We weed weed wee

Enquiring minds are no doubt wondering what all this talk of weed and wee and we and weed the abovely title portends. It's this, you see, I've been messing about with dandelions, one of the world's most famous diuretics, if for "world" you'll accept Culpepper's Complete Herbal (marrying botany and slightly dangerous medicinal advice since 1653). Old Nick Culpepper begins his reflections on dandelions by noting that the vulgar refer to them as "piss-abeds". This would be a clue: however tempting it may seem, you shouldn't drink your bodyweight in water and then gorge on dandelions unless you're prepared to sleep in a nappy on a plastic sheet. The good news, according to our favourite seventeenth-century herbologist, is that piss-abedding can be therapeutic. The dandelion:

openeth the passages of the urine both in young and old [eek!]; powerfully cleanseth imposthumes and inward ulcers in the urinary passages [double eek!], and by its drying and temperate quality doth afterwards heal them; for which purpose the decoction of the roots or leaves in white wine, or the leaves chopped as pot herbs with a few alisanders, and boiled in their broth, are very effectual.

As it happens, the passages of my urine have been in pretty good fettle of recent years, so I haven't been in dire need of a dandelion and alisander soup. However. Ever since the weather killed my first tea plant (a genuine Camellia sinensis, frizzled by a Melbourne heatwave) and then the chickens killed my second tea plant (not maliciously; it just happened to be where they wanted to excavate), I've gotten crazily enthusiastic about tea alternatives that are within my limited horticultural reach. And that means - besides lemon verbena and peppermint and lemongrass and raspberry leaf - dandelion root. What dandelion root tea lacks in caffeine it more than makes up for in a pleasing ... brownness. (How am I going? Talked you into giving up coffee for dandelions yet?)

The best time to harvest dandelion roots, I've learnt from grim experience, is before they flower (as with any root vegetable, the energy stored in the root gets used up in the flowering). We had a burst of dandelion flowering around September, but the next generation is yet to bloom, so this afternoon, with the soil good and soft from rain, I seized my opportunity to hoik up this fine assembly of rooticles.

You could probably brew with them as is, but I'm inclined to chop them up into 1cm lengths and plonk 'em in the oven for 15 minutes or toast them in a dry fry pan. The toasting seems to caramelise the sugars (starches?) in the root which makes these little niblets rather tasty.

They're ready now for my Dandelion Soy Latte deluxe. It's a thing. Sounds slightly more impressive than wee tea. You just plonk a teaspoonful of these into a tea strainer, steep it in your warmed and frothed liquid of preference, add honey if you like, and Bob's your nuncle.

P.S. more weeds for dinner. The mucilaginous mallow of the Malvaceae family has been springing merrily out of the compost I spread around my vegums. Imho, the best thing to do with a weed in the vegum patch is eat it (cf. nettles). Here, therefore, are some mallow leaves (centre) posing with some Murraya koenigii/curry leaves (left) and some cardamom leaves (rightish, downish) before being plonked into tonight's chickpea ragout. The leaves, stem, flowers, etc of the mallow are all edible, and quite an acceptable cooked green, particularly good in a casserole or something that benefits from a bit of thickening.

P.P.S. Tim wishes it to be known that he has brewed dandelion root ale. And lo it was good.

P.P.P.S. this post brought to you by the word "plonk", which I note I have now used four times.

Walking, onions, and walking onions

One of the nicest gifts I've been given this year (in a ridiculously competitive field, let me tell you) was a 10kg sack of brown onions. Those onions came into my life late in May, and they kept us in onioniness right up until early September, when the last few began to sprout and I had to eat them quickly before they had a chance to win me over, get me planting them out under the Granny Smith, giving them names, and knitting them scarves.

I do grow an onion, of a sort. It's the Egyptian walking fellow. In Summer, he sends up a stalk laden with bulbils; the bulbils grow in the air, weigh the stalk down, make contact with the ground and start putting down roots - voila! new onions! It's a pretty nifty arrangement, saves raising onions from seed blahedy-blah, but, alas, it's not doing anything for my immediate onion supply: the Egyptian walkings are busily enjoying the Spring, with nary a thought of fattening their bulbs.

This year's Egyptian walking onions of insouciance, demonstrating their capacity to chillax in the presence of Esme, if not to produce appreciable bulbs.

Happily, it just so happens to be the Season of Ubiquitous edible Onion Weed. By onion weed I don;t mean the pretty but otherwise pointless so-called onion weed with which I grew up in the wilde of NSW (Nothoscordum inodorum or Allium neapolitanum, nothing to write home about on the gastronomy front), but, rather, the delicious, faintly garlicky, and plentiful Allium triquetrum, or three-cornered leek, growing rampantly along the banks of a Merri Creek tributary near you (or me, more to the point).

Free-range onion weed.

While they don't have the world's enormousest oniony bit, the greens are like a particularly lovely mild shallot. I pulled up a clump from a nearby weedarium yesterday, and whizzed them, leaves, roots, flowers and all, with chickpeas, cumin, chilli, coriander and salt to make falafels. They've made their way into kale & tempeh cook-ups (oh yeah, I sure know how to party), lentil surprises (ditto), and been chopped into potato mash. There's a recipe floating around somewhere for tempura-battered onion weed flowers, which sounds like a dangerous dish to get fond of, but - on the other hand - the onion weed season is brief and the fried stuff is delicious.

In other matters alliumnal, I've got a wicking box full of King Richard leeks on the go. I've been so proud of the way they were growing, my plucky leeks, and then this morning, as we were nearing the end of our 15km creek-side walk from home to CERES (just thought I'd mention that in passing, our 15km walk to breakfast at CERES ... did I say it was 15 kilometres? before breakfast?), we stumbled across the Merri Creek market garden, and spied these beauties that make my leeks look like puny blades of grass.

 Intimidatingly good-looking leeks, buried up to their shoulders and everything.

So that put me in my place. Some kind of leek farmer I am. On the other hand, we came home with half a bagful of free onion weed, so spem in allium.*

* an incredibly sophisticated pun (punion!) on "spem in alium". Vastly improved by this footnote. Or, you know, not.

Basket weaving for mandarin eaters

My mum's been keenly following the adventures of a family of sea-eagles on whose highrise Sydney nest is trained a live-streaming sea-eagle cam (here, for those of you who need a bit of sea-eagle voyeurism in your lives). Every so often the family ornithologist emails my sisters and me an update: the egg's hatched!, the father's just brought back a dead fish!, the chick's taken up violin! I was very impressed to learn from Mum yesterday that the sea-eagles' nest is now six feet wide. That's, like, 183cm or so in the new money. Big! It's a truly impressive structure, woven out of sticks that have somehow stayed together through storms and rain, the comings and goings of a pair of grown-up sea-eagles, and the shenanigans of the baby sea-eagle (who, admittedly, doesn't seem to be doing much besides eating bits of regurgitated fish).

As a person with reproductive designs of my own, I see this nest as something of a challenge. Being able to weave a vaguely permanent structure out of natural fibres is clearly a vital parenting prerequisite, and one I lack. I was pondering all this yesterday as we wandered under the willows along the gully near Ma Harlot's place. Long yellow willow wands, just sprouting their spring leaves, were hanging from the trees like hair and a good scattering of these had detached from the trees and were lying on the ground. These fresh lengths of pliable wood looked like pretty perfect stuff for some amateur nest-smithing.

Or basket-smithing. Back when I were a wee lad, basket-weaving was regularly cited as the height of pointless hippy dilettantism, than which there is no better incentive for a person of my proclivities to wangle some natural fibres into a vaguely bowl-shaped mess. So, behold, my pointless hippy dilettante basket-making method:

1. I make two wreathes of roughly equal circumference. A wreath is just three or so lengths of willow, twisted together into a circle, with the ends tucked in.

2. I fit one wreath around another so that they form right angles (one wreath will form the keel and the handle of the basket, and the other will form the rim of the bowl). At this point I rummage around in my mother's kitchen cupboards until I find her string (although a purist would be using her  own nettle cordage), and secure the wreathes together with a God's-eye lashing.

(For those who skipped the God's-eye-lashing chapter of Girl Guides, there's a neato instruction video here.)

3. I extend the God's eye with some more willow. (It's not really bendy enough for this to work well, but, hey, we amateur sea eagles can't aspire to instant perfection.)

4. I cut some lengths of willow and use these to make the ribs of the bowl. The ends of the ribs get tucked into the messy God's eye lashing, so it helps to make these ends a bit pointy and to make the God's eye fairly substantial.

5. Beginning at one end of the bowl, close to the handle/keel and bowl-rim conjunction, I fold a length of willow in half and begin weaving it back and forth between the ribs. With my next length, I start at the conjunction on the other side. The ribs are at risk of popping out of their God's-eye anchors during this process, but they can be tucked back in again, and as the weaving progresses it secures the ribs.

And so, ta da!, a basket:

While it may not be quite the thing for a family of sea-eagles, it's perfect for mandarins or other things like mandarins (though I should note that when I offered it to my mother for just this purpose, she politely rejected it, which casts some suspicion over whether she really did think the spray-painted macaroni jewellery I gave her for Christmas '82 was the height of fashion).

On the perennially interesting subject of blackberries

The year the 1979-83 drought broke, the blackberries at our place in Canyonleigh fruited for their lives. Blackberry patches that had sat withering through the drought, barely holding the earth together as the wind whipped topsoil from sheep country and dumped it on the Pacific Ocean, sprung up like ... blackberries, I guess ... and bloomed their rosy white blossoms and grew fat lovely berries by the thousand. There were four of us kids. Mum equipped us with two four-litre ice-cream buckets apiece, the old cylindrical ones with a plastic handle, and we filled the lot with berries. It was a one-for-the-bucket, one-for-me arrangement, and still we ended up with about 25 litres of fruit, besides the smudgy purple around our mouths.

That was my formative blackberry moment. Ever since, I've expected blackberries to come in staggering quantity and indecent juiciness. So I was excited the other week when Bek mentioned that she'd stumbled upon a hoard of scrumpy blackberries in Mount Beauty, which is practically nextdoor (30km-ishly) to Bright, current Harlot Family HQ. I already knew about Bright's blackberries, of course. A few years ago, Tim and I had waded down the Ovens River with our pants rolled up, picking blackberries that dangled from the riverbank. Last year, in early March, I'd salvaged the last of the pickings from the pine forest track behind Mum's house. But Bek's enthusiasms triggered memories of the 1984 harvest, so Operation Pick Blackberries in Bright Y2K14 turned into a thing.

At about 7.30 this morning, the Aged Wilbur and I set up the hill behind mum's house. It's about half an hour of zig-zagging up through almost vertical gum forest (pant, pant, pant) until we reach a sort of plateau, and then a dirt track that winds through the pine plantation. The understorey has been colonised by blackberries, which, imho, is to the blackberries' credit. I mean, iknowiknowiknow, invasive weed of national significance and all, but those pine trees really acidify the soil and there aren't many indigenous plants that can cope with such a low pH. Blackberries help hold the soil together, which is no bad thing on a slope like this one. They are the delight of little bluewrens, and (in my unsubstantiated, research-free opinion) they do that  dynamic accumulator thing that makes permaculture people so excited about yarrow and comfrey. I'm convinced they're good eggs. Or possibly I just like the berries and need to come up with a compelling case for why the Department of Primary Industries should not be blasting my berry sources with glyphosate (which they seem not to be doing; good work, DPI).

I filled the better part of a bucket with blackberries, ate quite a few along the way, and fed some to Wilbur. The dog, I should say, has always been a fan of things he can eat. My brother, M, used to chide me for letting fruits and vegetables disappear down the Wilburtian gullet. The gist of these chidings was that fibre led to sloppy dogpoos, and as my brother was for a long time poo-picker-upper-in-chief, fair enough that he should hold strong opinions on the subject. Since M has moved to far north Queensland, where he has bigger anxieties than sloppy dog poo (such as monsoons, cyclones, cane toads the size of camels, tiger snakes in his bed, wild pigs stomping through his agricultural efforts, tropical ulcers, the full Indiana Jones shebang, really), I have resumed my program of supporting Wilbur in his quest for vegetable foods. In this quest he is wildly enthusiastic. Beagles really do know how to put the omni into omnivore, greatly expanding the definition of edible so that it embraces, for instance:

ineffably delicious wombat droppings.

Blackberry pickers should wear fishermen's waders, suits of armour greased with vegetarian lard, and gloves made out of synthetic rhinoceros. Not their favourite short-sleeved cotton shirt. I spent quite a lot of time this morning unpinning myself from the thorny embrace of a blackberry cane, which got me thinking about why blackberries come with prongs. It's a deterrent obviously, to creatures that might otherwise eat the canes, but that means that (to such creatures, at least) the canes must be edible. And possibly even more than edible? Possibly even Quite Nice? I am officially registering here my intention to do some experiments with the edibility of blackberry canes, but I'm going to wait until next Spring, when the canes are green and juicy, not cantankerous and a bit over it all, like they are now.

Rambling, ambling, brambling

I had some writing due today, and so (as happens all too often in these situations) I was up last night until a millionty o'clock trying to make the words hang together. This morning, Esme and Shirley started up their let-us-out, let-us-out cackle a bit after 6, so of course there was flopping out of bed and letting out of chooks, lest our long-suffering and uncomplaining neighbours should be cackled awake. I'm enough of a sleep monster that I was starting to feel pretty ragged and feckless shortly after lunch. My ragged-and-feckless adjusted work regime this afternoon consisted of checking my email, checking my email again, a bit more email checking, trying to do a thing I'm meant to be doing, deciding to do it tomorrow, after a Proper Sleep, eating some chocolate, checking my email, ambling to the bus stop, catching bus, catching train, walking home from the station, where - ta da! - I was inundated with a sudden desire for a spot of energetic blackberrying.

One of the things I love about living in outer suburbia is the interpenetration of "city" and "country". Fingers of whacked-together housing poke out into paddocks to the north, and while I'm not particularly pleased to see an old field immured under concrete, I am pleased at the way the paddocks reclaim the gardens to the south. As quickly as the developers move (which is no longer as quickly as they were moving a few years ago, in the throes of Melbourne's real-estategasm), the envoys from the country move quicker. Seeds drift into my garden - thistles and canola - that wouldn't dare if I lived in the city proper. Driving to the airport very early one morning to collect me mum, we saw a kangaroo nibbling at a tidy Lalor nature strip. Flocks of cockatoos and starlings wheel into town. Just down the road, living in a makeshift pasture between a suburban backfence and a suburban drainage canal, is a small herd of goats.

And I can walk in search of blackberries through a thicket of brick veneer houses, and turn a corner, and this ... 

These are the remnants of what came before the houses and driveways. The breathing old land divided by nothing but a wooden fence-line from the mown lawns and the backyard swing sets.  I can see the hazy skyscrapers of Melbourne. I could walk to them in the good part of a day, or hop on a train and stride amongst them in under an hour.

But meanwhile, I am wading through cardoons and dog roses and grass up to my waist.

The blackberries weren't much to write home about. It's been so impossibly dry and hot this Summer (six days over 40º now, with another forecast for Sunday), and most of the berries have shrivelled to hard little sundried bundles of seed. A few patches to the east of fences, protected from the hot afternoon sun, have proper juicy berries. Or had, I should say. They're snaffled now.

Despite the lacklustre blackberrying, it felt like there was food everywhere I looked. The cardoon buds have opened into big puffy thistle flowers now, but before they get there, they're as edible as any globe artichoke (as are their stems, stripped of thorns). I keep thinking herbal-tea-related things about the rude little rose hips on the dog roses. The seeds inside are covered in fine prickles, but I reckon if I just shoved a few hips, whole and un-de-pipped, into a tea strainer, and let them steep, I'd have the rose hip tea of champions.

And prickly pears! Not my all-time favourite invasive species, but not without its uses. Slice the thorns from the leaf pads and we have a very acceptable vegetable. Let the fruit ripen and ... well, they're sweet and bland, which could be worse.

Coming home means walking along Childs Road, cars grumbling past, a McDonalds announcing itself in the middle distance. It means padding along the concrete footpath of my street, past the disciplined gardens with their low brick walls. But then I see someone's nature strip overrun with the bright blue of chicory flowers or the yellow of dandelions. I think I'm saying that I like weeds.