30 January, 2022

Twenty-three members attended the garden on Sunday and we started to remove the sunflowers that had finished their month-long spectacular display. This has annoyed the sulphur crested cockatoos that had been feasting on them. Others laid black plastic on the path weeds in the Secret Garden, thanks to all.

At our meeting we welcomed Imogen as a new member. We agreed to join the Sydney Edible Garden Trail and be one of the gardens conducting tours for visitors on the weekend of 26/27 March. Its aim is to encourage and inspire people to grow edible produce. It’s a not for profit organisation providing grants for school and community gardens. https://sydneyediblegardentrail.com/about/

We agreed to send Jenny (Council) a list of maintenance jobs that need attending to: weed matting, rotting timber in beds and resurfacing paths with crushed granite. A green waste bin for regular pick up will also be requested.

We also agreed to expand the Secret Garden with 4 more tubs. A plan and budget will be circulated before it is submitted to Council for funding.

Jock agreed to circulate last autumns planting list for discussion over the next few weeks. Suggestions for planting are welcome and will be decided by the group (info on plant selection and seed suppliers is attached separately).

The meeting concluded with slices of delicious dragon fruit for morning tea.

Following our meeting we shared the harvest of bush and climbing beans, cucumbers, zucchini,

some silverbeet, tomatoes and okra, French tarragon, sorrel, chillies, basil (Thai, Greek, sweet and lemon), rhubarb, Warrigal greens, curry leaves and wild purslane (Portulaca oleracea). Our summer harvest winds down now as we prepare our beds for autumn planting. We saved seeds of sunflowers, parsley, fennel, cosmos, French marigolds and calendula.

Photos below are of the  flowers that opened during the night last week and one of the ripe dragon fruit we picked for morning tea.

Dragon fruit and flower

Dragon fruit

An opportunity for a maths class using sunflowers

Fibonacci was a famous Italian mathematician of the Middle Ages (13^th C). He discovered a sequence of numbers that appear in many plants and other natural systems. Sunflowers are just one example. A sunflower head contains many spirals of seeds to the left and many to the right. If you count the number of spirals to the left and the number to the right the result will correspond to adjacent numbers in the Fibonacci sequence: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144 etc. (each number is the sum of the two previous numbers and it plots as a spiral). Using one of our sunflower heads I counted the number of spirals to the right and, low and behold, they came to 55. I then counted the number of spirals to the left and they came to 89! Fibonacci is a hero (along with sunflowers). Sunflowers do it because it is the most efficient way to pack their seeds.

Sunflower spirals

Blue arrow points to one of the 55 spirals and red arrow points to one of the 89 spirals going in the opposite direction.

23 January, 2022

Twenty-one members worked in the garden on Sunday. We welcomed a new member, Alicia. We picked a bumper crop of bush beans and climbing beans along with cucumbers, zucchini, some silverbeet, a couple of eggplants, some tomatoes, French tarragon, sorrel, chillies, basil (Thai, Greek, sweet and lemon) the first okra and Warrigal greens.

The Zingiberaceae Family is flowering at the moment. Photos below of our galangal (top) and our turmeric (bottom).

Galangal flowers

Turmeric flowers

The four genera of the Zingiberaceae Family that we grow are tropical perennials and enjoy humidity and adequate moisture. We grow them mainly for their rhizomes (swollen underground stems) but other parts can be eaten or used for flavouring.

1. Ginger (Zingiber officinale). The cultivar of ginger we have growing is called ‘Jumbo’ and is bred to have insignificant green flowers so that more energy goes into growing the rhizomes. Rhizomes, leaves and stalks are good for flavouring or to wrap food for steaming.
2. Turmeric (Curcuma domestica). The cultivar we have growing is ‘Madras’. Rhizomes, young leaves, shoots and flowers can be eaten or leaves used to wrap food for steaming.
3. Galangal (Alpinia galangal). The cultivar we have is ‘Red’. Rhizomes, young shoots and leaves can be eaten.
4. Cardamom (Elettaria cardamomum). Pick pods while still green then dry. Leaves used for flavouring.

The common names for plants have a variety of origins. Some are not acceptable today because they are offensive. We use them without thinking about their connotations for some ethnic or religious groups. We have two such plants that require a common name change:

1. Citrus hystrix whose leaves and fruit are an indispensible part of Thai cuisine. It is called “Makrut” in Thailand and this is preferable to “Kaffir” which is an insulting term for black Africans.
2. Tradescantia albiflora is an introduced succulent creeping weed with a white flower that smothers other plants and is widely known as “Wandering Jew” which has disrespectful connotations and the preferable modern common name is “Wandering Trad” or “Spider wort”. To confuse matters there is a similar plant Commelina cyanea that is native to eastern Australia but has a blue flower and has long been called “Scurvy weed”. We mostly have scurvy weed growing on our paths (photo below) though there is some wandering trad.

https://weeds.dpi.nsw.gov.au/Weeds/Trad

Click to access wandering-jew.pdf

Scurvy weed and flower

16 January, 2022

On Sunday in very humid weather 18 members picked a good crop of bush beans, climbing beans, cucumbers, zucchini flowers, silverbeet, eggplants, mizuna, rocket, tomatoes, thyme, sage, oregano, curry leaves, French tarragon, sorrel, parsley, mint, chillies, basil (Thai, Greek, sweet and lemon), fennel, rhubarb, Warrigal greens and sweet potato leaves. A pepino and some zucchini were harvested during the week. We saved parsley and fennel seeds.

At our meeting we welcomed a new member, Svetlana, to our gardening group. We also decide to accept an offer from a friend of a true cardamom plant (Elettaria cardamomum) belonging to the ginger Family Zingiberaceae. It is also known as green cardamom. Being a tropical plant native to southern India it requires a lot of moisture. We decided to plant it in bed 3 of the Secret Garden along with its cousin galangal.

9 January, 2022

On Sunday 20 members worked in the garden. We welcomed two new members: Pauline and Marie-Gai. We picked bush beans, climbing beans, cucumbers, tomatoes (photo) more silverbeet, the last of the beetroot, radish, the first eggplants (photo), mizuna, ‘cos’ and ‘Amish deer tongue’ lettuce, land cress, French tarragon, sorrel, chillies, basil (Thai, Greek, sweet and lemon), Warrigal greens, Cape gooseberries and blackberries.

Harvest

Multiple sunflowers

The sunflowers are putting on a spectacular display in the garden at the moment. Most of them have multiple flowers. They are seeds we saved last year.

Recently Natasha noticed, while she was removing stinkbugs from our makrut lime tree, a colourful spider on a leaf (photo below). It is a female two-spined spider (Poecilopachys australasia). As the species name implies it is native to Australia. The female is a nocturnal orb-weaving spider spinning her web at night and eating it in the morning. The male is much smaller as is typical for spiders. The colours have evolved to make them look like bird poo thus warding off predators. This is just another good reason for not using harmful sprays in our garden.

Two-spined spider

I identified the spider using the iNaturalistAU app on my phone. You can submit a photo of any organism (animal, insect, fungi, plant) and they will identify it. It is a free citizen-scientist app that is easy to use and the data is collected to study abundances, distribution patterns etc. I can highly recommend it. “Google lens” is similar but does not give further details about the organism.

We got the all clear for the Biosecurity scientists studying the insect traps we set recently – no dangerous bugs found.

26 December & 2 January

Over the past two weeks we picked plenty of bush beans, climbing beans, the first cucumbers, more silverbeet, beetroot, radish, mizuna, ‘cos’ and ‘Amish deer tongue’ lettuce, land cress, tomatoes, radishes, French tarragon, sorrel, chillies, basil (Thai, Greek, sweet and lemon), rhubarb, Warrigal greens, Cape gooseberries and blackberries.

Daisy is the name for plants in the Asteraceae Family characterised by petals surrounding a mass of tiny flowers in the centre. The name comes from the old English “day’s-eye” referring to the way the flowers track the sun during the day. We grow at least 18 species belonging to the daisy family including: (those in bold are flowering now) sunflower, calendula, cosmos, chicory, feverfew, marigold, olive herb, dandelion, endive, French tarragon, Jerusalem artichoke, lettuce, celtuce, tansy, Mexican tarragon, wormwood, yacon and yarrow.

Sorrel (Rumex scutatus) and rhubarb (Rheum rhabarbarum) are the only species we grow belonging to the Polygonaceae Family, informally known as the buckwheat or goosefoot family. They are characterised by having high oxalic acid in their leaves. This adds a nice tang to the sorrel leaves but is in dangerous amounts in rhubarb leaves. Both are sending up seed stalks at the moment (see photos below). We remove these because they slow down leaf production and propagation by root division is more reliable than sowing seed.

French sorrel flower stalk

Rhubarb flower stalk