I met an inspiring woman... and you can too!

Yesterday, Garden Week opened in Perth. I got to meet a wonderful Australian - Stephanie Alexander:

Stephanie (I like to think we're on a first name basis now) is a keen kitchen gardener herself as well as being the author of a lot of cookbooks. But what I find most inspiring is her not-for-profit organisation that is teaching children the value of growing your own food and how to eat it. The Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Project was launched in 2004 and now involves 296 primary schools across Australia. In Western Australia 24 schools have joined the program and Stephanie said about 70 more in have put their hand up to take part.

 

Stephanie said her favourite place to be was in the garden. She had a bit of a poke about the Garden Week displays in between her engagements and she said what had caught her eye was the CSIRO limes. She was going to try to track some down in her home state of Victoria. I felt pretty chuffed that I have one of those limes. It is covered with fruit this year and I'm pretty excited to experiment with it in the kitchen when they ripen!

At Garden Week, the organisers set up this beautiful vege patch for Stephanie to use (below) and she'll be holding workshops with kids today.

Apart from my photo of Stephanie, I also took home some more native plants for my verge from the Carnaby's cockatoo display. I'm going to add couple of prostrate banksias, pimlea and more grevillia to the verge this afternoon.

I'll be back later with some more photos from garden week!



A place to rest

Remember my asparagus? How I said it was a long-term commitment? And that you had to leave it in the ground for several years before you could start to harvest it? Also, how I dug the poor things up from my previous house and brought them with me to give them a permanent place to rest in my new home. Well... I have a confession to make. I had to dig them up AGAIN. Yes, I've just added another year on to my harvest time frame, right there. The problem was, you may remember, that I only had a matter of hours to dig them up and plant them at my new house and that was well before I had designed the layout of my food garden. It turned out they couldn't have been in a more inconvenient spot. Even after the landscapers went to so much trouble to rope them off with fluorescent orange construction webbing so they didn't disturb them, I came along and disturbed them all. They were right at the top of the stairs. Oops.

 

So today's job was to prepare a new patch of soil and plant the crowns out (again) and hope for the best. That's me in the photo with a margarita, toasting their future success. Now I might mention the limes in the Margarita are not from our lime trees. (Thank you Laina for supplying them). We had a potting disaster with the lime tree recently, and while it's coming back with a vengeance, it did lose most of its fruit in the process. I went to re pot it because the potting mix had become hydrophobic and worn out, but when my husband pulled the tree out of the half wine barrel, the whole bottom of the barrel came out too! There was a mercy dash to the nearest garden centre to get a new wine barrel, some caster wheels from the hardware store and some gravel for the bottom of the barrel, to go with the new potting mix and compost that was waiting! Now that you've all waded through that tedious story, I think you deserve a drink too! So here's a recipe, perfected after many, many trials...

 

Nat's best margarita recipe

 

To a cocktail shaker add:

 half a dozen ice cubes

2 parts gold tequila

1 part Triple Sec

1 part freshly squeezed lime juice.

- Shake and serve in a salt-rimmed glass.

Tomorrow is a big day in the garden too... a big load of pine bark for the verge. This begins the transformation of the verge from highly compacted sand and scruffy patches of lawn, to an attractive (I hope) native strip! Stay tuned.