Nice to eat you: How to fill your garden with edible delights

Paulette Whitney was working as a hairdresser when she decided that what she really wanted was a life in horticulture. Twenty years after leaving her job in a salon for a career tending plants, she says she still feels the freedom of the move.

Whitney began planting thousands of native trees and casting seeds “like spells onto the soil.” She then took up work in a nursery, where, rather than selling overpriced shampoo, she helped customers “load miniature ecosystems into their car boots.”

Before long, growing plants became a compulsion.

Paulette Whitney grows food in the foothills of Mount Wellington in Tasmania.Credit: Luke Burgess

At first, this compulsion centred on native fare, but as Whitney documents in her new book, Broccoli & Other Love Stories, it soon extended to the cultivation of edible plants as well.

Whitney, with her chef husband Matt, runs the Tasmanian-based market garden and edible plant nursery Provenance Growers and writes about the deep entanglements with food that followed, including some years writing a monthly column for Gourmet Traveller magazine.

These include her experiments in the garden and her discoveries in the kitchen. She speaks of intense work and joyful forays and challenges us to learn more about the plants we eat.

Whitney says she has a “rampant, hungry curiosity” about edible species, even ones you might not think of as food. The new shoots of hostas (“steam them before the leaves unfurl, and they taste like asparagus,” she says when we speak over the phone), sprigs of sour sheep sorrel, the dusky pale-pink flowers of society garlic, the leaves of saltbush and the roots of skirret – she cultivates and cooks it all.

The ever-resourceful Whitney, whose favourite garden tool is a tip-shop steak knife and who knows how to “look for a dozen ways” to use any food in the kitchen, says she tries growing at least a couple of new things every season.

But if you are new to productive gardening and looking for somewhere to start, she advises trying classic herbs in pots outside your back door. “They add flavour and nutrition and (compared to herbs sold in supermarkets) they save plastic.”

And once you have got into the swing of parsley, rosemary, thyme and the like? She counsels you to expand your repertoire. “Meeting plants is like meeting new friends,” she writes. “It takes time and enriches the both of you.”

Whitney’s garlic crop. Cooking without it is unimaginable to her.Credit: Luke Burgess

Her advice for finding new plants is to read widely, from gardening books to cookbooks and other obscure corners of the internet. She says listening to radio talk shows, joining seed-saving networks, garden clubs and crop swap groups, and meeting other gardeners in your area are all effective ways of learning about the plants that will work in your climate.

Whitney herself is a voracious reader. She says you can’t get down her hallway for how many books are in it. She scrutinises online plant forums, historic recipe sites and specialised plant databases, and she follows hundreds of Instagram accounts in her quest to learn about the different plants that can be eaten.

Her view is that any edible plant that crosses your path will have already been cooked by others and that somewhere, someone will have documented it, thereby providing you with useful information.

“Without curiosity, I would never have tasted silky Portuguese cabbage, a bittersweet tamarillo or the tiny, succulent greens of chickweed,” she writes. “I would never have felt the numbing sensation of sansho leaves on my tongue, smelled the chlorine-pool scent of epazote or gathered the sappy shoots of an unharvested salsify plant and found them delicious.”

Whitney, Matt and their two children live and garden in the foothills of Mount Wellington, a 20-minute drive from Hobart, on a property with relatively thin soils that she has “gently coaxed with compost and crop rotation”. The area has chilly winters, frosts from May to September and summers that can be hot and dry.

The carrot that won Whitney’s heart – the Jaune du Doubs from France.Credit: Luke Burgess

If a plant won’t survive in those conditions, Whitney doesn’t even entertain the idea of growing it. And all gardeners in all climates should adopt the same approach. But if it is likely to thrive in her area – and is neither invasive nor unethical – she will try out a small patch, and if the resulting harvest tastes good, she might then ramp up production.

For all her appetising revelations, Whitney’s journey has not been without the occasional “experimental hiccup”. Adopt her approach and, as she says, “there will be plant deaths, and there will be toasted sandwiches for dinner after culinary failures, but sometimes that’s OK”.

Broccoli & Other Love Stories (Murdoch Books) by Paulette Whitney is out now.

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