Acerola Cherry - hardy perrennial superfood

I'm so very pleased with our small harvest of 6 acerola cherries this season.

It didn't fruit previously because I'd neglected everything, but it did survive! What a champion. It is still in a planter bag!

I noticed that fruit eaten earlier had a very strong flavour of Vitamin C, similar to (but nicer than) goji aka wolf berries. As they matured, the flavour became nicer but they are still good younger and if you were unwell, I'd treat this as a supplement :)


They are beautiful, hardy and delicious. Relatively easy to propagate... these are a winner.

Read more online -
http://www.trinidadexpress.com/featured-news/West-Indian-cherry-203857331.html

Sweet potato can survive not being watered in Western Australia

I just completed a job that has been left waiting for at least a month: repairing the retic for the sweet potato out the front.

I'm feeling very pleased with myself :) Sweat dripping down my face as I was working  lol... put a tap on the end of the dripperline for easy flushing next time (even a pregnant or new mother could do it ;))

The amazing thing is that the sweet potato has done so well - clearly the best source of carbohydrate for Western Australians. Hands down.

Winter 2012 sweet potato - only part of the harvest!

It does really need water to produce a good yield, but tubers will stay in the ground with no water for at least 6 weeks and leaves will not wilt. The ultimate test of resilience in my book since the last few weeks in Perth have seen some extreme heat - around 40 degree Celsius some days. And no rain.

Happy New Year!

It's been a big year.

The birth of our beautiful boy in March.

September 2013 with Granny at the park

Rediscovering myself and my talents in motherhood. Not insignificantly for me, learning to breastfeed - which we did exclusively for around 6-7 months and looks like continuing for a while yet.

I enjoyed reading about breastfeeding, balancing my mostly western perspective. This one is a cracker - Breastfeeding in Mongolia. Seriously funny. Apparently, the best wrestlers are breastfed until they are nine. No comment!

My husband Rodney and I continued our shenanigans.

Note from me for Dad when he arrived home from work (one of Reuben's words on card)

Note from Dad for us on our return from a walk (on the back of an envelope)

Doing a feed with Sir Patch Paddington, the kitten, snuggling in.

yay!

Hello 2014, I'm looking forward to getting to know you!

I'm looking forward to gardening, organic food cooked from scratch and showing our beautiful boy our world.

The connection between our environment's health and our own

There have been some great articles hitting my computer screen recently - about the connection between microbes and human health.

Last year I posted about sour dough bread - which I'm convinced is healthier for us - and the link between depression and unsustainable agriculture. This post connects a few more ideas.

This article is an interesting one, the lower rates of allergy in Amish communities. Some aspects of diet, environment or lifestyle have been helpful: Amish farm kids remarkably immune to allergies, study finds

It describes the connection between gut health and mental health - particularly autism and the now common disorders of the brain including ADD and dyspraxia:

Gut and Psychology Syndrome (GAP syndrome or GAPS)

We've all heard people asking 'is ADD a real problem?'  and people who work with kids responding 'oh yeah!' ... 'if so and so doesn't take their medication he'd be climbing the walls'. My feeling is it might be worth re-framing the 'disorder' into a collection of symptoms. In other words - these kids have a lot of trouble concentrating and have a collection of symptoms which vary from child to child and which are improved by medicating them. The 'medicine' shows us that symptoms can be improved, but it doesn't tell us much about the heart of the problem.

For me, it seems obvious that the rates have gone up dramatically when compared to older generations and that therefore there must be an environmental variable, or several, that have changed dramatically.

The microbes that we live with are one possible explanation:

Environmental biodiversity, human microbiota, and allergy are interrelated

Sadly, I don't think that we understand perfectly the connection between microbes and our own health. We know that intestinal flora provide us with significant assistance in digesting and properly absorbing nutrients from our food... this includes manufacturing B vitamins. Yet biodiversity of microbes also seems to play a role. Even the pH or acidity/alkalinity of your gut likely influences which bacteria will live there - this makes sugar and refined carbohydrates highly suspect!

My personal choice is to play it safe and avoid chemicals and 'new' foods as much as is practical. At home we eat foods that our grandparents might have eaten. Perhaps this includes too much sugar! This link shows you the major foods included in the diet of my American Indian ancestors including Jerusalum artichokes which are known to be helpful for intestinal flora. Happily I'm growing some in the garden and very much looking forward to harvesting them soon.

We don't use commercial cleaners with antibiotics or strong chemicals. We don't regularly eat or drink out of plastic, nor do we cook much in our microwave. The best way to summarise our philosophy is that we try to live the way our grandparents did, plus some technology.

Our environment is worth protecting - both in terms of its intrinsic worth and because we might need something from it later!

The link between depression and unsustainable agriculture

It's been a wonderful break over Christmas and I spent most of my lovely free time reading My Beautiful Genome by Lone Frank and Salad Bar Beef by Joel Salatin. I can highly recommend both: However, the spotlight deserves to be on My Beautiful Genome.

Wonderfully easy to read. Share Lone's exploration of her genetic history and gain a deeper understanding of how genetic variations help to shape your personality, relationships, emotions and more. Her reflections on neo-eugenics, emotional resilience, genetic plasticity and how coffee can affect breast size... if you have the right genes.

I know what you're thinking! Very different topics - genetics and agriculture - but for me, I have been thinking of how our modern lifestyle places people under extraordinary pressures that they may not be biologically equipped to handle.
This is concerning not only in terms of our health, but also in terms of reducing our capacity to adapt to a changing world - considering climate, land use and culture.


How can we, as a society, hope to forge a new path, if we can't be bothered to get out of bed in the morning?


If you're depressed and struggling, you're not going to be thinking behaviour change, advocacy or anything at all other than 'what's for breakfast' ... which will probably include cheap wheat and sugar from your local industrial food outlet. Possibly with a bit of some heavy metal or a bit of carbon that can be traced back to it's pre-historic origins.

The rate of depression in first world countries - not to mention allergies, auto-immune diseases, decreasing fertility and cancer - is way too high. I've heard many people suggest that people in third world countries are too busy surviving to have time to get depressed. That is part of the story. Certainly I've met some people who manage to survive on meat and potatoes... not everyone would be OK on that diet! These people seem to be made of pretty sturdy stock.

Many people who are actually in the midst of a deep despair (I've known a few)  feel that they have no choice but to medicate themselves for either short periods of time, or their entire life. I suggest that these people are the canaries in the coal mine for our society - considering stress from perceptions of crime in densely populated cities splashed all over the media, lack of community, low quality food and toxins.

We understand that health challenges like depression do have a genetic component and Frank's exploration of this puzzle is worth reading, just to understand that scientists are still piecing together the pieces of the puzzle. We medicate as a stop gap before the 'perfect' treatment that might be developed in a number of years. Maybe this perfect treatment will be a little protein that flicks the epigenetic 'switch' back to 'normal' (whatever that means).

After I thought about these connections between sustainabilty and mental health... I went looked up the ingredients that the body needs to make a batch of serotonin. This information is not that well known even by those interested in nutrition.

• Tryptophan
• Iron
• Vitamin B3
• Calcium
• Folic Acid
• Magnesium
• Zinc
• Vitamin C
• Vitamin B6

(Tabrizian, I. 2003)

Wonderful... the ingredient list for mental health. Perhaps I should add 'act, belong, commit', which is a great public health campaign in Australia at the moment.

Consider that the following anti-nutrients can be present in high doses in either our environment or our food supply.

• Mercury (blocks iron and zinc, which sit near it on the periodic table)
• Copper (blocks iron, folic acid, zinc and magnesium)
• Cadmium (blocks zinc, magnesium) 

(Tabrizian, I. 2003) 

I'm aware that cadmium is present in industrial fertilisers. It becomes more available to the plants in unhealthy or degraded acidic soils which occur in marginal farming country - where farmers may be pushed financially.

Here in Western Australia we don't have a lot of natural minerals in our ancient soils - zinc is one example. We can try to get it from seafood and eggs and so on, but realistically, chances are that we're on the low side. Supermarkets can't get the high levels of Vitamin C - the older the fresh food; the lower the levels. This is because Vitamin C is nature's anti-oxidant (preservative).

I don't know about you, but I find this biochemical reality very very interesting. For me, it is a nail in the coffin for industrial agriculture using chemical fertilisers. It is also a glimmer of hope for those who are prone to depression - the canaries in the coal mine... a warning sign that our society is getting it wrong!

It highlights for me the many many reasons we should be growing some of our own food on real compost... aside from deliciousness!

If you're feeling excited: have a read of Peter Dingle and get into local, organic produce!

Wicking Beds

I've got so many topics I want to blog about! Today I've chosen wicking beds, as I know that my good friend Theo is excited about them and it is very topical as we here in Western Australia are coming into summer.

We will want to design our spring & summer gardens to conserve our scheme (town) water. Did you know that around 50% of our tap water comes from ground water and that we have got forests and woodlands dying from drought? I only recently put two and two together and it has mostly cured me of my desire for long showers. I simply imagine the tree roots sucking on air above the clay bottom of their home aquifer.


The concept of wicking beds is to stop the water from running away and store it in such a way that plants can access it passively. This is in contrast to systems like hydroponics and aquaponics which rely on electricity to keep the water flowing past the plant roots.


There are as many ways to implement a wicking system as there are permaculture designers and practitioners! Speaking of designers, my favourites are Milkwood's Kirsten and Nick -you can see how they made their wicking bed here.


I've got one trial so far and it has worked extremely well. I'm happy to recommend it as possibly one of the easiest ways to grow food in pots.

I started with one of the food grade 5 litre oil containers below (thanks for these Andy!). I find the large size is best for plants to grow vigorously and that they are more productive this way.

I cut off the top to turn it into a pot - easy enough with an angle grinder but some people don't like to use the electricity!  I then cut slots in the base using the angle grinder to allow excess water to drain away, these are up about 5 centimetres from the ground. You can see the bottom has a slight ridge in the centre to allow them to be stacked like this. If you were using another container you can just as easily put the drainage in the side.


The image below is of the finished product with some mint I've successfully grown from seed! Mint seed is tiny, so I'm very happy with this result.

The plants have doubled in the last week or so and are loving the spring weather. They will do better in this pot than any other as they are thirsty!

I'm looking forward to mint with watermelon or apple and cos salad. Yum.!

Here's to simple gardening that is good for us and the earth.

Systems Thinking: We are all Environmental Managers

I'm lucky enough to work in an exciting field: tree declines in Western Australia.
During the last 6 months I've been able to have numerous discussions with some brilliant minds and this posting will capture some of this thinking.

I've also been reflecting on being a self-taught learner (autodidact) - which I feel is a very valuable thing to be, if I can claim that status? I admire this sentiment from Margaret Mead: "I learned to observe the world around me, and to note what I saw." The way I see it, we must pay attention, put two and two together and remember what we have learnt.

My big boss took me to the window the other day and pointed out the line of dead trees - Tasmanian Blue Gums. They'd simply run out of ground water. Plenty of other vegetation had survived, but these were the thirsty crowd.

I thought about that, suddenly putting two and two together... humans are using water that the trees have historically counted on to get them through droughts, possibly tipping them over the edge.

Water is important. I looked it up - we humans in Western Australia are using up to 50% ground water in our 'tap' water... leaving that much less for the plants. Bearing in mind we don't draw from every aquifer.

Having been interested in environmental matters for some time, it occurred to me that this was the first time I'd taken the 'lack of water' issue seriously - previously I was always thinking about human need/use. I felt ashamed but then began to realise that this is probably true for most environmentalists. I bumped into Jarred, pastor and peace activist, on the train and he couldn't believe that we use so much ground water. It is interesting to see that for most of us, water is 'out of sight and out of mind', but it can be reconstructed as not simply a commodity but life itself for the various ecological communities we live amongst.

Some weeks have passed since I experienced this paradigm shift. I was discussing this with a guest lecturer who I was lucky enough to hear speak on world food security from a plant pathologists point of view. He mentioned coal seam methane extraction and associated fracturing of the aquifers. Certainly, this is a permanent degradation of the previously separate bodies of water and fossil fuels - to farmers' detriment.

I trust that I can remember this lesson and be a systems thinker and not just a consumer.