so delicious and simple. Here’s what she did:

Into a wok put about 6 Sichuan pepper flowers and turn up the heat. Then add a dash of rice bran / peanut oil. Leave until it is really hot and the peppercorns turn black.

Turn off the heat and let it cool while you chop a spring onion and slice a piece of ginger and add then to the pan gently so it does not splatter and burn you. Leave for a couple of minutes.

Turn the heat back on and add some bottled tomatoes, about 1 – 2 cups  water, a few fermented black beans and a dash of soy sauce.

When this is coming to the boil, add a good handful of thin, dry noodles and cook as per the packet.

Meanwhile chop some greens from the garden and add them to the wok just before serving, along with 2 raw eggs (which cook gently in the hot soup). Drizzle over some sesame oil.

Top with some edible flowers, such as these bok choy. The whole thing took about 10 minutes. Sally and her husband often have this for breakfast in winter. Serves 2.

Sally made fresh soy milk too, which she usually drinks hot, during the afternoon, with a teaspoon of honey. She has made it in a Thermomix but says it works better in her Chinese soy milk machine which looks just like this one. This took about the same amount of time as the soup, after she had soaked the soy beans overnight. The soy milk tasted so different and fresh compared to the commercial stuff from the shops.

The lunch and the soy milk were a real treat. Sitting there talking to Sally was a very relaxing and lovely way to spend the morning and, as it turned out, some of the afternoon as well !! I will definitely make the soup often and I have asked Sally if I can provide her with all the organic, Australian soy beans she ever needs, if she will make me a litre of soy milk once a week. Nice.

ps Sally uses the pulp left over from making the soy milk, in her spring onion pancakes, with some polenta and egg.

Wonderful Winter Edibles from My Garden

It has been freezing outside today and I have spent most of it inside, cooking. About an hour ago, between showers, I took my basket out to pick a salad…. then I took some photos of what I had picked because it just oozes with vitality; so vivid are the colours, so shiny are the leaves, so crisp and so juicy that I just had to share it, even if only on a blog! (Actually most of it is for the local family I cook for on Tuesdays, but a little bit of everything is for me.)

I could go on about bad food choices, bad agriculture, bad governments, bad, bad, bad…. but I am too happy, looking forward to dinner, to think negative things. Nearly everything I picked today was self-sown, requiring no work from me. If only I could help people get to this point; if only they’d want to come to my “Cook with me from my garden” workshops where I could show them how easy, healthy, worthwhile and delicious it is to live this way. 

Sandra’s vegan rice balls..my way!	Miners’ lettuce, radicchio, hakurei (Jap turnips), spring onion, mizuna
Today’s garden greens and eggs	Such shiny parsley….
Juicy, crisp, delicious fennel….	Winter chicory….
…and scuplit, Asian greens, etc, all bouncing with vitality.	Baked pasta, layered with garden veg, topped with home made yoghurt, today’s eggs plus cheese.
Tasmanian quinoa with snow peas, carrots, lime juice and herbs etc	My famous sourdough bread …. that everyone comes to learn to make, in my workshops!

Bon appetit!

ps. You should watch this 6 minute video, to see why I am sooooooo passionate about what I do. And no, I am NOT vegetarian but I only eat meat from animals that once lived in a paddock near me, on land I can see and cared for by people I know.

Is this what “inner transition” means?

What kind of brain do you need to make these? And how about the bird; she is definitely thinking outside the square! Thanks, Sally, for the email full of these ideas and more.

   

 

 

Today I listened to a wonderful podcast about curiosity; who has it and why, what it does to our lives, our brains and our children. You can listen to it here.

Kitchen Garden Planner from KGI

Kitchen Gardeners International is associated with this fabulous, online garden planner. At only $25 / year its an amazing bargain. There are new features added all the time so you keep getting more and more for your money. Once you get familiar with it you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it!! This is the latest video.

My garden is so irregularly shaped but even so it is possible to draw it all up and use the planner. Once the days shorten and wet weather comes I will set to and get into this planner so that I can produce the maximum my garden will allow and never be fumbling my way through the seasons again. Stay tuned!!

Chard, for free. Forever.

While everyone else is talking about how tall their tomato plants are, I am more excited about the height of the ruby chard, which has run to seed and will provide me with thousands of seeds for sowing later.

It never ceases to amaze me how beautiful and creative are the different stages of plant growth. From a tiny, knobbly, chard seed sprouts a vivid red stem and lime green first leaves. Next come oval shaped, darker green leaves which are still without their final display of texture and a brilliant red main vein.

The whole plant then shoots skyward. The red stem becomes a solid trunk, the leaves shrink and give their energy to insignificant flowers. Before you know it, there are thousands of green seed heads becoming heavy as they mature, causing the plant to topple. I tie one or 2 to a stake and remove the rest….. but it breaks my heart to pull them out before the end of their life as they have given so much.

This is the job I did yesterday, finding that, once staked, they reached far above my head. I stood and looked at them. Awesome. As I lifted them to the stake I saw new life emerging below. Seeds from last season’s chard is germinating everywhere. Seeing new life made me feel ok about pulling out the old life (or cutting them off at ground level so as not to disturb the babies).

 

Once you have your favourite chard growing, you never have to buy or sow the seeds again. Food, for free, forever, with no work….. that’s my kind of food and my kind of garden.

Summer pruning, early and late

I have just pruned some of my plum tree that was sending wild new growth to the sky. I kept all the fruiting branches and they will be pruned later, when the fruit is finished. This video from Diggers is the best I have ever seen about pruning. Watch to the end, where he talks briefly about early summer vs late summer pruning.

Early spring herbs and Mark Twain

Chervil, tarragon, parsley, coriander, garlic shoots…. of course there are others but these are my favourites. Tarragon is the new comer in early spring; the others are plentiful all winter but now are growing faster than ever and about to go to seed.

I use herbs in everything. They can change the same vegetables (and meat), into quite different meals. A dish made with seasonal vegetables, kaffir lime leaves, coriander, coconut milk and rice is entirely different to one made with the same vegetables plus parsley, garlic, lemon and pasta.

This is my forte, I think; making use of everything in the garden to produce delicious and varied meals, even when the vegetables stay the same for a few weeks. This is especially so with salads.

What is a salad? To me it is a combination of vegetables and herbs and spices, eaten cold but not necessarily raw. It is not puréed and turned into a dip, neither is it a combination of hot vegetables, nor is it a meat dish, although it may have a few bits of bacon as in a Caesar Salad. Menus these days are too loose with their salad titles, I think. To me, if it has meat, it is a such-and-such salad with meat and not a meat salad! I think restaurants do this in order to avoid having to serve fresh, crisp salads, preferring to pre-assemble some meat and horrid cheesy sauce then toss in some tasteless, hydroponic lettuce at the last minute and call it a salad. Well, they don’t fool me! I judge food establishments on their salads and the best one I know of in this part of the world is my place (oh, and Sandra’s!!).

The sprouting garlic bulbs on my windowsill provide an endless supply of very garlicky shoots, for adding to salads, sprinkling on a bowl of soup or over hot roast vegetables. I find them so irresistible that I will snip one off and eat it, any time of the day, even 6am while I am waiting for my coffee to heat. Crazy? Of course. But, as Mark Twain said “If you find yourself on the side of the majority, its time to pause and reflect”.

 

My sea of parsley is going to seed …..I can’t bare to let it happen without some serious eating….so, what uses heaps of parsley? Walnut and parsley pesto, tabouli, my spinach and fetta pie.

Same deal with the chervil that has been wonderful in salads and light dishes all winter. The French use it a lot. So, I typed recettes cerfeuil (French for chervil recipes) into the search engine, and now have a cornucopia of ideas for using more chervil than ever! Mr. Google will translate them for you but I try to practise my French! I love the sound of this one which means Split pea soup with chervil pesto and truffle oil…. oh lalalala. When I typed in “chervil recipes” I did not get anything so varied as these dishes. So, if you want something French or Spanish or whatever, ask Mr. Google to translate the ingredient from English to that language, then go and find the recipes and ask Mr. Google to translate them back into English for you. I hear that Mrs. Google also likes to bookmark these pages for herself :-)

So, pick your herbs and start cooking!

Bon appetit!

Endive, the French way….and Monty Don on chicory, the Italian way

When I was in France, I ate a lot of endive; those pale, tightly packed, candle flame shaped bundles of leaves available at every market.  They were at their best when baked in the oven, next to the root vegetables. Amazingly, they stayed juicy and whole.

So, I read about how to grow them….. and did it. I sowed seeds of Belgian Endive last spring, let the plants grow all summer, then, in early winter I cut the tops off about an inch from the base, dug them up and put them side by side in a large pot, with barely damp soil. The soil was just to stop them falling over, but the methods I read about suggested sand. I think straw would also be fine, perhaps, although you don’t want them to dry out completely. They must be covered to make it dark, the story goes.

Dug up, with the outside leaves removed	Tops trimmed
Trans-planted to a large pot with a lid to keep out the light	Now here they are, ready to cook, about a month or so later.

Mine did what they were meant to, although they did not grow as big as those I bought (but never grew) in France (I understand they are grown hydroponically there these days.) Successful and delicious, never the less. However, since then, I have had a chance encounter with some more information, which sheds light on the life of chicory, in general.

Monty Don’s book about his own garden, Longmeadow, is such a delight to read that I find myself opening it up and reading a page at every opportunity. I came across this, the first sentence under “Chicory”…… I like the way that chicory has two distinct phases of growth….Ohhhh, why do other books not point this out??

Part one of their cycle is to establish a deep tap root and they will sprout lots of green leaves towards that end. But these leaves are impossibly bitter and tough. Not appetising. However, that is not their role. They serve to feed the taproot and supply the gardener with composting material during autumn …..what is then left, in late autumn is stage two, the harvestable plant, which responds to temperature and light levels to change leaf shape and sometimes colour.

 

 

 

Then he goes on to say that the British traditionally just grew witlof chicory (and the French, endive), which requires blanching in the dark (as I have just done). But radicchio (Italian for chicory) in all its assorted glory is adored by the Italians who grow it with great care and expertise. He goes on to mention “Rossa di Verona” (slightly speckled and cabbage shaped) and “Rossa di Treviso” (cos lettuce shaped, with curling leaves that have clear white ribs and perfectly good raw, or cooked). These two just happen to be some that I am growing for the first time, (see photos above) never ceasing to be amazed at the transformation from bitter and green, to brilliant red, totally different in shape and beautiful to eat! Now I  understand why!!

Wait, there’s more…..The winter leaves can be cut flush with the soil and will regrow to provide 3 or 4 crops before spring. So, it being late winter here now, I had better do this today, or they will go to seed before I get a second harvest. In fact, I am going to cut some now and take some photos….. breakfast will have to wait!

And while I was there I took some more photos of my garden….

A runaway chard, all alone…