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:

Chewed sorrel Chewed warrigal greens

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.

Two easy steps to make your warrigal greens thrive

We had a break from the back garden this weekend, camping at Twin Beaches in Marramarra National Park on the beautiful drowned river valley that is the Hawkesbury estuary.  The east-facing wooded slope up the back of the camp site was object lesson in how to use the shade-loving local plants I’ve been bringing back into my garden over the last couple of years.  Particularly gorgeous was the swathe of prickly rasp fern, tendrils fresh and pink after recent rain, appearing through the grass and the dianella caerulea along the path to the dangerously repellant pit toilet.

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I haven’t yet managed to propagate a cissus vine – I am working on some cissus antarctica cuttings pinched from a nicely planted up children’s playground.  Since it is a national park and I am slightly neurotic, I would have felt guilty if I had snipped off some propagation material from the vine that wound its way through the trees – a slender young cissus hypoglauca, I believe.  Apparently you can cut the stems of the mature vine into sections and drink the sap that drips out like water.

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But most impressive was the dense carpet of exceedingly healthy looking warrigal greens growing only a metre or two back from the high tide line.  I did end up picking some to stave off the scurvy likely to be induced by too much camping food.  However it was a bit of a challenge to find a satisfactory spot for my ad hoc harvest, since the most vibrant and sturdy patches of tetragonia seemed to be in just those  places – a couple of steps from the fire hole, around the base of a convenient tree – that a bloke might choose to relieve himself after putting away a couple of long necks.  This may be a coincidence of course.  But nettles and lime trees seem to favour human urine as a tonic so who knows, maybe New Zealand spinach is the same?  I know it’s sterile and Romans used it to wash their togas and all, but I’m not completely sure I’m going to try this particular high-nitrogen fertiliser on the salad greens at home.

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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.

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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”.

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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!