Wicked!

A lot of people have asked us folks up at the garden what those weird tubes sticking out of some of our garden beds actually are? The answer is "wicking beds" - the most joyous answer to water-starved guerrilla gardeners this side of the railway line!
In this video the gorgeous Deb (who taught us everything we know about wick beds) gives her lovely explanation of why wicking works, and how you can easily create your own at home or on a nature strip near you.

Weird weather...

In one week's time (and a bit) it will officially be winter - but try telling that to the eggplant bushes down at the garden. They're still going mental producing a wide variety of fruit - perhaps the results of the unseasonably warm Autumn we've just enjoyed or the weirdly wet 'n' wild summer that went before it. Not that we're complaining. We've been enjoying the tasty little fellas "nasty" dengaku style - grilled in the oven with a miso and miring glaze. Mmmmm.

A spoonful of soda...

Cleaning up a communal box last week we were lucky enough to dig up a bouquet of healthy looking Jerusalem Artichokes. According to a few of the gardeners up at the laneway, Jerusalem Artichokes are notorious for causing flatulence: in the words of one gardener, the last time they ate the stuff "it wasn't worth it!" However before the chokes could be chucked on the compost heap, the fabulous Antoinette came to the rescue with a remedy a chef once told her. This technique involves soaking the artichokes with 1 tsp. of bicarb soda for at least a few hours before you intend to cook them, afterwhich you can enjoy the chokes fart-free.
With some trepidation we bought the bouquet home, scrubbed the little fellas, and dutifully soaked them in a big bowl of water with said bicarb soda. We left them for rather longer than what had been suggested (in the hope that it would really work), and then Neil put together a simple soup. We ate the first few spoonfuls slowly and waited. Nothing. A few spoonfuls more and we'd stopped worrying about our innards and were simply enjoying the delicious flavour: at once creamy, nutty and spicy - unlike any vegetable I've tasted before. After that we completely forgot about their fart-inducing reputation and downed the lot. And it seems Antoinette's chef was right, the diagnosis from Neil was "no more farts than usual!"