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July 21, 2014

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Climate change, Companion planting, Death, Exclusion pest control, Garden trees, Plants and what I know about them, Possums, Rats, Seasons

Tropic Snow

The first peach blossom of ~~spring~~ winter: TropicSnow, a low chill variety. It has produced Cezanne-worthy fruits from its second year here – but so far I haven’t beaten the critters to them.

This year! This year! Mesh exclusion bags! Fruit fly traps! Pheromones! Chooks given the run of the pepino groundcover – dig, dig my sharp clawed friends! – on the condition that they utterly exterminate all fruit fly larvae. I’m toying with installing a band of slippery plastic (or inedible metal?) around the base of the tree to at least give the possums and the rats a bit of a challenge (or some core body exercise?). Tiger poo?? Whatever it takes!

Peaches apparently only live for a few years, and I simply refuse to have the damn thing die before I wrap my laughing-gear around some luscious sun-warmed home-grown fruit.

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mccnmatt

Posted on

July 17, 2014

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Fruit, Garden trees, Gardening, Plants and what I know about them, Possums

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A custard apple as big as a horse’s head

…can be harvested, by you, from your back garden in two years, with *no skill whatsoever required*. Yes, you’ve stumbled onto the TV Shopping Network, and with that custard apple big enough to fell an ox you also get a complete set of steak knives!!

Okay, a very tiny horse

Seriously, why doesn’t everyone (or at least, everyone in temperate to sub-tropical Australia) grow custard apples? Louis Glowinski, the man on underappreciated backyard fruits, suggests that anywhere you can grow a lemon tree, you can grow a custard apple (sorry, mountain dwellers and Canberrans, they don’t like a hard frost). Pretty much every garden larger than a pocket handkerchief in coastal Australia has a lemon tree, but custard apples are seen as tropical exotica.

Take it from me, the most incompetent of plant killers can grow a fruitful custard apple tree. And what fruits! Second only to the mango in my own personal fruity hall of fame. The tree itself is quite beautiful, modest in size (5-8 metres) with generous spring-green leaves, that, in Sydney at least, it loses for a few bare-branched weeks in late winter, before the next year’s bud burst. My little tree sprang up from the ground like Jack’s beanstalk, gaining about three metres in height in its first three years. Aesthetics aside, the thick skin on the fruit seems to repel fruit fly and, so far, the possums have investigated but haven’t persevered with their nibbling long enough to realise the glories that lie beneath the crocodilian skin. Long may their ignorance continue!

Spirited little custard apple tree blocking my garden path

Custard pple leaves

Louis, bless his cotton socks, while giving big raps to the cherimoya and its cousins, the atemoya (apparently the “custard apple” mostly likely to be found at the shops) and the sweetsop or sugar apple, makes fruit production sound a little tricky. According to him “cherimoyas need a relative humidity of 70-80% during flowering to set fruit and to ensure that the fruit produced is of a uniform shape and an adequate size” (221).

I think Dr Glowinski’s bar for successful fruit growing is significantly higher than mine. Bring on those illmatched and asymmetrical fruits, I say! Nonetheless, obedient as always to learned authority, as soon as the first little greenish-brown flowers appeared along the branches of my sapling, I was out there, kids’ paintbrush in one hand, recycled take-away container in the other, all ready for some assisted reproduction.

Dr Glowinski recommends collecting pollen in mid-afternoon from wide-open flowers, now releasing their pollen after of a day of sticky receptivity, and then applying it by “twirling the brush several times around the conical ovary” (222) of the newly opened “female” blooms of late afternoon. He describes a couple of other even more complex methods, involving toothpicks, blotting paper and refrigerated paperbags but my brain slid off these entirely. Glowinski recommends you continue doing this every few days until you are satisfied with the number of fruit set. Or in my case, until the paintbrush gets used for children’s craft activities. Who knows what glitter paint could do to the symmetry of my cherimoya harvest?

I’m pretty sure my ovary twirling lacked a certain something, as only two fruits eventuated from that first foray into annona IVF. Then, last spring we were overseas for several months during the custard apple breeding season. I didn’t hold out much hope for this year’s harvest – it seemed a bit much to ask our Swedish tenants to get so deeply involved in the sexual lives of our fruit trees. Surprisingly, however, without any kind of moral or technical support from me, we had a crop of four fruits this year. I will admit, our crop lacked something in consistent sizing. But it tasted fabulous.

I’ll be back to the interventionist approach to the custard apples this year. With luck next winter the tree will be groaning with perfectly symmetrical fruit. In fact, there may be a cascade of intervention, since my custard apple, never having felt the touch of a blade, thanks to my morbid fear of pruning, doesn’t look like it could endure that kind of heavy burden.

In a previous life as a cramped British gardener I accidentally executed a morello cherry with my secateurs and I live in fear of more casualties. But, despite a fairly sheltered position, my cherimoya, made vulnerable by its broad leaves and long whippy branches, has already been topped by a brutal southerly. I’m going to have to get out there, Glowinski’s Complete Book of Fruit Growing in Australia in one clammy hand, and work on those “second generation laterals” and “wider angled crotches” (220). I’m encouraged by the thought that no matter how crudely I amputate the poor thing, chances are it will produce a few misshapen but delicious fruits anyway.

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Posted on

July 11, 2014

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Fruit, Fruits for shade, Ornamental gardens, Plants and what I know about them, poisons, Possums

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Delicious monsters

After giving a damning review to one weird home-grown fruit I thought I’d better balance out the report card on the food forest. The babaco I selected and carefully cultivated myself. But the Monstera deliciosa (or cheese plant as its sometimes called, because of the swiss cheese-like holes in its leaves) was flourishing here long before we arrived. It did seem to get a new lease on life when the large gum tree that had shaded it fell on our house – the rejuvenating power of schadenfreude perhaps – and I’ve had to hack it back numerous times since.

“The window plant”

The next crop

While most people grow this plant as an ornamental, I had heard its fruits were edible. Our rampant vine has had quite a number of fruits over the years, but it wasn’t until I stepped over one knocked down and half eaten by possums that, in a moment of uncharacteristic boldness, I decided I would have to give them a try. I hacked off the end that had been nibbled by critters, for cootie management, and, peeling off the small green cap on each, tasted a few of the hexagonal berries, compressed together pineapple-style. What a revelation – absolutely delicious, with a hint of a pineapple-like tartness, and the creamy mouth feel of a banana, but perhaps closest in texture and taste to a custard apple (also appearing from the bottom of the garden at the moment – yum!).

At a first taste the berries were sweet but quite firm. After sampling a handful my throat felt slightly raspy, as it sometimes does after eating under-ripe pineapple, and there was a faint burning sensation around my chin and lips. Rather hastily, I did some light googling to find that, thanks to needle-like raphides of our old friend oxalates, the fruit salad plant, including its unripe fruits, can be quite toxic. Oops. There’s a lesson for the kids at home.

Unripe

Poisonous but beautiful

So, annoyingly, while babaco with its flavour of newly-laid-carpet is quite innocuous, monstera deliciosa fruits get the following rundown from the Queensland Government poisons centre: they are “considered edible” but can cause “immediate burning pain, and swelling of the lips, mouth, tongue and throat… copious salivation and difficulty breathing, swallowing or speaking… rapidly developing urticaria or hives, a transient swollen, itchy rash… nausea, abdominal pain and intense gastric irritation”. Kill joys.

Given that my light snack on allegedly toxic unripe berries had only mild side effects, I decided to try to ripen the rest of the “cob” in a paper bag with a banana, as one site suggested. As promised, after a few days the little green caps on each berry fall off spontaneously, although the fruit didn’t turn yellow as it appears in some of the pictures online. The fruit seems to ripen from one end to the other, so I pulled off some of the rather scabrous looking lidless berries, leaving others, still clinging to their hats, to ripen further. As you can see, the half gnawed fruit looks distinctly unglamorous, but the squoodgy berries underneath tasted great.

I’m going to keep eating them, carefully and in small quantities. On a cautionary note, my tasters, the possums, haven’t been seen since the appearance of that discarded cob. So if this is my last post, it was the raphides that dunnit.

Possum rejects

Not garden porn

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mccnmatt

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June 28, 2014

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Fruit, Fruits for shade, Garden trees, Gardening, Plants and what I know about them, Possums

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First fruit

Babaco

Not a great advertisement for a fecund food forest

Nearly ripe babaco with a banana for scale

Baby babaco fruit

Tasting the first fruit

I’ve had a few babacos now: small, cool climate papayas that are said to fruit prodigiously, and in the shade too. My first expired very quickly, probably from root rot, to which they are apparently quite prone. I kept the second in a pot for a while, for drainage reasons, and it clung on despite my peripatetic watering habits. The third plant I put in the “food forest” part of the garden, and it seemed to grow pretty well, on a sandy slope with filtered summer sun and not a lot of light at all in winter, so I popped the one from the pot into the ground nearby, in a slightly brighter spot. The second plant has had two torpedo-shaped green fruits hanging on for quite a while, during which time it has slowly but steadily shed all its leaves, possibly encouraged by the possums. I began to think it might croak before the fruits ever ripened, given the seasonal gloom. Eventually one of its paps started to turn a patchy lemon yellow. After some bad guessing with custard apples last year, I wouldn’t have been game to pick it but the fruit dropped off the tree of its own accord and pleasingly, ripened up quite well inside, sitting next to a banana in the fruit bowl.

Apparently the ancient Greeks had a tradition of offering the first fruit of the new season to Demeter, goddess of the harvest. I suspect Demeter might have turned her nose up at my first babaco. It’s been called the “champagne fruit“, and others suggest it tastes of strawberries and pineapple… it certainly has a citrus tang along with that strange slightly off taste of papaya and something else… the odour of freshly laid carpet? the plasticky inside of a new car…? Not something I would be super eager to eat anyway. That said, it’s a good looking plant which seems to grow reasonably well in a tricky spot and apparently propagates easily too. I’m fairly sure the taste of slightly curdled carpet offcuts will be the least of my problems after the zombie apocalypse so I think after Number Two’s second torpedo has been launched I might have a go at growing some cuttings. I have to drum up plants for the school fete this year (yes, we will be running a cake stall while the government spends $12 billion on jets) and it is always possible that there are fruit-growers out there in Berowra that like the taste of new cars.

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June 24, 2014

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Animal senses, Bandicoots, Brassicas, Companion planting, Edible flowers, Exclusion pest control, Insect pests, Plants and what I know about them, Possums, Rats, Vegetables

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All-conquering kale and its frenemies

Good friends describe me as “herbal”. I’ve been a lentil eater for 27 years and my shelves groan with organic gardening and vegetarian recipe books. And I’m not averse to dabbling in a spot of ancient-learned-women’s-plant-knowedge-as-yet-unverified-by-modern-experimental-science. But I have to say that companion planting has taken a body blow in our household in recent weeks. Here’s why:

Kale companion planted with marigold

Kale doing it for itself

Two kale plants, from the same punnet, planted less than a metre apart. On your left, the kale that enjoyed the companionship of a cheerful red and orange flowered marigold, “Naughty Marietta”. On your right, the kale out in the cold with no date (though giant mustard, baby leeks and daikon radish are hanging around in a kind of unstructured way).

“Well, I came for the marigolds, but I hear kale is a superfood!”

Companions in better days

Broadies under granny’s lavender-scented hanky

Shyla’s kale dreams

It turns out that the vague story I heard about marigolds, with their pungent foliage, as a nifty companion plant is true enough if you have a problem with nematodes, but dead wrong on the aphid front. It seems that all-female parthenogenic parasites love the cheery flowers of marigolds even more than I do. But not enough to turn down the opportunity for a feast on a superfood.

In fact, I read recently that if you rub some vaseline on a yellow sticky label and stick it in amongst your veggies, the aphids will be lured in and get stuck on the lube so you can dispose of them thoughtfully. But I’d advise you not to get too carried away with this approach, for a number of reasons: (a) if left long enough your post-it might attract aphids from further afield (b) striding out back with a bundle of stationery in one hand and a tube of vaseline in the other will raise eyebrows amongst your neighbours and (c) the veracity of this story is no more guaranteed than the one about the marigolds and the aphids.

I’m not dissing the power of the herb entirely though. It seems the smell of granny’s hanky does distract possums and bandicoots (and perhaps singing mice and super rats) from sniffing out newly sprouted peas and beans. My broadies and sugar snaps are looking good under a vegenet liberally sprinkled with lavender flowers and leaves. I hold out hopes that this continue to work, significantly reassured by the fact that absolutely no one, as far as I know, recommends these as companion plants.

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mccnmatt

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June 14, 2014

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Australian natives, Backyard birds, Climate change, Garden trees, Natives for shade, natural history, Plants and what I know about them, Weeds

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Sweetness and light

On our shady south-west facing hillside (who went house hunting without a compass, then?) there’s just one spot that gets plenty of light year round: not a bad place for some solar panels on the top of a pole. But right in that spot there’s a native tree, sweet pittosporum or pittosporum undulatum. And there’s a healthy specimen of the same species dead to the north of our kitchen windows, right where the winter sun might otherwise beam through.

Hornsby Council is pretty proud of its status as a leafy north shore suburb – “The Bushland Shire” – and dissuades its rate-payers in the strongest of terms from cutting down trees. But not this one. Until 2011, despite its status as a native, gardeners had a licence to kill sweet pittosporum, along with a select few imported nasties – cotoneaster, camphor laurel, privet and coral trees. But now it’s a different story. You can chop down quite a lot in Hornsby these days – pretty much any non-native tree. You can even gaily hack down Australian natives that don’t hail from this part of the Hawkesbury. But put that saw down! Pittosporum is now right there on that not very lengthy list of protected local trees, shrubs, grasses and vines. It’s a dramatic turnaround, from big-league environmental weed to local hero, all in the space of a single year.

A bird snack

Pittosporum is probably the least of our problems here!

The undulating, light blocking leaves of the pittosposum

So what’s going on here? Tim Low’s immensely readable book, “The New Nature: Winners and Losers in Wild Australia” (Viking, 2002), a fat but fascinating volume filled with stories about birds and trees, insects and frogs and their complex inter-relationships with human beings, has a lot to say about weeds and natives, and in fact quite a bit to say about sweet pittosporum. The essential argument of the book is that any quest to preserve untouched wilderness or to maintain nature free from human interference is not just doomed, but essentially ill-conceived.

Human influence has been making plant and animal winners and losers in Australia for many thousands of years, and Low documents not only the way some pragmatic species capitalise on urban environments (think peregrine falcons nesting in high rise buildings) but the way many others rely on continuing human intervention (like firestick farming or stock grazing) to survive. Sydney’s green and golden bell-frog survives at the Brickpits in Homebush, a location described as “one of the most industrially polluted in the Southern Hemisphere” (24) because these frogs are tolerant of high levels of heavy metals, while the frog-killing chytrid fungus is not. Low points out the limitations of the distinction between “native” and “exotic” as a way of gauging the impact of animals and plants on biodiversity, and argues that decisions about what to conserve and how to do it, are in short, very very complicated. Koalas can be forest killers and cows can step into the gap left by extinct megafauna in maintaining diverse grassland. As a greenie and a gardener, I found the anecdotes and ideas in “The New Nature” provoking and intriguing, making me take a good hard look at my weed anxieties and my fantasies of a bird-friendly, local provenance garden.

Hornsby Council’s change of heart about sweet pittosporum illustrates Tim Low’s arguments beautifully. Don Burke, the Australian Native Plants Society of Australia, Grow Me Instead (The Nursery and Garden Industry Association) and the Queensland Government all agree that it’s an invasive weed. “The New Nature” with its ambivalence about such terms calls pittosporum “our worst native weed” (250), “replacing diverse systems with monoculture” (201). While a canopy of eucalypts allows a rich understory, pittosporum shades out nearly everything else (although that nasty garden escape, privet, apparently copes well). Birds enjoy the pittosporum’s orange fruits and disperse its sticky seeds. Not needing fire or light to germinate, and tolerant of richer soils than many other natives, pittosporum is a native to this neck of the woods, flourishing on the shale ridgetops on Hawkesbury sandstone – most of which are now built on. Run off from houses and gardens has enriched the sandstone soils on the slopes and pittosporum has moved on in. According to Low, “If you take eucalypt forest, add fertiliser and water and take out fire, you have a recipe for rainforest. The pittosporum invasion is really a takeover by rainforest” (248).

Pittosporum undulatum has its defenders. Jocelyn Howell from the Royal Botanical Gardens suggests that pittosporum can shade out and outcompete other more troubling weeds (although Tim Low would argue that even invasive weeds like lantana can play their own role as a habitat). Others argue for it in terms of the food supplies it offers and the fact that it *is* a local really. Obviously, Hornsby Council has plumped for this point of view. Most of the advisories suggest that it’s a weed only outside its home range, using provenance to distinguish true locals from native invaders.

But according to Low’s arguments, its home range isn’t the home it once was. His book gives poignant examples of Sydneysiders talking about the impact of pittosporum (“pittos”) in terms of solastalgia, the sense of homesickness you have when you haven’t left home, but your home has changed forever. Orchids and grasses gone, along with the smell of eucalyptus (248). There are no easy answers here: it’s “a hard one”, “one of the most sensitive issues around” (249). Are the eucalypt forests of the Hawkesbury slowly morphing into (monocultural) rainforest? Will the catastrophic fires I expect and dread drive it back?

From a more selfish point of view, it seems like my kitchen windows will remain gloomy and my solar panels a dream, even as my fantasy as a kid growing up in the arid lands of the South Australian mallee, of coming home to a rainforest seems to be coming true…

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mccnmatt

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June 6, 2014

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Backyard chickens, Brush turkeys, chicken diet, Garden trees, Ornamental gardens, Plants and what I know about them, Plants that attract wildlife, Seasons

The liquidambar feast

So much excitement over such tiny seeds (or more accurately, in terms that will never be used in an up-market menu, even after the zombie apocalypse: “abortive seeds resembling sawdust“). Check out the mucky faces of these lorikeets. The yellow tailed black cockatoos love them too. At first, there’s just the occasional thump of the prickly round fruits hitting the deck, as if there’s a poltergeist at work. Then you hear a rustling overhead and a plaintive mewing, like a kitten stuck up the tree.

Don Burke doesn’t like liquidambar: they have thirsty roots that will choke your pipes and lift your pavers. But the 20 metre tree at our place shades us and our epiphytes in summer, lights up the yard in autumn, and by May, let the scraps of winter sun that makes it over the hill slide in through our front windows. The piles of fallen leaves get kicked up by the kids, scratched through by the chooks and dumped under the trees as easy if messy mulch. With my pro-native plant prejudices I wouldn’t have planted it, and if the sewage pipe backs up I’ll come to hate it, but it’s easy to love a deciduous tree.

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mccnmatt

Posted on

May 29, 2014

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Climate change, Companion planting, Death, Fruits for shade, Gardening, Greens, Ornamental gardens, Plants and what I know about them, Rats, Vegetables, Weeds

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Night of the Living Mulch: cover crops for the zombie apocalypse

When the very existence of humanity is threatened, perhaps by catastrophic global warming, perhaps by an attack of brain-eating monsters, what is the first thing you think of? Yes, we’re on the same page: ensuring an adequate layer of mulch under your fruit trees. Ideally something that not only retains moisture and maintains soil structure but offers a little something for the humans struggling with a post-industrial lifestyle nearby. So, to address the needs of fellow survivalists in these difficult times, I offer a run down on chlorophyll-laden companions for such moments of adversity.

Strawberries.

Chance of surviving: Good, given consistent moisture and morning sunlight. After a couple of years in the ground, susceptible to a virus that makes the fruits look like hairy-faced Cousin It out of the Adams Family – greenish protrusions all over the fruit. Still tastes okay, though: it doesn’t pay to be fussy after the zombie apocalypse.

Productivity: Theoretically, excellent. A delicate reminder of the luxuries of gentler times. In reality, in my garden, nada: easy pickings for critters. Maybe netting would help.

Capacity to out-compete weeds: Could do better. Needs extensive straw mulch or weed matting. This is your pampered city no-nothing who is the first to bite it when weapons are drawn.

Pepino.

Chance of surviving: Excellent. Said to be short-lived but can reproduce by layering, so new plants take root wherever branches lay on the ground. Tolerates partial shade well and copes well with periods of drought.

Productivity: Again, theoretically, impressive. Produces peach-sized juicy, mildly sweet fruits tasting like a slightly insipid melon – good in a mixed fruit salad. Flavour will be surely enhanced by the scarcities after the breakdown of civilisation. Fruits early, within the first year or so. Unfortunately, fruit tends to droop towards the ground where fruitarian zombies and/or rodents can easily nab them.

Aesthetic appeal: (the art galleries may be filled with mindless corpses, but the beautiful things in life are still important) High. Gorgeous little white and purple striped flower with a contrasting yellow stigma. The light apricot-coloured fruit is dappled with purple and the long leaves are an attractive greyish green.

Capacity to out-compete weeds. Not bad. Plenty of leaves right down to the ground, even in shade. Can’t entirely crowd out ehrharta or trad, though, and it’s a pain to weed around and through it. Not for neat freaks. But neat freaks probably won’t cope with the survivalist lifestyle too well, so not to worry.

Comfrey.

Chance of surviving. Comfrey will be the last plant standing. Deep tap roots enable it to access any water available. Needs some sunlight but copes with very little in my garden.

Productivity. This is the permaculture mother lode: high nitrogen, high potassium, a dynamic accumulator of minerals. No doubt there are herbal types who will profess it cures cancer. You can’t eat it and your chooks probably shouldn’t eat too much of it either unless you want them to have liver failure, but it’s a fantastic compost activator and decomposes into a comfrey tea that’s an all purpose liquid fertiliser.

Aesthetic appeal: Enormous textured grey-green leaves and lovely delicate purple flowers. Smells pleasantly of cucumbers when cut.

Capacity to out-compete weeds. Comfrey is a weed. Well, the non-sterile versions are: you are best getting your hands on the Bocking 14 sort which don’t produce seeds. Spend some time in the underground bunker planning ahead before you plant this, since, a bit like Jerusalem artichokes, once it’s in it stays there. Any tiny piece of root (or stem) in the ground will produce another plant. You can tear off its leaves three or four times in a year and it will come right back. In fact, comfrey may well be the plant version of the undead. The large leaves and capacity to grow when all around are wilting means it keeps most competitors down though trad seems to be able to find a way. Dies down briefly in winter which gives the other nasties a go. Since Sydney will no longer have a winter in the near future this may become less of a problem.

Sweet potato.

Chance of surviving: Very good. In theory dies back in winter (but see above). Regrows from tubers left in the ground in previous seasons. Copes well with drier periods, though it does need quite a bit of sun.

Productivity. In my garden hasn’t produced an astonishing number of tubers, but I haven’t taken it very seriously as a root crop. That will obviously change when civilisation breaks down and there’s no longer a chip shop around the corner. The new leaves and shoots are an excellent alternative to spinach or swiss chard, juicy and quite mild flavoured. They are much nicer to eat raw than rainbow chard, for instance, and apparently are a favourite food in the Phillipines. The leafy tips grow back quickly after being harvested.

Aesthetic appeal. Gorgeous. Some varieties have heart shaped leaves, others palmate. The leaves are a deep glossy green with purplish new growth. Related to the (weedy) morning glory vine, so you may get some very pretty flowers towards the end of summer. Apparently there are ornamental varieties with near-black or lime green leaves, but the culinary varieties are nothing to sneeze at. Note: there will be zero tolerance of ornamental plants after the zombie apocalypse.

Capacity to out-compete weeds. Not bad at all. The leaves are large and there are lots of them. The vine is quite vigorous and, like pepino, sends out roots where it touches the ground. With a little light supplementary weeding, my sweet potato seems to have kept things under control around the artichokes and the citrus pretty well.

* * *

No advice here on weaponry or tips on an antidote for those snacked on by the undead, but we have covered the important issues. Next week: hydroponics after the collapse of the West Antarctic Icesheet.

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mccnmatt

Posted on

May 25, 2014

Posted under

Animal pests, Backyard chickens, chicken diet, Gardening, Greens, Plants and what I know about them, Possums, Rats, Vegetables

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Critters with kidneystones

It was all going so well. The warrigal greens were flourishing, even without being regularly urinated on. Deep-rooted sorrel was a stalwart when pretty much nothing else was happening in the garden at all. Both were in high rotation in the kitchen. I’ve always been a bit cautious about using them raw, since, along with other garden staples like rainbow chard and rhubarb, both of them have a fair bit of oxalic acid, which if you overindulge and/or are unlucky can cause kidney stones (although the idea that the latest “miracle foods” might have the potential to be dangerous causes outrage in some) . Given that rainbow chard, which is also quite high in oxalates, always has escaped animal attention, it seemed too much of a coincidence that the beasties seemed to leave these plants alone: those smarty pants critters were sensibly avoiding intestinal distress .

But look at my poor greens now:

Something is clearly tucking in.

There are a number of possible suspects. Judging from the robotic squeaks and buzzes in the undergrowth, there are satin bowerbirds still around. Rumour has it they are fond of fresh shoots – I blame them for the tatty foliage of my now past-it Purple King beans. It could be the chickens of course, but though the four new girls spend a lot of time in the area where the warrigal greens are (or were… *sniff*) only tricksy skinny Shyla regularly scoots through the gap in the bamboo gate into the veggie patch where I’ve planted the sorrel and, more recently, rhubarb (the leaves of which *are* toxic to humans, and have also been chewed in the last few days). So, in the absence of an extensive literature review on comparative rodent, marsupial and human tolerances of oxalic acid (I have tried!), I’m blaming rats or possums. I guess definitive evidence would consist of creatures with particular glossy pelts. Or creatures rolling around with excruciating abdominal pain. Or both.

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mccnmatt

Posted on

May 7, 2014

Posted under

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.