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…
Too many tomatoes for eating fresh but not enough for passata making yet, so it’s sun drying time. We have a dehydrator but often low tech is easiest. A dark coloured enamel plate with a dark tinted pyrex pie plate in the sun. Halved cherry tomatoes and some sprigs of basil, oregano, thyme. Easy peasy.
We just split the first of our native bee hives. Late spring is the time, when they are warmed up and living their best life, and when there is still plenty of time for them to regroup before winter. There are over 1700 species of bees in Australia but only 11 of them build hives and only a few are stingless. We have two species, both stingless hive building, honey…
Much of the retrosuburbia writing about energy use and energy conservation that I see is about heating, but heating isn’t the issue here. Here, it is cooling, not heating that is the main challenge, even now let alone in the future.
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.