I don’t plant the supermarket kind of large head broccoli any more. It’s too slow, too short a season, to low a yield, too prone to pests and diseases. And broccolini fills the spot so much better. I have two favourite kinds, favourites for different reasons.
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…
Tamarillos are like a sweet, tart tomato in a tough skin. If you like tart fruit, they are good to eat just out of the hand. To my mind though, the highest use is for tomato sauce. In the tropics and subtropics, fruit fly make bulk organic tomatoes a bit of a challenge. I grow cherry tomatoes for eating and cooking fresh, but I’ve moved to substituting tamarillos for preserving.
Traditionally, corn silk tea is used for urinary related problems – things like cystitis, kidney stones, prostate problems, bedwetting. I’ll keep some dried silks on the shelf and keep it in mind in case of cystitis, but the reason I like drinking corn silk tea routinely is that it reduces LDL or “bad” cholesterol levels, without at the same time affecting HDL or “good” cholesterol. I have the genes for…
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.…
We talk about food security but not so much about medicine security. This is a series about the plants with a good evidence base for medicinal use. They all have garden ecosystem and culinary uses too, so worth growing anyhow, and having them growing close at hand might give you a small measure of security in the wild west of late capitalism. Calendula, for example, has some good evidence backing…