Backyard boon

Virginia Meager and husband Ben Boyd are renting in Chapman, but their landlords have accommodated their backyard ventures.

These include building them a chicken coop, allowing them to dig up most of the back lawn for vegetable gardens, and also allowing them to keep bees.

Boyd is an entomologist and Meager is mad about honey and they thought keeping bees would help pollination of their vegetables. They did a backyard beekeeping course at the Canberra Institute of Technology run by the ACT Beekeepers Association, then built a hive in winter 2012 and introduced a feral swarm in October.

They also have six chickens and share the eggs with their landlords.

Recent crops of snowpeas, cucumbers, zucchini, rocket, borage, capsicum, chillies, carrots and pumpkins are about to be replaced with cavolo nero, cos lettuce, beetroot and silverbeet, which they are raising from seeds in dozens of pots.

It has been a good tomato season in their garden. The most prolific producer was costoluto fiorentino, a favourite for taste and texture. Its ribbed shape means it looks beautiful sliced in salads, while the French heirloom variety, jaunne flamme, has sweet orange fruit, perfect for the table. Brandywine vines have produced enormous fruit of a pale pink colour, and black krim and cherokee purple added a meaty texture to salads, but these three varieties all split after heavy rain.

They say disappointments among their tomatoes were varieties called legend and northern delight, while whippersnapper looked promising but shrivelled up and died. Late producers have been Siberian and St Pierre tomatoes.

Meager grew up in Beechworth in Victoria and moved to Canberra in 2000 to study at the Australian National University. After meeting and marrying Boyd, the couple moved to Sydney for three years, where they grew vegetables in the small courtyard of a Paddington terrace house.

Their inspiration for growing edibles was a trip to Italy in 2007 where they were struck by the ability of people to grow amazing edible gardens in very limited spaces such as a patch of arable land on a steep rocky hillside or a tiny balcony in a large city.

In 2009, they returned to Europe as Woofers (Willing Workers on Organic Farms) to work in Spain, Georgia, Ireland, the Netherlands and Italy, where they worked on an organic goat farm making cheese. The 12 months overseas solidified their passion for all things home-grown and sustainably produced, and they picked up a host of recipes.

They returned to Canberra 18 months ago. In Chapman they have added lots of compost and cow manure to the soil. They brought bootloads of manure from Meager's parents' farm in Beechworth.

Meager and Boyd love cooking and often spend weekends in the kitchen.

He is the sweets maker; his latest dessert is a fig and almond tart. Meager is new to preserving and this is her first year bottling yellow pear tomatoes. She uses a simple technique she learnt while working on an olive and almond farm in Andalucia, Spain.

With their hosts in Spain, Meager spent a few days in the kitchen up to her elbows in tomatoes. The tomatoes were blanched in boiling water to peel them, then the fruit was pushed whole into sterilised jars.

When the jars were nearly full, the lids were screwed on tightly and they were placed in a large pot with tea towels to prevent breakages. They were covered well with cold water, then brought to the boil and boiled for 20 minutes.

Susan Parsons is a Canberra writer.