Breakfast this morning. It’s a bit astounding, and very exciting, that just three years into this retrosuburbia challenge, I can eat a breakfast of yoghurt and fresh fruit salad most mornings if I want to – apple and plumcot and mulberries last month, passionfruit and blueberries and dragonfruit next month, citrus by winter, and next year there will be feijoas and figs, pears and cherries, custard apples and carambolas. I…
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.