The most important bit of gardening advice I've learned in the past 50 years is this: always have a parsley patch within 20 seconds of your kitchen.
If you need to slog your way down to the end of the backyard in the dark, rain, cold, heat or when the scrambled eggs are almost ready for the table, you won't use that parsley.
Parsley is possibly the most reliable way of making sure your family has daily leafy green veg. You can add finely chopped parsley to almost anything, from pizza to chocolate cake to mashed potatoes.
Every garden, be it backyard or potted patio, needs a constant supply of reliable greens. This will not just save you money. The knowledge that you have greens in abundance waiting just outside your back door means you are more likely to use them.
Kids who refuse to eat cabbage or spinach will pick snow peas off the vines as they pass - kids are worse that white cockatoos when it comes to munching snow peas. Kids who refuse to allow green-coloured veg anywhere near their mouth or their plate won't notice finely chopped parsley or English spinach if it's disguised in anything brown or red, be it spag bol or tomato sauce or meatballs.
This is possibly the only time of year when conscientious gardeners in our climate may not have a few rows of lettuce waiting to be chomped in their gardens. Our winter lettuce have just begun to run to seed, turning slightly bitter as they do. Any lettuce seeds or seedlings planted now will probably decide they've gone through winter after the next cold spell, and it's time to flower for spring.
This means we have at least two months of lettucelessness ahead of us, as even tiny Buttercrunch and Red Mignonette lettuces really need another week or two of warmer days before I plant them. Luckily we are rich in other greens, like the Italian parsley, broad leafed, and wonderfully lush and tender after this wet winter. It too is trying to go to seed, but we can defeat this for at least a couple of months by picking off the seed heads, forcing the plant to produce more leafy branches if it wants to flower.
Tabouli, or finely chopped parsley with diced baked beetroot, walnuts, fetta and much else, makes excellent salad material. There are new parsley seedlings from last year's gone-to-seed crop coming up, too. Always let your best parsley plant go to seed every year, to give you a variety specially bred to do well in your garden's microclimate.
The shaggy mizuna is still well behaved and available for salads. Mizuna is a leafy tender green that likes dappled shade, which we have plenty to offer it. Possibly it's the shade that keeps it from going to seed till summer. Mizuna also comes in red, which is what I usually grow, but even though it's red it's still a green, like red lettuces and red cabbage. (If anyone objects to this classification, I'm happy to give them a long and boring justification).
Salad or garden cress (Lepidium sativum) grows in the ground, not in water like watercress. It doesn't produce many leaves per plant, nor would you want a whole salad of it unless you like strong tastes, but a few leaves do add a lovely celery flavour. It is excellent sprinkled onto fish, or anywhere as an alternative to chopped parsley garnish. A few leaves in a fruit cup is delicious too.
Then there is winter cress (Barbarea verna) which isn't watercress either, but a biennial with a much more delicate flavour than salad cress and watercress, though I still find it too strong to make up the bulk of a salad. Like watercress, it is delicious in egg and cress sandwiches (heavy on the mayonnaise), and a plain cheese sandwich becomes luxury with fresh sourdough bread and a helping of wintercress, garden cress or watercress.
Watercress - the most familiar cress - needs to grow in water, full sun or dappled shade. It's best in a snail-proof pot - watercress can harbour tiny snails that carry liver fluke. Try growing watercress in a hanging bird bath with a layer of soil then water, netted to keep out the birds. Top up the water as necessary.
Every family's "greens" garden will differ depending on the veg you love and your skill at cooking. A Malabar lime tree is a must for those who needs its leaves for Thai fish cakes and much else. Our family are Iceberg lettuce eaters, mostly for their crunch, so a heat-hardy variety of those will be going in, with some sweet Buttercrunch and red Mignonette just for me. There will also be a couple of frilly red lettuces and mizuna, to mix in with the Iceberg for more sophisticated salads when we have guests. Guests also share the coriander leaves that I love and my husband hates.
As for growing greens to cook: a dozen silver beet plants are a reliable standby when everything is wilting, including you and the dog. Even severely heat-struck silver beet will perk up with a watering. Fresh, tender-leafed English spinach is a luxury to anyone who has grown up calling silver beet "spinach". It is difficult to grow enough English spinach, partly because it is crisp and delicious straight from the garden, but also because Possum X agrees that true spinach is a delight, and munches a bit of it nightly.
But most importantly, get that parsley into the ground now, or into an extremely large pot or hanging basket by the kitchen door. You might add a pot of peppermint for summer drinks and fruit salads, a couple of indispensable thyme and winter savoury bushes, a sage plant and a rosemary bush, with a lemon tree somewhere close by. That's the minimum a kitchen garden needs, to give you the maximum of excellent meals and deliciousness.
This week I am:
- Mourning the red cabbages going to seed before they've formed firm heads - I planted the poor things too late for them to grow big enough before they stopped growing in the cold. The leaves are still tender enough for stir fries and coleslaw, and they still produce a surprising amount of leaves, even without firm cabbage hearts.
- Rejoicing in the sheer abundance of early blooming Louisiana iris. The gift of a single plant about 25 years ago has slowly spread into a mass of flowers behind the lemon trees.
- Preparing bunya trees to plant in a back paddock. These native nuts are definitely "paddock trees" as they grow massive, and the clusters of nuts can crush a small car when they fall, but once they begin to fruit they are the world's most generous nut tree. As bunyas take about 20 years or more to fruit I may not ever see this lot crop, but few gardeners plant only for themselves.
- Waiting for the first large asparagus spears - some tiny shoots have appeared from the new plants, but no big luscious ones yet. Usually we get spears by September 1, so I'm slightly anxious in case they aren't going to wake from hibernation and we are deprived of our annual asparagus eating orgy.
- Marvelling at the self-sown primulas that still come up year after year. Every lazy gardener knows that if you leave your dead annuals in the ground long enough, they'll leave seeds behind for next year.
- Picking the old-fashioned white freesias that colonised a small cliff at least a century ago, and still bloom every spring, delicate and hardy. The modern ones are more showy. The old-fashioned ones are tough.
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