By Sarah Naumoff
I first heard about the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation, when I attended the Australian Landscape Conference in September 2009. Stephanie Alexander was one of the many wonderful experts who spoke at the conference.
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What a great month to get into the vegie patch or potted vegie garden. It is usually warm enough now to plant chillies, zucchini, cucumbers, eggplants and basil, (although so far this month its been freezing). It’s the only time of year you can grow these varieties, so give them priority over the year round stuff, and don’t even consider cauliflower or cabbage, leaving them for the cooler months.
The gleditsia tree is barren – there is not a leaf on it. The pruned roses are looking naked, and the unpruned roses are a dishevelled mess. Deep into winter, the garden is at its most minimalist. It is a distinct season but beneath its bitter cold, there is beauty. The days may be shorter, but we are now past the shortest of them, and gradually they will get longer – and then the earth will wake, the birds will begin to sing and new growth will flood our eyes. This is the time to let your senses explore every corner of your winter garden.
Norfolk Island Pines on a wintery Elwood beach
Winter wonders - a liriope intertwined with fallen leaves of a silver birch
We have just finished building a little herb garden in front of the café. Now the staff can simply walk out and pick some Italian parsley, mint, rosemary and dill. In a few weeks the thyme and oregano will also be big enough to harvest. Of course it is too cold for basil now, but coriander will grow well in the cooler weather and it is less likely to set seed. It is a great feeling to have built something so useful, and the food has never tasted so good.
Continue reading "June in a Melbourne garden - shallots, bare-root trees, camellias..." »
This week we received our first batch of mushroom kits for the year. There is something weird about fungi. I can remember seeing shitake mushrooms growing in Vietnam. They were under a house and growing on hard wooden beams. The kits we have are a lot more practical than that !
Mycelium is the vegetative part of the fungi. It is like frosty white flattened cotton wool. This comes embedded in the organically certified compost which has been through a sterilisation and pastuerisation process. The trick is to suffocate the mycelium by covering it with the bag of coconut fibre peat. This peat has been PH adjusted with ground limestone, so the entire process is 100% natural and organic. So once the suffocant goes on, the mushroom thinks it's going to die and begins to flower, which is the bit we eat. Sometimes the mycelium creeps up the corners of the box, but scratch it with a fork. Swear at it ! We don't want it to be happy so treat it mean to keep it keen with mushrooms. It needs to be threatened to produce mushrooms and thats why we keep it in a dark place and give it nothing but misty water !
Last Sunday on Channel Nine's 60 minutes program, vegetable growing went primetime. Yep, there was the ever energetic Peter Cundall harvesting potatoes in front of disbelieving Liz Hayes eyes (although some of his spuds were gigantic). The reporter then went on to inform us that people are digging up tennis courts and replacing them with vegie patches although I don't believe Leyton Hewitt has done this yet! However give Peter Cundall 5 minutes with him and I am sure he would love to get his hands this dirty.
Continue reading "The 60 Minutes 'Backyard Revolution' Story" »
It wasn't so long ago that large truss tomatoes were $6.99 to $7.99 per kilo. The price hardly ever varied. I noticed that my local fruit shop is now at $5.99 and that an Aldi catalogue this week advertised truss tomatoes for $2.99 per kilo. I started to wonder why. That's when I did a bit of research and found that there were 2 reasons for this. Reason 1 is that Aldi and Coles are bypassing the vegetable markets and the other middlemen and going direct to the growers. Reason 2 is one of supply and demand. It seems that three big companies have built huge greenhouses that are many hectares in size. They include Timbercorp, Costas and Moraitis. All three projects have all started to come on tap at around the same time.
Thats good news for consumers but beware, as over the last few weeks I have tasted some of the various truss tomatoes and would suggest that there is a difference in flavour. Some of this may be attributable to variety grown, but there are other factors at play. You see if a greenhouse is built in the wrong place, or the temperatures in it cannot be stopped from getting too high because the cooling system or shading are not adequate, then these tomatoes will use a lot of water and too much water will mean less flavour. Therefore quality will vary so keep an eye on who's tomatoes you are eating (your green grocer will know) and keep in mind that price can refelect quality. I have always thought Flavourite had a nice flavoured truss tomato but will be analysing all future purchases much more closely.
Continue reading "Why are truss tomatoes so cheap at the moment ?" »
By Dennis Ting - Gardenworld Nursery
The Goji Berry (Lycium barbarium) plant
is a recent addition to the range of plants we have in the garden centre.
It is widely known as being a "Super
Fruit" packed with vitamins, anti-oxidants, amino acids and polysaccarides.
You have to believe its properties given the price currently charged
for Goji juice, dried berries and similar products!!
We have had these plants in the nursery for just over a year now and there is still some amazement expressed by customers when they see the plants and wonder whether it is possible to grow these in Melbourne.
I have been growing these plants here for several years now and harvest my fruit in December each year so let me tell you a bit about them.
The plant itself looks fairly ordinary with thin canes and long dull green leaves. It is actually a member of the Solanaceae family (tomatoes and chillies). The plant has several growth flushes during the season and in between tends to rest with no active growth.
During the week someone sent me a very interesting article from the Australian Financial Review (Jan 23-26,2009). The author Sue Williams was interviewing scientists about what they are finding out about food. One of them was the CSIRO's Ingrid Appelqvist. She was saying that although carrots eaten raw provide fibre, the body does not have the enzymes to break down the carrots cellular structure in order to release the nutrients. "What goes in and comes out is much the same". Instead we should slightly cook them and then puree them to extract the most nutrients.
The same goes with a tomato. Appelqvist says "...there's much more chance of increasing the bio-availability of lycopene from a grilled tomato as from a raw one. If you add a little olive oil, because its fat soluble it even enhances that in a way". This augers well for tomato sauces and soups in being beneficial in the possible prevention of prostate cancer. Cooked peanuts were also rated better than raw - I suppose thats part of why a lot of Asian food is considered quite healthy.
So next time you eat that healthy raw carrot, consider that you are not getting the best from it.
An email from Dennis Ting:
Back in early November (around Cup Day) I got a couple of Tomato Plants – Tommy Toe and Red Fig varieties and a Chilli - Hot Red variety for my daughters to plant in pots. I cannot keep the dry soil in the vegetable patch evenly wet so have had heaps of disease in the plants the last couple of years so decided to use pots. Also probably need crop rotation as a build up of disease no doubt.
I used some 300mm plastic Terracotta coloured pots (like my fruit trees) and have not pruned out any of the side shoots at all. The principle here is that spreading the vigour over many branches results in a shorter plants (as with fruit trees – e.g. Cherries). I used Debco T&T and a Lucerne Mulch layer to protect the soil from the sun. As you can see they are all fruiting and looking healthy.
On the last couple of hot days I just filled the large saucers with water in the morning. The plants show no sign of wilting and have retained all the fruit on them despite being in the full sun on the hot days.
Not a sophisticated system but it works!
