One of our Coffs Harbour Davidson’s Plum trees has bourne its first harvest. Davidson’s Plums are full of good stuff but the big claim to medicinal fame is a compound called ‘anthocyanin’. Anthocyanins do a number of generally healthy things but the one that really interested me was the way they improve gut microbiota.
Come with me on a picking walk as I pick dinner out of the garden.
A key insight of permaculture thinking is that there is no such thing as “side effects”. Everything has multiple effects. Everything exists in a networked ecology of interdependencies, ripples, cascades and risk insurance redundancies. So verge gardening has to be looked at as a sector analysis that takes account of all the “wild energies” of “the public”, and some of them are quite wild.
My usual use for lemon myrtle is as a treatment for coughs, colds, runny nose, stuffy sinus, hayfever. The essential oil in lemon myrtle is 90% citral, the same essential oil that gives lemon grass its lemon scent. Citral is antimicrobial – antibacterial, antifungal and antiviral – and it’s also anti-allergic and anti-inflammatory.
Our two year old tropical apple is fruiting, and the apples are so good – sweet and crisp and intensely flavoured. The description says they…
It was a very nice outcome from this bit of research that aloe vera actually does work to repair sun damage “stimulating hyaluronic acid and collagen production” – which is what the labels on expensive little bottles of cosmetic serums say too. I think I need to plant more.
Someone asked me in a comment about my seed raising mix, so it’s a good opportunity to do a whole post about it. My recipe has changed with the availability of ingredients. But the concepts remain the same. Permaculture is like that – not a recipe but a system to be applied differently to every site.