Sustainability Corner
RPS IS NOW GROWING WARRIGAL GREENS
Warrigal greens aka New Zealand spinach is thought to be native to Australia and New Zealand and is now found widely in the Pacific region as well as France. It is easy to grow and is a good substitute for spinach and very healthy, being high in fibre, vitamin C and healthy antioxidants.
These days it’s found on menus of many top-end restaurants including our local Attica. We approached the owner of Attica, former RPS parent Ben Shewry, and asked for his culinary tips on cooking of warrigal greens. He said:
“Warrigal greens are a brilliant and versatile local food. You can sauté them briefly in a pan with olive, garlic and lemon, blanch them in boiling water like spinach to make a pie, or they are awesome folded through a curry at the very end. Warrigal greens are only limited by your imagination. There is only one rule- they must be cooked before consumption.
Hope alls well at Ripponlea Primary”
Most recipes recommend briefly blanching warrigal greens and then discarding the water before use. From a few cuttings I got from another RPS parent, I now have a large lush patch which needed no watering or much care and the bugs were not interested in them.
At home we recently added warrigal greens to our favourite pesto recipe and the result was delicious!
At the school we have warrigal greens growing in the Koor garden and last week a group of students planted some warrigal green cuttings in the Italian (Japanese?) Garden. When this (hopefully) takes off, feel free to take your own cuttings to use or plant at home for your own culinary creations.
For further reading, see here:
This is the big patch that grew at my home from a cutting from another RPS parent!
These are the pesto ingredients (and pesto-making helpers!)
Blanching the warrigal greens is an essential step.
THE RPS OLIVE HARVEST
Have you ever noticed how many olive trees we have in the RPS gardens?
These were planted by parents many years ago. You may have noticed that they’ve ripened recently and begun dropping olives. So on Monday the Sustainability Leaders and a group of grade 1/2 students and parents did the RPS olive harvest.
We used olive rakes, picked olives by hand and collected them on a huge olive net that was laid out beneath the trees. We filled a large esky - so many olives!
This was delivered to the Cornerstore Network, a social justice enterprise that, amongst other initiatives, collects excess produce and preserves it. They will brine the olives for free, keeping some jars to cover their costs and returning some to the RPS community.
More info about them is here: https://cornerstorenetwork.org.au/pages/about
