The Poetry of Poverty

"The chair was seven years old," she said. "High time we got a new one."

I blinked. I almost said that the average age of my furniture was about 70 years, with nothing younger than a decade. Even the washing machine has passed its 27th birthday.

Suddenly I saw our house through her eyes. The kitchen needs painting, no longer pristine off-white but faintly yellowed in patches; the carpets are faded from sunlight and wear; the sofa and armchairs have comfortable hollows from decades of bottoms.

Valley vistaThe house is frankly shabby, and so am I, both jeans and face showing my age, but we don't have any plans to repaint, redo the floors, update the cupboards and, though I will buy my annual new pair of jeans, they'll only be for 'work', that is, public talks until they grow shabby enough — and stretched and comfy enough — for home and garden too. Even the wombat is grey-haired and scarred about the nose these days (but I still like to read to him).

It's not from lack of money. There are also roughly 50 000 books — but unless a thief breaks in who has a passion for eucalypt identification or fungi there probably isn't anything they'd want to steal. Except the choc chip biscuits maybe, or the fruitcake, but I'd hate even a thief to go hungry. If they need the fruitcake they're welcome to it.

It's not that repainting is too much trouble, either. It's that we've learned to love the signs of age. The carpet may be less vivid than it was 30 years ago, but new patterns made by time and sunlight have emerged. I like the walls' dapples; the familiarity of Bryan's threadbare vest that was once a jumper till the last of the sleeves wore away beyond any hope of darning.

Poverty is not necessarily beautiful: it's good to have enough to be secure. But when you don't have much and still dream of beauty, good things emerge: houses built of the wood or stone or earth around you, instead of imported kit homes from China, fabrics dyed with leaves or bark, blankets knitted with the wool unravelled from the jumper the moths got into, outfits made by putting together clothes that have been loved and cared for over years or decades.
Darned socks are beautiful. Proper darning is an art, weaving the thread in and out instead of a knotty cobble.

Patchwork evolved from poverty.

The happiest kids I know are the ones who have least money spent on their entertainment (for which read: keeping the kids out of the adults' hair). Too many kids have never climbed a tree, made a cubby out of old sheets and slept in it in the backyard, made mud pies, scrabbled in the rag bag to make a tail for their kite, or rummaged through the 'don't fit anymore or need remaking' chest of old clothes to play dress ups, or spent a day making a complex of sandcastles or a sand fort to keep the waves away. (The tide always washes them away, but then kids see the beauty of the swept bare beach, and learn that creation can be transitory too.)

When I was a kid the best times were the annual repainting of the bicycles and tricycle, the steps and garden chairs. We were allowed to choose the colours. We pitied Elaine up the road who got a new bike, so wasn't allowed to sully its gleam with paint. And okay, the steps were a rainbow for about a decade, but houses need to belong to the kids who live there as well as the interior design dictates of the adults.

Too much money leads you to silly choices, the holiday on a Thai beach instead of a quiet mooch across the local sandhills, or along the river to the swimming hole.

Vegie gardens and back yard chooks used to be signs of poverty, as did growing enough tomatoes and plums to see you through the winter. But without them you lose the joy of the seasons. Bush furniture, made of twisty branches and slabs of fallen tree or old fruit boxes (which some of our furniture is) makes you look at the bend of the wood and the knotholes every time you look at it. You actually SEE recycled timber, the irregularities of collected rocks to make a wall or steps long after you have taken the blandness of the mass produced for granted. When was the last time you really looked at the houses in a housing estate? Why bother, when they are mostly the same?
We've got used to the blandness of the mass produced. For so many, there's no point living in the 'now' because now is mass produced. You want to shut out the streams of cars, the rectangled office blocks.

When did I decide I preferred water to wine, the silver essence of the earth instead of the grape? That I'd rather go home and eat a dish of baked veg with oil and lemon dressing than eat a restaurant meal of complicated flavours, one of which was probably preservative? When did I find out that the foods I love best are those of poverty-stricken peasants, food made good by centuries of expertise instead of expensive ingredients?

Cheese is a food of poverty, last autumn's grass preserved for winter and spring eating. So is butter, which used to be packed in kegs and kept in bogs to ferment and be eaten months — or even years — after it was made.
Flour is the way of preserving last year's grain so it won't sprout. My grandfather had bread and cheese for lunch in all the decades I knew him, and I find I'm doing the same, though I do sometimes vary it with bread and soup, or bread and ultra-fresh tomato and dressing with the bread to mop up the juices, or even a boiled egg scooped out on to bread.

My food heaven as a child was a box of assorted chocolates. Maybe now I've simply learned to taste, that the taste of bread changes as you chew it, so that your bread and cheese can have 1000 flavours and all of them good.

Spring greens

Today's spring luxuries come from yesterday's starvation. Who'd have thought of eating thistle buds (artichokes) or thick green shoots (asparagus) if they weren't starving? Who was once so desperate that they discovered that while rhubarb leaves could kill you (also known as mother-in-law's lettuce) the stems were delicious and would one day evolve into one of my favourite kitchen sins: a round of puff pastry dough spread with thin stems of rhubarb, generously sprinkled with sugar and baked till the sugar is crunchy and caramelised and the pastry puffed and brown and the stems tender?

Artichokes are ridiculously easy to grow — they just need sunlight, enough water to establish, and protection from hungry wallabies (those with enough other tucker will ignore them). They grow like the weeds their ancestors once were. We eat the first big 'chokes' by cutting them back to their tender core, and either boiling them in water with a squeeze of lemon juice to keep them from discolouring, or stewing with potatoes, onion and garlic in stock and olive oil on low heat for about two hours — peasant food at its most luxurious. The smaller ones that come after the main crop are picked as small as a walnut and deep fried and eaten crisp, again with lemon juice, and sometimes with a few cloves of garlic in the oil.

Valley vistaAsparagus also grows like a weed, unless the lyrebirds dig it up before it's properly established (I cover them with netting till it is). Wallabies usually don't eat it, but feral goats do — they've cleaned out a lovely paddock of wild asparagus I'd been harvesting for twenty years. Asparagus may seem finicky if you buy crowns — two- or three-year-old plants dug up in winter and left to dry out. Most crowns are half — or even nine tenths — dead and their roots never will shoot again. Seedlings are stronger growers, and a well-grown seedling will be as big — and a lot hardier — than a two-year-old crown within a year, and a heck of a lot cheaper.

It's worth cosseting asparagus with all the water you can spare, as well as tucker and mulch for the first five years or so, and not picking until the spears are as thick as your index finger or you may exhaust the plant. I cover half our asparagus with heavy mulch at the end of each winter, so that it doesn't shoot for another six weeks or so. That way we feast on the unmulched early asparagus, and can then let it grow and regenerate while we pick the next lot, poking up through last autumn's leaves.

It was probably also hunger that discovered 'microgreens', otherwise known as baby salad veg: tiny lettuce and rocket leaves.

A box of microgreens

The advantage of growing some of these is that the box heats up faster than the soil, so spring greens grow faster than in your garden. It's also easy to place the box in the warmest spot you have. Above sunny paving, or next to a stone or concrete or rendered sunny wall is perfect, as the stored heat in the wall or paving will help keep the box warmer overnight too. The more heat and sunlight, the sooner you'll get your greens, and the more the box will produce.

I first made this using an old styrofoam box from the supermarket — a lot of vegetables come packed in styrofoam boxes these days and some have slots in their bases. The boxes that broccoli comes packed in are excellent but need holes put in their bottom for drainage. Any container that can be put up on a table or bench above sunny paving is fine, as long as it's thick enough to retain heat overnight, too. Old bathtubs, propped up at a slight angle so excess moisture drains from the plug hole, are good too.

Fill container with compost, or a mix of potting mix and soil. (Plain potting mix will dry out too soon.) Scatter on lettuce seed, watercress, fenugreek, mizuna, mitsuba or even celery seed, though lettuce is best. One gone-to-seed lettuce will give you enough seed for about six boxes. The seeds should be a couple of millimetres apart — far closer together than if you want to sow the vegetables to grow into decent sized adults.

Keep moist till they sprout. Cut the shoots with scissors as you need them; feed with a seaweed-based fertiliser or compost water (soak compost till the water is a weak tea colour) or diluted worm wee and give your microgreens that every three or four days. The more you cut, the more you need to feed. (And if you don't water enough the lettuce will turn bitter). With luck and sunlight your box of greens will keep giving you microgreens every few days for weeks, or even months, well into the season when the true salad vegetables are ready.

Spring harvests

So what else is in the garden in spring? The only other new crops in cold or temperate areas will be peas, snow peas or broad beans if you planted them last autumn and the wallabies didn't get them, the cauliflowers and broccoli planted in autumn which should be heading now and — if you planted wisely — masses and masses of onions. Otherwise it's time to eat the old before they go to seed or sprout: carrots, beetroot, Jerusalem artichokes, salsify, celeriac. The spinach and silver beet leaves will be those small winter curled ones, but wonderfully sweet, tiny red mignonette lettuce, celery that's about to bolt and parsley — just keep picking out the seed heads till this spring's crop is ready. And MULCH before the soil heats up to slow down the wild rush of last year's veg to turn into spring flowers.

As for the larder: spring is why we treasure nuts, with last autumn's walnuts and chestnuts still in their shell though no longer as sweet and nutty, also autumn's olive oil; there are still two bags of Lady Williams apples, a bit faded and wrinkled; a jar of even more wrinkled rose hips … enough, in fact, to keep us from starvation and malnutrition if the supermarkets ever vanished (as I admit they sometimes do in my daydreams, though I'd miss the mangoes and regular bananas — our bananas fruit every two or three years, poor mealy creatures that need at least three months more sun and a winter where the wombat droppings don't freeze.)