Kitchen garden: the best of basil

With the large harvest, Evan blended basil, olive oil, salt, pine nuts and garlic (no parmesan) in a food processor then froze the pesto in meal size 'bricks' in small ziplock bags. He has done this for a few years and the colour stays vibrant, it is a space efficient storage method, defrosts well and is a great convenience food that the kids always love.

This writer queried how long he would keep it in the freezer due to garlic inclusion. Evan's sister-in-law, Dr Kerry Mills, a former food safety scientist said, "I think that the whole time limit on frozen food, especially if it's at the freezer's normal temperature of -18 to -20C, is actually more about food quality and nutrition than safety…".

A fortnight ago Evan and his partner Katie Mills, welcomed Good Food to their garden where the have been for six years. It formerly belonged to Brian and Marion Gunning who laid down the bones including planting fruit trees, fig, apricot, quince, persimmon and medlars.

Evan and Katie both spent their childhoods in Canberra and attended university here. He has an engineering degree and philosophy diploma and Katie is a a graduate in landscape architecture and history. Their first house was in Kambah where they rebuilt a disused vegie garden and also had plots at the Kambah Organic Growers Society garden.

In their large Hughes garden, on the lower slopes of Red Hill, the soil is naturally rich in iron but it is mostly clay. They use homemade compost augmented with cow manure to lighten the soil and increase organic matter. In raised vegetable beds they rotate crops and use green manures which has dramatically improved soil quality. The couple runs their own software development company and they enjoy gardening for its connection to real life, missing in the virtual world of their IT work.

Katie says environmental science and cultural heritage are important in everyday living and she likes the choice of plants to provide edible infill and ornamental beauty.

Two beds of garlic have recently been planted, Creole Long Storers from Tasmanian Gourmet Garlic and garlic saved from last year's crop. Coloured heirloom carrots fill one bed, raised from Diggers seeds and the mature crop is being pulled while broccoli and cabbage are being planted in adjoining beds. Young spinach and Asian veg are growing for winter and Evan finds if he puts them into gozleme with feta, their children Keira, 12, and Henry, 10, will eat them. Henry has a small worm farm and is experimenting with garden tonics which he brews from worm juice to secret recipes. Keira waters down the compost as Evan turns it, normally weekly.

Both children spend a lot of time in the garden playing with the chocolate labrador, Fergul, the aviary of birds including quail, chukka partridges and lorikeets. There are seven hens, Isa Browns, Barnevelder, Australorp and Welsummer, the hybrids are good layers and the heritage types live longer. Following chook losses, a chainlink fence built by Evan and Katie keeps out local foxes.

Their greenhouse was built from a kit purchased online. During May it is producing crops of coriander, capsicums, turmeric, ginger and tomatoes and an avocado tree that has never set fruit.

Against a brick house wall, they also have a heated propagation unit filled with three box trays that are used for raising seedlings.

In 2011 they planted 30 fruit trees including seven apple and crab apples, a Josephine pear, three varieties of apricots, two nectarines, self-pollinating almonds and a hedge of hazelnuts along one fenceline using three varieties for cross-pollination. There are grapevines, currants and kiwi fruit vines.

Heavily bearing cherry trees of Stella, Early Burlat, Sunburst and Lapin varieties and the prolific berry patch are tended by Katie. Blueberry plants were purchased at the Royal Canberra Show and came from a grower in Oaks Estate. A good crop of blackberries was mixed with the huge cherry harvest for Evan to make delicious berry cherry jam.

Evan and Katie both cook, as do the children from time to time. Evan's favourite cookbook author is Rick Stein and he is currently working his way through the recipes from Stein's odyssey from Greece to Turkey in Rick Stein: From Venice to Istanbul (Penguin, 2015). The other book on the kitchen bench is Matthew Evans' Summer on Fat Pig Farm (2015) from which they recently made Saganaki with smoky eggplant puree and pomegranate dressing and everyone loved the fried haloumi and a South-Indian- inspired fish and eggplant curry using greenhouse homegrown curry leaf and chillies.

On Sunday May 21, from 10am-noon, Friends of the National Arboretum Canberra are holding a market stall at the entrance to the Village Centre. Figs harvested from the Fig Forest at the Arboretum and herbs and vegetables from the Discovery Garden have been used to make a range of chutneys, jams, pesto, dried herbs and pickled figs.

Susan Parsons is a Canberra writer.