Tag Archives: Chefs and restaurants

advocate, Coffs Coast, Community gardening, Resilience, Self-sufficiency, Uncategorized

Garden of Eden at Coffs Jetty

Garden of Eden – Garden by the Sea

A version of this article was first published in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday 13th October, 2012

For the past 21 years, Wayne Kirkland and Mary-Ann Crowther have been living with as low an environmental footprint as it’s possible to have – on a yacht, travelling up and down the east coast of Australia.

For the last few years they’ve been coming back to Coffs, and now they’ve so fallen in love with the place, that they’ve taken over the lease for the Galley café and burger bar at Coffs Harbour jetty.

Wayne and Mary-Ann are passionate about sustainability and treading lightly on the earth, but it’s not about preaching to people. As Wayne told me, ‘I live by the philosophy of just show people how to do it’.

And now, with the help of Steve McGrane, Matt Downie and some willing volunteers from the Combine St community garden, Wayne and Mary-Ann are showing their customers, and the people who work, live near and visit the Jetty, just how amazingly productive a 6m2 veggie garden can be.

Steve McGrane (left) and Wayne Kirkland

 

This wasn’t a case of turning the first sod. Rather, it involved clearing out some pretty massive rocks, on the café side of the breakwater. Underneath was some gravel and fairly barren soil, laced with salt spray.

But Wayne wasn’t deterred, because he knew Steve had a very cunning plan. After years of research and trial and error in his own gardens, Steve has developed a special no-dig garden, layered lasagne-like with ’17 secret herbs and spices’, as he likes to say.

Actually, they’re not so secret. They include lucerne; sugar cane mulch; blood and bone; bags of comfrey, tansy and other leaves;  various manures; molasses (‘very important for the microbial action’); wood chip; and mineral rocks (calcium and phosphate). With the exception of the lucerne, everything’s organic.

The Garden by the Sea – early stages

The results are truly impressive. The garden is barely six weeks old, and Wayne and Mary-Ann have been eating out of it for three weeks. As Steve explains, the porosity of the mix, and the rapid action of the microbes in breaking everything down and making the nutrients available, allows the roots to grow very fast, producing very rapid growth above the ground. More than that,  the nutrients ‘aren’t leached out of the system, because the microbes hold them in suspension’.

The end result is both a super-healthy and productive garden right now; and even better, it ‘will be more fertile at the end of this growing season that it was at the beginning.’ That’s something, because what’s already growing is impressive enough: rows of broccoli, beetroot, kolrabi, lebanese cress, leeks, onions, chillies, tomatoes, a pumpkin vine, two varieties of sweet potato, several types of basil, parsley, lettuce, chinese greens, choko, taro, kumara, and flowers for companions.

The Garden - up close and personal!
The Garden – up close and personal!

The food tastes sensational, and because it’s so rich in minerals, it is very nutrient-dense.

In the next phase, Wayne will put in native wildflowers and grasses, ‘to attract the birds and bees’. He’s already got a resident blue tongue.

As for the salt, everyone told Wayne he could never have a veggie garden by the sea. He’s proved the doubters wrong, through ‘a bit of love and care, and keeping the salt spray off it – I just come and gently hose the plants down when there’s been a bit of spray, and that keeps them fresh.’

Wayne and Mary-Ann are delighted with the garden, and so are their customers. ‘People love it, they sit here and look at the plants, and talk about it.’ Some people have even anonymously put in plants after closing time: Wayne has arrived in the morning to find chillies and tomatoes that weren’t there before. And in the few short weeks of its existence, it’s already creating a web of relationships, so that it can truly be regarded as a ‘community garden’ in its own right.

One of the most satisfying things for Wayne is that he can now send all the green waste from the café to the community garden, where Matt has established an extra worm farm to cope with it all. In return, Matt takes plants to the ‘garden by the sea’, and Wayne now gives him extra seedlings. Community garden volunteers will help out with extensions to the café garden. And Wayne is even getting donations of plants from other yacht owners; and encouraging people to pick parsley.

For Wayne and Steve, this garden is about living their vision: ‘We both have the philosophy that we should be planting every square inch that’s available. Food is essential to life, and if people got more involved in the backyard garden…That’s what stitched communities together, a generation ago. But today, you buy everything from the supermarket. A lot of young people don’t know what fresh food is, they’ve never seen it”, says Wayne.

“This is trying to show people that fast food doesn’t come from MacDonalds. This is fast food. I can take this out of the garden and put it on your plate in five minutes. That was the essence of the project, to shift people’s understanding, and thinking, of what you can do with a garden.”

If the last few weeks are anything to go by, Wayne and the team behind this garden have already achieved a lot.

advocate, Chefs and restaurants, Local and regional food economies

Why chefs love local and seasonal produce

GOING LOCAL – FROM LAKE COMO TO COFFS JETTY

Nick Rose

First published in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 1.1.11

When he first arrived in Coffs Harbour five years ago with his family to open Fiasco’s Restaurant and Bar, Stefano Mazzina found himself in an unfamiliar landscape. Unlike his native Lake Como in Northern Italy (north of Milan, near the Switzerland-Italian border), everything in the food and agricultural business seemed large-scale and anonymous.

Stefano Mazzina, Proprietor of Fiasco Restaurant, Coffs Harbour
Stefano Mazzina, Proprietor of Fiasco Restaurant, Coffs Harbour

This was a big change from Lake Como, where the majority of produce was local, small-scale and specialist to that region, both for the restaurants and for householders. Stefano fondly remembers a strong local cheese-making tradition from his childhood, which is still continuing today:

“Everybody had a couple of cows…and they used to bring their milk into this house where they made cheeses…your repayment for bringing in the milk, was cheese and butter – you never saw money [changing hands]. So this tradition of [local produce], that’s where I’m coming from”, he says.

Stefano also noticed a big difference in the way people related to, and understood, food, when he came to Australia. Unlike in Italy, he says, “there is not the [same] understanding of food [yet], especially in terms of vegetables.”

“People see vegetables in terms of people being meat eaters, or vegetarians, but there is not a fusion of looking at food in general”, he continues. “[For example], some of my chefs here didn’t want to try lentils, but I said, in Italy we eat everything – everything is dictated by the weather, the terrain, and the [culture of the] region. The menus vary with the seasons – they follow the seasons, what’s around – [local produce] is cheaper, it lasts longer, it has a better flavour – it just makes sense.”

He is now working hard to bring this tradition of incorporating local, seasonal produce into his menus at Fiasco. His main supplier, Phil [A & D Fruit and Vegetables] has a good percentage of local produce on his list. “That’s lettuce, mushrooms, strawberries, blueberries, cherry tomatoes, oranges, limes – soon there’s going to be zucchini, green beans, parsley, coriander, basil, – it’s good produce”, says Stefano.

There are many advantages, Stefano says, in having a menu oriented towards local, seasonal produce:

“Having more local produce makes the life a lot easier for a chef, because he’s got more to get inspired by – rather than just buying the same things – there’s no variety [in doing that]. With local produce, you don’t have to have a single menu that runs all year…you can use the seasons, and use the growers’ input, to [craft] the menu and make it more interesting and sustainable.”

In addition, because the produce is fresher, its quality and taste is better. Lower food miles means far less pollution than vegetables from the big central markets. And buying local stimulates the local economy:

“The money stays in town – [and] it comes around. The farmers knows I’m buying from them, and I keep them in business, and maybe one day they’ll come to my restaurant!”

If possible, Stefano would like to encourage more local growers to produce food especially (though not exclusively) for his restaurant. He experimented with this recently, when he provided a local grower with some purple carrot seeds.

With so much dairy in the region, Stefano believes that there is a real lack of value-adding to dairy produce, and especially cheese.

“If I could buy local cheeses, I wouldn’t buy other cheeses. We make ricotta here, from goat’s milk, I know some basic cheese-making techniques…but I’m not a cheese maker, you need an expert for that”, he says.

“In Italy, we used to make a lot of fresh and soft cheeses locally, the blue cheeses – caprini, buffalo mozzarella – [but] you need someone who has the knowledge to do it…”

So here’s a challenge for the Coffs Coast – any budding local cheese-makers out there? And if not, how can we support the establishment of a cheese-making tradition?