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.
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.
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…
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.…
I love the chair. It saves me the angst of murdering perfectly healthy seedlings, or worse, being tempted to plant them and use up all my precious garden space on more basil or zucchinis than any household can stand. The chair brings me into lovely conversations with passers by who garden, even just pots on highrise balconies. Because I am sharing what I am myself planting, it creates conversations about…
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…