Alice Miller Kitchen Garden Blog

  Kitchen Garden Blog #4 - Yummy Yummy Yummy I've got love in my tummy.  You  would be forgiven for wondering if Kitchen Garden was in fact just Garden if you've managed to read this far into these blog posts. But fear not, we Kitchen too.  Since our gardens are just getting established we've had limited things at our disposal to cook, but we are a resourceful bunch. Last year's sustainability crew under the watchful eye of Adrian Wood nurtured some garden beds at the school and produced some lovely produce which we've put to good use so far. The seasons have also been kind to us in the form of black berries and apples. So we haven't wanted for things to do in the kitchen.  We started the year by harvesting some spinach and silverbeet and incorporating these into pasta dough which we rolled out to make raviolo (large ravioli) and some fettuccine. We filled the raviolo with ricotta, feta, parmesan and more spinach. These got bathed in a browned butter, sage and a...

THE ALICE MILLER KITCHEN GARDEN  Blog #3: Hügelkultur Garden Beds  Our beds are full of sand. I suspect that once upon a time they were filled with a sandy loam mix from a garden supply shop and over the years any organic matter that was in that mix has long since gone and we're left wth very hydrophobic sand. It's great for drainage....that's about it. So we need to reintroduce organic matter into our beds. We're doing it in a number of ways. One strategy is creating Hugelkultur beds. This in an old German permaculture system whereby you fill the beds with logs, sticks, straw, cardboard, manure, compost...any biomass really and top it with soil/compost and let the natural processes break all of it down over a number of years. This system has a whole host of benefits. The bigger logs in the base of the bed serve as sponges. They absorb water in the wetter months and gradually release it as the soil dries out reducing the need for irrigation. They also become food for fu...

THE ALICE MILLER KITCHEN GARDEN  Blog #2: In which we winnow. A wise person once said, "Gardening is a long game that never ends." I don't actually know if anyone ever said that. But i'm saying it now. For those reading this that are avid gardeners, they'll know what I mean. You're always learning as a gardener, the issue is that it takes a long time to get another crack at it. "Oh my cucumbers struggled this year, perhaps they didn't get strong pollination, I'll try again.....in 10 months!"  BUT - gardening is not all about the end product. It's about the journey too and you can get a lot of joy from the various stages of growth. Planting a seed, creating the right conditions for germination, nurturing the young plants, observing them grow into big healthy plants, trouble shooting any issues along the way, and then finally harvesting! (A little bit like growing young people. I'm not sure about the harvesting part...) But it doesn...

THE ALICE MILLER KITCHEN GARDEN  Blog #1: In which we investigate and work on plans to improve our soil. (2.3.24) A Kitchen Garden is a place that revels in both function and form. It can be home to all sorts of lovely critters and can provide a space for both quiet reflection and community energy. We were lucky to inherit a space that had a lot of old infrastructure already in place. The previous owners of "the house" had clearly had a thriving vegetable garden, orchard and chicken run at some point in time. It's all been left to rack and ruin somewhat...but that's where we come in. We aim to transform this area back into a thriving, abundant garden space that could grow over time into all sorts of things, limited only by our imaginations.  Our first task was to check out the soil. Soil is the key to all vegetable gardens. It seems to me that the original creators of this garden space once upon a time filled these beds with a sandy loam mix from a garden supply store...