Welcome to market

Holly!* (Because it’s Christmas, after all).

Slowly I am painting my way through the seasons, in an attempt to reconnect with the root of the matter when it comes to life on this earth-and-water ball of ours spinning through space, which we call home. My goal is to create a kind of illustrated perennial almanac, a diary that celebrates the seasons and becomes a guidebook for living seasonally, even in the city, via gardens, farmers markets, the wilds and the kitchen. ⁣⁣

This is a personal project, something I’m doing for myself because I want to learn, but hopefully (if I do it right) it might be useful or inspirational for others, too. ⁣With that in mind, I’m sending my ‘almanac’ out into the world, one glorious, seasonal produce at a time, and that’s what I want to tell you about today.

I called this project “A Year at the Market” but in reality, it has been more than two years in the making. The seeds of this idea came while I was living with my children in Dinan, a rural village in France. Shopping in our village was done the traditional way, at the farmers markets each Thursday morning. Here, people from the entire village - and all the outlying villages - would come to buy all the fresh vegetables, fruit, cheese, meat, fish and eggs they needed for the week to come.

I learned to arrive early to get my hands on the freshest produce, (although this came with its own set of hazards because all the French grandmothers likewise got to the markets early, and nobody wants to come between a French grandmother and the best looking leek on the table). 

At first, navigating the markets was as confusing as it was frustrating. I’d arrive clutching a shopping list in my fist, all the ingredients for all the meals I’d hoped to cook that week, and make my way in a somewhat haphazard fashion from stall to stall, searching for everything I needed. Only to realise half way into my shop that a third of the ingredients on my list were not in season, and another third were not even grown in this region. 

(One week, after the children and I had been collecting chestnuts, I tried to buy Brussels sprouts so that we could pan-fry them together with the chestnuts and some local bacon. When I asked one of the farmers if they had sprouts, she said, “they’re not in season… not for two weeks!” I realised that the food available at the market didn’t change season-by-season, it literally changed week-by-week.) 

As the weeks and months went by, I learned that pre-planned menus and shopping lists were all-but useless. If I wanted to shop locally and eat seasonally (and I did), I’d have to learn to accept whatever happened to be available at the farmers market on each particular week, and build a week’s worth of family menus from the best and freshest food I could find. 

The problem was that I’m not a naturally confident cook, and certainly didn’t have a ready-made repertoire of meals and recipes that could be planned on the fly, depending on whether tomatoes were good this week, or mussels, or romanesco broccoli, or spring lamb. 

I found myself wishing there was some kind of field guide that could help me navigate the seasonal markets, in the moment. Not a recipe book to look up when I got home, but one that could tell me - while I was at the market - how to choose the best of the produce I was looking at,  what to expect from it, what to cook with it (so I could plan my meals while I shopped), and what to do with it if I happened to buy too much, and couldn’t eat it all in time. 

When I couldn’t find the kind of field guide I was looking for, the idea began to bloom in my mind to create one myself and that, finally (after two years!) is what I’ve done.

I’ve written a pocket-sized guide to shopping seasonally and navigating the farmers markets with confidence, called Welcome to Market, and am in the process of researching, writing and illustrating a new “Farmers Market Field Guide” to complement Welcome to Market, every month. Each new Field Guide celebrates one particular fruit or vegetable, lovingly illustrated in the botanical style of the holly and asparagus you see here, and tells a full story, from when it’s in season, how to choose the best, and what to do with it.

The whole project is called ‘A Year at the Market’ and I’m super excited and inspired by the idea, which is why I’m sharing this story with you today.

If you’d like to come on this journey with me, I’ve created a subscription service through which you can receive a host of seasonal shopping resources, as well as a new Field Guide every month. I’ve kept the price very low - basically it’s what it costs me to produce it (not including my time, which is yours for free) - because this is not a business venture, but something I’m incredibly passionate about, and want to share with likeminded people.

In all honesty, I’m probably tapping into my childhood. When we were little, our local supermarket began selling an encyclopaedia series, month by month. We weren’t a family that could afford the classic Encyclopaedia Brittanica, so, instead, we would purchase a new volume of the supermarket encyclopaedia every month. Over time, we built up a wonderful resource that saw me through almost a decade of school projects on everything from wool to marine biology to a history of electricity, and we gained a sense of achievement as each red-spited issue was released by the supermarket and added to our bookshelf.

I want to create the same sense of value and curation for you, by posting a new Field Guide to you every month.

There are three things I’d love to know from you, if you have the time (if you received this post via email, just click the title or “view original post” to see it on a website and a comment box will be available):

1. If you have a preserving recipe that you absolutely swear by, I’d love to hear it. I’m testing recipes for my field guides because I want to provide people with ways to use all that wonderful produce if they buy too much at the farmers market, or have a glut in their own garden

2. Have you come across a fruit or veggie at the shops or the market and you really wish you knew more about it, and what to do with. it? Let me know in the comments here. I’m hoping to cover just about everything over time, but I’ll prioritise requests

3. If you’d like to join me for A Year at the Market, there’s more information about this 12-month subscription (and all the lovely gifts I’ll personally post to you) in my shop, here. The first issue will be posted mid-to-late January, but there’s also a printable gift certificate if you want to give this subscription to someone as a thoughtful Christmas gift

*ps. I painted this sprig of holly at beginning of winter where I live in Melbourne. Snow season started the same weekend, and holly was sending out bright red berry-beacons of cheer on neighbourhood hedges everywhere. Near our apartment in Dinan, France, there was a famous Victorian-era holly tree with variegated leaves, just like this one. Holly berries are poisonous, but ancient herbalist Culpepper says the leaves and bark are good to heal broken bones (not that I’ll be trying either any time soon).

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Christmas in a time of Covid

After one of the most difficult years most of us can remember, I think we could all do with a little moment to stop and celebrate, don’t you? This online magazine - a bumper version of my monthly newsletter - contains ideas for celebrating and sharing the joys of Christmas, even if you are in lockdown; mindful gift ideas and DIY projects; tips for writing Christmas letters; 12 festive envelope templates for you to colour in and post; and loads more.

Flip through the magazine below (if you hover over the magazine window you’ll see an option to make it full screen), or click “download” to print and read it the old-fashioned way, and to use any of the resources and templates inside. (Give it time if it’s slow to download - it’s a big file!)

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Can you hear the garden singing?

When the world closed back in March, and the us of our familiar communities, neighbourhoods and even entire nations was reduced to the surprising smallness of the we, or me, that inhabited each of our individual homes, Nature welcomed us like a mother hen.

We tended seedlings on window-sills, pruned back overblown autumn branches, and finally learned how to pronounce the names of our house plants. (It’s Monstera Deliciosa, not Monsteria). I would rest my palms on the soil beneath the Japanese maple tree, fingers outspread, and imagine the way the soil connected me to the trees and through them the root systems and through those root systems all the other root systems that spread across my yard and my neighbourhood and beyond the closed borders, all of us belonging to one giant ecosystem, even while we were apart.

At night I would look up at the moon and imagine all the other people alone in their houses, looking up at that same moon.

(Outside our tiny lockdown worlds, Nature didn’t weaken her embrace. Ducks swam in the Trevi Fountain. A herd of wild goats wandered through a Welsh town. The skies above some of the world’s most polluted cities shone clean and clear.)

Nature, and in particular for many people their gardens, became a place of solace. Even more so than usual. For me and my children, our tiny garden became the one place where we could go outside for as long as we wanted to. When the weather was warm we’d carry their schoolbooks into the garden and read on the grass. We’d eat out there when we could, and together tend to the plants: pruning the roses, netting the fruit trees to protect them from marauding possums, and planting rows of tiny carrot seedlings, celery, and Brussels sprouts.

Now spring is here and though my garden was late to bloom this season, it is well and truly making up for lost time now, showering us with an abundance of colour and perfume. For a little while I congratulated myself on a gardening job inadvertently well done, until I began to notice the roses blooming in front gardens and over fences and along road-edges, all over my city.

Nature is having a moment.

I don’t know if it is the extra love and attention, the cleaner air and water, a sign of resilience after last year’s climate disaster, or something altogether different, but right now, it seems to me that the gardens of Melbourne are singing.

I shared this thought on Instagram recently and was surprised by the sheer number of people - not just in Melbourne but all over Australia and the world - who are noticing the same thing.

There is such sweet solace in a garden. Even in the tiniest of gardens, just a pretty pot with one happy houseplant growing, changing, reaching up and out - ever toward the light - and I have never been more grateful for my little pocket of green-and-rainbow than I am right now.

Can you hear the gardens singing?

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It's just a carrot

Except of course it was never going to be “just a carrot.”

Last weekend when our Premier announced that hairdressers could start working again, my husband booked a haircut for the very next day. “It’s symbolic,” he joked. “My curly hair is a symbol of our oppression.” I laughed at him, but I could also relate. Here in Melbourne we have been locked up for so long that everyone is starting to lose perspective, and the little things can feel very big indeed.

My husband has out-of-control hair. I have shingles. My kids are most probably illiterate.

And we are the lucky ones: we have steady incomes, we have each other, and we have our health (although just between us, shingles suck).

Not long ago I bought a take-away coffee from a cafe around the corner from our house, and the owner started to cry. She said, “I don’t know what I’ll do if we’re not allowed to open soon. I haven’t been able to pay my rent for seven months, and I’ve put everything I have into this business. I’m in my 60s and I live alone. What else am I going to do?” She said that if her landlord insisted she pay the missed rent she’d be sleeping “out there,” and gestured to a park bench, still wrapped in “Do not cross” tape because we were not supposed to sit down in public places.

For my part, ever since our second-wave lockdowns tightened in July, I began nursing a fantasy of going out for a walk, and not stopping. Not stopping when my one hour outside allowance was up. Not stopping when I reached the five-kilometre line that we were not supposed to cross. Not even stopping after the nightly 8pm curfew. In my imagination I just kept on walking, and strangers spoke of me as “that crazy, middle-aged lady who is walking her way around the world.” Kind of like Forrest Gump (except that I wanted to walk, not run, because I’m not that crazy).

I almost called this blog post “Run, Forrest!”

I ordered carrot seeds from the Diggers Club back during the first lockdown in March and, when they arrived about two months later (since everyone else seemed to have had the same idea at the same time), I popped them into soil in old egg cartons, and hoped they’d germinate.

Those baby carrots had to survive the entire winter outside in the ground, having their feathery tops battered by winds and munched by marauding possums, overcrowding one another because I didn’t bother to separate the seeds the way I was supposed to, and being generally neglected as my every waking hour was consumed by fitting overdue work commitments in around school-at-home for two children, while indulging fantasies of going for a walk and not stopping.

Yesterday I pulled the carrots out of the ground to make room for snapdragons (priorities, my friend!). Most of them were still small, many of them curly or split in two or twined around each other like lovers. But a few were long and straight like this one here. The children said, “Those look like they come from a shop!” in awed tones, as though this was the highest of possible achievements.

If my husband’s hair is symbolic of our oppression, my carrots are symbolic of our resilience. We can grow, even when the conditions are not… quite… ideal. And we might not all be big and strong: some of us feel very small. Some of us feel split, or wonky, or twisted. But we can still grow, and we still have the capacity to nurture and nourish each other.

The news isn’t looking great here, and the optimism we ventured to feel a week or two ago that things might open up quickly is starting to fade before it even had a chance to bloom, but tomorrow I’m going to make a Sunday roast. I’ll sauté the carrots (straight ones, baby ones and curly-wurly ones all) in butter and orange and honey. And when I serve them up I’ll tell my family they are not just carrots. They are a reminder of our capacity to survive, and grow.

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Apples, autumn, and broken hearts

It was a poignant moment. We were out for our daily exercise, the children rolling their scooters through piles of leaves and whorling autumn winds, turning the footpath into a miniature circus maximus (a circus minimus?) for their two-wheeled chariots.

There was a letter for Scout in the post and seeing it reminded me that she had a birthday coming up. (Eight! How did that happen?) And that for once, I’d have to plan ahead, this time relying on the already slow post for any birthday shopping.

I stopped her mid-chariot race and asked her to think about what she might like for her birthday this year (“no promises, but you can always let me know”). “OK!” she agreed, then scooted off again with her brother, no doubt happily dreaming up a wish-list of plastic monstrosities and impractical clothes. I braced myself.

Several more blocks of walking and scooting passed, several more mountains of leaves, but surprisingly, the requests failed to come. “I just can’t think of anything,” she told me at last.

On we scooted, more races, still more leaves, until she circled back to me again. “Mum, I don’t know what I want for my birthday because the only thing I actually want, I can’t have.

“I just want my friends.”

And that right there is how hearts break.

But in happier news…

Lingering autumn sunshine at the start of this week enticed us back out into the garden, where I cut, trimmed and coaxed all that was end-of-summer and overblown back into order, ready for the winter sleep. I lifted out the dahlia tubers, cut back the salvia, pulled out the over-zealous wild violets, gently pruned the standard roses and ruthlessly pruned the climbing roses. Out came the elderberry suckers, finished sunflowers and dried-up cosmos. In went the sprouted celery-bottom, a winter tarragon, and a neat row of garlic cloves.

All of the above was completed in stages, in between me being escorted away in gentle but no-uncertain terms by the bees, all of whom appeared to be knee deep in a case of autumn-mania. They’d permit me to dig and cut for only so long, before one would start circling my face, buzzing and nudging until I hot-footed it back to the house. There I’d hesitate in the shade of the balcony, calling out futilely, “You’ll thank me in the spring!” before venturing, inch by inch, back to the garden bed. Ten minutes later, we’d start the whole parade all over again.

When the bees permitted, I discovered the first spikes of daffodils, bluebells or snowflakes - I’m not sure which, it could be any combination of the three - peeping up from among the fallen leaves, harbingers of future colour.

A day or two earlier, on the weekend, Scout and I had walked to CERES in what was frankly freezing rain. It was such a pleasant walk together despite the weather, holding hands and chatting about everything and nothing. Once there we picked up a new pair of gardening gloves for her (which she wore home to ward off the cold wind), and a dibber for me, which was the point of the excursion. And here is a great mystery: why is it that as I hurtle towards my fifth decade on this planet, I have only just now purchased a dibber for planting bulbs?

Every year, putting those bulbs down has been an arduous, time-consuming task, trying to dig holes with a spade, deep and narrow, while not disturbing the roots of any surrounding plants. But yesterday, I put down 20 white bluebells, 10 snowflakes, 5 spare tulips, 10 allium drumsticks, and 10 nerines (all unplanned, Edna Walling style, by gently tossing small handfuls in the air and planting them wherever they landed). It probably took me less than half an hour to plant the lot, with zero disruption of the roses or any other pernickety plants nearby. Thank you dibber, my new best friend.

I’ve been researching a big list of seasonal produce, and painting them as I go. The biggest insights so far have been just how little I know.

Take apples, for example. Apples are autumn fruit and we probably all know that. Even I knew that, so I didn’t think there would be lessons to learn about eating apples in season. But I was wrong! Because here in Australia, apples are available all year ‘round, in both the supermarkets and all the fruit and vegetable shops. Even at the fruit and veg markets. And I’ve never really thought about where they are coming from but, if you’d asked me, I’d probably have hazarded a guess that Australia has a (relatively) moderate client, and it’s big, so the apple season lasts longer and spreads across several months in several States.

As it turns out, no.

The apple season lasts a couple of months at most. And here’s something I should have known but didn’t: once the apples are picked, the ‘bloom’ (the natural wax on them) is blasted off, to be replaced by a new wax made up of either shellac - secretions made by lac beetles - or carnauba, which comes from Brazilian palm trees. Then the apples are put into cold storage for up to a year. That apple you buy in December has probably been sitting in the ‘fridge since April, and may or may not be coated in beetle secretions.

Anyhoo, we all get to choose how we shop and what we eat, and I’m not immune to the fact that there is an enormous amount of privilege in me making that statement. But my point is, no judgement! Eat the December apples, don’t eat the December apples. Wax on, wax off, Daniel-san. But isn’t it nice to make choices that are informed? In the future I’ll be keeping one eye on my research, and the other on the calendar to find out when the farmers’ markets reopen, redoubling my efforts to shop direct from the growers.

And in the meantime, the winds have picked up. The autumn leaves are falling. Let’s play!