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Food foraging tips for Canberrans

Susan Parson

Winning combination: Kathryn Stuparich with quince jam made from foraged fruit with homemade rock cakes.
Winning combination: Kathryn Stuparich with quince jam made from foraged fruit with homemade rock cakes.Elesa Kurtz

Kathryn Stuparich, of Wanniassa, responded to a Kitchen Garden query last month when I asked if any readers forage the byways of the Canberra district.

She grew up in Canberra but foraging was a foreign concept to her until she associated with New Zealanders in Western Australia.

Now, as the mother of three and a keen permaculturist, she always has an eye on what is available when driving or walking. She teaches the children and a niece about mulberries and they are allowed to sample a few that hang over a back fence in Chapman. Even though plums are prolific on nature strips and in other public spaces she has yet to see anyone else enjoying the crops.

Learning how: Kathryn Stuparich's permaculture books, home-made kimchi and freshly-laid eggs.
Learning how: Kathryn Stuparich's permaculture books, home-made kimchi and freshly-laid eggs.Elesa Kurtz
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In Fadden, Stuparich was delighted to discover two apple trees, seemingly growing from cores that someone had thrown away. One is in a dense planting of bushes next to a bus stop and the other is beside a pathway frequented by children leaving school in the afternoons. There are also grapes dangling the length of a back fence on a walkway in Fadden.

Stuparich often walks along tracks that pass the backyards of houses backing on to reserves on the edges of suburbs and says it is easy to see that a lot of fruit goes unpicked. She says wouldn’t it be great if there was a way people who are keen could harvest unwanted fruit from gardens where the owners have lost interest or find it too difficult to pick lemons, stone fruits and olives.

At home in Wanniassa, Stuparich has raised vegetable beds, one filled with potatoes and a newly built chicken coop for two barnevelders and two hylines.

Free rein: Kathryn Stuparich working in Nicky Grigg's garden.
Free rein: Kathryn Stuparich working in Nicky Grigg's garden.Elesa Kurtz

Through the Canberra Organic Growers Society a Canberran had advertised for someone to come in regularly to get her garden back on track. Having done a Permaculture eXchange course, Stuparich followed up on the ad and she has worked for the garden owner, Nicky Grigg, of Macquarie, for four hours a week for the past year.

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“It is a fabulous arrangement,” says Stuparich. “Nicky gives me free rein and, as a result, she and her family have a constant supply of salad greens and herbs and some seasonal vegetables. Winter crops growing now are garlic, broad beans, rainbow chard, leeks, artichokes, fennel and celery and lots of coriander in pots. Nicky encourages me to take produce each week so my family of five reaps the benefits too.”

Wearing Steel Blue work boots for safety, a purchase chosen by her husband Jeremy Stuparich, Kathryn has replenished the soil in the Macquarie garden with large amounts of compost made on site. She followed an abridged version of the Berkeley hot compost method using horse and cow manure, household vegie waste, coffee grounds, comfrey, shredded newspaper, deciduous leaves, small amounts of old woodchip with its mycorrhizal fungi, crushed eggshells and rainwater. She has also set up black bins for weed tea. “I have a pile of fabulous books related to all "this sort of stuff’”, she says. Her nephew, Jeremy Roberts (aged 20), is a keen fisherman and he often gives Kathryn dead carp to bury in gardens to enrich the soil.

The next project is to rejuvenate the fruit trees that have been unpruned for some years. These include cherry, green gage plum, wild plum, nectarine, pear, lemon, quince, peach, cumquat, loquat and a mulberry that bore kilos of fruit this year having had a pile of horse manure unceremoniously piled under it waiting to be composted. The garden is a haven for birds and hosted an army of bats when the nectarines were ripe. Grigg was happy to have her garden featured as she is keen to ensure that others, and not just her own household, get the benefit of her garden.

For morning tea, Stuparich shared healthy rock cakes made with wholemeal flour, dates, currants and lots of mixed spice. They came with quince jam made in April from wild foraged fruit. She showed us kimchi recently made using organic garlic and cabbage at a Raw Kinetics fermented foods workshop held at Goolabri near Sutton. “There were 40 women in the room and it was excellent,” she says.

Susan Parsons is a Canberra writer.

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