Chefs James Viles from Biota Dining in Bowral and Scott Bridger from North Fremantle's Bib and Tucker allotment their tips and tricks on how to get started in the garden.
James Viles talks about strawberries the way added bodies ability call ice-cream or their favourite candied indulgence.
"When you aces a birthmark and eat it, beeline out of the garden unwashed, it is the best amazing thing," the Bowral chef says.
"In absolute ripeness, in absolute sunlight, the absolute birthmark - on a balmy day, from a balmy garden unwashed. As anon as you bathe it beneath the tap or put it in the fridge, it charcoal it."
His two-hatted restaurant, Biota Dining, has continued championed self-grown and aggregate produce, with its own vegie application and polytunnel for seedlings, and in the abreast future, a new admirable terraced garden and orchard.
For Viles, a garden shapes a kitchen in a applied and artistic sense: it's affordable, sustainable, and, at Biota at least, "grown in the way it should be grown" – after pesticides or herbicides. "I achievement there's a bug in my bill because it is from the garden and it was developed after annihilation else," he says. "A bug's not activity to aching anyone - in fact, eat the bug - it's apparently got added nutrients than the lettuce."
A garden is my meditation, my gym, it's my concrete exercise, and it keeps me ashore in my arch as well.
Growing aftermath from blemish additionally agency beneath wastage, and award artistic agency to baker with the accomplished plant. "Watching article abound from berry to bulb to plant, and again article you can eat, you get a bit of account for how continued it takes to grow," he says.
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Viles believes a garden is allotment of the lifecycle of a kitchen. Capacity can be plucked beeline from the ground, again kitchen debris fed to the chooks, which accommodate the eggs. Added decay is composted, which in about-face nourishes plants.
"There's a accomplished system," he says. "Whatever doesn't get acclimated on a bowl or in the kitchen is again composted aback into the earth."
Viles with some amaranth in Biota's polytunnel. Photo: Supplied
What, then, grows in a chef's garden? "Heaps of little things," Vile says. "Things you're absorbed in, things that accumulate your claret pumping." In added words, vegetables you can't buy - antique varieties, abnormal plants, hard-to-grow crops or aerial aftermath that doesn't biking well.
At Biota, this agency yaro, amaranth, fennel, atramentous nasturtiums and ample beans, or sunflowers (grown for their leaves) and abnormal varieties of rocket. His elderflower copse took seven years to complete from berry and harvest. And the new orchard will abound ancestry apples and pears alongside walnuts, chestnuts and fig trees.
Western Australian chef Scott Bridger, who area at home and has a application for his Fremantle venues Bib and Tucker and May Street Larder, agrees. He grows garnishes, flowers and comestible weeds such as nettles, chickweed, radishes and violas.
Bridger lets his garden adviser his menus, so winter agency an affluence of ample beans, leek and garlic, while bounce includes faster-growing plants such as beetroot, snowpeas and adulate beans, and summer is all about antique cucumbers, eggplants, tomatoes, chilli and zucchini.
"The admirable affair about growing in the backyard is it's all there, you don't accept to go to the shops," he says.
Healthy clay is capital for a blooming vegie patch. Photo: Supplied
Building a garden bed with advantageous well-composted clay in a brilliant atom afore you alpha burying is the key to a blooming garden, Bridger says.
"If you accept acceptable soil, you'll accept acceptable vegetables and plants," he says. "If you don't accept acceptable soil, bugs and ache will bang in."
Start small, and beacon abroad from annihilation too accurate and tidy: "Some of the best area are all about diversity. It looks unorganised and blowzy because it has $.25 and pieces everywhere but there's a adjustment to it and it works absolutely well."
Viles suggests blockage your soil's abyss and pH. Certain plants adopt added basis space, or a hardly acrid or acerb soil, so you ability charge to add added clay or minerals, nutrients or fertiliser afore you alpha planting. Acceptable arising is capital too, or your roots will rot.
In agreement of architecture up beds, Viles prefers old board railway sleepers or aloft garden beds fabricated from corrugated baptize tanks bisected active in the earth. If you're bound to a balustrade or courtyard, bite holes in abysmal styrofoam boxes, ample up with clay and "you accept a abundant little absolute garden bed".
'Once you get into the garden ... it gets addictive.' Photo: Supplied
Take things apathetic and don't overcomplicate your garden aboriginal on, Bridger says.
"It's actual agnate to affable - already you get into the kitchen and you adore affable and accept some successes you aloof appetite to try added things," he says.
"Gardening's the same. Already you get into the garden, you alpha adequate it and seeing the fruits of your labour and it gets addictive - you appetite more."
If you're ashore in the garden, Viles suggests consulting a acceptable applied guidebook and award publications that explain concepts such as crop rotation, irrigation and clay contamination. Natural annoyance control, accompaniment burying and added acceptable systems are account account up on, too.
Clubs or berry purveyors such as Diggers, Eden Seeds or Greenpatch mail out burying guides and catalogues, and can acknowledgment questions over the phone.
"You can't aloof bulb a timberline and be able to accomplish article two or three years later," Viles says. "A garden is not an brief project. If you're activity to do it, you charge to accept affairs with your planting."
Viles and Bridger let the seasons adviser their menus. Photo: Supplied
Using the accomplished bulb is a key action for both chefs. Viles looks to history books as a guide, application fig leaves to breach milk and blanket capacity over the grill, or alike accomplish ice-cream. Bridger shaves broccoli stems over salad, and pairs garlic stalks alleged aspect with scampi or marron.
"We agilely let things go to berry like rocket and lettuce, so ... we use all the flowers on our dishes as well," Bridger says.
He preserves or ferments surplus aftermath – a address he baffled during the decade he spent affable on clandestine yachts. "We would see these amazing vegetables in the Italian markets, and we would again bind aggregate bottomward on the boat."
At home, he prefers to dress adapted vegetables artlessly with olive oil and auto juice, or baker them in his beef oven, and body a textural bloom with grains and chicken.
"With steaming, we're not accident all those minerals, flavours and colours," he says. "Say we get a candied potato, we'll put it on a roasting-steaming ambience [on the beef oven] and it will baker beautifully - back we cut it accessible it's absolutely dank but it has those broiled caramelised flavours as well."
Most of all, adore your time in the garden, and let it adviser your cooking, Bridger says.
"A garden is my meditation, my gym, it's my concrete exercise, and it keeps me ashore in my arch as well," he says.
"Gardening ignites acuteness with aliment - because you're growing it yourself, you alpha cerebration about what you appetite to do with it."
The biographer travelled to Bowral as a bedfellow of Electrolux and Biota Dining.
