An Eco Farm visit - Long Breath Farm

Brendan explains putting a water channel along a contour line, 

to distribute water evenly across the slope to 'irrigate' a new orchard.

Long is the Chinese word for dragon, and at Long Breath Farm on the slopes of the Waitakere Ranges in west Auckland the mists swirl in long wisps – the breath of the dragon. It is a good pun of a name as well, because seeing what Brendan and Li-Chen Hoare are creating on their property is enough to make one draw a long breath. 

Brendan gave me a very quick tour of the farm on the morning of May 13, before we went back to our respective organic stalls (Biogro and the Soil and Health Association/Organic NZ) at the Green Living Show. Long Breath Farm is on a series of ancient gentle north-facing step-like slumps. The land was covered in native forest for millenia, but sometime in the twentieth century this was cut down and replaced by paddocks for grazing and blocks of pine trees. Brendan and Li-Chen are trying to reinstate the polyculture production system of East Asia, based on forests and birds (and the odd pig). They are now engaged in a conversion process which will see all the land return to forest – some of it native, some of it producing fine timber, and some of it producing a great variety of food in a sustainable way.

 Ducks and fish in the pond, and a healthy stand of bamboo

The first step in the process has been to work with the abundant water resource below the land, channeling and directing it in ways which do the most good and the least harm. When he first studied horticulture Brendan was taught – first you drain the land, then you irrigate it. Both these activities require a lot of energy and expensive equipment, and both are completely unnecessary if a more intelligent and informed approach to working with water is adopted. Brendan has studied the methods of Asian farmers who have been successfully growing rice and other crops on slopes for centuries, without either draining or irrigating in the modern Western sense. He has adopted their techniques for spreading ground water out across the land, so that it both 'irrigates' everything grown there, and 'drains' away from places where it could pool and become a problem. 

These techniques include channeling water across appropriate contour lines, damming water at regular intervals in creeks, making ponds that can also be put to food-producing uses (fish, ducks, water vegetables), and using trees to soak up water in potentially marshy spots. Native trees are good in this last role, but they do not thrive if planted in the open. So Brendan plants fast-growing exotic deciduous trees like poplars, willows and alders (which can later be used for firewood or mulch) to create a shady canopy for slower-growing natives like totara and kahikatea. 

This 'whole landscape' approach to growing is so different from the industrial agriculture approach - isolating a piece of land and beating it into the size, shape and water content required for a mono-culture of a particular grain, fruit or vegetable – that it can be hard to believe that Long Breath Farm really is a farm producing a lot of food (and wood), since it looks nothing like the rectangular and rather barren shapes we associate with farms in New Zealand. Yet as I watched Brendan gather tamarillos from under a well-laden tree I could see for myself that taking a holistic approach works, and works well.

 Brendan gathers abundant tamarillos

Visit Long Breath Farm

Brendan and Li-chen run tours, workshops and training opportunities from Long Breath Farm. Contact Brendan on 09 8328986 or email on hoareb@gmail.com for more information.

Grow Together - a new food growing and sharing resource

Some of the gardeners at the Smith St community garden in Linwood, Christchurch, which is run by the Te Whare Roimata Trust

I was in Auckland at the Green Living Show last weekend, and there I met Katherine Smith of the Community Food Network. According to its website, Grow Together:

The Community Food Network was started in November 2011 with the aim of inspiring New Zealanders to take on the challenge of helping to provide nutritious food for themselves and other New Zealanders in need. The aim is for this website to act as a link between people who are hungry and those who want to help alleviate this growing social problem.

The Community Food Network is about empowering people to take responsibility for growing some food for themselves, their families, and to share surplus produce with friends, neighbours and community groups.

I think this is a very timely and important initiative, and already the website has lots of links to food growing groups, and sources of food growing information. I will be doing what I can to help Katherine build this great community resource. Meanwhile I have made a link to it so that you can check it out for yourself, and perhaps contribute to it as well.

A family harvests food for dinner at Kelmarna Gardens, Herne Bay, Auckland

Food with good intentions - Farang Green Curry

Kaffir lime leaves are an important part of a green curry paste,

and can be grown outside even in Canterbury.

Last Sunday I went to a one day meditation retreat in Christchurch. It was led by Ajahn Chandako, the abbott of the Vimutti Buddhist Monastery (which is just south of Auckland). The theme of the retreat was 'Stability in the Heart'. This is something that many Cantabrians have needed to cultivate since the ground started being so unstable.

As well as sitting and walking in silence, and listening to a very helpful talk on the theme of the retreat (my favourite line - “You get to unshakeable peace by being at peace with being shaken.”) we also shared a vegetarian potluck lunch. There was a tempting array of different kinds of hot rice, with flavourings, rice salads, mixed vegetable salads, and a range of fresh and cooked chutneys and relishes.

Before we started eating Ajahn Chandako talked about the intentions with which the food was made and shared, and how important that was both to the quality of the food and to our appreciation of it. With these words in mind I ate my meal slowly, and thought about how good it tasted because of the care people had put into preparing it. They had intended the dishes they made to both nourish and please the people who ate them.

Most of the people on the retreat I had never seen before, and will probably never see again. Yet I know by eating their food that everyone who brought a dish to the retreat made it with good intentions, and each one will have her or his own back story of making and perhaps even growing food at home to nourish others. As some of the people on the retreat were of Thai or Sri Lankan origin, their back stories and the food they make at home will be very different from mine. Yet wholesome intentions produce wholesome food, regardless of whether it is curry, rice and chutneys or the leek and cheese flan with roast potatoes and green salad that I made for dinner the other night.(Whereas food that is made just to make money - think fast food chains - is not wholesome in intent or quality.)

For my own contribution to the potluck lunch I decided to try making a Thai green curry, putting together a couple of recipes I found on the Web and improvising mightily because the main green ingredients in the proper Thai version (coriander and basil leaves) just don't grow in my garden at this time of year. I thought I would see if rocket and Japanese brassica (komatsuna, mizuna) leaves would do instead, with a few nasturtium leaves and some laksa leaves (also known as Vietnamese mint or Polygonum odoratum). The laksa leaves grow in a pot in my glasshouse, along with the lemon grass which is essential to a green curry paste, and it was there that I also found a couple of small (but plenty hot) green chillis. My other exotic ingredient from the garden (or glasshouse) was kaffir lime leaves. I have had a kaffir lime bush growing in a large pot in a frost-free part of the garden for several years. It doesn't thrive the way it would in Thailand, but with enough water it produces lots of deliciously-scented leaves.

I thought the finished curry was very tasty, but decided that I couldn't really call it a Thai curry since I used non-traditional ingredients. So I have called it a farang curry – farang is the Thai word for foreigner. My intentions in creating the recipe were good – you be the judge of how good the result was.

FARANG GREEN CURRY

Ingredients – for the Curry Paste

2 t coriander seeds

½ t cumin seeds

½ t black peppercorns

2-3 stalks lemon grass, finely chopped

2-3 kaffir lime leaves, finely chopped (or zest and juice of 1 lime)

3 cloves garlic, peeled and finely chopped

a piece of fresh ginger (thumb-sized) peeled and finely chopped

2-4 finely chopped fresh green chillis (to taste)

1 ½ cups spicy green leaves

e.g. Japanese brassicas (mizuna, komatsuna, etc.) and rocket, coriander and/or basil if available,

and optional small amounts of laksa leaf, nasturtium leaf and other green leaves, coarsely chopped

1 small onion, finely chopped

2 T shoyu or tamari

1 t brown sugar

1 T peanut oil

½ t salt

Method – for the Curry Paste

Grind the seeds and peppercorns in a grinder or mortar until half ground.

Add the lemongrass, lime leaves, garlic and chillis, and grind everything to a fine paste.

Put the green leaves, onion, shoyu, peanut oil and salt in a blender or food processor;

add the paste and stir in.

Whizz everything until it is a green paste.

Ingredients – for the curry

3-4 cups seasonal vegetables, cut in small pieces and cooked in 1 ½ cups water until just tender

(save the cooking water)

(In autumn and winter use a selection of cauliflower or broccoli divided into florets, finely sliced carrots, a sliced leek, and squash, pumpkin and/or kumara cut into in small cubes;

in spring and summer use sliced zucchini, whole sugarsnap peas, sliced green beans, sliced asparagus, cubed eggplant, cubed squash)

OR

3 cups vegetables and 1 cup firm tofu, cut into cubes

2 T oil, for frying

4 tablespoons cashew nuts (optional)

1 400ml can coconut milk

½ cup vegetable stock (cooking water from the vegetables)

1 whole kaffir lime leaf

Method - for the curry

In a large wok or frying pan, fry the cashew nuts (if using) in the oil, until golden brown.

(If you have a red or orange capiscum handy, it can be sliced and fried after the nuts.)

Add the curry paste and fry it, stirring, for 1-2 minutes.

Add the cooked vegetables and roll them in the curry paste.

Lastly, add the coconut milk, vegetable stock and kaffir lime leaf, and simmer the curry gently for 5 minutes until it is hot. Do not let it boil, or the coconut milk will curdle. If more liquid is needed, add extra vegetable cooking water.

To serve, sprinkle with roughly-chopped basil or coriander leaves, if available.

Food@Home - the author on tour

 Food@Home being launched - I grew the pumpkin and baked the cake, 

and the good folk at the university bookshop did all the rest.

Food@Home was successfully launched on May 1^st at the Canterbury University bookshop (read more about it on Beattie's BookBlog).

Now it is time to take it out into the wider world, so trips to Auckland (May 11-13), Wellington (June 2) and Oamaru (June 22) have been confirmed so far, and I'm open to offers to go to other places if enough people want me to be there to talk about the message in the book, and can pay my expenses to get there. (That's what I'll be doing at the Transition Town Oamaru meeting on June 22.) I will also be speaking in Christchurch on June 8 as part of the Christchurch City Library's Matariki programme.

I'd like it if my trips away from home could do some good for your community as well as my book sales, so if you think your school, environmental group or other good cause could use me as a speaker at a fundraising event, then I am available for a speaking fee of $100, plus travel expenses, AND I will donate $3 from every copy of Food@Home sold at the event towards your cause. I can speak without props, OR give a powerpoint presentation, OR lead a garden ramble (you provide the garden), OR take a gardening or cooking workshop (fee negotiable). (I can even sing my song composed especially for the book launch – The Very Best Food – but you will have to join in on the chorus.)

Please check the Food@Home - book and author on tour page on this blog for details on where I will be when over the next two months, and come and say hello if you can. To organise a speaking engagement with me, please write to ecogardenernz @ gmail.com or call 03 329 4588.