This post I have shared parts of before when I was a thermomix consultant, but now I get the pleasure of sharing as a family day care educator and just in time. Thermomix announced yesterday that they have a bowl blade and lid set for only $29 when you buy a brand new Thermomix, so I would like to start with recommending a rock star consultant to you, Karen Bath from Plant to Table. Karen is an amazing consutlant and I would highly recommend her to purchse your thermomix through.
I digress, sorry. Thermomix, yes I love my thermomix for so many reasons and the children cook with it at least 3 times a week. But when buying all the herbs and other ingredients it can get pricy so we grow as much as we can. It gets the children in the garden learning about the smells and the various flavours and give them a sense of pride when their plants grow and we are able to harvest to use in our cooking experiences.
SO lets build a garden!
Where do you start?
My favourite shop is definitely #bunnings, you can get almost anything I want from Bunnings at the moment, my pantry and my garden are both prime examples of why Bunnings is a weekly shopping zone for me and even more so with family day care and the children in my service with $2 raisin toast and a playground, we really can't go wrong.
Bunnings has everything you need to attempt to extend beyond the herbs and spice you currently have in your pantry and not just that, there are so many recipes on #cookidoo that require fresh herbs for you to cook with and I guess the simplest example for this that I can share with you is Vegetable stock paste, in this basic recipe that you use all the time, you have #basil, #parsley, #sage and #rosemary as well as dried bay leaves, and it is a wonderful feeling to be able to go and gather these #herbs from the garden. But it doesn't stop there, #Vegetable stock paste is also filled with some of the easiest veggies to grow including #celery, #onion, #tomato, #carrot and #zucchini if you have enough space in your yard.
We have an amazing yard, and we had an amazing yard in Wagga too, but down here in SA our yard is about twice the size of what we had before. We have spent a lot of time planning and chopping and changing things to make it work especially as we collect animals and expand our family day care space with our working bee. Our back yard use to have a section called the waste land and now, it's definitely not that. We have a lamb/duck/chook yard up the back which is part of our horticulture and animal husbandry department. It's possibly a little excessive, but so much fun. I won't go into the working bee, as there is another couple of blog posts about that.
Our garden has been built with the idea of crop rotation, gardening for ingredients we use all the time and things the animals can eat which boost their diet. While filling our beds, we have filled with the saw dust from the indoor duck pen which is emptied/changed every 2nd day, we have mixed this with some seaweed solution and dynamic lifter to get the maximum amount of boosting nutrient possible. So this is slow going but once topped with soil, we have a huge amount of sprouting seeds to plant and then mulch around. And now with our amazing ducklings, we have a natural snail remover preventing the poisoning of snails and slugs and secondary poisoning to other animals (massive safety issues with snail baits we have never ever used them).
I just want to point out here that I am not a professional gardener, I just enjoy being in the garden and am raising my little girl to love the garden and great outdoors also.
Addy loves being outside in the garden, she can often be found eating parsley, lemon grass or coriander!
Check out our front garden development below!
What to grow?
When thinking about what you are going to plant, my best advice is to talk to your local Bunnings staff, or local nursery about what will grow in your area. Think about the recipes you make on a regular basis and what herbs you use in them.
Some of favourites in our house are:
Chicken Veloute, and it use tarragon leaves to sprinkle over the chicken,
Vegetable Stock Paste
Chicken stock paste
Chunky Bolognese, which uses basil and oregano
Thai Green curry paste which uses chilli, coriander, lemon grass, kaffir lime leaves.
So to start think about 2 things, what space have you got to use and what are your favourite recipes and what fresh herbs do those recipes use?
Why grow it? How can it save money?
If you have ever made Thai green curry paste or Thai red curry paste, you would have had to purchase lemon grass stalks, they are expensive, I honestly couldn't believe how expensive these are! Last time I had to buy lemon grass stalks they cost me $4 each and Thai red curry paste takes 4 stalks, eeeew $16 on one ingredient is quiet expensive, but if you can grow it yourself, it really becomes a very affordable and budget friendly staple to have in your fridge.
But that's just lemon grass stalks, so lets look at what other herbs are easy to grow and a massive saving! looking at our local big supermarkets, its usually approximately $5 for 2 small sleeves of various herbs such as curry leaves, parsley, basil and coriander, imagine spending that $5 on a seedling which is going to grow and continue to grow and replenish its supply of leaves/sprigs for you too cook with! It may not seem like a lot but when you add up all the sleeves of herbs you buy over a year, I guarantee it will ad up extremely quickly!
Also think about the dried herbs you use, how much do they cost you?
Currently the list is so extensive of what we are growing, it's wonderful! Think about what I you would do with so many sprigs of various herbs. Did you know you can get a dehydrator from Kogan or even catch of the day for under $100, that means you can have a never ending supply of dried herbs to use and never need to buy them again! Instead of using a dehydrator, you could also just get some cotton or hessian string and tie bunches of your herbs together and hang them to dry out in your kitchen!
What about the gift of staples, how often do you struggle to think of a budget friendly gift to give to friends and family, small jars from Kmart are $6 for a pack of 8, and filling them with various home made spice mixes and curry pastes etc makes a great gift and is also the gift that keeps on giving, and think about how you could be inspiring someone who only cooks with a jarred pre-made sauces to experiment a little bit more in the kitchen!
I love my garden as I am sure you can tell, and I would love to help you get your child friendly Thermomix inspired garden under construction, feel free to contact me with your questions and please don't hesitate to share you garden with me!
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