DAMN. Nigella damascena – not sativa the seed-spice plant, which is what we wanted – has flowered profusely in our kitchen garden. Gorgeous blue; cerulean, indeed, but it’s not sativa, which yields the seeds for such exotica as the spice the Hindus call kaloonji.

Checked this out on the web last weekend by typing in ‘nigella’, and the opening page on Google gave me nothing but links to the lovingly-endowed English chef of the same name, surname Lawson. Wonderful as that was, it took quite a few minutes to find a reference to the annual known as N. damascena and the spice called sativa.

That time of the year has come which brings plants to blowsiness; overgrown and, some might say, untidy. Our oakleaf lettuce has flowered prolifically, throwing up great stalks such that these look like dwarf Christmas trees. Leeks have thrust long prongs skyward, topped by heads of fluffy white florets on which sit elfin-like caps for a short while. Oregano has reached 60 centimetres tall and almost rivals the cornflowers that are hanging on between the roma tomatoes.

Into our plots have gone russian tarragon, caraway, pyrethrum daisy and dill. Dwarf beans yielded wonderful greens for christmas lunch and tomato yellow pear is racing ahead of its neighbours, the german heirloom sugar lump red tomato.

Summer also brings thornbills, silver-eyes and wrens in search of food, and the small softening tomatoes are perfect targets for their tiny beaks. But what is a kitchen garden if not for sharing?
We have now spent a total of $210 on our vegetable-and-salad patch since April 2008, but we have bought not tomato, lettuce nor bean since then. And another bonus – the blue-banded native bee has just returned to pollinate the flower-heads.

MENTION vegetable gardening and a few people will likely respond with the ‘problems’ of growing-your-own: ‘It all crops at once’; ‘It’s cheaper to buy it at the shops once you add up what you’ve spent.’

Yesterday – Saturday 13 September – we returned from Zanthorrea nursery in Maida Vale $74.90 poorer (according to the pundits) with a clutch of seedlings and a bag of organic cow and sheep manure for the spring refurbishment of our vegie patch. Today, in a telephone call with Slow Food Perth co-leader Pauline Tresise, she posed a challenge – almost Keynesian in dimension – of measuring the costs compared with the benefits of maintaining a kitchen garden.

Gawd. It is difficult to put a dollar value on pleasure derived. The water is free – it comes from the sky and we collect it from the roof – as are the ladybirds (‘voman-bugs’, as one German we know calls them), and the bird-life is constantly amazing. On the other hand, we run the pump to push the water about, so there’s an electricity cost, and the silver-eyes spoil some cherry tomatoes, so there’s occasionally a benefit foregone, as Treasury might term it.

This year, in our 4 x 14-metre patch, we have probably spent about $140 all-up, starting with winter salad plants, herbs, seeds, manure and blood-and-bone. The salad greens have been extraordinarily generous during the coldest weeks – a handful of oakleaf, cos, red mignonette and English spinach leaves plucked from plants just before lunch or dinner have fed us daily for about eight weeks (these also provided all the greens for 120-plus people at Slow Food Perth’s Mundaring truffle festival lunch on 02 August).

The seeds of scarlet globe radish have provided a similarly substantial return-on-investment that would rival the dividends of BHP Billiton. For 100-odd seeds we have had 100-odd plump radishes and fed some ground-bugs to boot. Yes, the maligned slater families here are fatter for them-there radishes, like those enjoying mining boom pay packets.

The creamy-yellow broccoli romanescu, in the beginning, was all-leaf-and-no-head, much like those marble neck-to-knees classical male torsos that the church in later centuries did so much to cover up. Romanescu, indeed, was one week doing nothing in the nether regions and the next week sticking up a great flower that almost immediately went to seed. We are now trying again with the broccoli and a very close eye will be kept on it (we hesitate to say ‘voyeuristically’).

The so-called all-year-round-carrots – ‘a splendid maincrop carrot, producing long, pointed roots’ (sounds like something out of a Christies’ catalogue) – made it into the ground but didn’t come out of it in quite the way we intended. A zealous weeder up-seeded them (rather than uprooted, as they’d barely had time to perform this function) and the wrens and pardelotes enjoyed lunch for days on end; given the minute size of these would-be 12-month rooters it would have been truly a ‘slow’ lunch. On the other hand, the dwarf blue bantam peas have been great croppers, and last evening we enjoyed them with a delicious chook roasted in our old wood-fired oven, together with our first cauliflower in a fabulous white sauce made all the more appetising with some Cambray sheep milk farmhouse cheese. Never mind the odd aphid in both the cauliflower and the red cabbage ranks. We have ‘voman-bugs’ already and, as we have just read in a weekend newspaper article, will be making a chilli and garlic spray forthwith so that the little beasts will think they’ve walked into a crowded Italian restaurant should they try nibbling again.

Fennel has leapt out of the ground, woolly and lemon thyme and oregano are travelling like fast food across the well-manured earth and a nigella crop shortly will flower – and seed (double benefit).
We look forward to the new black russian tomatoes roistering along like a Cossack dance troupe and joining their eight-week-old Italian cousins – the romas – to yield spring feasts. Oh, and a good ROI, or EBIT, or whatever that’s called.