Best of all,
Canonigos - Lambs lettuce, the enchanted leaves that Rapunzel's mother stole. I
understand her craving, though perhaps the promise of her unborn child in
exchange for a plate of the mythical salad was a too high a price!
Small wonder
then, that I was excited when Megan McCarthy joined our team at Boschendal.
Megan, whose
long legged form can be seen striding purposefully through the gardens at the
werf in dungarees and a blue lumberjack shirt, is our resident horticulturist.
She is responsible for making us eat our greens...yellows, reds, blues and
oranges! Megan has an encyclopaedic knowledge of vegetables and their favoured
seasons and appears to have freakishly green thumbs as well.
At the
insistence of Rob Lundie, who wanted to create a commercial vegetable garden
that formed a changing and visual art landscape, showing the beauty behind
agriculture, Jan Blok, our landscaper, pulled out his brushes and watercolours
and together they have turned a ripped out pear orchard into a kaleidoscope of
tiny leaves. Every day the colours of our garden grow stronger as these
impossibly tender plantlets defy the torrential rain and blustering wind and
impose themselves on the earth.
Sourcing
untreated seeds from organic suppliers wherever possible, Megan's plant list
reads like the who's who directory of the veg garden. From Artichokes to
Zucchini, they are all represented, with a special nod to our heirloom and
heritage varieties, rescued from delicious obscurity by chefs like our own
Christiaan Campbell - never one to use a plain carrot if he can find one in
purple or candy stripes!
For anyone who
has experimented with growing their own, the biggest obstacles to a satisfying
harvest are the soil and the
critters. My own
efforts have invariably been rewarded with a fine crop of plump green
caterpillars and a half empty trug of tiny misshapen vegetables.
Happily, Megan
is generous with her knowledge and excited to share it with our guests and our
local communities. She is positively evangelistic in her belief that good,
inexpensive nutrition and optimal soil health are but a trowel and some elbow
grease away. She will be setting up seed banks, composting workshops and skill
sharing programmes and instructing us all in the application and management of
good bacteria, some of which are sitting in a box behind me as I write (no
cause for concern, apparently- even if they do escape they are good for both me
and the environment)!
For those of us
who are not quite up for the challenge, she will be packing our produce for
sale in the farm shop and for those of us who like to feel we have had some
hand in foraging for and feeding our families, we will be able to pick our own
and pretend!!
So…First up - the
soil. Mulching , Micro organisms, Minerals.
Using techniques
drawn from permaculture and biodynamic farming, Megan employs companion
planting and nitrogen fixing cover crops like yarrow, comfrey and serradella to
draw minerals up to the surface and make them accessible to her baby veggies.
She makes foliar feed tea from their composted remains to drench the plants in
nitrogen rich liquid. Mulching reduces her need to till, irrigate or compost
and protects the younger sprouts from the elements.
The
microorganisms in Megan's garden have never had it so good! Far from waging war
on them unilaterally, she uses organic products which encourage their growth
and help restore the balance of the soil system.
The critters are
pitted against or with each other. Ladybirds v aphids, ducks v snails. The
chickens add their beneficial droppings to the soil and the worms, if they
avoid the chickens, process our restaurant waste into a rich ganache of micro
nutrients .
It all adds up
to seriously nutritious and delicious vegetables all grown with love and within
sight of the table where they will be served.