This website has grown out of two great passions — three really — cooking, gardening, and teaching. I've enjoyed cooking for as long as I can remember — the ability to turn simple ingredients into a proper meal from scratch.

The food itself is good, but the real pleasure is watching friends and family go back for seconds. It's caused me one genuine problem: eating out rarely meets our own standard anymore, and my kids never let me forget it. I'll take that as a compliment.

I was lucky enough to grow up in a family of gardeners. Mum had the fern house, the flower beds, and the houseplants covered. Dad ran the vegetable patch. Some of my clearest childhood memories are helping the two of them in the garden — the dirtier I got, the better the day.

The family home is still standing. My grandfather started building it just before the Great Depression hit, and my dad helped him finish it after it eased. In my younger years the block ran to over 21,500 square feet (about half an acre), surrounded by market gardens — mostly Italian families growing produce and herbs, both for themselves and for the local markets.

We lost Mum in 2019. Dad turns 101 this year — born December 1925 — still in the family home, still keeping our veggie patch going, although a little smaller these days. He lets me help, occasionally.

Over the years I've gardened in just about every setting there is — apartments with no yard at all, up to a five-acre block (over 200,000 square feet) where the local deer, wallabies, and cockatoos took their share before I got to mine.

Wherever I lived, the plants came with me.

I've grown in the ground, on balconies, in pots and planters, and indoors through the winter months.

Herbs have been my constant for all the years.

These days the veggie patch is as much for the grandkids as it is for us — they wander round picking peas, beans, cherry tomatoes, and blueberries straight off the plant. This year we've got more chillies than we know what to do with, which mostly ends up as our own hot sauce — a hit with friends. I give away a heap of seed every year too — mostly saved seed, though a few special people get seedlings.

It didn't take long to realise that unless you grow your own — or you're part of a community garden — good quality organic produce is genuinely hard to come by, herbs especially. That's where the love affair with herb gardening started, and it's grown into a real passion for culinary herbs, and a few medicinal ones besides.

Whatever I didn't learn from my parents, I picked up from the market gardening families next door, landscapers, horticulturalists, books, courses, and anyone patient enough to answer my questions. My only real qualification is the result: a productive, year-round garden I'm happy to share with anyone who asks.

That brings me to the third passion — teaching. Not classroom stuff, just practical knowledge and skills that actually get used. I like showing people how to cook (my kids especially), how to grow their own food, and how to use and preserve produce so they last the year.

Thanks for visiting.