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.
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…