Striped Marsh Frogs moved in of their own accord. They don’t mind urban environments except that, like all frogs, they are highly sensitive to RoundUp ®. Use RoundUp to get rid of your bindii-eyes or lantana, and you end up having to use insecticide on your skin to ward off mosquitoes. And then snail bait. And then whatever it is they use against malaria plasmodiums and rat lung worm.
I’m not a fan of winter. I like light and warm. I like being barefoot and outside. Winter always comes on me unprepared. So the equinox is a good warning. It’s like when the kids are playing hard and having fun and the games are getting a bit manic, and you give them first warning – half an hour more and it’s time to come in and get cleaned up.…
We talk about food security but not so much about medicine security. This is a series about the plants with a good evidence base for medicinal use. They all have garden ecosystem and culinary uses too, so worth growing anyhow, and having them growing close at hand might give you a small measure of security in the wild west of late capitalism. Calendula, for example, has some good evidence backing…
I’ve just discovered black-eyed peas, and they’re set to become a staple in my garden. I’m looking forward to playing with some African recipes with these.
I go on a picking walk most days, picking what needs to be picked, and then thinking about what to do with it (and what else I need to pick from the herbs and perennials to go with it). What’s for dinner is always led by what needs to be used. This has the useful side effect that what needs to be used is pretty nearly always what’s at the…
Gotu kola is renouned for improving mental clarity, cognition, memory, brain power, and it’s also useful for wound healing and vein healing. But beware – it has a hidden talent for bioremediation of soils contaminated with heavy metals.
Our local farmer’s market is a brilliant display of ethnic diversity in food. There’s East Asian, West Asian, Middle Eastern, African, South American, Pacific Islander stalls. I can buy fresh bamboo shoots, banana flowers, yams, red eggplants, cassava, abika, kang kong. It’s where I found fish mint, a little pot of it for a dollar, from someone who spoke so little English that all I got was that it was…