The Aussie Backyard Gardener

 

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Kitchen Gardens I Remember by Maggie

Every time I take my parents (who are now 88) out or go to visit them, I ask about their lives and in particular what they ate when they were young.
Most of the food they ate came from their own gardens.
Apples, quinces, grapes, pears, stone fruits, silver beet, carrots, potatoes, berries.
Mushrooms were gathered from paddocks.
(I remember going mushroom and blackberry picking when I was a child.
They were the best mushrooms and berries ever!)
A chicken was killed and eaten for Christmas lunch and eggs were gathered from happy chooks, fed heaps of greens as they wandered around gardens watered with rain water tanks and played with carefree children.
(I remember climbing an old oak tree and playing teasets with the tops of the acorns.
We spent hours building cubby houses near the bamboo as adults weeded and pruned and had cups of tea and chatted with neighbours.)
They ate milk, meat or rabbits and bread all delivered daily by men with horse drawn carts.
The ice man would deliver ice to be placed in the ice chest to keep milk cool.
They must have bought tea, sugar and flour from grocery stores but they did not buy much else.
My Dad always complains that the food today has no taste. He is of course right, apples are sprayed with chemicals and then waxed. It is no wonder that people don't eat much fruit and vegetables from supermarkets, it don't taste good!
I don't have a photo of any of the gardens I remember, but I have vivid memories of the taste of raw milk and cream and all the wonderful flavours of fresh peaches in summer and roast pumpkin in winter!

The fruit above has now been eaten, some was bought at the Rare Fruit Society meeting in May.
The meetings are held every second month, so July grafting of fruit trees awaits us.
Check the web site for details as there will be other grafting workshops in July.
Members bring unusual fruits they have grown, to taste at supper time, it is like opening a mysterious jewelry box, amazing colours, exotic smells and delicious flavours.

MANGOES AND MORE

Just as my mother had told me on the phone - the mangoes are magnificent. So are the peaches, pears, plums and apples. She bought many, many lengths of stupid dripper line to water her fruit trees when a small sprinkler used to do a much better job with an infrequent, deep watering. If you had mango trees like these wouldn't you water them? Mangoes you buy in Adelaide come from the Northern Territory and are sprayed for fruit fly and, no doubt gassed to ripen. We pick these fully ripe and my mother sits out on the lawn and devours the whole thing in one big messy frenzy !








As I touched this peach to photograph it, it fell off into my hand. My peaches are only half this size. The land where she lives should never have been sub-divided for housing. Imagine how good those old market gardens were that surrounded us when I was growing up.











Last year the nashis were fabulous - after many years of not producing anything. This year there was only 1 nashi but, as usual, the others pear trees are laden.











This sunflower soars way above the others and is at least 8 feet high. Always plants have very strong stems in her garden. Bulbs that flop over in mine stand strong and firm in her's.





One day we will have a members visit there. I asked her and she relunctantly agreed - she doesn't think her garden worthy of visitors.

The Rare Fruit Society is having a feijoa and guava competition, in a couple of months, to find the best tasting, water efficient and productive trees in Adelaide so they can take cuttings and propogate them. My mother's feijoa has never been watered and produces the biggest, most luscious fruit by the million. I am going to enter it in the competition this year and then everyone can share its success.

Mr McGregor's garden

"Visit Mr. McGregor's garden at Carrick Hill to view the work in progress and admire the scarecrows... you might just spy Peter Rabbit"

This is taken from the Tasting Australia website for an event called EAT UP YOUR GREENS. Primary school kids have created a veggie patch which is open to the public. It is on this Saturday from 10 to 4:30 and costs a gold coin donation.

Since my baby Peter has the middle name Robert, he is often (affectionately) called Peter Rabbit. We're going to take him there to see if he can have his photo taken with his "nicknamesake" and see what the kids have done.

Here's the website
Eat Up Your Greens

COWS, FOOD AND NEWS

I was talking to my mum this afternoon and asked her about the kitchen garden her father had when she was a child. She said she didn't take any interest in it at the time because, during The Depression everyone did what they could and it was not something to get excited about. After The Depression was over and food became available again, her father stopped growing vegetables. His vegetables were wonderful and they always had plenty, she said. He also used to take her rabbit shooting and she had to gut them - no wonder she doesn't ever want to see another dead rabbit !

However, she knew more about what her mother was doing during those times and this involved the care of their Jersey cow, Daisy, and the production of the milk, cream and butter. They lived at Plympton, just off Anzac Highway and had a cow. In the mornings a lad would come and milk all the cows in the area, after washing his hands well as there was no refrigeration or pasteurization. Then he would take the cows off down the street and they would graze on the various paddocks about the place and the lad would bring them back in time to milk them in the evening.

The fresh milk was put through a separator and from this they would get milk and thin cream. The milk was then left overnight - whatever wasn't used during the day - and the thick cream would rise to the surface. This was skimmed off and used to produce butter - often a lot of churning seemed to be needed to make the butter, especially during hot weather, my mother seems to recall. Once a good flopping sound could be heard that meant the butter had formed a lump and the buttermilk was washed off to leave a beautiful, dark yellow pat. Salt was mixed in and this was then formed into shapes with wooden boards and a special impression made, just like you see in the movies. All the equipment was boiled in the copper after use.

Any extras were given away to the neighbours but wasn't allowed to be sold. There was a lot of sharing of produce as they didn't have a fridge. Everything stayed pretty cool in the cool-safe but things like bread were fed to the animals if not eaten the day they were made. No-one would eat day-old bread , she said.

They didn't ever have a lot of money but never seemed to feel poor - just like so many others I read about during those times. She pointed out that they had many dreadful droughts too, in the days before the Murray pipeline but, interestingly, they never had water restrictions because there was no TV and, during the depression people didn't have enough money to buy a newspaper or a radio. All the 'news' came via the pub where her father would hear that so-and-so said he had heard that such-and-such had happened. It would have been impossible to have everyone knowing what was going on ! Sounds great to me !

Sorry I don't have any photos and it doesn't seem right to get something off Google Images, somehow !

When I was a child this was what my families kitchen garden was like !

With International Kitchen Garden Day approaching I thought it would be a good chance to write about the kitchen gardens we remember from our childhood.
Or it could be a recent experience of a garden we have created or visited.
Has their been a garden which inspired or delighted you?.
It will be interesting to read everyone's story.

Are some of us actually eating healthier foods than our parents?.
What did our grandparents eat?.

I have some Indian friends I shall try to get a story from them about Southern Indian Kitchen gardens.
Try to get your friends to write their stories.
There are probably even some old photos that could be scanned in.

I have a great aunt who is 102 years of age, still lives on her own, cooks her own meals and lives in a quiet NSW town, I shall write her story.

So the challenge is on lets see how many stories we can get.
They can be anonymous entries, or you can choose a blog name, it does not matter, it is the stories that will be interesting.
Please enter as many stories as you can.

We may even have prizes for the most interesting and most unusual stories.
Good writing deserves good eating ,you never know you could win a Doof Doof cabbage!