Burra Maluca

I find that guests usually enjoy a good nose around the garden, which gives me an excuse to harvest anything that might be good to make a meal out of for them. Right now the prickly pears are ripe, so a quick lesson on how to pick and prepare them would likely go down well. Also the sichuan peppers are ready for harvesting so something that will complement their mouth-numbing spiciness would be good, then have the prickly pears for afters.

Then if they liked them, they would get sent home with a handful of peppers, a baby pepper tree and a pad of each of the four colours of prickly pear.

I stumbled on this yesterday, which made me laugh far more than it probably should have done...

The next morning, Rosa invited everyone to come and play with the new magnifying glass. But Iggy was still far too busy studying his ever-growing mountain of books and couldn't get his mind off all the things he was learning, so the other dragons began to play without him.

I was a little concerned about how much Iggy was shutting himself off and thought I should have a little chat with him.

"Iggy, you must be learning something terribly interesting if you can't drag yourself away to play with Rosa's new lens and meet young Ben. What is so fascinating about that book? And all the other books that seem to have joined it..."

"Well mum, that's the thing. It IS utterly fascinating. And it does seem to explain pretty much everything."

"Hmmm. I do know what you mean, because I found it fascinating too. But I'm a bit worried about you spending quite so much time being completely absorbed by it. Maybe you could explain some of what you've been learning to me. Which bits did you find most interesting?"



"Well all of it. I mean, it explains gravity. It explains time. And it ties pretty much everything all together in a way I've never seen before. Do you want me to explain one of those to you? There's so much in it that it's hard to pick out just one aspect. They all tie together..."

"I read something in the thread about polymaths that might be a good way for you to pull some of it together. Somebody asked 'Can you explain why light has momentum but no mass?' "

"Oh that's easy mum! It's because E = mc² and momentum isn't really to do with mass, it's to do with energy. Most things have both mass and speed so the equation works for them, but with light it's just speed so it looks like the equation doesn't work but it does really because it it still has energy, which is the important bit. Of course if you take the equation too literally it looks like you should get divide-by-zero errors but if you read it as a relationship rather than as a mathematical function it works just fine."

"Well yes Iggy. That's true. But can you explain it, so a child could understand it? Or to someone who shrinks in horror every time they see an equation? Imagine how Rosa would look at you if you used an equation like that to explain anything to her."

"Hmm, you're right. Understanding something is very different to explaining it. I think I'd have to use words, not equations. And I don't think she'd know what those letters mean either."

"Exactly! But you must also remember that she's an intelligent little dragon, she just sees things differently to you. All of us see things differently, and have different knowledge sets. Do you think you could find a way to explain it so she could understand it?"

"Let me think for a while..."

Iggy looked over to where the other dragons were playing with the new magnifying glass, and with Austin's little telescope too by the looks of it...



"You're right, mum. Rosa IS very intelligent. But she's also thinks very differently to me. I think maybe I should use different words. Maybe I can use 'oomph' instead of 'momentum'."

Iggy thought for a while, then he asked me "Mum, you homeschooled Alan, didn't you? How did you teach him about momentum?"

"Well he learned it in his normal science studies originally. But then when we were going through the pre-release version of the Relativity+ book he learned the same stuff you've been reading about now."

It seemed an awfully long time ago. Alan was twelve years old then, and he's thirty now. And I remembered how learning an alternative take on something he thought he already knew all about had challenged him somewhat.

"I think I wrote it all down as I found it fascinating at the time. Hang on, I'll see if I can find it..."



I rummaged around on some old files and found where I'd written it up. And then I read it out to Iggy...

Everything was going well with the book testing until we came to Compton scattering which, if you remember, is what happens when a massless photon bumps into an electron, the momentum of which sends the electron off in one direction while the photon bounces off in another with an increased wavelength.  Which I think means that some of the energy in the photon is transferred to the electron.

“But mum, that can't happen because if the photon doesn't have any mass then it can't have momentum 'cos momentum is a function of mass and velocity.  It said so on the Discovery channel.”

For a moment I am transported back to the scene in Babe movie, when the little girl is presented with a beautiful dolls house lovingly crafted for her by her grandfather.  She takes one look, bursts into tears and wails, “But I wanted the one I saw on the television!!!”

I try to snap myself back to the present moment.

“But it does happen.  Apparently.”

“Then in that case the photon does have mass!”

“But as far as we can tell, the photon doesn't have mass.  So somewhere there is obviously a problem with the way we are understanding things.  Where do you think the problem could be?”

“Well either the photon does really have mass, like I said, or the definition of momentum is all wrong.”

He was obviously seriously unhappy with the thought that the model of momentum he'd built up might not be right.  And he was finding it very difficult to accept that anything he'd seen on the television could possibly be wrong.  

“Do you remember when you were learning about electricity and you came across the idea of 'conventional current'?”

“Yeah.  They didn't know which way the electricity flowed around the circuit so they just guessed so they could carry on figuring things out and then years later they found out that they'd got it the wrong way round and that in fact it flowed the other way round to what they thought it did but it didn't matter because the stuff they'd learned and the circuits they'd built still worked so they just called the way it went round the wrong way 'conventional current' as their way of admitting they'd got it wrong and carried on as if they'd got it right in the first place.”

“Yes that's right dear.”

At least, I thought it was.  It was an awfully long spiel from my usually monosyllabic offspring.

“So you see sometimes when you don't know something you just have to take a best guess and see how far that idea gets you.  But you should always remember that sometimes our best guesses are wrong and be prepared to change them if necessary.”

“Well what could be wrong about it?” he asked.

“Well what does your definition of momentum involve?”

“Mass and velocity”

“And it needs both?”

“Yes.”

“And what is the velocity of a photon?”

“The speed of light, duh!”

“Oh yeah.  And what does E = mc²  mean?”

“It means that energy can be expressed as a function of mass and the speed of light.  See, look!  It's what it says!”

“A bit like momentum then?”

“Doh!”

He clapped his hand on his forehead in true Homer Simpson style before continuing.

“So momentum is just another way of describing the energy in something.  A photon doesn't need mass as all its energy is in its speed.  They didn't realise and they tagged the momentum label onto the wrong thing.   Silly beggers.”

“That's right dear.”

Wow, I wasn't expecting that lot!  It seems that even twelve-year-olds don't like having to de-construct their mental models of the way things work

But before Iggy and I had a chance to talk about what I'd written, the front door burst open and Austin stomped in, looking exceedingly unhappy and complaining loudly about how a wild boar had shot out from the side of the road at a rate of knots and put a huge dent in the front bumper of the car, and taken out one of the headlights. As I listened, I noticed something sneaking in through the open door behind him and heard the pitter-patter of not-so-tiny trotters as they carried a guilt-ridden Mochyn into the house and off to hide in the other room. I thought it best not to mention that he'd come home and decided to cut the conversation with Iggy short and make a cup of coffee to attempt to calm things down.

Why is my life so chaotic?

Or maybe make a proper book summary post in the books forum. I don't have the spare energy right now to create one right now.

Here's a link - How to make a Summary for Review Thread

I have heard, but don't know for sure if it's true, that much commercially sold celery seed is actually lovage seed. Which would make sense because lovage is a perennial that lives for around fifteen years so it would be easier to keep a few lovage plants and not have to keep replacing the biennial celery plants, and get seed every year.

Apparently it's very, very similar to genuine celery seed - slightly bigger and a stronger flavour.

Lovage itself is like a super-charged mix of parsley and celery, only it grows six foot tall and is perennial and is much stronger in flavour.

I started growing it for the first time this year as I'm trying to move towards more perennials in the garden.

Finally, we have cut those bits of granite, giving three pieces the same size to lay next to each other to form the top of the heated bench.

I think we might actually have the bench itself before winter!

Note also duck-patched T-shirt, grey water pipe to take the laundry water to the fig tree, old marble kitchen sink also waiting to be installed...

I wonder if it would work to post asking how the generally accepted advice could be improved by applying permaculture principles to it? Using it as a springboard for something better seems much more appropriate than just posting generic stuff and then hoping to sneak affiliate links in, which feels icky to me. What on earth are you hoping to promote if you have no personal experience? And of course whatever you post would have to meet organic standards as a bare minimum.

Are you hoping to actually start your own garden? Can you share pictures? I'm sure there are plenty of people here who can help you make that move from the standard AI researched advice to something that actually works.

In the eight years I've had my dog I've trimmed his nails twice. Once was very soon after I got him as he'd been living with someone who kept him in a cage and he didn't get enough exercise to wear them down. Once was quite recently because one of his dew claws had gotten so long it was curling around and began to catch on things as he ran around the place, which obviously hurt him.

I'm still not convinced it was necessary to cut all of them though. But then he's a sheepdog and runs around like a lunatic on fairly hard ground as much as he can which keeps all the claws except the dew claws pretty well under control.

When we bought this place around seven years ago, the neighbours had loads of exceedingly well cared for young fruit trees. They had drip irrigation installed, they were professionally pruned every year, and the grass around them was mown neatly but the land was never ploughed, which meant they can comply with fire regulations whilst allowing the soil to rebuild.

But there was one young tree that broke their rules.

And it was growing half way down the bank that rose from their bottom terrace to the track that goes up to the next terrace.



They never seemed to prune it like the others, and it wasn't neatly arranged and maintained. And as it grew it started to overhang the track which meant we started to drive into the branches with the truck, and then also the car as it grew bigger. I felt guilty about this and eventually asked them if we could cut it back a bit so we didn't damage either it or our wing mirrors. They laughed and told us to do what we wanted with it as it wasn't even supposed to be there and must have grown from a peach pit that got thrown onto the bank years ago. They never even watered it! So I trimmed it a bit so stopped driving into the branches.

It's one of the first trees I see every morning when I come down the steps, and I was utterly delighted a few weeks ago when I noticed that it had three little peaches growing on it. I watched them getting bigger and bigger, then one morning I noticed that one of them had fallen off. And it had tumbled down the bank and got caught behind a rock. I also knew that the moment I let my dog out, he would immediately sniff it out and devour it, which to me is sacrilege as the first ripe fruit from a young fruit tree should be carefully sampled and shared out so everyone can assess it. I couldn't reach it from the track, and it felt wrong to go onto their land to steal their fruit, so I got my long-handled fruit picker, scooped it up, and put it safe indoors until I saw one of them.

Later that day my neighbour came down to take Rock out for a walk and I gave the peach to her. We ceremoniously washed it and cut two pieces off so we could each test it. It was absolutely delicious! So then she clambered up the rocks and picked the other two, gave one to me and took the other, and the remaining half of the first one, up with her to sample with her husband. And also gave me permission to go onto her bit of land to take photos to share.

It looks like the pit must have been thrown 'out of the way' and landed in a perfect spot, part way down the bank so it's shaded from some of the brutal summer sun, especially in the afternoons. Those rocks (the stone ones, not the dog...) will also give shade, and act as a serious mulch to reduce evaporation.



I just find it a wonderful accidental success story!

Christopher Weeks wrote:I have grown-from-seed 6-7 year old trees that are 12-15' tall and haven't produced any blooms yet. When do full-sized trees start making fruit?

I have a seven year old tree grown from seed, smaller than yours at about six foot, that is producing its first fruit this year.

I wonder if yours put their effort into growing taller, while mine settled on being smaller but more productive?