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Category: Garden

A knobbly, scaly, irregular shaped dark brown tuber with roots coming off it.

Yams

My part of the world is not kind to potatoes, or wheat, or sugar cane. More and more I am realising that our northern European food culture, imported along with the first fleet, makes very hard work of it. The food crops that dominate the Farmer’s Market are mostly south-east Asian, African, Central American, or Pacific Islander. Besides all the wonderful range of greens and fruits, there’s the starchy calorie…

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A small tree in a square, black plastic pot. It has glossy, medium green leaves and a small bamboo stake.

Garden Pharmacy – Cinnamon

I bought a cinnamon tree. It’s a small tree – two to five metres – and attractive with its glossy green leaves and red new growth. And it needs to be pruned hard. So I should be able to find a spot for it somewhere even in this little suburban garden. But some research about cinnamon being “a potent botanical for complicated UTI” struck me.

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A glass breakfast bowl with slices of banana, cubes of paw paw (papaya) and passionfruit pulp, sitting on a bed of white yoghurt. A spoon sits on the back edge of the bowl.

Beating fungal disease

First of the season’s pawpaw (papaya) for breakfast this morning, with Cavendish banana, black passionfruit and homemade yoghurt. The pawpaw in last year’s winter fruit bowl had more black spot but this year I think I’ve beaten it.

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A large pile of leafy greens, lots of different shades and textures, all of the named ones pretty identifiable in there. At the top, you can just see the bottom of an EzyYo container with some yoghurt in it, a blue plate with a block of white cheese, four eggs, and a bowl of red cherry tomatoes. On the right, you can see half of an unbaked pie crust filled with baking paper and beans ready for blind baking.

Picnic Pie

This morning on my picking walk, I picked silver beet, lucullus, chives, spring onion greens, nasturtium leaves, dandelion leaves, chickweed, scurvy weed, aragula, leaf amaranth, sweet potato leaves, lemon basil, dill, oregano, parsley, sorrel, curly kale, dino kale, rocket, warrigal greens, molokhia. So I made a last minute pie to take to a picnic lunch.

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A green tarpaulin covered in fragments of black charcoal with a shiny surface.

Bamboo Biochar

We made bamboo biochar on the weekend. There’s some impressive science behind the idea that biochar, and especially bamboo biochar, might be a cheap, fast, effective way to remove huge amounts of carbon from the atmosphere and add it to the soil. And biochar does such good things for soil quality.

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First of the Season Broccoli

I don’t plant the supermarket kind of large head broccoli any more. It’s too slow, too short a season, to low a yield, too prone to pests and diseases. And broccolini fills the spot so much better. I have two favourite kinds, favourites for different reasons.

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In the centre of the image is a large wooden carved fruit bowl filled with ripe Ladyfinger and Cavendish bananas, orange-red tamarillos, lime green guavas and yellow passionfruit. In the foreground and background are more tamarillos.

Autumn Fruit Bowl

I continue to be astonished at the quantity of food we can produce on our little suburban block. We harvested over 20kg of tamarillos today, and this is the third pick of the season, with another to go. here’s a huge bunch of Cavendish bananas ripening on the back deck, and a smaller bunch of Ladyfingers. The lemon tree in the verge planting has its first real crop just starting…

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