Blog Posts

Notes on cultivating yam daisies (microseris lanceolata)

4/8/2017

Yam daisies or murnong are really delicious bush tucker - a root vegetable that tastes like a pre-salted chip! The good news doesn't end there - they're also really good for you. But while once common around Canberra, they're pretty hard to find in the wild now.

But you can grow them in your own garden - specialist nurseries sell them and you can buy seeds online (albeit for a small fortune). They're actually not all that hard to grow, though I have learned the hard way that they do have some particular requirements.

Here are some lessons from my experience growing them for a couple of years.

How to identify a yam daisy (microseris lanceolata)

3/8/2017

When Europeans first arrived in the Canberra area, it was said that the open hillsides glowed yellow with yam daisy flowers - a delicious indigenous staple food. This little yellow flowered plant looks remarkably similar to a dandelion, but up close it is quite different.

Sadly today yam daisies are quite hard to find. Decades of sheep grazing has almost eradicated this plant from its former habitats. The yellow flowers you see around the suburbs, and increasingly in our national parks, are usually exotic dandelions and cat's ears.

So next time you're walking through the bush and you come across a yellow flower, how can you tell if it's really a yam daisy?

In this post I'll show you how.

Planting up our berms with perennial plant guilds

4/7/2017

Permaculture is about growing plants together in beneficial combinations - where the characteristics of one plant benefit another, and vice versa. A simple idea is to ensure you have habitat for pollinating insects (e.g. lots of different flowering plants) so you can be sure there are lots of the right kinds of insects around to pollinate your fruit trees when they come into flower too. Another is to use ground covers that don't directly compete with your trees and shrubs, but instead act as a barrier to weeds and grasses especially, which can compete for nutrients in the same soil layer with establishing produce trees.

Earthworks continued - hand finishing the sunken beds

30/6/2017

A machine gets you only part of the way with earth works - the next step was to finish things off by hand...

The challenges of trying to make a bed completely level was also a very useful lesson to learn!

The earthworks have begun!

21/6/2017

So, the house is a mess, there's soil pretty much everywhere, but we made huge leaps and bounds with our garden implementation this week!

Creating a design for our back garden

10/6/2017

With any garden overhaul there is a question about how much re-modelling should take place. At one end of the spectrum, new plants can be added around existing garden structures without fundamentally altering the original layout of a garden, at the other end, the whole site can be razed and re-contoured, shaped into something completely different to what has been before.

For our back garden, we have opted for something in between these two extremes: some existing structures remain, but there is a reasonable amount of earth working in the middle of the current lawn to make for better water flows and passive water capture.

Digging a mini swale to grow some bush tucker plants

2/6/2017

One of the challenges for our garden overhaul is how much of the original garden to keep the same, and how much to change. This post shows how we added in a water harvesting feature (a mini swale) within an existing landscaped area, to enable the establishment of new plants - some local bush tucker species!

The perils of pH: watch out for alkaline commercial soil mixes

21/4/2017

The pH of your soil is critical for good plant growth. When we buy in soil we expect it's suitable for growing plants in - but amazingly, this isn't always true. In fact, the issue of alkalinity of bought soil here in Canberra doesn't seem that uncommon - I've heard from several people of similar issues, so this post is relevant for anyone who's thinking of buying in some soil!

Growing perennial leeks in Canberra

7/4/2017

The leek we're all familiar with that you can readily buy in the shops is an annual plant, meaning that new seeds need to be grown every year to grow new leeks.

But did you know that leeks have a perennial cousin?

The perennial leek is a variant of allium ampeloprasum - the other being elephant garlic. I didn't know about it either, until I happened upon a market stall on the south coast, about 2 years ago, where someone was selling a few tiny leeks in a pot. So I bought the pot and took them back, and now, a few seasons on, it's taking off! From that tiny punnet, we now have a whole bed of them! What's more - they're delicious!

The challenge of gum trees

15/11/2016

A challenge to the would-be food gardener in the 'Bush Capital' is the amount of gum trees planted throughout Canberra as street and garden trees. Eucalypts are surprisingly water-hungry and pump huge amounts of water up from the soil to their leaves. Their light dappled shade allows more sunlight to reach the ground under the canopy, so that, unlike the heavy shade zones under deciduous trees in European and North American forests, where it's often quite damp, it's usually dry and crunchy under a gum tree. Combine this with the fact that gum trees produce chemicals to inhibit the growth of competing plants, you'll see that the hard, dry soil near to a gum isn't going to be a great habitat for your next planting of lettuce.

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