Here’s how we can grow our own food. From the very easy plants which grow in six weeks, to the fruit trees which can take a few years to provide fruit.
• Some rosemary sprigs from Chippendale road gardens in Four Pillars Shiraz Gin add a touch of the local
• This is how I regrow plants by cutting the roots off before cooking them
In the photo above the leek is ready to cook with the roots partly still on the plant. I cut off the roots and cook the leek, and put the roots into a glass in the window sill for 3 to 5 days then I plant the revived roots. Then I harvest the second leek from the roots still-alive from the first leek.
Plants which can be regrown quickly like this include: shallots, chives, lemon grass, and others.
Other plants can be grown this way too: for example, keep your rosemary cutting and put it in a glass then into a pot plant and often the rosemary will grow into another rosemary plant. The same goes for lemon grass with roots still on, garlic from the single garlic pieces. If in doubt just do an internet search using the plant “name” + “how to grow from cutting'“.
Growing in our back garden or the road garden
Since 2008, in about 20 city blocks Chippendale, NSW, we grow about 1,000 fruit trees, herbs, vines, espaliered fruit and such out on the street in the road verge. Some images, tips and stories are on our local facebook page.
Anyone may pick fruit, herbs and other plants from the road verge gardens here and across our cities and towns and if you’re taking exercise there then you’re welcome to harvest.
Community gardens are all over the place in cities and towns. Many leave surplus fruit and veggies out for anyone to take. For example, in North Wahroonga, Sydney, NSW, a grassed verge has been turned into a self-watering garden. There’s one at Erskineville, Sydney, NSW.
And down at Bondi Beach, Sydney, NSW there are espaliered fruit trees in what was once a sad sand and rubbish strip, outside The Shop and Wine Bar and this is one I designed and built.
A list of community gardens in the centre of Sydney is here.
Some food gardens are closed to regular gardening due to the lockdown so check their websites and do, please, use common sense and social distancing, of course.
I picked some chillies from our Chippendale road gardens recently and felt much safer and was far more alone doing so than when at a veggie shop in a shopping mall where I see so many people all sharing air con and close spaces where it’s impossible to avoid others in the aisles.
(Why aren’t aisles one way in fruit and veggie sections of the shopping centres now there’s a virus? With one way we can physically separate which is impossible in two-way aisles. And, as the virus lives up to 3 days on plastic packaging and 2 to 3 days on stainless steel - surfaces which dominate shopping centres - I now wear gloves on the occasions I reluctantly go to these people-filled shops.)
Gardening is great, renewing exercise. Harvesting food from my garden also gives me both exercise and peace. To walk out the back and cut some sage leaves off a potted plant and pop it into some newly roasted potatoes is to grow some simple pleasure inside, too. Anticipation is heightened for the meal ahead .
Books
In my book, Sustainable Food, 2010, New South Books, there are chapters on how to make, grow and harvest and look after our own food gardens; there are options for compost, fruit trees, getting supportive council policies and approvals.
And this book by Jackie French, Backyard self-sufficiency, is a terrific short but fact-filled goldmine of gardening for the town and city householder.
Buying from farmers
When we can’t grow all our own food or get it from a local farmers market we can buy food boxes from various services across Australia.
In Sydney, NSW, one food box services is OOOOBY - or, Out of our own backyard.
Buying food boxes means most of our money goes to the farmer. OOOOBY, for example, says it gives 50% of your money to the farmers it buys from. By comparison when you buy food from Coles, Woolworths and such never more than 10 cents of your money gets to the farmer. The other 90 cents goes in those big shops paying for advertising, rent, transport - most of their food travels over 1200 kilometres. For example in NSW bananas bought at Tweed Heads near the Qld border will typically have been grown in the Tweed, trucked to somewhere near Sydney, then sent back to Woolworths or Coles at Tweed Heads.
When we garden we also grow something in ourselves - peace and calm.
Even when a plant dies it becomes compost to grow soil for the next plants.
Try it. Michael (Oh - and if you do garden, I’d love to hear from you about how it’s going and some photos would be terrific, please. I’d welcome posting your garden stories here.)