Homegrown content

I was cooking a basic little meal for the two of us last night and, as usual, I took a moment to think about the homegrown content in that meal. I do this almost every time I cook, as there's always something from the garden in most evening meals. Here's what was homegrown last night.

It's no fantasmagoria of self-sufficiency, it was just a typical night. The potato salad (shop-bought spuds) included homegrown radish and green onions (shallots), and the tomato salad was homegrown cherry tomatoes plus homegrown basil. The fish that I grilled came from the fish shop.

I can't remember how many times people have asked me if I grow all the crops I eat at home. The answer is always "no, I'd need an acre to grow all our own food, and it would be a full-time job to keep up the supply." 

Instead, all I like to do is grow enough edibles in my garden to have some homegrown content in most meals I prepare. Herbs often fit that bill, but it is nice when vegies get to be the star turn. 

And that's what most backyard food gardens are all about. A bit of homegrown content, the occasional star turn, rather than the self-sufficient organic farmer fantasy.

Coming of age

A short while ago it occurred to me one morning, while harvesting my next batch of vegies, that I don't really know what a lot of my vegies look like as mature, adult plants. All vegies are harvested relatively early in their real life-cycles – usually well before they flower, for example – and that led me into my latest little garden project. As I love growing shallots (also called scallions, green onions or spring onions, depending on where you live) I ended up with too many. And so I decided to let one little batch go all the way through to flowering. Here's what happened.

Traaa daaaa! Hardly the world's most spectacular flower, but a fairly pleasing white flower typical of the allium family, nevertheless. Other onion family members have groovier colours, such as the purple of some garlic varieties and the pretty mauve of chives, but at least I now know what my shallots look like, as adults. In fact, the best part of this flower, for me, was watching it develop, rather than the final bloom itself.

It was the sight of this neglected shallot plant sending up this flower bud that made me decide to see it through to flowering.

While the normal shallot/spring onion is a straight, single stalk, the adult plant looks more like a candelabra. Its 'branches' are hollow and glow the most beautiful light lime green when backlit by the morning sun.

As the flower approaches bursting point the translucent sheath around the bloom shows the contents inside. Hundreds of tiny flowers, waiting for release from their papery confinement.

I almost hit the panic button on the day the first bloom opened, as it was also the day that huge, red dust storm hit Sydney last week. At least the dust storm provided an interesting filter for my camera that day!

Then, as a mild anti-climax, it did not a lot for the next day or two. It just stayed like this, looking like an oniony nun with its little headdress cowling its face.

Following the dust storms we then had a whole weekend of strong, blustery, gusty winds that threatened to blow the shallots down. I had to race out and mound up soil around the base to prop them up, just so they could complete my experiment/their flower show.

At last, the wind has died down, the dust has settled and the shallots have bloomed.

Elsewhere in the garden the next crop of shallots is already being harvested. As mentioned earlier, they look great when backlit by the sun, but within the general garden design, their small forest of upright green stems does break up the wider-leafed uniformity of the vegie patch. I love growing these vegies as you can harvest them one-by-one, as needed, they last for weeks in 'ready to use' condition without deteriorating, and yes, they just look and taste great.

I have left other vegies to grow to maturity before, and it's an interesting thing to do. You'll discover that lettuce are actually members of the daisy family. Several lettuce varieties grow into rather nice looking, tallish cones, from the top of which sprout clusters of little yellow daisies. Cauliflowers and broccoli are of course flowerheads, but that would be a bit of an extravagant waste to let one of those big beauties go to flower and seed.

Fortunately, with my 'adult' shallots, I've been told by a friend that they're still usable in the kitchen, not as an uncooked salad onion (they'd be too strong-flavoured for that) but as something closer to a leek, which of course you'd need to cook. And that's what I'll do, once the flower show is over.