AUTUMN HARVEST
Weathering challenges and reaping the rewards, market gardener Paulette Whitney lays her table with the bounty of the land she cultivates with her family.
Market gardener Paulette Whitney lays her table with the bounty of the land she cultivates with her family.
My family lives nestled in the folds of hills under Kunanyi, or Mount Wellington, where dark, dense forest breaks into gentle, open slopes. The mountain elevation keeps our farm cool, but the clear air and dazzling sunshine make our autumnal garden a place of plenty. We moved here 14 years ago when my husband Matt was working as a chef and I as a horticulturalist growing native plants from Tasmania’s wildest places. When we decided to raise a family our focus changed and our careers melded; notions of nutrition, soil health, a quality environment and delicious food intertwined, so we fenced out the pademelons and possums, and sowed seeds, tucked in seedlings and zealously amassed a collection of edible plants. As we became better at growing we met chefs who helped to make our work viable; as their interest grew so did our collection of plants, and our timing was perfect.
Luke Burgess had begun Garagistes restaurant in Hobart and he quickly became a fast friend, the first I’d met who could chat at length, and with great fervour, about frost affecting flavour, the nuances in texture of different leaves, or how a particular wild herb is prepared in a tiny Italian town. The highs of bountiful harvests, and the lows of drought or pests are softened greatly by relationships with the chefs or home cooks we supply. Seeing a photo of a loyal customer’s kitchen table filled with our produce can take the edge off a rained-out market.
Farming as a family is both challenging and rewarding. When it’s dry and every minute is spent watering, the children have to fend for themselves; but being left to fend for themselves makes them capable, which tempers those thoughts of neglect. Our daughter Elsie has perfected pesto, her sister Heidi is a dab hand with a kale salad. We regularly test our soil to ensure it has the right balance of minerals to nurture our tiny workforce of soil microorganisms – bacteria, fungi and their ilk – which help make the widest range of nutrients available to our plants. If the plants grow strong and healthy, they’ll pass these gifts onto our girls.
There are days when we’ll make salsa from tomatillos, fill Peruvian stuffing-cucumbers with raisins and beef or drop shungiku into a steamboat. But more often than not, when the sun dips on a hard day of market gardening, we’ll reach for the recipes of our mothers or grandmothers to put food on the family table. provenancegrowers.blogspot.com.au