I recently sacked my greengrocer. He’s not the type in a leather apron, but a nice franchisee in a van for a high-profile national company delivering a weekly, mystery selection of fruit and vegetables. His role is less about vegies, and more about smiling and depositing boxes on doorsteps; but not ours any longer.
It was a shame to part company with this chap, but no matter how much pumpkin soup and how many pumpkin scones I manufactured, I simply couldn’t utilize Halloween quantities of this one vegetable every seven days. Combined with 1500kg of left-over onions each week - even after I’d produced a vat of French onion soup, and fried sporting-ground-hot dog-volumes of onions - I was forced to acknowledged I was flogging a dead horse. Perhaps he thought the year was 1770, my name was Cook, and scurvy was a real threat, but combined with the emergence of Spring and the resurgence of life in my vegetable garden, his redundancy was a fairly straightforward managerial decision.
His other problem, was that the weekly 5.30pm Wednesday delivery was often a culinary saviour when I was working full time, and domestic provisions usually bottomed out at this precise moment. It’s not his fault I’m currently semi-retired and consequently should be able to squeeze in a visit to the greengrocer.
So once more, my supplier of choice is Galluzzo (est. 1934) on Glebe Point Road. I can fill a box of my previously delivered provisions at half the price and still afford all the produce I actually want. Their wares are straight from Flemington Markets, unlike the van network which I suspect has fallen foul of the warehousing requirements burdening our supermarkets. This seems to undermine the franchise group's claims to freshness and seasonality of the selection. Alarm bells started ringing for me when oranges with the taste and texture of honeycomb tripe started cascading through the letterbox in March and April.
Reverting to my traditional procurement strategy is providing me with fresh produce again (and the proximity of Galluzzo to Glenmore Meat and Sonoma Australia
The truly delightful aspect of my current produce-sourcing blueprints, is that the sun is back - and this means I’m a producer again. My vegetable garden is forced into hibernation during the colder months, when the sun is unable to muster sufficient altitude to bathe the garden in its life-giving rays. During this period everything puts on about 1cm per month at best, and I burn more calories walking three metres from the kitchen to the garden, than my meagre harvest is able to put back into my feeble body.
Over the last few weeks things have changed, and the sun’s angle of incidence is now sufficient that me and my vegies are back in the money. It happened quickly. Suddenly everything emerged from its winter funk. Spinach mitts capture the sun thrown at them.
Seemingly perennial endive has actual leaves, rather than just being a tight frizz. Cos lettuce are no longer miniaturized. Purple cabbage has taken on the form one would expect of the mature version, rather than being an umbrella for nothing bigger than a fairy.
Seemingly perennial endive has actual leaves, rather than just being a tight frizz. Cos lettuce are no longer miniaturized. Purple cabbage has taken on the form one would expect of the mature version, rather than being an umbrella for nothing bigger than a fairy.
French Breakfast radishes are now launching themselves from the soil.
Alpine Strawberry flowers are transforming into dimpled little fruit.
Sweet peas are not just a floral adjunct, but will die down and inject valuable nitrogen into the soil where I’ll be raising rat-inducing tomatoes.
The herbs are back. Rosemary leaves are soft and fleshy. Their aroma lingers from the slightest touch. Thyme, with its deep and rounded scent, is growing long, soft stems, replacing its winter woodiness.
That weed-like herb mint, which I’ve had in the same pot for about a decade, is more luscious than the newest and over-fertilized enticement you’ll ever see in a nursery.
Sun loving sage has floppy, pungent, rabbit-eared leaves again, and its neighbour, marjoram, has also been restored.
Young, malleable, yellow-green bay leaves augment mature, hardy flavour-bombs from this most important and practically indestructible tree.
Tarragon is pining for chicken.
Optimistically, I bought some basil a couple of months ago. Somehow it survived and is now on a quick path to pesto - assuming the caterpillars don't digest the spoils first.
After only producing lemons this year, it's a relief to see the oranges, mandarins and blood oranges are decorated with flowers, hopefully heralding the magnitude of the next citrus season. The lime tree is in the worst spot, facing south and espaliered hard up against the fence. Only now that it’s into its third season and has breached the lattice, is it experiencing any direct sun for the first time - and it's celebrating with an explosion of fruit foetuses.
The star performing lemon is sprouting siblings large and small.
Which all means the man in the van is out of a job, and I'll persist with the quasi self-sufficiency, real greengrocer, and occasional supermarket plan. The strategy will be up for revue when the sun once again prepares to descend into its winter depression.
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