Susan Parsons: Greg Blood shares kitchen garden secrets

Greg Blood came to Canberra as a child and has lived here for more than 50 years. In 1986, he moved into a new house in Florey and undertook an associate diploma in horticulture at CIT part-time. His parents grew tomatoes, and that gave him the taste for home-grown vegetables. He is also an advocate for using seasonal food and avoiding vegetables from overseas and he enjoys giving produce to family and friends so they can taste new flavours and fresh, organic food.

Summer shade restrictions led to Blood getting a small plot (30 square metres) at the Cook Community Garden, where he could raise additional crops for storage and preserving. From the longest day of the year (December 21), he grows red onions and, in spring, he plants butternut pumpkins, King Edward and Pontiac potatoes and Red Globe beetroot. These crops jostle with red cabbage, zucchini, spinach and a large rhubarb plant.

To improve the soil, he uses cow manure with additions of Seamungus, an organic fertiliser containing chicken manure. He has small compost bins at home and at Cook where, in summer, he waters about three times a week so lucerne hay is used as mulch.

In October, Blood got three red-feathered chickens, which started laying in early December. Called Julia, Shirley and Lucille, they are a cross between Rhode Island Red and Australorp, the former breed laying for a longer period and having a good nature. Hay and manure from the chooks will be composted at the Cook plot.

Blood fell in love with tomatoes after eating an heirloom tomato salad at Grazing in Gundaroo. Each tomato has a different flavor and level of acidity and colours. He says you then only need a good olive oil and sea salt. This season he sourced fourteen varieties from local nurseries and Murrumbateman Field Day suppliers.

The tomatoes are grown in raised beds at home so they can be watered daily and their names sound like the words of a song. He has Gold Dust, Amish Paste, Apollo Improved, Saint Pierre, Green Zebra, Rouge de Marmande, Low Acid Yellow, Indigo Ruby, Black Krim, Carmelo, Tigerella and Blood Oath.

During our visit, there were Purple King beans, cucumbers, capsicum, mizuna, basil and parsley in the beds. There are also Eureka lemon and lime trees, a black Genoa fig tree and a small plot of raspberry bushes that provide berries from early December to late January.

Having an abundant supply of beetroot, Blood uses Donna Hay's recipe (on the internet) to which he adds apple for beetroot relish. He makes onion marmalade to a recipe from an Australian Women's Weekly preserves cookbook and Maggie Beer's tomato sauce from her cookbook Harvest, which is bright orange from additions of carrot, celery, an onion and verjuice. He buys a variety of jars from a Queensland source and says this makes preserving easy in terms of clean jars at a consistent size. Fennel, grown in the Cook plot, is baked in olive oil and lemon juice and the chooks love the fennel fronds.

During the past six months, Blood has helped Calvary Retirement Village develop a labyrinth garden for its residents. It is planted with blue fescue and westringia and is in a setting of established eucalypts. He is also a volunteer at the National Arboretum, helping measure tree growth, where his favourite tree is the Japanese snowbell (Styrax japonicus), which he also grows at home.

Though Blood's fig tree is young, it is supplying a good crop but a friend of his in Ainslie has a large 50-year-old fig tree and, in March, he collects several buckets of the fruit that he preserves to an easy recipe. They make a great dessert.

Easy preserved figs

Serves 8-10.

3kg firm, black figs
6 cups sugar
1 cup water

Wash figs. Use a toothpick or skewer to prick them all over so they don't split during the cooking process. Bring the sugar, water and vinegar to the boil, add the figs to the liquid, cover and simmer very gently for about two hours – timing will depend on ripeness of the figs. Be careful not to overcook. Sterilise jars, ladle in figs and syrup, and seal.

Susan Parsons is a Canberra writer.