John and Lorraine Bockwinkel, of Queanbeyan, support local growers and are members of Slow Food, which they joined seven years ago after visiting a native food garden in Holder and saw Warrigal greens growing.
Attractive, edible and hardy, it thrives in their garden, where John Bockwinkel has built a pizza oven, a six-month labour of ingenuity, and there is an outdoor, covered dining area.
John Bockwinkel is proud of his huge block planting of corn that is ready for harvesting; there is a large bed devoted to Dutch cream potatoes and another crowded with berry canes. They have frilled lettuce, rocket, chard, spinach and tomatoes for salads. Among uncommon herbs they grow curry leaves, kaffir lime leaves and comfrey. They have harvested Melbourne and dynamite varieties of garlic from Diggers, which are now strung and hanging to cure.
Next to a wall decorated with found objects, Lorraine Bockwinkel has planted cos lettuce in a large round bowl as a still life. Discarded laundry tubs and an old toilet are used as planters for herbs and shallots. Lorraine Bockwinkel tipped an old packet of chia seeds from the pantry into a garden bed and the plants grew. The chooks love it and you can make tea from the leaves.
John Bockwinkel has been brewing for 25 years and is a member of Canberra Brewers' Club. He grows hops that climb strings beside a wall of the house. The cellar is filled with brewing equipment and a fridge with taps from which he pours homemade Australian pale ale, though Indian pale ales and stouts are his favourite styles of beer. Though he was raised in Canberra, his parents are German migrants, and his father was an experimental brewer who made a hole in a squash, filled the vegetable with sugar and water, popped the squash ''cork'' back in and let it ferment into pumpkin wine.
Because they live on a hillside the Bockwinkels had very poor soil. Over the past two decades they have built raised garden beds and filled them with mushroom compost, chook manure and chook house litter. They have eight bags of Gunning Gold sheep manure, ordered from Gunning School, delivered every August to dress the garden in spring.
The hen house, made by John Bockwinkel and with its own sprinkler system, is home to six chooks, all red hyliners, which lay five eggs a day.
After making a sand mould, then the main shape from heatproof concrete with an insulation layer, the pizza oven was rendered and ready for cooking. Apart from pizzas, the Bockwinkels use it for garlic prawns in a cast iron pan, and for stuffed mushrooms. It is extremely hot at the beginning and when they throw some butter in a pan with homegrown asparagus they must stand back as it cooks.
Lorraine came to Canberra from Adelaide and married John Bockwinkel in 1983, when they bought their first home in Queanbeyan. She laminates favourite recipes and keeps them handy, and has a folder of handwritten, cut-out and copied recipes waiting to be tried. Middle Eastern cuisine is a family preference, but her summer feta, rocket and zucchini slice includes all that is good from the garden - spring onions, zucchini, Warrigal greens, young kale (pictured), basil, baby spinach, rocket, eggs, gluten-free self-raising flour, olive oil, Greek-style feta and grated cheddar cheese.
The Bockwinkels quoted words from Leonard Cohen: ''There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.'' They were referring to a towering self-sown cherry tomato plant, covered with fruit, which grew in a crack in the paving in their outdoor living area next to their kitchen door.