If you are wondering why the blog went a bit quiet over the last couple of months, this is why. For the past few months I've been thoroughly caught up in the management of the 14th Australasian Permaculture Convergence (APC 14 for short) which was held in Canberra for the very first time this April.

There's a bit of press out there about eating weeds and how healthy they are. But really, is it worth it? I am always game to try new things and have been experimenting all summer with some edible weeds. The verdict: some are a bit naah, but fat hen passes all the taste tests with flying colours. It tastes just like spinach - only it's nicer. No kidding, it really is! If there's one weed worth eating, this is it...

We have a lot of rocket in the garden - perhaps a little too much! Perennial or wild rocket, diplotaxis tenuifolia, is a fabulously successful plant in Canberra that provides pungent leafy greens for most of the year. The trick is finding enough ways to eat the stuff.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!