Tag Issue 22 Premium

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Read & Watch

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Chef Annie Smithers takes us on a generously honest journey of finding, connecting to and regenerating land that can support her family, her restaurant and her desire to live more sustainably.

Part cookbook, part journal, Recipe for a Kinder Life is a warts-and-all account of the realities of caring for the land and reaping its bounty. Sincere, frank and often laughout- loud funny, Annie details the lessons she’s learnt through chapters such as Land, the Productive Garden, Buildings, Water and Weather, each punctuated by her favourite recipes from her decades of experience.

‘The path I have chosen over the past dozen years does not make me an expert in sustainable living; I’m just a regular person trying to step a little more gently on the earth and to live a kinder life,’ she writes. ‘Yet, I feel there are more and more like me who want to make a change for the better: to simplify their lives, to lessen their footprint, to have time for things that matter, for each other, to reconnect with skills and lessons that have been forgotten.’

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In The Garden – November-February

map of aussie

Seasonal garden guides for Australian climates

Moon planting

The moon’s phases and its associated gravitational pull has a significant effect on the behaviour of tidal oceans, so it’s easy to understand how the moon can have a similar effect on the moisture in our soils and plants. By planning what you sow to coincide with the phases of the moon best suited to the type of vegetable and how you’re planting, you’ll give yourself a higher chance of success as well as increase your yields.

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Save Your Seeds – Eggplant

eggplant

Solanum melongena – solanum is Latin for nightshade, melongena is Greek for ‘sprung from a fruit tree’.

Origin

The purple eggplant, now so common, was domesticated in India and Burma; it arrived in China by the fourth century. Arabic people introduced Europeans to the delights of eggplant in the seventh century.

Description

There is great variation in eggplant fruits, from the common large purple to the pea-sized yellow ones of Thailand. The first eggplants grown in England were small and egg-shaped, hence their English name.

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Five Of A Kind – Sustainable Party Ideas

party-ideas

Birthday celebrations can be a haven for single-use plastics. Between balloons, tableware, decorations and gifts, the landfill created in a single day may far exceed what you’d otherwise create, but often and understandably justified by their once-a-year occurrence.

With the current pandemic upon us, money may be in short supply, but creativity and imagination is as abundant as ever. There are lots of fun and thoughtful things we can do to create a special day for loved ones. Things that not only ensure we’re looking after the environment, but when we may not be able to enjoy traditional large gatherings to celebrate a special day, things that can create treasured and long-lasting memories.

For too long, many of us have associated the price of a gift with how much we care about someone, but in an era where a lot of us have a bit of extra time up our sleeves, and maybe not as much disposable income, creativity should be the new currency.

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Ways With Waste – Weed Tea

weed-tea

Pulling weeds out of your garden is one thing, but disposing of them once out of the soil in a way that ensures they don’t reshoot can sometimes be a struggle. Turning them into a weed tea gets rid of them for good while producing an inexpensive and nutritious fertiliser for your garden.

Composting your weeds is a great option, but the time taken between pulling them out of the ground and turning them into something you can return to feed the garden in the form of compost can take months. Fermenting them in water over a few weeks, however, is a fast and effective way to not only dispose of them, but to turn them into food for your garden.

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Urban Foraging – Wild Mustard

wild-mustard

Native to Europe, Asia and northern parts of Africa, wild mustard (Sinapis arvensis), also known as field mustard or charlock, is one of the tastiest and most versatile weeds in the brassica family.

The whole plant of wild mustard is edible and its botanical name, Sinapis, comes from the Greek word ‘sinapi’ meaning mustard. As well as making it easy to spot, its bright-yellow flowers make it a great pollen crop for bees and other important pollinator insects.

How To Identify It

Wild mustard is found right throughout the year, but is at its most abundant in spring and summer when its vivid yellow flowers are tall and on show.

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