TAMMY: I love the way that plants can make you feel.
You have such a range of emotions, from calm
to just excited because there's a new leaf growing or a flower coming up,
but also just, you know, seeing the process of the plant
from being a seed to a seedling to then something harvestable
and then having it all die down
and then composting it and returning it to the earth.
I think that's such a beautiful process.
My name is Tammy Huynh. I'm a horticulturist.
I'm a garden writer, I'm an educator,
a plant lover, a garden lover,
all things to do with plants.
I live in Cabramatta, and that's in south-west Sydney.
I've pretty much been here for most of my life.
So, I come from quite a big family.
So there's Mum and Dad, and then there's five of us.
So, I'm not quite the middle child but, yeah, so second eldest.
My parents came from... or escaped the Vietnam War
and they wanted the best for us.
This garden was started by my grandma.
She always grew her own things.
That's what they did back in Vietnam -
grew to sell, to obviously to sustain the family.
I...you know, very close to her as I was growing up
because she sort of looked after us while my parents went to work.
She grew everything from, you know, just lettuce to beans
to everything that you could possibly eat, really.
And when she passed, about five or six years ago now,
then that's when my parents sort of really took over.
And it kind of worked out that
they were sort of heading into semi-retirement.
Here's OK? Yep.
So I think they've really, you know, taken it to where Grandma had it.
I think there's some capsicum, some chilli.
I'll put some chilli in too.
Mum's a very, uh...
"Let's just dig a hole and put it in there and see what happens"
kind of gardener.
And I think it's worked. I mean, everything's growing really well.
(SPEAKS VIETNAMESE)
She loves all the different things, I guess, seasonality
and being able to grow things that she did grow back home.
(BOTH SPEAK VIETNAMESE)
Yeah, she does. She loves the heat in the cooking.
So, yeah, definitely love planting chillies.
It's a north-facing garden, which is great.
Everything grows really well.
But there's nothing on either side of the east and west boundaries,
so we get the full brunt of the sun.
We've got a lot of productive areas, lots of fruits and veggies growing.
Lime, lots of different herbs.
Garlic chives are one of my favourites,
so we've always got them perennial growing.
But, yeah, it's a real sort of eclectic mix of things.
Even in the productive patch,
we've got some ornamental things sort of just hanging about,
just because we didn't know where else to put them.
And then through here, come and have a look at this dragon fruit.
So it's growing on a structure here because it's a climbing cactus,
so it does need to climb
and it does need a structure to then grow and spread.
It doesn't look particularly attractive.
If you get too close, the thorns will scratch you.
I've done that many times.
But we do have some flowers that have died there.
The fruit is forming, so we've got a couple of little ones growing there.
And then we've also got little chicks, or chooks, I should say -
one sort of scratching around over there
and a couple are sort of roaming around.
There is lots of taro growing in the garden,
and Mum loves to use it in her cooking,
so in soups and also she loves to pickle it as well.
So what she's saying is that you have to wait for the stems
to fall away from the main clump, then they're a bit more flexible,
so then you know they're ready to harvest.
And you just cut it off at ground level.
Then she'll pickle it.
So she strips all the leaf sheets back
and then she puts it in salt
and then in a bucket to just let it pickle away.
For how long? For four weeks.
For about four weeks. Yeah.
Typically, Mum then uses it in stir-fries.
This one?
It's a bit sour, the taste, but she cooks it with oyster sauce
so there's a little bit of sweetness too,
so sweet and sour.
So part of the decision to study horticulture
was because my parents kind of randomly decided
that they were gonna buy a piece of land and plant bamboo.
They wanted to harvest edible bamboo shoots
and then supply them to the Sydney markets.
So that's what really got me into it.
I mean, I love gardening but I didn't know I could, you know,
actually study it and do something with it.
The bamboo farm is in Peats Ridge. It's north of Sydney.
There's lots of hectares of bamboo.
I don't know how many but there's lots.
So I helped my parents plant out the bamboo, or all my family did.
So we spent many long weekends there.
And then eventually I decided to write about it for my honours thesis.
What I personally love about bamboo is just the sheer size they get to.
Because it grows so tall, everyone sort of assumes it's probably a tree,
but it's actually a grass.
It's one of the fastest-growing grasses in the world.
So we grow a couple of edible bamboo shoots here.
This is Dendrocalamus latiflorus.
It's also known as sweet bamboo
and I think it's because the shoots are quite sweet when they're eaten.
It grows quite tall. It's up to about 25 metres.
This clump here is probably well over 10 years old.
Definitely not for the small garden.
So if you have a large one, yes, definitely go for it.
The Dendrocalamus asper is a bit darker in colour,
a bit more brown with a green tinge.
It's also known as a giant bamboo just because of the size it gets to.
So, the most identifying feature are these velvet-like hairs
on the culms, or the stems, of the bamboo.
And if you go all the way down to the bottom,
we've then got the bamboo shoots, and that's what's edible.
So, to prepare this, you'd need to remove all the leaf sheets.
Let me see if I can do that for you now.
And then that gives you the bamboo shoot.
You would need to boil it first before you eat it.
It has a bit of bitterness to it.
And once you do boil it, then you can add it to your soups and stir-fries.
Bamboo is what sort of got me into horticulture,
but it hasn't made me stay there.
So I've seen the beauty and so much more I that can do with plants.
So that's why I haven't necessarily gone back to the bamboo yet,
but I may.
There's just so much... so much variety in horticulture.
So, at home I do have a little dedicated space
where I can just experiment with plants.
So, this is my little ornamental alley.
It's where I spend a lot of my time
tinkering, experimenting and just being
'cause it's such a lovely place to be.
It's out of the sun.
It's, you know, just a small area
that's sort of been fashioned out of old steel posts.
We've got chicken wire, we've got real estate signs,
we've got, you know, random just sheeting.
But it works for the purpose
and it just allows me to do my thing away from everyone else.
And, yeah, it's my... my happy space.
So, I wanted to share with you this plant here. It's a Schefflera.
I really like it just because of how the leaves are arranged,
just like your typical Schefflera.
It sort of comes out like a little umbrella, I guess.
The leaves are a lot more jagged, or toothed,
so it just looks really cool.
So, this is another one of my favourite plants.
It's the Anthurium veitchii.
It is a tropical plant, so it hasn't
grown as well as it really should have.
The leaves can grow up to almost a metre long.
But you can still see that it's still growing well.
Just the leaves, like, they're just so beautiful to look at.
They kind of a remind me a bit of abs,
just because of the ribbed texture.
I think it adds a lovely textural contrast.
So, I've got quite a few variegated plants.
So, what can happen with variegated plants
is that they can revert back to green - the solid green leaf.
What you can do to help encourage more variegation
is to actually cut it back to where the variegation is more prominent.
And provided you do have a node,
you can actually continue to propagate that.
But I just put it in a glass of water and roots will form
and it will grow again.
So, I do a lot of teaching online and also in local garden centres.
I meet many people at workshops who haven't grown anything at all.
But they want to, but they just don't know where to start.
WOMAN: Oh, oh, yeah. (LAUGHS)
Ah, that's the nature of gardening.
If your hands or the table wasn't dirty, I'd be concerned.
Is there a vacuum for the garden?
(WOMEN LAUGH)
It's called a broom. (LAUGHS) Yeah.
TAMMY: I love seeing people have that light bulb moment
when they learn that they can look after a plant...
TAMMY: So that's an interesting one. It is a jungle cactus.
..'cause most of the time, people come
and they're not sure what to do or they've killed many plants.
So being able to share how to grow plants and then see that they can
is what I really hope people can walk away with -
the knowledge to grow.
TAMMY: And make sure it's got a brightly lit spot.
And it will grow really well for you. Oh, nice! Thank you!