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It's not just the planet you'll be saving when you grow your own fruit and vegetables,
it's your soul, writes Jackie French.
The salad you ate for lunch yesterday may have used more fossil fuel than you used all week.
Your snow peas were probably flown from Zimbabwe; your vacuum-packed greens were
probably brought from China, which was where the garlic came from, too. Your salad's
"energy miles" also included the fuel needed to grow it, as well as to make and transport the
fertilisers, fungicides, herbicides and pesticides. That salad probably used more water than
you did, as well. (Only about 3 per cent of water use is domestic.) What's the use of turning
off lights and cutting back on travel kilometres if your cherries come from California?
So how do you minimise your "tucker footprint"? By buying local, and organic. But the
greenest solution - in every sense - is growing your own.
Aha, I hear you chorus, impossible! I've only got a balcony and 10 spare minutes a week
Impossible? Of course not.
Step 1. Buy six large pots (small ones heat up and dry out too quickly).
Step 2. Plant:
One Eureka lemon (three to four lemons a week all year round).
One grapevine (one month of fruit; the tiny leaves are good in salads, the large ones for
stuffed vine leaves).
One passionfruit vine (four months of fruit).
One choko (four months of fruit).
One tamarillo (five months of fruit).
For the sixth pot, choose from: the dwarf Stella cherry, dwarf apples, a dwarf mulberry, dwarf
peaches or nectarines, a dwarf pomegranate, an "All-in-One" dwarf almond, Tahitian limes, a
cumquat or a calamondin, blueberries, gooseberries or raspberries (try the giant native
Atherton raspberry on hot patios or the new jostaberry, a gooseberry-currant cross).
Step 3. Around each tree plant parsley or silver beet, or let thornless blackberries,
strawberries or Cape gooseberries trail down the pot.
Step 4. Buy 10 giant hanging baskets. Hang them from the eaves, but stagger them - some
high, some low - but all within reach for watering.
Step 5. Now plant:
One basket of Wandin Winter year-round rhubarb.
One basket of "cut-and-come-again" lettuce, such as red cos or Webb's Wonderful.
One basket of rainbow chard. One basket of Warrigal spinach.
One basket of perennial basil, thyme and oregano.
One basket of Chinese celery, garlic chives, mizuna and mitsuba.
One basket of cherry tomatoes and spring onions (eat the tops).
For the other baskets, choose from: golden nugget pumpkins, zucchini (they trail out of the
basket), purple or lemon basil, lemon grass, snow peas (plant around the edge of the basket
and they'll trail, too), tiny wild strawberries, more parsley and land cress.
The result? Assuming you water and feed with a slow-release plant food, you'll get:
Six lovage plants. Lovage looks like a small, wild, perennial celery. It gives a meaty, celery
flavour to soups and stews, and young leaves and stems can be stir fried or tossed into salads.
Twelve Italian red ribbed chicory, instead of lettuce.
Twenty Jerusalem artichokes.
Twenty perennial leeks. They stay tiny if you let them grow into clumps, but as large as
normal leeks if transplanted every year.
One patch of Warrigal or New Zealand spinach. One patch can grow to three square metres.
The leaves are high in oxalic acid, so blanch them in boiling water for one minute then throw
out that water and cook again in fresh water. They can be used for an excellent spinach
quiche or fetta and spinach pastries, and reasonable soup.
Three yacon. This perennial plant produces tubers like crunchy sweet potatoes, plus
sunflower-like flowers.
As a result there will always be enough in the garden to make a salad, vegetable quiche, or
nine-tenths of an interesting stir-fry, plus the inspiration to come up with another thousand
vegie dishes. (When you have backyard abundance you are more inclined to work out some
way of using it.)
Growing your own is friendly, too. Six cases of plums mean you either need to give plums
away, or make jam - which also tends to be shared around. Which means that you get other
people's surplus in exchange.
I haven't made marmalade in 15 years - friends who take home baskets of our citrus give us
jam in return. Not to mention last fortnight's haul of 12 apple muffins, two cakes of calendula
and goat's milk soap, two bottles of tomato relish and jar of tamarillo chutney so savage it
could out-snarl a pit bull terrier - all in informal exchange for our surplus avocados, limes,
chokos, eggs and tamarillos.
Growing stuff is good for you, offering exercise and the therapeutic relaxation of surveying
your bounty and picking it. Green leaves and swelling fruit really do lower the blood
pressure. Not to mention the joy from the birds they bring, the butterflies, the scents of
growing things.
Humans once lived closely with the world around them. These days our gardens are the only
contact most of us have with the natural world. You need only look at children's faces when
they pick their first apple to realise how deep in the human psyche is the need to grow things.
A packet of asparagus, frilled lettuce, artichoke or snow pea seeds costs less than a packet of
frozen chips, but gives a lot more luxury for your money. You can buy the seeds for a decade
of flowers for the same price that you rent a video.
This article was typed using a solar-powered computer; refreshments included two cups of
home-grown green tea (made with tank water), one bowl of rooster, leek and sweet corn soup
and a plate of wattle seed Anzacs.
Jackie French is the author of Backyard Self-Sufficiency, The Wilderness Garden, The
Chook Book and The Best of Jackie French, among other titles.