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…
I’ve just discovered black-eyed peas, and they’re set to become a staple in my garden. I’m looking forward to playing with some African recipes with these.
We’ve done relatively little “renovation” in the conventional sense in retrosuburbia-ing this 1950’s cottage. In most cases, the embedded energy, and money, is more than would be saved by changing an old thing for a new one. This west wall is one of the few bits of real demolishing and rebuilding we’ve done.
We have six bunches of bananas on (there’s a reason Coffs is the home of the Big Banana!) – three Cavendish and three Ladyfinger. We also have two of a Filipino variety that have yet to fruit. They are supposed to be a dwarf, cooking variety so they may be Saging Mondo? Luckily, my grandkids are as boring with their favourite lunchbox recess baking as they are with their pita…
I picked a couple of eggplants on my picking walk, and there were at least another three or four needing to be picked this week. It had to be eggplant for dinner. These barbeque skewers turned out so well that I had to write out the recipe even if just to remember it myself, for next eggplant glut, next week.
I go on a picking walk most days, picking what needs to be picked, and then thinking about what to do with it (and what else I need to pick from the herbs and perennials to go with it). What’s for dinner is always led by what needs to be used. This has the useful side effect that what needs to be used is pretty nearly always what’s at the…