No Dig Gardening

No dig gardening sounds like a bit of a misnomer when you apply it to pots, since they don’t usually require digging anyway. This method isn’t simply way to avoid digging though. It’s a way to create soil. It involves layering nitrogen rich and carbon rich organic materials alternately to make compost.

In my pots I used pea straw as my carbon rich material, alternating with nitrogen rich mushroom compost. Manure is another good nitrogen layer. I supplemented this with a handful of blood and bone and some seaweed (which was a gift from a friend with a lakefront house). To start the process the materials are layered alternately into the pot, with the carbon rich mulch layers about 5 cm thick and the nitrogen rich layers just thick enough to cover the straw.

In time the layers of mulch and manure will compost into a very rich soil. The only problem with the composting is that the volume in the pots will sink considerably over time, so top them up with new layers as they sink.

Spring is a very exciting time in the garden, as you harvest the last of your winter crops and plan your new plantings for summer. This spring I’ve had some great results from my no dig pots, with my pea plants climbing right along the balcony. Pea flowers have such a fragile beauty, and the sweet crunch of sugar snap peas has been a delight. I’ve eaten a lot of them straight off the vine!

While you’re enjoying your spring harvest, it’s time to plan what you want to be harvesting around Christmas time. In Sydney it is warm enough to start planning (and planting) your summer garden. Currently in my germination box are Tiny Tim Tomatoes, Jimmy Nardello Capsicum, Lemon Cucumber and Purple King Beans. When I’m growing seedlings I often swap with Alloronan so we can try more varieties. She recently gave me a baby rhubarb in a pot big enough for it to grow to full size. I hope it will be an edible present soon.

I hope you’re enjoying spring. Remember to admire the flowers in your garden, and your neighbours’ gardens, and enjoy the last of your winter veggies. It’s also time to plan for summer, so have fun with your seed catalogues and let me know what you’re up to.

Resources
Fact sheet on No Dig Gardening from the Watershed
More elaborate version from Gardening Australia.

Feeding Your Soul with a Balcony Garden

Children in primary school always ask each other about their pets. I remember telling a few people who asked me that I had pet bees. At the time I mustn’t have realised that there’s a difference between keeping pets and animal husbandry. Beehives are for honey, and you don’t get any affection from the bees (actually you occasionally get stung by them). They don’t really count as pets, which explains the puzzled expressions I got when I described them that way. Later on in my childhood I did have some proper pets. The guinea pigs were so boring they were given back to their previous owner, but our tame cockatiel was a delightful little fellow. He liked to share salty biscuits with you, and have his neck scratched.

The animals I keep now are back in the category of useful animals, although I like to think of them as pets. You’ve already heard about my worm farm, and I must admit that worms are not really pets. They’re efficient, but they aren’t affectionate. On the up side, they provide me with a great way of getting rid of all my veggie scraps, and they’re producing a wonderful liquid fertiliser for my balcony garden. They help put my food waste back into my food production cycle. My other pets are more tenuously connected to this food chain. They’re a pair of goldfish.

Now what have goldfish got to do with growing vegetables? I hear you ask. They’re actually another source of liquid fertiliser. Fish produce nitrogen which they release into the water, and the algae in their little pond is another source of nutrients. If I scoop pond water onto my plants, this is richer food for them than tap water. The fish are serving another purpose too. They eat mosquito larvae. I have to admit that I didn’t buy the fish solely as a clever way to produce fertiliser. The main reason I have the fish pond is so that I can grow a water lily.

Even in the tight confines of my balcony I can’t bring myself to grow only edible plants. I need to feed my soul as well as my body, and that’s why a few flowers sneak into my pots. The flowers are rationed though. At the moment I have the water lily and I’m about to plant some bluebells that Alloronan gave to me. Like the bluebells, lots of the plants I grow have come from friends. You get the same warm feeling when you share your garden as you do when you bake a cake for a friend. You don’t have to stop at sharing produce either, you can share the plants themselves.

Lots of herbs will grow from cutting. Oregano is a wonderfully tough one. My cousin ripped some oregano up from between his pavers for me, and it’s now potted on my balcony. It’s great in pasta sauces, when you want something stronger than basil. Mint is another tough herb. My mint is a cutting from Alloronan, and it makes good tea and adds freshness to salads. It is sharing a pot with the flat leafed parsley I sprouted from her seeds and some baby onions (offspring of her grown up onions).

Herbs are great for balconies, because you can pick and eat them whenever you like. There’s no waiting for the harvest. This actually goes for the onion family too, because you can use the leaves just like shallots or garlic chives. A friendly vegetable stall holder at Eveleigh told me last week to do that with her last-of-the-season garlic. I’m looking forward to the garlic tops when I run out of cloves, since I don’t want to buy bleached imported garlic if I can avoid it.

I try to grow vegetables as well as herbs, even in the small space. I’ll save what I’m planting now for another post, but in the meantime I’m just starting to eat my cos lettuce and silverbeet. Home grown veggies definitely taste better, although maybe they’re just flavoured with pride.

Food Gardening

I think it’s time for another food gardening plug! This time I’m simply going to show you some of the produce I’ve grown over the last couple of months, and talk about the experience of growing them:)

Firstly I guess I’ll start with the things I’ve intentionally grown, as opposed to those that just happened, which I’ll discuss later. There is my staple herb garden, which is my pride and joy, since I masterminded its construction and planting from the very beginning, and it’s an enormous source of satisfaction (and deliciousness) for me. This contains parsley, basil (perennial and annual), garlic chives, rosemary, a kaffir lime, a bay tree, lemon grass, lemon balm, thyme, mint and marjoram. Sounds like a honking lot, doesn’t it? But really, it doesn’t take up a lot of space and more critically, it doesn’t take much care. I’m a great believer in a garden that can take care of itself. Originally, when the concrete was taken off the top (I carved a chunk out of what used to be shared driveway) I put in a bunch of compost, but since then all it’s had is the occasional mulching. We’re talking very occasional too, more than six months apart. It very rarely gets watered either. Yet, I have more mint than I know what to do with, parsely coming out my ears, a mat of thyme big enough to sleep on… you get the idea. Throw in some herbs people! Things like thyme, majoram and mint can be grown in the cracks in pavement and will help to keep down weeds, as well as smelling delicious when you step on them Also, practically all herbs can be grown from cutting (particularly mint) and most of them are very forgiving when you do so that with a high success rate you’ll have plenty of herbs fairly fast.

A bit of fun I had this year was in planting a strawberry pot. If there’s one thing I’ve found out about strawberries, it’s that they are very heavy feeders. If you don’t feed them, they just don’t fruit. This being said, you can get a bit creative with feeding them I use slow release food pellet thingies, which you can get for about $3 for a big container, and the occasional spare bit of  seasol when I’ve mixed up a watering can full for something else. The other thing I’ve discovered is that strawberries really like a banana peel. So, wander around admiring your garden eating a banana, and then stop by the strawberry pot and leave the peel there. I had a reasonable amount of fruit from it too (it’s still going!), the only problem being that they tend to ripen one, maybe two at a time, so they’re more of a treat than anything else. I also had a lot of lettuce and spinach growing, all of which went very well. I have grown the lettuce several times from their own seed, and there is no noticable change in the plants, so they’re obviously a good stock. Not only that, but the seeds I hadn’t collected are self seeding, so there’s random lettuces sprouting here and there, which is handy!

My capsicums also went very well indeed, going absolutely nuts and pumping out the fruit. The fruit were quite small, much smaller than you’d get in the shops, but with a much stronger, sweeter flavour and with so many growing at once you just picked four or five of them. They were much easier going than the strawberries, requiring only the occasional watering on very hot days when they tended to wilt. I strongly recommend them as easy growers. Not only that, but from the seeds from the ones that I didn’t pick are already sprouting new plants! This is ideally what you want from a cooking garden- self seeding plants so that you don’t have to spend any money on seedlings.

Then there are the carrots, which I harvest as I need them. I grew them from bought seed, since none of mine have gone to seed yet. They aren’t anything like your shop bought carrots, I haven’t had many that have only one tap root and they’re much more carroty flavoured. It seems like everything I’ve grown for myself has a much tastier flavour than bought, which probably has to do with there being about 10 minutes between garden and plate, or garden and mouth depending on the plant and my appetite Anyway, I’ve had all varieties of shapes, sizes and contortions in my carrots. However, in terms of presentation it actually makes things more aesthetically interesting- it also punctuates the homegrown-ness of your vegetables when you serve them. The beauty of carrots also is that you can plant them all year round if you use a fairly standard variety. For me, this means that as soon as a punnet of carrot seedlings is transplanted out into the garden, it is refilled with dirt and new seeds, so that the carrots are constantly being planted and harvested. A note on carrot growing- if it’s been a very dry period, like we had this summer, give them a good hard water about an hour before you uproot them, or they can be a bit bitter. Otherwise, they’re beautifully low maintainence and take up very little space among your other plants. Not only that, but the feather tops are quite appealing, so there’s no reason not to plant them scattered about a flower bed as an interesting foliage note. Ten points says most people won’t even guess they’re carrots You could even grow them in pots as feature plants, they’d look lovely with their draping tops.

My zucchinis did very well this year too. Zucchinis are the ninjas of the vegetable world. There’s nothing, there’s nothing, and then all of a sudden there’s a zucchini lying there the size of half a tyre. Perfect for stuffed zucchini, or for whizzing up for zucchini slice or zucchini hash browns (which admittedly I haven’t made yet, but I swear it can be done! I’m making it my mission to perfect them).  Again, low maintainence. Stick it in, water it if there’s no rain for ages, and zucchinis will happen.Then, finally there is The Mystery Vegetable which produced three very tasty melons/pumpkins (although I’m not sure if that really counts in the intentional category).

On to the Children of the Compost! I rarely compost once I have established a garden (I probably should) but when it’s still in creation I compost a lot. I’ve been in the process of reclaiming a bit of not-quite-lawn-but-not-garden-bed-either into a flower bed, so I spread it with lots of compost. Then I got busy with other things, and while I was gone there sprouted various vines and a whole lot of tomato plants. The tomatoes were insanely prolific, I’ve never seen anything like it. Every day you could go out and pick several handfuls of tiny toms without making the slightest dent in them. And oh, the flavour! Absolutely to die for. If there is one plant you ever grow for yourself, make it tomatoes. The flavour is just insanely better than anything you ever buy, and tiny toms seem to fruit heavily, making up for their small size. The melon/pumpkin vines spread out (you need a lot of space to grow them, definitely not balcony material) and eventually started producing fruit (at which point I could identify them). I ended up with a Japanese Pumpkin, which I got 4 largish pumpkins from, who went to various delicious fates. Then there was a rockmelon which gave me one soccer ball sized fruit and one tiny little cute one, a bit larger than a tennis ball. They were particularly tasty, once again having a much stronger, better flavour than bought melons. Finally, there was a butternut pumpkin vine, from which I got one full sized pumpkin and one mini pumpkin, which was possibly the cutest pumpkin I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the good sense to photograph it before it got eaten.

Now don’t get scared off by this! It sounds like I grow a lot of plants, and I do. The one thing I have, which you may not, is a lot of space. Other than that, I spend very little time or money on my garden. Every month or so I transplant the seedlings and replant my seed boxes. Every second evening I water any pot plants, but because that’s a pain I have very few pot plants. The actual garden beds don’t get watered unless they’re brand new seedlings or it hasn’t rained in forever. Maybe every 6 months I get excited and mulch, or maybe even put on a bit of cow manure, but that’s very very rare. The only thing I spend money on is the occasional bale of sugarcane mulch, snail pellets and seeds. The point of this post is actually to show you that vegetable gardening is piss easy, and that you will get results. All you need is a bit of space and sun shine. Even if you don’t have space, a little creativity can make things possible. Things like spinach and carrots are quite attractive, and can be grown in pots as feature plants so that you don’t have to compromise between vegetables and style if you have a balcony. Food gardening makes a huge difference to how you eat, since your scraps go into the compost and eventually come back onto your table, a cycle which changes your relationship to how and what you eat. It’s also a great lifestyle thing- it gets you out of the house and active and you eventually get to eat what you’ve produced, which inevitably tastes wonderful (the sweat of labour is the best sauce). Not only that, but it’s great fun for kids, and it reconnects us with our food. It’s important to remember where the things you eat come from, and the process by which they come to exist.

Pesto Pasta with Smoked Chicken

This dish has been a long time coming, in many ways. It is chiefly made by one of the housemates of the Male of the Species, a delightful fellow called Maximilian (who has such an awesome name that no sobriquet is necessary). All of the housemates swore by it, said it was delicious and easy, and yet somehow I never managed to visit on a night it was being made. Finally I did time my visit right, and got to both taste the dish in question and see it being cooked as well. I instantly decided I needed the recipe, and Maximilian was quite happy to give it to me. Somehow, though, it never materialized. Being a busy person, it doubtless slipped his mind. Eventually, after many threats and apologies, I have received the recipe and made my own attempt. Thanks Max!

I started off by making the pesto. You need about two cups of fresh basil leaves. In my case, I used basil from my garden, since home grown is as fresh as it gets. I’m going to digress here and do a little plugging for perennial basil. I currently have standard basil as well as the perennial growing, and there are distinct advantages to both, but the perennial one eventually wins because, well,  it’s perennial! That means fresh basil all year round.

It also grows like a weed. The Male of the Species has one in his backyard, and it has to be sheared every month or two to stop it taking over the backyard- this means that you can make heaps of pesto in bulk, for sandwiches or pasta. It almost means you HAVE to, or you won’t be able to get out the door, which is good because then you regularly make it.  I once picked a washingbasket full of basil when visiting the Male of the Species, and it made no noticeable dent in the shrub, the thing is just that big. It also seems to flower continuously, which attracts bees to fertilize your other plants and looks rather nice. It grows well from cuttings too, so if you can find someone with a plant just grab a bit and stick it in the ground, and away you go!

There are some disadvantages, of course. The leaves are usually smaller than normal basil, and they’re sort of furry rather than that shiny glossy green so they don’t look as good for garnishing. They also wilt much faster, so if you take some away with you for a weekend it’s going to look a lot shabbier a lot faster than the standard stuff. The taste is also not exactly the same, although it’s pretty darn close, but in the end having heaps of fresh basil all year round more than makes up for any deficiencies. Or you can just grow both, like I do You may note in the final photo I used standard basil for the garnish because it does look better.

But back to the pesto! Use a food processor, not a blender- blenders are the spawn of the devil when it comes to making pesto, they just don’t work. Hurl in your two cups of leaves, a palmful of pine nuts, four or five cloves of garlic, and a hefty slosh of olive oil (we’re talking pretty hefty here). You should also throw in about 60 grams of parmesan, but unfortunately my mother went to visit my grandmother and took my packet of parmesan with her (the thief!) and since I was making this at ten at night I wasn’t going down to the shops to get more, so this particular mix goes without. This was unfortunate, because I do think it impacted on the taste in the end- I don’t think it was as good. You would normally serve it with parmesan and pepper on top, so that probably didn’t help either.

Anyway, this is a pretty standard pesto recipe- if you want you can make heaps more of it and freeze it, since it freezes (or rather unfreezes) well. I imagine you could also use bought pesto which would make things a whole lot faster, but the dish would probably be nowhere near as nice.  Whizz it all up (add more olive oil if you need to) until it is, and I quote, “a dazzaling bright green”. Maximilian typed this on his phone Once that’s done you can put your pesto aside and we move on.

Let me freely admit right here that I am not one of nature’s carvers. When Maximilian makes this he gets nice little cubed chunks of chicken. When I make this I get contorted, twisted gobbets of flesh. That being said, it doesn’t affect the taste. Using smoked chicken is not like normal chicken. For starters, it’s cooked so it isn’t slimy and it’s a lot firmer to cut. Also, it smells damned delicious. The recipe he gave me says to use four large breasts, but I was told that he actually uses a whole smoked chicken, since it’s considerably cheaper to buy that way (about $28 a kilo for breast as opposed to about $11 a kilo for the whole thing). This means you can gnaw on a wing while you carve up the rest of the beast. Believe me, you will want to, it smells awesome and as we all know, feeding the cook during the process of cooking is critical to prevent collapse from starvation.

You can keep the skin on, I did and it’s very tasty, or you can remove it if you’re feeling health concious. Cube your chicken and chop up a large onion. Then throw the onion into a pan, and soften with a little olive oil until it’s a little browned. Make sure you use a hella big pan, because everything is going to end up in here. Maximilian uses an unaturally large saucepan (awesomest piece of kitchen gear ever). I used a wok. Once it’s looking good and browned, throw in your chicken and turn up the heat so it browns a little as well.

The next step, I was very suspicious of. It sounded a lot to me like a wanker step (an unecessary but makes you feel more like a chef step that may make a tiny difference in flavour but not really) but I did it anyway, since I was making it for the first time. Next time I won’t, and see if it makes any difference. The (potentially wanker) step is to remove the chicken and onion from the pan, pour in a cup of white wine and scrape all the browned goo off the bottom into it. Then you can put the onion and chicken back in. Why you can’t do this with the stuff in the pan and reduce washing up I don’t know. We’ll see. Let it reduce for five minutes, and don’t inhale the fumes from the pan, since it’s mostly ethanol. I did that, and since I hadn’t had any dinner yet I got a bit woozy. But I imagine you all know not to do that Go have a glass of wine while it’s reducing, since you have the rest of the bottle spare.

After it’s reduced, you can put in your pesto. If you’re not making the pesto fresh (either using bought or defrosted) then I would pitch a guess at it being about 4 tablespoons of it. While you’re at it, add 500 ml of liquid chicken stock. Guess what! You get to reduce again! Fifteen minutes this time- it’s probably a good time to throw your pasta on. Penne seems to be the go, but there’s no reason you couldn’t use other types of short pasta like spirali. Not spaghetti though- I think that could get awkward trying to get at the chicken chunks. Now go have another glass of wine and the other chicken wing while it’s reducing.

Then finally you add about 50 ml of non-thickened cream. Stir that through, and you’re done! Now you just have to drain your pasta and stir it in. Serve it with some parmesan (fresh is best if you can get it) and some pepper. It’s surprisingly quick and easy to make, and is exceptionally delicious. Also, I think it reheats better than things with ordinary chicken in. Ordinary chicken tastes a bit funky once it’s been microwaved, but because this stuff has been smoked, it doesn’t have that problem which is brilliant. This does end up being rather huge, it’ll feed you a good 6 people or more (depends on how much pasta you put in) and because it’s reasonably easy it’s a good entertainer.

Thanks again Maximilian, it was well and truly worth the wait!

Edit: Oh, and I forgot to mention, completely gluten free as long as you use GF pasta!

Food waste? Start a worm farm

The three girls who ran the worm farming workshop were my kind of hippy. In their shorts, t-shirts and tevas they picked up worm castings in their bare hands. They even thought the worms were cute. A couple of worms tried to escape onto the carpet and the girls were quick to rescue them. “Worms are naturally adventurous,” one of them explained.

I think worms are cute too, but I’ve realised not everyone feels that way. One friend asked me to photograph the worms for her, but when it came to looking at them she covered her eyes. She said “I know it’s a good idea, but don’t you think it’s gross?” Obviously worms aren’t everyone’s idea of a nice pet. Having discovered this I need to warn you that there are some photos of worms in this post. Remember that they can be loveable.

This post isn’t about eating food, or even preparing it, but it is about food. It’s about wasted food, offcuts and leftovers which are normally consigned to the garbage bin. I want to tell you about how to use this waste to feed your worms and finally your garden. It’s good for the environment and I think it’s a good hobby. If you find worms cute you could even think of them as a new pet. Worms are an ideal way to recycle organic waste in a small space. You don’t need a garden. You can keep them on your balcony. You could even keep them inside because they’re contained in a tub.

I’ve just been to a fabulous free workshop about worm farming at the Watershed in Newtown. I was so inspired that I bought a worm farm and worms then and there (which got me a few funny looks on the train home). In this post I want to tell you how to start a worm farm. Obviously I’m new to worm farming, but I’ve had some good advice from the experts and I’d like to share it with you.

Let’s start with the reasons why having a home compost or worm farm is important. Around 50% of household waste that goes to landfill is made up of organic material. Landfill is a significant contributor to Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. It accounts for around 3% of our emissions which, for comparison, is similar to air travel. The main greenhouse gas emitted by landfill is methane, which is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. The reason landfill emits so much methane is because of the anaerobic breakdown of organic garbage. Waste often travels a long way to get to landfill too. Here in Sydney the available rock solid ground for landfill is limited and some of our waste goes all the way to Goulburn (halfway to Canberra) to be buried. The other icky thing about landfill is that liquids can leech out of it into the surrounding environment. While the liquid produced by rotting organic matter isn’t too offensive it can act as a carrier for fluids that have leeched out of batteries or other kinds of chemical waste.

If we can keep the organic matter out of landfill it’s better for the environment. Worm farming is a great way to recycle your organic waste rather than sending it to landfill. The other big advantage of a worm farm is that the organic waste is recycled into fertiliser for your garden or pot plants. You get liquid waste and solid worm castings. Both of them are great for the garden.

I was surprised to hear how much organic waste a worm farm can turn into fertiliser. Worms are efficient little creatures. They can eat up to their own bodyweight each day, or at least the ones that come with your worm farm can. Amazingly, you can keep 10 000 worms in the worm farm. This means you can get rid of scraps from two people easily. The worm farm could probably service most of the waste produced by a family. The worms in the worm farm are from South America and they like a moist environment. They’re used because they’re faster at breaking down the scraps than the Australian earthworms you find in your garden and compost heap.

The really handy thing about worms is they don’t need much space. The worm farm consists of three plastic boxes. The bottom box catches the liquid fertiliser and has a tap for collecting it. The middle box is the worm bedroom. This is made up of castings (worm poop and broken down organic matter). This is where the worms breed. You can collect the castings from here to spread on your garden. The top box is where you put the food, all your vegetable food scraps – the worm kitchen, I suppose. Worms don’t like light and they need to be kept moist, so you should cover the food with wet hessian or newspaper. Then you put the lid on the top box. The worms eat the organic material in the top box which breaks down and falls into the castings box. This means you never empty the top box, just the middle one and the liquid waste in the bottom one. Both these products are great for the garden.

When you start your worm farm the worms need some bedding. You make it from coir (coconut fibre).

This stuff has an amazing ability to soak up water. After about 15 minutes of soaking my block had turned into mud pies.

First I lined the box with the cardboard from the packaging. That stops the coir falling through.

Then I added the coir and the worms. Finally I covered the top with damp paper. Newspaper, hessian or any other scrap paper is fine. Since I’d recently assembled furniture I used my Ikea instructions.

The bag of worms I got was supposed to contain 1000 worms. I presume no one actually counted them. They’re a mix of red, blue and tiger worms. Some of them are big and pink, like you’d expect an earthworm to be. There are also tiny, pale baby worms. While they’re settling in they seem to be living happily on the coir bedding. I tried giving them a piece of cucumber, but they don’t seem to be interested. Hopefully they’ll start eating properly soon.

I’m looking forward to being able to recycle my food waste into my potted garden. I feel guilty throwing my veggie scraps in the bin, but hopefully the solution is on its way. Grow well little worms!

Worm farming links
Workshops on worm farming (the Watershed)
Easy guide to worm farming (NSW government)
Fact sheet on building a worm farm (Gardening Australia)