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.
I have one of those huge, chaotic families that are impossible to describe to someone else. And tomorrow, we’re all gathering, (outdoors, under marquees), for Christmas lunch. This year, my contributions to the table nearly all come from the garden, one way or another – icecreams made with real egg custard, passionfruit for the pav and the punch, green salad, rosemary oil sourdough crackers, and this seafood sauce.
Tomorrow morning, at 8.47 am, we here in eastern Australia reach the crest of the year. The earth tilts its face fully towards the sun, the shadows that day will be at their shortest, the day the longest.
Come with me on a picking walk as I pick dinner out of the garden.
I forgot about the party. I had half an hour to get a plate together to take. Woops. This is such a good, easy, fast recipe, and if you have sourdough culture going and rosemary in the garden, it’s all but free. And they are really good.
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.