Megan Palmer

If you are growing any perilla, boil a generous bunch with a piece of slab sugar for 15 minutes and drink the tea.

I grow it especially to dry to make a tea.

If I eat too much shellfish, I break out in a skins rash and the perilla tea helps to relieve the itching.  

If I know that I’ll be eating shellfish, I usually brew up a batch to drink before I have the meal.

Comfrey, calendula and/or plaintain slave ought to help soothe your skin too - comfrey is my go to salve.

Hope you recover quickly.

Puts

Jugs

Poppies have established themselves at the community garden amd with a relatively high turnover of gardeners, many plots are often dug over.

The seeds will germinate quickly in spring and grow so well that they are almost like weeds, but oh such beautiful weeds that I struggle to pull up.

As others have pointed out, allowing them to overwinter in plots that have been lightly dug is a foolproof way to get them established.

Tereza and Chris have covered most of the solutions, however, I’d like to add roasted tray bakes of a glut of summer vegetables.

Spices can be added at the time of roasting or the vegetables can be refrigerated/frozen and used in other meals - add a dressing and eat as is; make into a ratatouille style dish; added to frittata and/or a quiche.

I also enjoy making pickles, chutneys and relishes so excess produce can be made into a condiment to spice up cold meat, sandwiches, quiches etc

Dehydrating produce is one of my favoured preservation methods and I’m still using dehydrated birch boletes and wine caps foraged several years ago.

We make a version of spinach and ricotta cannelloni with homemade crepes, substituting silverbeet aka chard or kale.

We prefer the tomato sauce topped with Parmesan baked in the oven over the white sauce version.

The baked cannelloni freeze and reheat well too.

The crepes are easier to stuff and roll up than stuffing the bought pasta tubes and as a bonus we have the extras for dessert with castor sugar and fresh lemon juice or maple syrup etc.

For just the two of us, 1 1/2 cups flour makes 8 crepes for the cannelloni and 3 each for dessert.

Yes, they look ready. Hope that they are a tasty variety!

Judith Browning wrote:

I've cut bamboo a little with my pruning saw...this would be a lot of cuts and would need to set up a way to hold more firmly while cutting.

Hubby bought me a battery powered mini Stihl chainsaw for my Christmas present a few years ago, best present ever - when is your birthday- maybe you could just get it for yourself as an early present🥰

Hello Judith, this video shows how to tie the pieces of bamboo together - I’m sure there must be lots of others.



If you don’t want to bother lashing the spacers to the cross lengths, you could just drill through the nodes of the spacers and the cross lengths and thread a wire through to secure them.

Look forward to seeing what you end up doing.

Have you considered lashing the bamboo together and then tying the bamboo around the cross pieces of your pergola?

Twine would not be too obtrusive and you could stain it with the same colour that the cedar has been treated with?

The twine ought to be relatively easier to cut and remove when the times comes to take down the bamboo.