Burra Maluca

I've just discovered lovage - it's like a six foot tall perennial cross between parsley and celery (not actually a cross, but you can use it like a super powerful version of either) that I'm really enjoying adding to lots of my dishes.

Here's an image from the wikipedia entry of lovage

Nancy Reading wrote:Ooh, is that tamarillo Burra? I've been wanting to try those!
I wonder whether it would be perennial with you? Please let us know how you get on.

Yes, tamarillo! They are a bit frost tender so it will be touch-and-go whether or not it survives without a bit of extra protection. I have it in a big pot stood in roughly the place I want to plant it, while its poor roots recover from being hacked about and stuck in a net in a plastic bag for months. It also likes a bit of shade so I want to mess about with the position a bit until I find the perfect summer-spot then hope it's also frost-free enough. My most successful dragon-fruit plant is in the same area so I'm hopeful.

Taking bets what colour the fruit will be because the seller didn't know...

This year I'm growing lovage, walking onions, feijoca (perennial beans that give a big edible root) and globe artichokes for the first time.  I've also planted a tree tomato, but I'm not going to get into the debate about whether tomatoes are vegetables or fruit. I don't consider them to be mutually exclusive...

I've just got my hands on some hamburg parsley root seed too, which I've sown but obviously it hasn't germinated yet. It's not really the right time of year for sowing here as it's a bit too hot but I kept some seed for autumn sowing and spring 2027 sowing too so I'm hedging my bets a bit.

I'm also eating a lot of mulberry leaves. I've had the tree for a few years but this year is the first time we've tried eating them. It's a white mulberry, which seems to grow faster and have softer leaves than the black ones I've had before. And it keeps trying to grow too big for the space I have available for it so snipping it into shape by harvesting greens from it seems a perfect way to keep it under control.

My apple cores mostly get shoved into the compost caddy, which is then emptied onto the veggie garden and covered in hay mulch. Then when baby fruit trees grow I dig them out and transplant them. It's not exactly what Paul had in mind but I'm gradually running out of places to transplant fruit trees to...

This video about traditional grain growing and harvesting in Spain was published a few days ago and I think it's worth a watch.



The soundtrack is available auto-dubbed into English, but it's full of errors and I'd recommend also putting the English subtitles on to make it less confusing. To a very large extent the images speak for themselves though. It shows various techniques for harvesting, from sickles and scythes through animal powered harvesters right up to combines. The threshing scenes were faschinating too. Locally they used similar methods and many old rural properties had smaller, circular threshing floors which in more recent times would be put to use by driving the tractor round and round on, but this video shows mule-powered devices in action.

I stumbled on this, which seems to fit this thread pretty well. It begins with this quote...

It is not the man who has too little, but the one who desires more, who is poor.

23k trees in 24 hours!

The very idea of being bent over for hours at a time is enough to give most of us a backache. But that's all in a long day's work for Antoine Moses.

This 23-year-old tree-planter from Quebec has a unique ability and incredible endurance.

And as Global’s Paul Johnson shows us, both feats have earned the young Canadian another impressive world record.

I love trees. I love to watch them grow big and tall and wild and free.

And then I discovered that big trees try to produce a lot of fruit. And that if I'm struggling to keep up with the watering they will then lose the ENTIRE crop and I get nothing. If they are kept small, they produce a manageable amount of fruit that I have some hope of using up, and it's easier to get enough water to the tree to support the development of that fruit. Also, when they are small I can fit more trees into the space available. And it's easier to pick the fruit because I can reach it.

We still have an enormous orange tree because I like to sit in its shade, and oranges drop when they are ripe so it doesn't matter if I can't reach them, and they ripen later in the year when there is more rain. But the fig tree has been hacked to about a quarter of the size it was last year and is doing brilliantly. And I'm busy imagining the maximum size I want the other fruit trees to grow so I can squeeze more varieties in between them.

Just because I love trees doesn't mean I have to have just a handful of huge ones - I can have dozens of little fruit trees that I can actually harvest and care for!

This is the book that finally opened my eyes - Grow a Little Fruit Tree

Jay Angler wrote:So what's a French food that starts with a 'V'?  

Only one answer to that as far as I'm aware - Vin!

I asked Stephen Barstow, author of Around the World in 80 Plants and he told me this...

Yes, many Alliums occasionally produce small bulbils like yours which you can try to grow on. Other Alliums always produce bulbils - like hardneck garlic, some types of leek, Allium vineale etc.

I looked up the wikki page for Allium vineale, also known as crow garlic.  Apparently the umbels of crow garlic usually have several small bulbils and may or may not also have flowers. Apparently the seeds seldom set and propagation is usually by accomplished by bulbils getting knocked off and growing into new plants.



Onions are strange creatures...

Does this count as demi-ace?