AUTUMN NOTES FROM OUR COMMUNITY GARDEN
By Kit Shepherd
Autumn has stepped into our community garden at the back of 241 Bondi Rd. The chokos (common in the ‘50s and 60s but not so much now) are in full growth and production. Tender raw and cooked and a good addition to kim-chee fermentation, as well as any dish and style of cooking. I read that the large vine needs to be cut back to 30cm at the end of fruiting (beginning of winter) and will come back next season.
We seem to specialise in the less common edible plants: We’re waiting for the Jerusalem artichoke tall mini-forest to die off too, so that we can harvest the tasty ant-flavoured roots, so good for giving winter soups an earthy undertone.
Turmeric will be ready to dig up soon, for drying and grinding, or making turmeric latte with fresh slices. Let us know if you’d like some as we have some to spare. Shiso is about to go to seed – a favourite herb in Asian cuisines, and snake beans are dangling off the vine in a humorous way, with the little helicopter
flowers at the top J.
Our chia bush is in full flower – beautiful blue – and will yield a crop of seeds soon. The garlic chives just keep going, a lovely addition to salads. Lantern fruit – low sparse bush of canes, that gives lanterns with a delicious berry inside. Also called Cape Gooseberry. Dried they are imported and sold as Inca berry. They are not yielding their fruit in our compost rich garden beds, just soaking up the compost-nitrogen and making leaves.
The same happened with our lush zucchini plants…no fruit!! And a Vietnamese vegetable, given to me as a seedling, by Aileen at The Bean Tree café on Bondi Rd, is thriving. She is a brilliant cook and a gardener, interested in medicinal plants. They are also giving us their café kitchen scraps and some coffee grounds for the new community composting system at the Art School. Please bring your own scraps there too, if you live nearby (opposite the lower end of Waverley Park).
Closer to our main garden (at the back of 241 Bondi Rd) we have three eateries supplying their scraps for our community composting system there: South Bondi café, Critical Slide Coffee, both on the corner of Boonara Ave, and Mami’s the very popular Mexican café, in the same precinct. All with the aim of keeping food waste our of landfill.
Ending here with a fun hack … a young friend told us about how they plant carrots in their school garden – in the row, place a strip of toilet paper to make visible the little seeds as you sprinkle them along.