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In this ezine:
- Comfort food from your sub-tropical garden
- A new fence - a new opportunity
- Saving seeds
- New gallery on my website
- Fruit tree fertilising
Comfort
food from your sub-tropical garden
Comfort food gives us the snuggled-up
feeling of fresh, rich flavours and smells that evoke a sense of belonging and
happy memories. English chefs and cool
climate gardening shows talk about comfort foods, but there is a discernable
absence of talk about comfort food of
the warm climate here in the subtropics. Let me tell you about some of our
family comforts when it comes to food…
We love salads at our place. A salad is
part of many meals, freshly picked form the garden and laced with olives,
home-marinated feta cheese and some balsamic vinegar sprinkled over the top.
Since primary school days, when my kids return home from travelling with sport
or holidays with others, their comfort food has been ‘a fresh green salad with
olives and tomatoes please mum’. I’d head into the garden and pick a bowl of
fresh lettuce leaves, radicchio, Surinam spinach (pic below) and green elk and often lots
more. Oh and I forgot the sorrel that’s a perennial favourite!
Salads were ‘on tap’ as we always have a
pot, garden bed or even sometimes a hanging basket of salad items. They may not
all be traditional iceberg lettuce, but the flavours are fresh, zingy and
crispy. It’s a good policy to grow as many different leaves for salads as you
can. The permaculture principle of not having all your eggs in one basket
ensures you’ll have a mixed salad no matter what the weather.
As cooler weather approaches our family
comfort food includes eggplant moussaka made with huge purple eggplants from
the garden and sweet potato bakes with melted cheese - once again, a product of
our small suburban garden. The potato bag started last month in the shopping
bag has a few stems of potato growing form the depths. I will start layering in
more compost in the next week.
Growing your own comfort food garden can be
as easy as converting a holey rubbish or a green shopping bag to a portable
garden bed with compost and soil or potting mix. Grow your favourite vegies to
include in your special comfort meal.
A
new fence and a new opportunity
A new timber fence on our back perimeter
has replaced the fallen one and has opened up a world of opportunities for
planting. Our neighbour loves the idea of sharing a passionfruit harvest . I
have planted a hungry Panama Gold with plenty of comfrey leaves for potash and
magnesium and some well-rotted manure and compost into the area. I hope we will
be sharing passionfruit within the year.
Wing beans, germinated in January when the
overnight temperatures are warm, are climbing wildly towards the middle of the
fence. We are hoping for our first crop of wing beans Phosphocarpus tetragonolobus in about 5 weeks.
Mind you, we can also eat the leaves and
roots if the pods are not profuse. They are long day length beans, so growing
them now as the days are getting shorter is a bit tenuous! Next year I will
start earlier and scrape the seed to assist germination.
Not only has the fence provided a new
vertical growing space, we have been able to utilise the old fence palings
around the garden. They were lovely hardwood ones about 30 or 40 years old that
have made planks for planting seeds, a wobbly bridge across the swale and many
other things besides.
Saving
seeds
Saving your own seed to plant next season
would have to be one of the most satisfying and economical things a gardener
can do.
We grow organically at home and can be
confident that our seeds have stood the test of challenging conditions and come
out as the best plants for our garden.
At the Brisbane Botanical Gardens Mt
Coot-tha, we plant heritage varieties during our Naturally Good Vegies
Workshops. We also collect the organically grown seeds from these vegies and
share them among the participants.
At the workshops, sharing seed means that we
share the promise of a future meal, share knowledge to grow and maintain the
plants and we share tips and hints for growing and cooking the lovely harvest.
Gardening becomes more than a growing thing, it becomes a culinary adventure.
Come and join the next workshop on growing
vegetables. Check the brochure for the Naturally Good Winter Vegies course.
Enrol with a friend and go into the draw for a Yates cooking/gardening book.
New
gallery on my website
If you haven’t taken a look at the website
for a while, why not visit and have a look at the new gallery pictures? They
are a selection of images from public gardens I have visited around the world
while researching environmental and horticultural education.
Workshop enquiries: 3349 2962
Would you like you like to book some garden advice?
Sometimes it's just what you need.
Your own garden advisor who can sort out a few tricky issues.
Image: Newspix Chris Mccormack
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