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Tradition has it that the tomatoes have to be planted out by Melbourne Cup Day. Well I did an advance planting of Black Krim, Rouge de Marmande and Brandy wine, which are all growing well, and then today, the rescued seedlings from the hothouse went into the ground – Black Russian, and two others from saved seed after eating two especially luscious tomatoes last summer. One is named Tony’s oxheart, from my friend Tony Tan. Neither of us knows the variety. And then there is Lina’s tomato, gleaned from a visit to the remarkable Rose Creek Estate in suburban Melbourne, where Lina and Tony Siciliano have created a Mediterranean paradise of fruits,vegetables, olive trees and grapevines, all just fifteen kilometres from the centre of the city.

I have had several meals from my globe artichokes. This is a vegetable that stuns with the superiority of a just-harvested specimen compared with the more leathery texture of bought artichokes. The leaves of mine are still pliable and squeaky and pull off readily, the choke scoops out easily leaving a substantial and delicious heart to enjoy. I have sauteed slices in olive oil and added them to pasta, I have combined them with my own double-peeled broad beans, and spooned the mixture over a piece of grilled ocean trout, I have added soft spinach leaves and made a delicious spring omelette (also adding the first of the new season’s garlic – not mine which is not yet ready to pull).

At the end of next year I am planning a holiday in France with friends. As I am the main French speaker I needed to brush up my fluency. I am enjoying my weekly French conversation classes and after several weeks my comprehension has improved considerably. Vocabulary building is helped by reading a few French novels, but I admit to finding the French news very challenging. My fellow students assure me it will become easier. We shall see. It would be better if I had more time to devote to it.

It seems hard to realise that last week I was experiencing autumn again! I was in Italy for just one week!  Alice Waters of The Edible Schoolyard Project in Berkeley, California, convened a group of those especially interested in food education and we presented a panel at the Slow Food Terra Madre global gathering in Turin. Ange Barry, the CEO of the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation came too, and we had a most fascinating and stimulating time. As always it is wonderful to meet and talk with like-minded colleagues. Our presentation was received most warmly and we felt that our message that it is possible to work with government in a constructive partnership surprised many. We know that the strength of our partnerships with corporate, philanthropic and government bodies is directly responsible for us having been able to roll our kitchen garden programme out to so many schools. The audience clapped when we stated that at present we are influencing the food habits of around 30,000 children each year.

Our last day was spent at the open-air market in Turin. After five days of sunshine, it poured with rain. I loved it and took some somewhat soggy pictures of very perky vegetables, including autumnal porcini mushrooms. Try as I might I did not find them on any menu.

Back home and immediately I am busy with Foundation work, speaking events, book signings and realising that this eventful year is drawing to a close. A very special event will be meeting with HRH the Prince of Wales and his wife the Duchess of Cornwall, who have specifically requested to visit one of our kitchen garden schools, Kilkenny Primary School in South Australia. All involved are very excited.

In the vegetable garden the broad beans are setting – I ate my first handful last night and they were possibly a bit too dainty. Better to give them an extra week. Artichoke heads are thrusting from their handsome leaves. The sprouting broccoli is still producing new shoots. And I am still enjoying crisp carrots, wonderfully tender salad leaves, and plenty of kale and silverbeet. This morning I spied the first tiny hump in one of my vegetable boxes announcing the first bush bean pushing through.  And my tomato seedlings are growing well in the hothouse but are still too tiny to set out in the ground.

Travels over the past few weeks have included Margaret River Primary School in Western Australia to mark the launch of its kitchen garden program. My team of enthusiastic kitchen specialists worked together to make handmade oriecchiette which we served with broccoli and anchovies. The kitchen specialist Melanie Nicholls showed me some luscious orange peel she had candied which we used to garnish a dish of sliced oranges. I asked for the recipe as I wanted to have a third go at candying the peel of my very rare bergamot orange, and even rarer, I had a single cedro, the huge citrus usually found only in Sicily, but in this case a gift to me from Lina Siciliano. Lina and her husband Tony own Rose Creek Estate in the Melbourne suburb of Keilor and they are rapidly becoming legends for the extraordinary range of fruits, vegetables, herbs, wine and oil produced from their amazing suburban farm. I have the honour of launching the book that describes their activities, Growing Honest Food in a week or so. It is an extraordinary story.

Back home I used Melanie’s recipe and was thrilled with the results. I mixed some of the candied cedro with ricotta, mascarpone, pistachio and dark chocolate to make a luscious Italian zuccotto dessert for my friends. Recipe remembered from Stephanie and Maggie’s Tuscan Cookbook.

Travelling again I joined a bus tour of three of our Tasmanian schools, Moonah, St James’ College at Cygnet, and Snug. These bus tours provide an excellent opportunity for interested teachers or would-be kitchen gardeners to observe, ask questions, and in this case enjoy a stunning banquet of local treats provided by the staff and students at St James’ College, including an organic pig roasted in the school’s adobe oven. Definitely a first for a kitchen garden school!

The lasting memory of all three schools is of smiling enthusiastic students, of prolific gardens and bright kitchens humming with activity.

I have been asked to join a panel of food educators from several countries, including Alice Waters from the Edible Schoolyard Foundation in Berkeley, California to discuss our experiences at the Slow Food Terra Madre conference in Turin Italy.  It will be exciting to hear what is happening in other countries and to be able to tell our own story.

My almond tree blossomed today and the sun came out to celebrate. It has been a very cold winter here in Melbourne, with morning frosts crisping the spinach leaves. Driving around my heart lifts each time I see a magnolia tree in full flower, or a delicate prunus covered in white starry blossom. My kitchen window box has blue hyacinth and lipstick-pink miniature cyclamen. And on my desk is a fragrant posy of daphne with Parma violets.

It has been an extraordinary few weeks for the Kitchen Garden Foundation. We formed a new and important partnership with Medibank Community Fund, acknowledging that we are both working to promote habits that lead to good health and happiness, and that have the potential to involve the community.

And yesterday we received the news of $5.4 million of new funding from the Australian Government through the Department of Health and Ageing which will enable us to expand our reach to more and more schools with a primary enrolment, and to hopefully achieve our aim of having a kitchen garden program in ten per cent of all such schools in Australia over the next three years.

As usual I have been visiting schools and as usual I have been delighted by all that I see. I came away from Sunshine North with a bottle of ‘worm wee’ which today I have sprinkled on all of my small lettuces, hoping it will initiate a growth spurt, helped by the sunny days. Lunch included freshly made linguine with lemon and herbs, a delicious Moroccan-spiced silverbeet, and an orange and date couscous, and a celery and shaved Parmesan salad.

Yesterday at Meadows Primary I was given a lemon thyme plant, and enjoyed my lunch of a cabbage pie, a lentil salad, and a delicious coleslaw with sliced bulb fennel and orange.  The students who welcomed the visitors wanted us to know that there was more to the kitchen garden program than leaning to be a good gardener, and a good cook. They told us some new words they had discovered – amongst them, ‘translucent’ and ‘scrumptious’. Sure beats ‘Yum!”

The kitchen specialist Ema is from Portugal. I love it when I learn something new. She showed me my first Portuguese kale (pictured above), and told me how it is shredded and added to the well-known Portuguese soup of ‘caldo verde’, made with potatoes and kale and finished with chourico sausage and a drizzle of spicy oil. Plants grow in a tall, handsome, vase shape with large deep green, ruffled leaves that have white mid-ribs like silverbeet, which are sometimes prepared separately. The leaves are quite different in shape and colour to those of Tuscan kale. Ema told me that she picks the leaves from the bottom of the plant and as it continues to grow the central stalk grows straight and tall. The internet describes this plant as couve tronchuda, but admits it has various names.  I wondered how closely related it might be to the plant I know as ‘walking-stick cabbage’, seen in France, and apparently common on the island of Jersey. Once the leaves are harvested, the stem can be dried and varnished to make an excellent walking stick.

In the next week or so I shall visit the launch of the program at Margaret River in Western Australia, and assist at the launch of two Victorian schools at Auburn South, and at Brunswick South.

This certainly keeps me busy, but not too busy to be part of a panel discussing my memoir A Cook’s Life at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival on August 24. I am also discussing this book and answering questions at Minimax in Brighton on Wednesday August 29^th at 6:45pm.

My travels have included an exciting one-day visit to our most remote school at Punmu in the Pilbara. Ever since the The Rawa Community school applied to join our program two years ago I have been intrigued and have wanted to visit. It would be my first visit to an aboriginal community and my first visit to the Pilbara.

The school is seven hours by road from Port Hedland, and one and a half hours from Broome in a very small plane. Our Senior Project Officer Jacqui Lanarus and the Learning Support Officer for Western Australia Marcelle Coakley had already been at the school for a week when I arrived together with our CEO Ange Barry. The school has more than its share of challenges and in 2011 it had to contend with significant flooding making roads impassable for considerable periods of time.

About fifty students attend this school and we are thrilled to welcome them into the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden program. The school has built a wood-fired pizza oven, and when I was there the students had dug a fire pit on which fresh corn and potatoes were roasted for our celebratory farewell lunch. There is plenty of artesian water and the newly planted garden was already sprouting beans, cucumbers, pumpkin, and there was a substantial crop of garlic and potatoes planted. Alongside was the beginnings of a bush tucker garden with the local elders advising on seed collection. Other students were enthusiastically planting seeds in a shade house constructed from recycled items found at the local tip. The school had two African teachers who intrigued us all by promising to show how to stew pumpkin leaves with spices without damaging or compromising the growing pumpkins.

The pizza lunch was a huge success. The students cut all the vegetables from fresh food trucked in from Port Hedland (this happens only once a month so one can understand the enthusiasm to get their own garden producing), they made the dough by hand, rolled and shaped it and had a great time deciding on the toppings. Everyone ate everything!

There are so many exciting possibilities at Rawa. Many involve greater engagement with the community elders for art projects, or to hear the stories, or to share cook-ups.

Next stop was the Flinders Ranges and a quick visit to one of our newest projects at Quorn Area School. The school already has an attractive teaching kitchen space but the garden construction was just starting. I was impressed to meet a local bobcat operator who was effortlessly moving piles of rich soil and red gum sleepers to create the raised beds for the children to plant into.

For a complete contrast I visited tiny Ungarra school on the Eyre Peninsula. Total student population at the time was 32. Every child participates from the youngest to the oldest. The school is two years into the program and its garden is extensive and prolific with a gigantic strawberry patch! I toured the fabulous orchard, met the chickens, noted the worm farm and the compost heap, and then went to the kitchen. The class had had a competition to decide on the two best pizzas to make for my visit. The winners were surprising. We had parsnip, carrot and goat cheese for one, and yabbie, oyster and calamari for the other! It was great to see the 6- and 7-year-olds cutting up the vegetables, and the 8- and 9-year-olds all shelling the freshly boiled yabbies, and ‘removing the poo’ as one little girl told me very seriously. And how wonderful that the students had thought of using the local speciality.

Back home the growth in my garden has slowed down. The new plantings of broccoli, Tuscan kale, spinach, celeriac and a second crop of leeks are all growing but slowly. The salad barrel is still growing but the leaves are smaller than they were. And yet surprisingly the green capsicums are still ripening to red.

The picture of the month has to be this enthusiastic student dealing with yabbies at Ungarra.

Have been tweeting quite a bit and I think I am enjoying it. Still not sure about the etiquette of retweeting, or even how to do it to best effect, but am learning all the time. I do notice the blanket tweeting of political figures – is this in case they miss our attention by the blink of an eye, or the click of a finger?

Saw a great bit of footage after the first episode of Masterchef that followed the fortunes of several former contestants.  One was Fiona Inglis who is a kitchen specialist at Findon Primary School and she is doing a great job and the footage showed the children enjoying themselves in the garden and in the kitchen. I also attended a working bee at Stanmore Primary School near to Sydney airport, where thirty volunteers who work for one of our partners GPT Group had come to help create the beds for the  kitchen garden. The children had planted fruit trees, and enthusiastically showed me where they would free-range their chickens. In a few hours the volunteers had done an amazing job and the shape of the beds could be seen, where once had been bare ground.

We have been corresponding via Twitter with the Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley California. Their schools are just starting up and soon we hope to create connections between the students themselves.

I have planted out crops for the winter months and will now sit back and watch, and scare away the white cabbage butterflies and the snails. I have a mixed arsenal. Copper ribbon along the edge of the bed, coffee grounds regularly sprinkled around the seedlings, twirly dangling things that are shiny and that scare the birds, and pet-friendly pellets near to the tiniest broccoli and spinach seedlings.   I have planted some chicory, some Tuscan kale, brussels sprouts (my first ever), more carrots, and small cauliflower and sprouting broccoli.

And I also have planted more of the beautiful sweet peas that I bought a year ago at the Chelsea Flower Show. They were spectacular and so highly-scented.

It has rained on and off all day and such weather always makes me think of soup. At dinner at Andrew McConnell’s Golden Fields a few nights ago a favourite was the chicken congee, a Chinese rice porridge that is a popular breakfast or anytime pick-me-up soupy dish and absolutely delicious.

Last week I made a pot of minestrone. This week it will be leek and potato, with the extra bonus of a large quantity of parsley to make it apple-green. I pick the parsley, give it a quick wash, then plunge it into boiling water for less than a minute, drain it and then blend it with the leeks and potato. And maybe the week after I will make my version of caldo verde that combines torn silverbeet or kale leaves, with potato and pieces of pork or spicy sausage.

I am really enjoying this autumn weather!

Well A Cook’s Life is now out there and so am I.  I have spoken at events in Sydney and in Melbourne and am now off to Brisbane and Perth and Adelaide. It was lovely to spend a relaxing Easter with my closest friends on Phillip Island. We rented a large rambling house built in 1920 as a country retreat for the Bishop of Melbourne. The weather started out warm and sunny and we all settled into the comfy chairs on the wide verandah with our books. Too soon we had rain and blustery winds necessitating a retreat indoors. Not ideal weather for the obligatory penguin viewing but one of our group is American and we all agreed that we had to include this outing on the itinerary.  And it was very cold and we waited for an hour and a half on the beach before the little birds marshalled themselves and hurried up the wet sand to their burrows.  We then hurried home ourselves to a fire and a shepherd’s pie that I had prepared earlier.

Back home for a quick garden check between departures I notice that the cauliflower and broccoli seeds have germinated in the hothouse. The spinach seedlings are growing well as are the leeks, and my barrel of young cut-and-come again lettuce leaves is full to overflowing. The broad beans have yet to appear.

My gardener Jen invited me to accompany her and visit Lina and Tony Siciliano at their Rose Creek farm situated less than thirty minutes from the centre of Melbourne. The original property was bought thirty years ago and Lina says that thirty years ago the property was bare save for rocks and weeds. I believe her although looking around at this verdant landscape it is difficult to do so. Now there are avenues of olive trees,there are at least four different varieties of fig, avenues of vineyards that son Angelo tends and turns into lovely wines. The vegetable garden is similarly expansive. Lina says that last year she picked her last tomato in mid-July!

I was jealous of her many scarlet capsicums whereas my own have sulked this year and refused to colour. Everything was lush and so healthy. Rows and rows of chicory and broccoli were already in the ground and the first broad beans were ready to pick. I came away with a laden basket of samples, a recipe for  peperonata and another for Lina’s favourite way to cure olives, and with boundless admiration and astonishment at the energy of the family and the output of the estate.

I have been growing galangal in a large pot for a couple of years and this month it has flowered for the very first time. Each snow-white bloom smells exquisite.  Tony Tan showed me how to dig a chunk of rhizome from the pot, and chop it finely with chili and garlic and keep the paste covered with vegetable oil in the refrigerator. A teaspoon fried along with Asian green leaves or young leeks or young broccoli is a treat indeed. Diluted with a little lime juice it also makes a good dressing for fried bean curd.