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May 15, 2014

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Animal senses, Backyard chickens, natural history, Possums, Recycling

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Twilight of the Chickens

Jeez, chickens go to bed early. I’m outside getting the washing, and ok, it’s heading towards dusk, but not only can I see the location of my smalls, visibility’s so good I can even spot and dodge the brush turkey doings as I go. But the chooks are already tucked up in their palatial quarters, or in the case of Snowball (pictured above), having a nap in an elevated position while waiting to be eaten.

So, twilight is more complicated than you might think, and I’m not talking about the teen vampire series. Apparently it comes in three types. As the sun first sinks, there’s civil twilight. Technically, that’s when the centre of the sun is 6 degrees below the horizon – in good weather you can still see the things around you (say, your knickers on the line, or an inconvenient pile of guano). Then, after about 20 minutes, more (as you get closer to the poles) or less (closer to the equator), you have nautical twilight. The sun is 12 degrees below the horizon now, and if you’re a sailor, you can take a bearing on the stars with the horizon still visible. If you forgot to pick sweet potato greens before sundown, you’re rummaging around in the cupboard for a torch.

After nautical twilight comes astronomical twilight, with the sun 18 degrees below the horizon. To an untutored eye it might appear as if night has finally arrived, but impatient astronomers wanting to check out nebulae will be still pacing up and down waiting for full dark. Of course, you won’t get the full sequence come the summer in Trondheim (civil twilight from sunset to sunrise), Glasgow (nautical twilight for most of the darker hours) or even London (astronomical twilight all night long, even without throwing in the orange glow of light pollution).

I find this orderly taxonomy of darkening moments curiously soothing, an effect only slightly diminished on reading that nerdy acronyms like EENT (end evening nautical twilight) aren’t just used by meteorologists and astronomers to document the passing days and track the movements of the stars, but also in military campaigns to synchronise watches.

But all this is from a human point of view. For chickens, it’s different.

If possums have got pretty dud typical mammalian dichromate vision, chickens are rocking their cones. Not just three sets of cones like us, but five, including one that enables them to see ultraviolet light and a double cone for detecting motion. And “cellular sunglasses”: an oil-drop to filter particular wavelengths of light.

But wait! There’s more! Chickens also have, in essence, a third eye. Okay, not as visible as parietal eyes of Tuataras and other less famous reptiles (and related organs in the eyes of other tetrapods – like the receptor that looks like a little blue pimple between this critter’s eyes).

But still, a pineal gland perched up just under skull that receives enough light to regulate sleep and trigger annual reproductive cycles. Extremely cool. Perhaps too cool for some. While researching this post, I noticed, right underneath a webpage spelling out the multidimensional excellence of chicken vision, an advertisement for eye surgery.”Replace tired and baggy eyes with a younger look!”. Presumably the reader, ruminating dolefully on the superiority of the avian retina and the failings of human sight, is primed for this kind of thing.

But perhaps we humans shouldn’t be so grim about our drab colour vision, our tediously symmetrical pair of eyes. At the very least the time our mammalian ancestors spent cowering in a burrow while the dinosaurs strode the earth gave us respectable night vision. We can revel in our fine array of twilights while the shutters come down with a clang at the end of the day for our long time companions.

Okay, The Twilight of the Chickens may not have the apocalyptic ending of the Ragnarøkkr, the Twilight of the Gods. The rivalry between Treasure and Shyla over who gets the highest perch in the upcycled coop doesn’t have the same Wagnerian grandeur as Odin’s battle to the death with the wolf Fenrir. But pleasingly, even the Norse myths have a place for chooks: the end of days is heralded by the crowing of a crimson rooster, a golden rooster, and a rust red rooster. I must tell Andy Ninja.

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mccnmatt

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May 7, 2014

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Australian natives, Backyard chickens, Companion planting, Death, Gardening, Insect pests, Natives for shade, Plants and what I know about them, Weeds

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A hoarder’s confessions

Impulse buy online this week: Rock Samphire. I set out to get a couple of extra galangal plants to join the one that’s doing well in a shady spot at the foot of a banana tree transplanted from my sister’s garden. Galangal look great – too great to dig up for a Thai curry, it turns out. WIth three plants on the go I figured I might get up the courage to be more brutal next time I’m considering a tom yum. This is one of the problems of the whole food forest concept. Your turmeric plant, for instance, makes a terrific understorey plant which, if undisturbed, generates a gorgeous, long-lasting white flower.

A powerful incentive to leave the roots in the ground, and that’s leaving aside the tedious multistage process of actually making tumeric powder from the rhizomes. Even a brief description of this sounds implausible at a number of levels: “sweating”, curing, drying, “polishing”?? removal of the “mother”?? With the passing of time, I am beginning to draw the conclusion that my painstakingly assembled collection of food plants functions more in the realm of the hypothetical or fantastical (“I could source all my herbs and spices in my garden if I really wanted to and/or when civilisation breaks down“) than in the practical domain of producing stuff for tonight’s dinner. In fact, it’s a sort of epicurean hoarding.

So, with that revelation, back to the online plant acquisition. It’s a slippery slope: once you’ve decided to order a couple of plants you think, well, since I’m paying for freight anyway, I may as well get a better bang for my buck. Native mint Mentha Australis: looks and smells just like your bulk standard mint, it turns out. Wormwood, for the chicken run, to deter mites. The upside there is, if I lose another chook (possibly as a consequence of an infestation that artemesia absinthium alone fails to resolve), I can always chuck the wormwood some in some low grade spirits to make up my own absinthe and go out in style like a debauched French Impressionist while weeping over my decorative poultry corpse.

And on a whim, Rock Samphire, which along with the unrelated Marsh Samphire (both names a corruption of “St Peter” – it’s a rock reference) seems to be a thing in British wild foodie circles. I’m always faintly nervous about bringing a new non-native into the garden, and this one is an umbrelliferae which often seem to be a bit weedy though useful for attracting hoverflies and the like. But I reckon I should be okay with this one, since it grows naturally on exposed maritime cliffsides, presumably with plenty of sun. Any escapes at our place, on the shady side of the ridgeline, are unlikely to enjoy their freedom.

When this one arrived, I realised that I had seen it before, at Worm’s Head on the beautiful Gower Peninsula in South Wales.

Seen it and, entranced by its delicate winter skeleton, taken loads of photos of it. Today’s garden treasure, avariciously gathered, and yesterday’s digitised booty, reunited in the hoard.

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April 27, 2014

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Animal pests, Animal senses, Backyard chickens, Chickens as cultivators, Companion planting, Edible flowers, Exclusion pest control, Plants and what I know about them, Rats, Vegetables

Diggers

Naughty as it is to dig – vandalising the earthworms’ underground cities and all that – I decided to take to the spade today. The youngsters did a pretty good job in their weeks under the chook dome of clearing that patch of its weeds but excavating the couch grass was beyond them. And I wanted to work in the chicken manure they left behind: black-and-white gold it might hypothetically be called by some chicken-obsessive. And, let’s face it, I just felt like digging.

And now I have more garden buddies to help out. The young chickens returned with some enthusiasm to their old stomping ground. Tragically perhaps, there are few moments when I’m more content than gardening with an inquisitive chook scratching away beside me, perilously close to being whacked by a spade in its eagerness to dart in for grubs. Today I almost decided that the psychodrama of raising day-old chicks was worth it. Shyla, raised in the brooder, hung out with me, approaching periodically to inquire, with a dinkum Aussie rising inflection, when I was going to find her something delicious to eat. Absolutely charming.

Allegedly Einstein said “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. This aphorism seems appropriate to ANZAC Day somehow. It also quite accurately describes my approach to planting broad beans. I’ve had two goes at getting my broadies going with minimal success, but now the human and chicken digging is done, I’m trying again. The humane traps are in the post, and in the mean time I’m hoping a well secured vege net will keep critters at bay. With luck aromatherapy will be my ace in the hole. The beans planted right by the lavender hedge seemed to germinate unmolested – benefiting, I suspect, from distracting smell of the companion plants. This particular net was draped right over my “Frenchette” lavandula dentata for the last three months. It’s as delightfully scented as your granny’s hankie: hopefully rats don’t favour potpourri.

If that doesn’t work, perhaps I should leave out some of the unexpected harvest that appeared underfoot today. One scraggy looking stem of jerusalem artichoke, sprouted from peelings I chucked to the chooks, produced two double handfuls of dangerously more-ish tubers. Blow on winds of winter, the artichokes have arrived! This bounty was greeted with groans in the kitchen. I love the taste and try to sneak them into to soups and bakes and stirfries, just one or two, cut up small so no-one will notice. But the post-prandial flatulence that inevitably ensues is a dead give-away. If they have a similar effect on rats, this could be our secret weapon in organic pest control. Maybe if we leave them scattered around the garden-robbers will gorge themselves on that toothsome but indigestible inulin and simply explode. If the decorous aroma of lavender doesn’t work, perhaps the more prosaic accumulation of gas in the alimentary canal is the way to go.

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April 25, 2014

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Anthropomorphism, Backyard chickens, Brush turkeys, pecking order

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Cliff hanger on Chicken TV

“Who are these people? And why are they eating my breakfast?”

Last night we moved the young’uns out of the veggie garden and into the chicken run. At dusk, I found them wandering disconsolately around the spot where the coop had been the day before, scratching out symbols in the mulch in an attempt to reverse the invisibility spell that had obviously been performed on their living quarters. Having sorted out that problem, I made a late breaking decision to grab Snowball from her highly exposed roost and throw her in with the others.

Public holiday sleep-in abandoned, I was up at dawn to watch the next gripping episode of “Chicken TV”. Who would be new Top Chook: Andy Ninja or the feisty contender, Treasure the Light Sussex? How would Snowball react after her night sleeping with strangers? Could there be peace between the two clans, or would blood be spilled?

Major turn-up in the pecking-order stakes: Treasure not only monstered little Snowball, but had Andy on the backfoot as well. The two veterans, driven together in a “spirit of the blitz”, paced up and down while the two most brazen of the new girls muscled in on brekkie. We took 2 weeks to train the older chooks to use the foot-pedal feeder: it took Shyla the Australorp about 10 minutes.

So much for getting the new birds for Andy’s mental health – she spent much of the afternoon in her usual haunts in the front garden, on her own or in the company of one of the brush turkeys. Snowball hung with the young team for a while, but it looks like it was a one-night stand in the coop – she’s back on her “fox appetiser” roost this evening. So I guess Chicken TV is the poultry Home and Away: mostly about the triumphs of good looking teenagers.

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April 23, 2014

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Animal senses, Backyard chickens, Death

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A sentimental chicken recalls the good old days

From a sentimental chicken remembers the good old days

Long ago, Andy Ninja the ISA Brown laid an egg a day, regular as clockwork. The laundry, attached to the back of the house, was her chosen spot. The eggs started appearing on the tiled floor, so we put out a straw-filled cardboard box, to stop breakages if nothing else. For Snowball the Silkie bantam to lay, everything had to be just right: clear blue skies, light yet refreshing breezes, no interruptions to routine or uproar of any kind. She is a right diva. Looking around at the picnic-perfect weather and hearing some self-satisfied cackling you might well figure that she had done the business, but you then have to find the damn things before they started to rot. If you successfully track down her hidey hole she immediately looks for a more private and profoundly inaccessible location.

But you could set your watch by Andy and her much missed sister Harley as they hopped up the back steps on their daily mission. I used to joke that the only way of making egg collection more convenient would be to put an egg carton next to the washing machine and get them to lay directly into it.

Sadly, those days are well behind us. Harley succumbed to some nasty bite or bug and, after a few months of laying soft-shelled eggs, Andy stopped producing eggs over a year ago. No amount of shellgrit or other calcium-enhancing pampering seemed to toughen those babies up. I guess it was the beginning of “the change”.

Despite her recent “transition” from egg-laying stalwart to quasi-cockerel who crows at dawn, Andy still seems to have a soft spot for the laundry.

She loiters on the steps while waiting for her breakfast to be delivered, but when she’s fed, she’s there again, trying to sneak past me while I’m filling the front-loader. She’ll settle in a corner near the sink, fluff out her feathers and hunker down in position that says “I’ve got some serious egg laying to do”. Given half a chance, she’ll roost in there at night as well. Here’s her, shut out, roosting on the next best thing: the back doorstep.

The laundry probably is a cut above the other dry and sheltered places to bunk down for the night, at least until Palm Beach, the new coop, is open to the general public. But I wonder if she goes there because she hankers after the good old days when she was Andy the regular layer, top chook in the pecking order, Andy the laundry ninja.

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April 15, 2014

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Animal pests, Backyard chickens, Brush turkeys, Diamond python, Exclusion pest control, Gardening, Insect pests, Native animals, Plants and what I know about them, Rats, Recycling, Vegetables

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Bean thieves

I’ve been a little obsessed with brush turkeys lately, in case you haven’t noticed. As yet I haven’t set up a nanotechnology lab to investigate the remarkable hydrophobic properties of their eggs but perhaps that’s only a matter of time. In the interests of keeping them from scratching everything up, the garden is an “homage de Christo” at the moment, swathed in vege nets and scraps of daggy horticultural fleece. That’s in addition to chicken wire hoops over my garlic, rocks and tiles around the baby citrus, and a trellis trapdoor over germinating sweet peas. And my new strategy: distraction. The brush turkeys have been having a grand time digging through a recently applied layer of wood chip mulch on the garden paths. Since “tidy” is not my watchword this is all to the good, keep them from pondering on what mysteries might lurk under the sugar cane mulch elsewhere.

However, while I’ve been congratulating myself on my success, other produce snackers have been at work. A few weeks ago I put in a couple of patches of broad beans, and for good measure some lupins as green manure. I spent some time fretting that lupins could become a garden escape, spreading through the sclerophyll forest of the Hawkesbury sandstone like the blue carpeted uplands of New Zealand’s South Island.

I really shouldn’t have bothered. A week or so later I peeped under the fleece to find a neat sequence of holes in the loam. I actually wondered if I’d forgotten to fill in the divots I’d made with my dibber, but no. Apparently lupins make a fine high-protein rodent snack. Sadly broad beans seem to be haute cuisine too – though they weren’t nibbled til they had sprouted. It seems the local rats are health food freaks. Mental note: don’t bother planting quinoa or a goji vine.

There’s a lot in the permaculture literature about the virtual cycles of animal-botanical interactions. Your chickens in their upcycled chook tractor convert scrap to crap, dig up your weeds and move on to clear pastures new. They are a serious danger to your slug population and their bedding makes a fabulous mulch.

Not so much lyrical celebration of the rats that come to eat those scraps and also make short work of your seedlings.

It is particularly irking when these inconvenient animals deploy a pincer movement, the sad story of last year’s voluptuous TropicSnow peaches being a case in point. Protected by mesh exclusion bags, they were safe from fruit fly, or so I thought. But the bags were short work for the local rat pack, and once they’d had the pick of the ripe fruit, the fruit fly came in to clean up the rest.

This is where the food web shows its grimmer side, at least from the human harvester’s perspective. We could put out poison for the rats. But what if bandicoots are also fond of RatSak? And when the rats pop their clogs unobserved, what if the tawny frogmouth or Snakey the diamond python decide groggy and voraciously thirsty rodents or still warm corpses are an easy snack? The poison’s up the food chain and the next thing you know a White Bellied Sea Eagle has carked it on top of your washing line.

Snakey has made inroads on what I should perhaps refer to as our “organic” rodent population.

Unfortunately with that slow reptilian metabolism one rat a fortnight is the best you can hope for. I like to think that Grandpa’s chook feeder with its foot pedal operation has made things a bit more difficult for the rodents, since I’ve not yet seen them jumping up and down en masse to access the delights inside.

So, over the last month I’ve managed to raise my first green (and purple) bean crop for years. I’m not quite sure why the critters left them alone. There seems to be an element of the stochastic in all this. Things emerge and grow peaceably and then, bang, the satin bower birds have macerated your greenery. Are the beasties lulling us into a false sense of security? Waiting for the precise moment when everything tastes its best? Or are they just a bit flakey and take a while to figure out that beans are once again on offer down the bottom of the yard? For all I might be a bit skeptical about the “we sow the seeds, nature grows the seeds, we eat the seeds” hippie vibe of permaculture, there is a lot to be said for stealing a march on the predators by simply baffling them with a jumble of plants: an odd collection of survivors and accidental successes.

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April 2, 2014

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Australian natives, Backyard chickens, Gardening, Natives for shade, Ornamental gardens, Plants and what I know about them

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Absurd gardening prejudices pt.1

It seems I harbour a deep-seated suspicion of people who use epiphytes as a garden feature, something I discovered at the exact moment I transformed into one of them. According to my brain, the sin of gratuitous staghorn display is gravely compounded by the location of said epiphyte on any kind of artificial structure, including but not limited to fences, trellises, wooden mounting boards and hanging baskets. As far as the Chelsea judges in my head are concerned, such epiphytic offenses are right up there with non-ironic use of garden gnomes, concrete kangaroos, or indeed any form of arboreal statuary.

So, obviously, this – garden design by guano – is unimpeachable:

But when bird-dropping inspired artlessness comes crashing down, what’s to be done?

Well…. this might pass at a push:

But this is just plain tacky, or so my inner hippie informed me just as I whacked in the last fencing pin:

The garden, begun with an earnest utilitarian intent, has strayed from the straight and narrow of food production. First it was the bird baths, those gateway ornaments, a thin veneer of ecological functionality only partly disguising their real purpose, as a visual full stop in the fernery (“fernery”??!). Then it was the native grasses: “to promote biodiversity”. Huh. We will turn silently away from the mosaic stepping stones. Even the companion animals are becoming disturbingly decorative:

Clearly the shark was jumped long ago. And to add insult to injury, this post has no political rationale either. No musings on death; no hot tips on organic gardening; not even a passing reference to climate change. Utterly bereft of any skerrick of social utility. Bugger it: I’m off to a garden centre for that replica of the Manneken Pis.

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March 17, 2014

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Animal pests, Backyard chickens, Brush turkeys, Death, Microbiome, Native animals

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What lurks in brush turkey bellies?

This is my other flock, the brush turkeys. I think there are about six of them using our place as a recreation area and take-away just now. Teenagers and youngsters, I think, none of the absurdly young yet unattended chicks at the moment – the hatching season must be over.

Our fences are not so much boundary markers, more convenient perching sites and high level walkways, attractive and arboreal, a little like New York’s famous High Line. When we bought our vermin proof chicken feeder (made by Grandpa, it seems) we were warned not to train the chooks how to use it in front of cockatoos. Though individually cockies are not heavy enough to step onto the foot pedal and trigger the lifting of the feeder lid, apparently they are quite capable of learning to saunter on mob-handed and get a feed that way. It took the chooks a few weeks to get used to the clanging as the pedal went down and the feeder opened. The learning curve for the brush turkeys was pretty steep it seems. They are casual snackers at this stage.

So I’ve spent a lot of the last few weeks thinking about the contents of brush turkey guts and the parasitic load of brush turkey ordure. We lost another chick (Turbo… sniff) and I’m blaming the turkeys rather than myself. Viral and bacterial vectors, flapping and crapping all round the yard. We couldn’t leave little Shyla to join the big chickens all on our own, so we went back to the hatchery and got some older and hopefully more robust pullets. But now the veil of naivete has been drawn back and I’m expecting more deaths, despite Sulfa3, cider vinegar, natural yoghurt snacks and regular anxious visits to the bottom of the yard where the young ‘uns are segregated in their chook dome from bigger fowl. I’m not sure I can bear to lose any more, at least not yet.

So I’m going for a chemical blitz, on new chicks and the old. Still thinking through which antibiotics I should have in the cupboard for the inevitable emergency. And when I’m dosing up the chickens, I’ll also be dosing up the brush turkeys, our involuntary companion animals.

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March 1, 2014

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Backyard chickens, Brassicas, Brush turkeys, Gardening, Native animals, Predators, raising chickens, Recycling, Vernacular architecture

A grand day out

Time to get the fully feathered chicks – all of 6 weeks old – out of the brooder in the kids’ bedroom. To my amazement the new coop, which weighs the same as a gas giant, does actually fit under the chook dome. After Donna’s departure, I’m a bit worried about plunging the peepers straight into the fowl-and-brush-turkey-ordure-rich environment of the run, so we’ll give them a few weeks in the chicken tractor, getting a garden bed ready for brassicas. They had a first scratch around this afternoon, ready for the big move tomorrow.

Andy is looking very miffed by these developments. I caught her lurking in the new coop – I think she envisages it as her own personal quarters. She was transfixed by the sudden appearance of the new girls, so I was able to grab her and turf her out before any argy-bargy. However, Snowball and Andy have been using the top of the dome as a perch, so they were wandering around the run at something of a loss at sundown tonight. They have a whole series of dry places to sleep – under the granny flat, in the wood-shed – but since they seemed to favour a spot underneath the neighbour’s horrible coral tree, we leaned a ladder (a previous craft project) against the outside of the woodshed, exactly where the chicken dome used to be. I tried to give Andy the idea but she wasn’t having it. Hope they are somewhere out of the rain tonight….

Off for a walk

The new coop inside the chicken dome: fits nice and kentucky

“We’re not in Kansas any more…”

Checking out the view through the fish tank lid window

A fledgeling at 2 months old

“You want me to sleep here??!”

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February 25, 2014

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Animal pests, Backyard chickens, Brassicas, Brush turkeys, Companion planting, Exclusion pest control, Gardening, Greens, Insect pests, Iron deficiency, Native animals, Natives for shade, Possums, Rats, Vegetables

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It’s not easy eating greens

Maybe it’s a careless-vegetarian-with-low-level-iron-deficiency thing, but I’m often hankering after greens. Thankfully, the green leafies seem to be one of the few foodgroups to which brushtailed possums, rats, bandicoots, brush turkeys and chickens – the non-human beneficiaries of my most of my horticultural efforts – all seem relatively indifferent. When things were very barren in the yard recently, my sorrel plant, a marvellous perennial that, with the deep taproots of a potential weed, soldiers on with minimal attention, was munched by something with a sophisticated palate for citrus flavours and a high tolerance of oxalic acid. Occasionally some beastie has a light snack on my other trusty standby, the rainbow chard, but on the whole my favourite greens seem immune to animal predation.

Having failed to grow them from seed, the Warrigal greens I bought from Daleys have been a cracker. They’ve threaded their way through a garden bed that, with only a couple of hours sun a day, has pushed the envelope for even shade tolerant plants like Davidson’s plum, macadamia and callicoma serratifolia. Andy Ninja regularly scratches her way through that neck of the woods, grubbing for remnants of trad, but she hasn’t managed to loosen the Warrigal greens from their moorings, and we’ve had it in everything from lasagne to dal to quiche without any visible dent appearing in the supply. Rumour has it that they self-seed prodigiously, so there’s promise of more next year.

During a couple of La Nina years we had watercress soup on the menu for about 18 months on the trot thanks to a semi-shaded spot near the chook run: boggy in torrential downpours but otherwise ordinary garden soil. A soft spot for umbrelliferous flowers and the aphid eating critters they attract, and a lazy habit of chucking decrepit parsley plants under my fruit trees as mulch has meant that Italian parsley pretty much dominates the seed bed in the herb garden and food forest around the back door. Whenever the moisture level and the temperature is right, a new generation surges forward underneath the potted makrit lime and the Cavendish banana and even between the paving stones.

I had rocket doing the same in the veggie patch a couple of years ago, until I put the kibosh on it by over-zealously collecting the contents of the papery pods. I must have been indulging in some herbal fantasy of seed saving, and so I have feral rocket no more. At least for the moment. Because of the tedious necessity to earn a living, I’m never on top of the weeding, and as the years pass I’ve started to recognise the seedlings of my favourite plants wherever they appear so I can “edit” the garden rather than, in that hateful bit of business-ese, attempting to “grow it”.

However, a particular favourite has proven to a more difficult proposition. I love bok choi and all its cousins, but especially the look and taste of red bok choi, an F1 hybrid that’s really a luscious purple, a perfect match for the “house” beans, Purple King; the salad enriching Giant Mustard and the beautiful but apparently impossible to grow purple brussel sprouts.

I have spent far too much time, money and mental energy over the last three years trying to produce an anemia-busting harvest of bok choi. In year 1, following the gospel of Jackie French, I tried to shelter my precious cruciferous greens in a guild of fellow travellers, with limited success. In year two, I went for a guerilla strategy – my choi germinated under the cover of the great hairy leaves of my zucchini. I was optimistic but the cabbage whites were not so easy to fool. But I have made a break-through, thanks to a “chuck all the seeds in the bottom of the packets together and hope for the best” approach. Coriander! So impossible to grow in Sydney, always starting so well and then going to seed before you’ve even got a garnish out of it. But apparently, you can keep the barn door closed (to moths? where is this metaphor going?) even if your coriander has bolted. The bok choi that grew in amongst my incorrigible coriander was completely untouched. So under the shelter of brush turkey-thwarting hoops of wire and the modest veil of a rather tattered veggie net, in goes bok choi and sacrificial coriander along with the aragula and the mizuna, the watercress and the daikon. If I can crack this one, the purple brussel sprouts are next!