Kitchen Garden: ‘salad bar’ makes for a happy clucker

Oh to be a chicken at Finch Farmlet in Chisholm. They have a ‘salad bar’ raised from Clucker Tucker seed mix from Bellchambers in Fyshwick with a dedicated patch of lucerne and clover. The coop has a solar-powered auto door so they can free range along the back fence and under a pomegranate tree.

You can see these chooks next weekend when Christine and Warwick Finch invite visitors to their garden for Open Gardens Canberra. This is one of 15 demonstration gardens chosen under the ACT Government’s H20K Healthy Waterways Program Stage 1. Water capture is integrated into the gently terraced gardens, they have a 5,000 litre rainwater tank and a large koi fish pond into which Warwick was going to plunge after we left.

Chris grew up in Canberra and first appeared in The Canberra Times as a nine-year-old with a two-headed worm she found when digging in her family’s garden in Curtin. Her nanna and pop had a block full of fruit trees and berries in O’Connor and Chris helped her nanna and mum in the kitchen as they stewed, preserved and juiced things. Nothing was wasted. Her parents’ garden supplied fresh produce year-round due to her dad’s crop rotation, digging compost into fallow beds and using the “Canberra Gardener” to guide his plantings. The children climbed the cherry tree and filled their library bags with cherries and they helped shelling peas and were allowed to eat one pod for every 20 they shelled.

Warwick and Chris bought their house in 1990 and are now making a little working property growing produce and dabbling in urban homesteading. There is a constant supply of frozen stewed apple from Pink Lady and Gala apple trees for a crumble with homegrown rhubarb. Raspberries and redcurrants from a hedge last from one season to the next. Chris cooks and freezes silverbeet in muffin tins and makes spinach pie, affectionately known by their daughters as ‘slime pie’. The human salad bar includes herbs in a wicking bed by the deck and large cos lettuce and perpetual leeks.

From a dwarf Meyer lemon tree she makes cordial and squeezes and freezes lemon juice in mini milk bottles – this predominantly ends up in margaritas. She makes quince and fig pastes, jams, jellies and marmalades; zucchini pickles; tomato passata and sun-dried tomatoes from the Mighty Red variety from Rodney’s in Pialligo and Grosse Lisse from urban homesteader Annette Bunfield where Chris also swapped eggs for cranberry mead.