Gardening & Cooking

        Welcome   to   the  Art of Gardening, the Art of Cooking and the Art of Presenting Food.

Starting from The Garden it’s a wonderful place to Be! To joyfully Co-Create amongst the elements of Nature to feel Alive and productive.

It’s where I go daily, when home, to be in communion with Mother Earth. Here from the hundreds of seeds that I have in storage I start my growth from my propagation Hot House shed. A single seed (or a single thought) is implanted and nurtured, ensuring it is always feed, sun and water, never dry. Often this is where in the process a new idea for a art piece is first inspired.

When in the Garden you have no need to think seriously about anything or concentrate. Time has no bearing,so you’re relaxed into a gentle flow of energy that simply makes things happen, as you do as you please creating and developing the Garden. Building new garden beds, building paths and steps along with bridges, constructing stone walls and boxes. Preparing compost bins, collecting sea grasses and hose manure,  worm farms, pulling out weeds, mowing lawns, trimming and pruning. Watching the growth and harvesting the healthy natural organic abundance of fruits, vegetables and berries. What enjoyable fun it is when doing it for the Love of it. Naturally enough the more Love Expressed the more the    abundance Mother Earth provides.

I do not recommend chemicals since they are unhealthy to plants and US, there isalso no need to use them. My practices are purely organic achieved through permaculture. What’s permacultural gardening like it’s like Nature. Permaculture is a sustainable agriculture system that reproduces natural interactions of plants and animals in the smallest practical area. Permaculture involves long-term planning, using native plants and animals together with structures so that they support each other and perfotm multiple functions, recycling all waste, installing energy efficient systems, and relying on renewableresources instead of fossil fuels.

I wont go into the details on gardening since there are many excellent guide and reference  books available. Such as:

          .  NZ Gardening

          .  Vegetables  by Roger Phillips and Martyn Rix

          . 

Plus many garden magazines and newspaper garden section for tips and advise.

So what I shall do here is to take any novice person who perhaps has never planted a fruit tree or vegetable and take you through the basics to enable that person to start growing immediately. Every household really needs to grow some food one way or another.

As you become more evolved in gardening your fingers become greener and you live from your Garden through sheer joy, excitement and pleasure. It is so healthy in many ways. The Way to Go!

From the harvest I will share recopies and storage techniques to help spread your abundance throughout the off seasons and also allow you to give and trade your surplus goods. We’ll bottle chutneys and relishes, Jams and fruits. I intend making my own wines next season of fruits so can share in that as well.

In conjunction with food production we need to develop the beauty in flowered gardens from ground creepers to colourful annuals, bulbs, roses, dahlia’s. Flowering creepers such as clematis to flowering trees like the Jacaranda. Herb and vegetables produce beatiful flowers throughout the year also.  We’ll cover the advantages of companion growing, for example a colourful petunia plant stimulates the beans and visa versa. We shall also deal with seed saving and self seeding to have a healthy food bank at home. There is so much beauty to enjoy in the Garden. We shall deal with the Herb Garden as well, a very good place to start in home gardening, a Herb patch is always recommended close the the kitchen.

The next section I present is the Cooking and Baking along with presentation of the meal to complete the cycles from the seed in hand to the food on the folk.

Right now let’s go on a visit Up the Garden Path to give you an idea what I have been doing over the last few years here in wonderful Golden Bay with Lethea. We are fortunate to experience an ideal micro-climate for growing. Last year the Garden won the Golden Bay Organic garden of the year, so you know you will always enjoy a heathy meal when ever you visit our place.