Gallifrey Permaculture

Amaranth (Amaranthus spp.), also known as love-lies-bleeding or pigweed, is reasonably common in flower beds and nurseries around Perth. It’s an impressive looking plant, with tall spires of long lasting pink, purple, or orange flowers and often attractively variegated red and green leaves. Amaranth species prefer a tropical climate, but many species are frost tolerant, and they’re so hardy that they’re considered a weed in many places. I saw a few growing wild in the middle of the city this morning.

Almost every part of the plant is edible. The seeds were a staple food of the native people of Mesoamerica, until its cultivation was banned by the conquistadores. The seeds have a mild, nutty, malty flavour, and are high in minerals such as iron, magnesium, phosphorus, copper and manganese as well as offering a complete protein (containing all essential amino acids for human health).

They can be cooked like rice, either with rice or other grains, or alone; cooked on their own they cook up to a stickier consistency than rice or quinoa do, more like polenta. The seeds can also be cooked into a porridge, or used to add protein andinterest to stews or soups. They can be parched and milled into a gluten free flour, or popped like popcorn. Popped amaranth seeds mixed with honey make a very tasty breakfast cereal. Amaranth seeds can also be sprouted, in the same way as alfalfa, wheat, or other seeds.

The leaves, young stems and shoots can be cooked like spinach. They soften up readily, requiring only a few minutes cooking, which helps avoid excessive nutrient loss. The boiled leaves may be rubbed through a fine sieve and served as a puree. Young shoots and tender young leaves can also be eaten raw, as a salad vagetable.

Generally different species are grown primarily for the seeds (Amaranthus caudatus, Amaranthus cruentus, and Amaranthus hypochondriacus) and for the leaves (Amaranthus tricolor, Amaranthus cruentus, Amaranthus blitum, Amaranthus dubius), but both the seeds and leaves of all amaranths are equally edible and nutritious. Amaranths grown principally for vegetable use have better tasting leaves then the grain types.

Amaranths are mostly annuals or short-lived perennials, grown from seed or seedlings planted in late winter or spring (after frosts have passed). As they are tall, soft plants they need protection from strong winds. They use the C4 photosynthesis pathway, which means that they thrive in areas of high light intensity and heat, and can survive drought conditions better than many plants. With supplemental water, the yield of grain amaranth is comparable to rice or maize. Seeds can be harvested by hand or mechanically; leaves are harvested by hand.

What amaranth needs:

• Water – Amaranth survives drought conditions, and will grow happily with 200 – 3000 mm of rainfall, or supplemental water. Leaf amaranths require more water than grain types.

• Sunlight – Amaranth thrives in strong sunlight and high temperatures – it will grow and thrive at 30 – 35 degrees celsius. The ground should be 18 degrees Celsius or more before seeds are planted to ensure good germination.

• Soil – Although amaranth prefers a rich soil, it will grow in virtually any well drained location short of pure beach sand. Clay soils can inhibit germination, as the young amaranth seedlings are quite delicate and may not be able to push through a clay crust on the soil.

• Space – Amaranth comes in all sizes, shapes and colours. Commercially, optimum grain yields have been obtained at around 45 plants per square m.

What amaranth has to offer:

• Edible seeds (which, when cooked, can also be fed to poultry & fish).

• Edible leaves (which can also be used for animal fodder).

• Attractive, hardy ornamental plant for landscaping.

• New amaranth plants.

Further info:
Amaranth grain & vegetable Types
Alternative Field Crops Manual: Amaranth
Jefferson Institute: Amaranth
National Academies Press: Lost Crops of Africa: Amaranth
Ripe organics: Amaranth
Strengthening food security with grain amaranth
Tropical Permaculture: Amaranth
Harvesting Amaranth grain – Is It Worth it?

Images sourced from Wikimedia Commons:
File:Amaranth_%22opopopeo%22_%28367191600%29.jpg
File:Amaranthus_hypochondriacus_%28Amaranthaceae%29_plant.JPG
File:20120921Rispen-Fuchsschwanz_Hockenheim.jpg
File:Amaranthus_caudatus2.jpg
File:Amaranthus_kiwicha.jpg
File:Den_luoc.jpg

This morning as I was cutting up a persimmon, one of my workmates came over and, apologising for asking a stupid sounding question, asked what it was that I was cutting up. I don’t think it’s a stupid question at all – if you don’t know what something is, trying to find out is admirable. But it made me think about why someone wouldn’t recognise a persimmon (not just not know what it was called or where it came from, but have literally never seen one before).

I know about persimmons because I spent a year in South Korea teaching English when I finished university, and they’re often included on fruit platters there as well as being widely available in supermarkets and local grocery stores. They’re a well-known fruit in east Asia, which is where the persimmon tree is from. For those who might be curious, a persimmon (a non-astringent Fuyu type persimmon – the astringent ones are slightly different) is crunchy like a firm nectarine, with a flavour somewhere between a sweet apple, a peach, and rock melon (cantaloupe), with a hint of a cinnamon. They’re delicious. There’s no core, and generally no seeds, and you can eat the skin or peel them.

There are so many domesticated plant and animal species which we use for food, and yet the average diet of the average person in an industrialised country is very limited. I’m unusual in the variety of foods I eat, and I don’t have access to even a quarter of the edible things I’ve read about.

I really feel that we need to start branching out in our eating habits. I know that a lot of people have the Crocodile Dundee opinion (said of roast goanna: “tastes like shit, but you can live on it”) of unusual foods or foods that have been popular with native peoples and are not (yet) mainstream – but many if not most of those foods are valuable sources of nutrients, and tasty. Look at quinoa; eaten for centuries by the people of South and Central America, relegated to “poverty food” because of its association with the native culture after European colonisation, and now it’s a high value health food and increasingly looks like one of the best staple foods we have available to us, with more protein and minerals than rice or wheat.

How much would the world change if we made better use of our domesticated species? We domesticated them for a reason, after all.

Images sourced from Wikimedia Commons:
File:Threekakifruit-cutopen.jpg
File:Chinoa_from_Bolivia.jpg

It’s the end of May already – and past the end, by now. This year is going so fast.

So, some updates: The house planning & building is going, although ever so slowly. We’ve almost finished sorting out a small mortgage extension to cover getting the first water tank in, the second big shed up, and the full engineering plans drawn up. It may sound like an odd selection of things to prioritise, but those are the things we can get money for from the bank without having a builder, and getting a builder is still proving tricky.

The water tank will be invaluable. We meant to get it in last winter before the rains started, so it’s a full year and a few months late, but with luck we’ll get something in in time to catch some rain this winter. With luck there will be some more rain this winter. I’ve had to abandon – or at least put on hold for now – any hope of a stainless steel tank. Just too expensive to ship (truck) over from NSW. So the plan is to go with unlined concrete, since concrete is a well-understood and reliably non-toxic building material (assuming you don’t put toxic fillers in the mix, I know) even if it isn’t the most environmentally friendly option with its high embodied energy and non-recyclability.

The shed will eventually be the main workshop for woodwork and large-scale projects (like building the Lifetrac Open Source Ecology DIY tractor). In the shorter term, it will be used for a bedroom. Although the initial kitchen/living room pod of our distributed house, which (along with the bathroom & toilet) will be the first part to be built, is designed to function as an independent cottage, I didn’t design in anything like enough storage space for the wardrobes of two urban professional who also like to dress up in steampunk, and have enough casual farm clothes to handle camping and farm maintenance. In short, we have too many clothes for the space we’ll have, and they’re not things we can easily do without while maintaining our current jobs and social lives. Thus, the shed will fill that gap until we get the bedroom pod built with it’s wardrobe space.

Meanwhile, we’re getting chickens! We’ve started building a little chicken coop in the back yard, and we have permission from the owner to get a couple’ve chooks as long as we keep them contained and clean so we don’t attract rats. This will not be a problem; I can’t stand stinky, inefficient livestock operations and rats are just right out. Except tame, friendly domestic rats, which are ok for those who want them. The frame should be done this week, and we can get paint for it and the wire to enclose the run on the weekend. So, maybe another 2 weeks and then we can go chicken shopping at Comp’s Poultry for a couple’ve heritage breed chooks. I’m thinking we’ll get one naked neck and one wyandotte, and see how they go. This can be an initial experiment to see which breed(s) we end up keeping once we have a house and are moved up to Gallifrey full time.

I’m also signing up – well, applying – to do a postgrad course in dryland agriculture. Don’t know yet if I’ll be accepted, but there’s a good chance. I have a meeting set up tomorrow afternoon to fill in all the paperwork and look at my potential timetable with the head of school. Wish me luck

There are a multitude of tomato varieties, ranging from black and purple through every shade of red, pink, orange and yellow to the ones which are green when ripe. Most of them taste better than the standard supermarket tomato varieties available in Australia. Diggers Seeds holds annual taste tests of a selection of varieties, and the supermarket variety they scored for comparison got only 42.46% approval, while the heritage varieties ranged from 60% to 77%.

Not all good tomato varieties are heirloom or heritage varieties, though. There are still plant breeders out there working on annual vegetables like the tomato, creating new varieties that breed true (as opposed to the F1 hybrids, which do not). The Modern Farmer magazine has an article on a new tomato variety called Lucky Tiger, bred by Fred Hempel of Baia Nicchia Farm in Sunol, California. It looks beautiful, although since it’s in the US and I’m in Australia I haven’t had a chance to try it. As with TV and movies, we have to wait a long time to get seeds to new plant varieties, when we get them at all.

Mr Hempel hasn’t said what the full parentage is of his Lucky Tiger, but he said that one of the direct parents is Blush. Blush, released in 2011 (and available from Seeds of Change and from Artisan Seeds), is an open pollinated tomato variety, selected by Mr Hempel from an original cross between Maglia Rosa (selected by Mt Hempel, released in 2007) and an un-released variety called Zucchero. I have none of these varieties available to replicate the process that created Lucky Tiger, unfortunately.

However, there are many heirloom varieties that I do have access to. Jaune Flamme (aka Jaune Flammee) was declared the equal first winner of the 2013 tomato taste tests held at the Adelaide Botanic Gardens. It’s an indeterminate, heavy yielding old French variety with beautiful persimmon orange skin, a blushed yellow/red interior, and (apparently) a full-bodied, citrus-like flavour. Ananas Noir and Green Zebra also scored highly, and Green Zebra has those beautiful stripes.

I know I get overly excited about plant and animal breeding projects, but tomatoes wouldn’t be too tricky. Perth has almost the ideal climate for them – lots of sun, hot summers and mild winters, little chance of mildew. So, amongst my many (many, many, possibly too many) projects, I think I might try some tomato breeding. Jaune Flamme x Green Zebra to begin with, and then perhaps one of the elongated types – maybe Speckled Roman, or Cherry Roma. And in the mean while, I might see if I can get a few different varieties from the farmers market this weekend, and try growing the seeds from the tastiest ones.

I might also look up tomato genetics and see what I’m dealing with.

All images from Diggers Seeds, except the Lucky Tiger image which is from Modern Farmer.

I created and gave a talk for International Permaculture Day (Perth Edition) on Sunday, talking about less common food plants and urban foraging. I think everyone liked it – there were questions, both during and after the talk, and the audience all looked interested. People complimented me on the presentation afterwards, which is always nice. Some people even took notes! This is very exciting to me – I haven’t really given any presentations before outside of a work context.

I thought I’d share the content of the talk for those who might be interested, but missed the event.

In the 1950s, a Russian geneticist by the name of Dmitry K. Belyaev started an experiment to determine the genetic factors affecting domestication in foxes. This is relevant, I promise. He started with foxes form fur farms, and bred them for acceptance of human contact, testing by hand feeding the pups and selecting for those which showed the least avoidance behaviours. What he discovered (other than how to breed adorable domesticated foxes) was that one of the most significant changes that occurs in a species with domestication is a reduction in the fear response to new stimuli in adult animals.

To a large extent, domestication means being open to new things. You could say that humans are a self-domesticating species; historically, the humans who were most open to trying new things – new places, new ways of doing things, new foods – were the most successful. That ability to adapt and try new things is very important in an environment which is changing very quickly, the way ours is through climate change, globalisation, technology, and simple population growth.

Most of the plants we are used to eating here in Perth come from Europe. Wheat, apples, pears, carrots, most of the fruit and vegetables you can buy in a supermarket really – they all come from a climate that is both wetter and colder than ours. We can’t afford to rely on just these plants for our food, because long term we don’t have enough water to grow them.

Our underground aquifers will run out if we keep pumping water out of them, and it takes thousands of year for them to refill. Our river runs low at the best of times, and our dams don’t fill up any more. We don’t get enough rain to fill them, or to irrigate the very thirsty plants we know from our European cultural heritage. We need to start eating plants that will grow happily and easily with the water we do get, that will survive the heat of our summers and reliably produce food for us.

Some of those plants you already know, others are going to be new to you.

• Quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa) is an annual plant from South America, which grows in climates just as hot and dry as ours. Its seeds are edible, and can be used the way you would use rice. They’re very high in protein, so they’re especially good for vegetarians.

• Amaranth (Amaranthus spp.) grow similarly well, and is actually considered a weed in some places. You might have already seen this plant growing in flower gardens, with tall spires of pink, purple, or orange flowers. Their seeds can be cooked like rice, or made into porridge, or popped like miniature popcorn and eaten as a very tasty breakfast cereal. Their leaves are also edible, and can be cooked like spinach. Amaranth seeds are high in protein, and very healthy.

• Dates (Phoenix dactylifera) have been used as a staple food in the Middle East for centuries. Although they’re very sweet, the sugars are slow-burning and will give you long lasting energy rather than a diabetes-inducing spike in your blood sugar. Dates make an excellent breakfast or snack food, and can be used to sweeten biscuits and cakes.

• Moringa (Moringa oleifera), also known as drumstick tree or horseradish tree, is a pretty, graceful tree which produces edible seed pods (eat them when they’re green and tender, after cooking like snow peas) and edible leaves and flowers (eat raw or cooked as a green begetable). Moringa leaves are tasty, with a slightly nutty, broccoli flavour and a hint of mustard-like spiciness.

There are hundreds of other plants which are well-suited to Perth’s climate. I couldn’t possibly list them all for you here, but trust me, they exist.

One of the best ways to find the sorts of plants that will grow well in your local area is urban foraging – otherwise known as take a walk around and see what edible plants are thriving and healthy, especiallyweeds, verge plantings and plants on vacant blocks, or council street plants, all of which receive little care.

Foraging simply means collecting edible things from the environment, and humans have always done it. urban foraging means foraging in your suburb or urban area. These are some of the edible plants you’ll find growing around the Perth area:

• Mulberries (Morus spp.) thrive in Perth. Not only are their fruit edible, their leaves can be used to feed herbivorous livestock (rabbits, goats, sheep, cows, etc.) as a replacement for hay – i.e. as almost the entire diet of the animal if necessary.

• Citrus (oranges, lemons, grapefruit, limes, mandarins, cumquats, ..) love the heat and the sun in Perth. They are fairly thirsty plants, but as long as they’re given plentiful water support in their first year or two, they’re quite tough and drought resistant.

• Rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis) grows brilliantly in Perth. It’s commonly planted as a hedge, and can easily be collected. Rosemary is very strongly flavoured, but it can be used in salads as well as for flavouring food, and can also be used to make a caffeine free tea (technically an infusion). Rosemary is also a fantastic bee plant, with a long flowering period.

• Olives (Olea europaea) are ideally suited to the Perth climate. In some areas where they’re been planted as street trees you can hardly walk 5m at this time of year without running into a tree so laden with fruit that its branches are bent almost to the ground. Don’t eat olives raw – they’re horribly bitter; instead you can pickle them in brine or with plain, dry rock salt, or press them for oil. Olive leaves can be used to make a caffeine free tea replacement, and can also be fed to livestock. The mash left over after pressing olives for oil can also be fed to livestock, as up to 40% of their total diet. It’s high in fat (oils) and protein, so it’s good for them and promotes healthy coats and good milk and meat production.

• Frangipani (Plumeria spp.) flower petals are edible, and good in salads. Do not eat the leaves or stems of this plant, only the flower petals.

• Bottlebrush (Calistemon spp.) flowers produce high quantities of sweet nectar. This is why you often see their flowers being visited by honeybees. If you pour hot water (or even warm water) over the flowers and soak for a few minutes, the nectar is dissolved in the water for a sweet honey-flavoured drink.

• Most people know that sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas) are edible, but not so many people know that the green parts of the plant are edible, and can be cooked and eaten like spinach. These greens are a common food in some North African and Central American communities. Sweet potatoes are one of the easiest of all vegetables to grow; cut the end off an edible sweet potato tuber form the supermarket, leave it for a few hours for the cut end to dry out slightly, and then plant it. The plant is thornless climber with big, heart-shaped leaves and purple trumpet shaped flowers.

• The common fishbone fern (Nephrolepis cordifolia) is often seen growing semi-wild around Perth. It produces edible bulblets, which can be eaten raw or slow roasted for a caramelised flavour. The smaller bulblets are hard to roast, and tend to just burn up, but the larger bulblets can be roasted in a slow oven.

• Rose (Rosa spp.) petals are edible, as are the fruit that some older rose varieties produce. The rose hips (fruit) are very sour, with a high vitamin C content, so they’re usually stewed, made into jam or jelly, or dried to make tea. It’s best to remove the seeds before eating the rose hip, as (a) the seeds are slightly toxic if chewed, just like apple and pear seeds, and (b) the “fluff” around the seeds inside the rose hip is irritating to the mouth and throat. Anecdotally, it’s just as irritating on the way out.

• Sourgrass (Oxalis pes-caprae), also known as wood sorrel, is a childhood favourite of many Perth dwellers. It makes a good salad plant or pot herb, as do most of the other Oxalis species which we incorrectly call clover. They’re sour because of the oxalic acid in their leaves and stems; oxalic acid can leach calcium from your body, and in very high quantities can cause bladder stones, so don’t eat too much of these plants without cooking them first. Cooking destroys the oxalic acid, leaving a mild tasting green vegetable (pot herb). Don’t worry about it too much, though, as many well-known vegetables (such as spinach) contain oxalic acid.

• Elephant food (Portulacaria afra), or dwarf jade plant, is edible – but is very, very sour. Anecdotally, it is believed to contain high levels of vitamin C, and to increase lactation in lactating women. It can also be fed to livestock. [Note - be careful with this one, as it can be unpleasantly sour, especially if it's slightly wilted. It may be better to cook it before eating.]

urban foraging is a great way of finding edible plants which will grow happily in your area, and it’s fun too. There is a lot of information about it available online, although much of it is U.S.A.-centric. Information from the U.S. and Europe is still useful, though, because many of our common garden plants are the same as theirs, and many of those are edible or useful.Very few garden plants were originally kept just for their pretty flowers or foliage. For more information on urban foraging, one of the best online resources I’ve found is Green Deane’s Eat the Weeds (& Other Things Too) site.

Other than that, generally plants which grow well in places like Peru, Argentina, South Africa, Spain, Morocco, California, and most parts of the Middle East will usually do well in Perth.

Although my talk was one of the highlights of the day for me, the rest of the day went really well. Loads of people came through and browsed, and (hopefully) learned a bit about permaculture. We sold raffle tickets for a food forest starter kit, and told lots of people about the permaculture ideals and methods, sustainability, and aquaponics (thanks to Tony of Life Aquatic, who is brilliant and knows all the things). There were chickens and ducks, and a sheep that tolerated being petted by many, many small children. I had a fantastic day, and I hope everyone else did too.

Images sourced from Wikimedia Commons:
File:Apples.jpg
File:Chenopodium_quinoa_in_Cachilaya,_Bolivia,_Lake_Titicaca.JPG
File:Amaranth_%22opopopeo%22_%28367191600%29.jpg
File:Date_palm.jpg
File:Starr_070207-4337_Moringa_oleifera.jpg
File:Mulberry_1.jpg
File:Bee_on_rosemary.jpg
File:Plumeria.jpeg
File:Ipomoea_batatas_%28Purple_Sweet_Potato_Variety%29_Flower.JPG
File:Oxalis_pes-caprae_from_Malta.JPG
File:Denaid_Eggfly_%28Hypolimnas_misippus%29_on_Portulacaria_afra_W_IMG_1473.jpg

 Other images are mine, free to use under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

I’ve spent the last few weeks researching rabbits. I have my reasons.

First reason is that K indicated an interest in spinning, and I thought I’d look into how viable it would be to have a little cottage industry setup selling yarn, and possibly raw fleece. (Answer: limited to zero for making any actual money/profit)

Your basic wool animal is a sheep, but I dislike sheep. I’ve never met a bright one, or one that didn’t stink, although I’ve been assured by people who like sheep that they don’t inherently stink. After sheep, there are goats (cashmere goats, which produce cashmere, and angora goats, which produce mohair), alpacas, and angora rabbits (which produce angora).

At the same time, I’ve been reading and thinking about the Russian domestication experiment with silver foxes. Short version: the researchers took mostly-wild foxes from a fur farm and bred them for domestication, using a lowered fear response to humans as demonstrated by least avoidance behaviours and lowered agression as the main selection criterion. Within 8 generations they had adult foxes which wagged their tails like dogs, whined and fawned for attention from their keepers, and showed a diverse range of colouring and coat patterns. After 50-some years of the breeding program, the domesticated foxes are adorable, completely domesticated housepets.

I’m absolutely fascinated with genetics, and I really want to replicate the experiment. But not with foxes. Keeping foxes is illegal in Australia (even assuming we could live-trap enough for a starting gene pool), and there are hefty fines for doing it. I considered ferrets, but they’re tricky to breed (female ferrets which go into season and aren’t bred will often die!) and there probably isn’t much call for super-domesticated ferrets. Ferret fanciers don’t mind the slightly bitey nature of ferrets, and non-ferret-fanciers won’t have a ferret anyway. Rats are an option, but again – what do you do with your super-domesticated rats? Rat fanciers will keep rats anyway, and other people will still dislike them. Rabbits, though – rabbits are a possibility.

Rabbits are only semi-domesticated, in that they still display fear responses and avoidance behaviours towards humans (unlike labrador dogs, for example, or even domestic cats), so there’s the potential for the experiment to show obvious results. They reproduce fast, which is desirable to get results in a resaonable timeframe. They’re easy to get, legal to keep, and thay’re also useful. Angora rabbits are a possible wool animal, and I was considering keeping rabbits as meat animals anyway.

However, before getting too heavily invested in the idea of keeping rabbits for meat, I thought it might be wise to try it. I’d never (knowingly) eaten rabbit. So I made rabbit stew the other day. I got a farmed rabbit form the butcher, and followed instruction on youtube to debone it (I was fine with the tiny little carcass, but K had to leave the room, and my mother made slightly horrified noises about eating Flopsy, Mopsy, or Cottontail when I told her about it). One slow cooker later, rabbit stew.

Nom nom nom. Turns out that I like rabbit. Especially with a bit of red wine, tomatoes & garlic.

As an aside, I have no idea how fibre farmers make enough money to keep going. Not only is it a negative sum, financially, to keep Angora rabbits, this is also the case for angora goats, cashmere goats, and alpacas.

The goats become (just) financially viable if you include the savings from milking them (and using that milk instead of buying milk) and eating the unwanted baby goats produced to keep the does in milk (instead of buying meat). Alpacas, similarly, become (just) viable if you breed them once a year and include the savings from eating the young alpacas instead of buying meat. Rabbits are only viable to keep for wool if you can reduce the time spent checking their health, handling them, and making sure they have food & water down to 1 minute per rabbit per day or less. How do farmers survive???

Credits:
• Image sourced from Wikimedia Commons: File:Fluffy_white_bunny_rabbit.jpg
• Image (but not recipe) sourced from Environmental Graffiti
• Image sourced from The Gourmet Forager
• Image sourced from Wikimedia Commons: File:Fretts_301004_selbstfotografiert,_GNU-FDL.jpg
• Rabbit Stew recipe: BestRecipes.com.au

I don’t know what the crossover is between permaculture and plant nerds (and gardeners, farmers, sustainability seekers, etc.) and technology nerds, but I fall into that demographic.

And, like most people who spend any amount of time online, I hate online advertising. I despise uutoplay video and audio on websites (even non-advertising video and audio, to be fair). Ads prepended to my video feeds so that in order to watch <cool new music video> I have to sit through <boring and irrelevant advert for something I don’t want or need> are obnoxious. Even the banner ads on most sites irritate me, with their blaringly loud colours and inclination to use up to 60% of the screen. So I use ad-blocker software. Lots of people do – increasing numbers of us in fact, 50% or more of the users on some sites.

A story linked on Slashdot a few days ago highlighted the problems that ad blockers cause for a lot of journalists and news sites – if they don’t get any revenue from ads, where will they get enough revenue to survive? Advertisers are becoming disillusioned with the whole web advertising thing as a way to target potential customers, because even if some people do still allow ads, at least non-invasive ads, enough people disable them completely to make the advertising not really financially viable.

It puts  journalists in the same boat as visual artists, authors of fiction, animators and musicians. How do you get paid to do what you do? The traditional ways for artists to get paid were patronage (which, these days includes distributed patronage - e.g. Kickstarter) and busking, i.e. donations.

Paywalls are a dead-end alley, in that there is so much information and entertainment available online for free that asking for payment to even visit a news site in case there’s something interesting or important there just sends a lot of users to another site. Patronage is an option, but most direct patrons these days are corporations and we all know what happens when journalists or scientists have their salaries paid by corporations. Distrubuted patronage works best for one-of things – a documentary, an album, an invention going to market, a specific novel or graphic novel. It isn’t such a good model for ongoing work like day to day journalism and reporting.

It is possible that a journalist could ask for payments for individual articles, paywalling the articles rather than the entire site on which they reside. I think that’s a good model – let us read the first paragraph or a summary, and then ask for a micropayment to read the full article. But doing that requires a reputation for high quality content, and a niche in which the free content is not as high quality as the content you provide. In other words, it’s hard, especially for news organisations which would then have to deal with how much of the micropayment went to the writer, how much to the photographer or videographer, and how much to the site itself, not to mention the less visible employees like administrators, proofreaders, and typesetters.

Which leaves you with donations. The poor cousin of income generation schemes.

Donations are hard, but they might work. A lot of sites now include ‘Donate’ or ‘Flattr‘ buttons to allow micropayments from users. But it’s tough to know how well it works – are those webcomic authors making a decent living on donations and merchandising, or are they subsidised bya  day job or a partner with a day job? Without knowing how viable it is, journalists and news sites are unlikely to try it.

Which brings us to the actual, original point of this post: someone is running an experiment with voluntary micropayments, which is linked on Slashdot. No actual money is involved, it’s just theoretical. You add an app to your bookmarks toolbar, and then when you find content you enjoy you click on one of those links (1 to 3 cents), depending on how amazing you thought the content was. Your “tip” is recorded, and that’s it. There’s a summary page that tells you how much you would have spent, and the experimenter will be releasing anonymized analyses of the data to see if this sort of system is viable in the wild. I think it’s a pretty neat experiment. If you’re game, go sign up.

The common sword fern (Nephrolepis cordifolia), also called the tube ladder fern, ladder fern, erect sword fern, bayabang or fishbone fern, is common in Perth gardens. It is native to northern Australia and Asia, and it’s hardy enough that it is classified as an invasive species is some areas where it has been introduced. It survives, and even thrives in sandy Perth soils (basically beach sand) with no care or attention. What you probably didn’t know about the sword fern is that it produces edible tubers.

Sword fern can be either terrestial or epiphytic. The fronds are 20 to 60 cm long, 2.5 to 5 cm wide. Leaves are pinnate; the leaflets are entire to slightly toothed, with kidney-shaped, brown spore packets on the underside. The plant produces a horizontal root (rhizome), with wiry side roots (stolons) growing off it, both densely clothed with brownish scales. Growing on the stolons will be the tubers. The tubers are fleshy and round or egg-shaped, usually 0.5 – 2 cm in diameter, occurring on the Rhizomes of the fern. From the plant’s point of view the tubers are for water storage. They are present year round, and can be harvested without damaging the fern, provided it is replanted after harvest and provided with sufficient water.

A team in Nepal tested the tubers of Nephrolepis cordifolia for nutritional content [Nutrient Analysis of Nephrolepsis, Kathmandu University Journal of Science, Engineering and Technology, Vol 4, No 1 (2008)]. The study concluded that the tubers are a rich source of carbohydrates and calcium (96% water, 13.42% carbohydrates, 1.34% protein, 1.25% starch, 14.88% crude fiber, 6.53% ash, 0.75% calcium and trace phosphorus), and also noted that they are frequently eaten raw by children in the region. The team recommended the tubers be investigated as a potential commercial crop.

The tubers can range in color from cream to yellow to dark tan or brown, and can be eaten raw or cooked. Raw, they are described as being crunchy and sweet, or similar to Jerusalem artichokes, with a verying amount of astringency and a slight brackeny or earthy taste. Apparently if you roast large ones in a slow oven the turn into sweet, chewy lumps. Small ones keep their shape but turn to a powder inside that tastes like coffee.

What sword fern needs:

• Water – Sword fern thrives in many environments, ranging from semi-arid Mediterranean climates such as Perth through to the humid tropics (e.g. Florida, north-eartern Australia) and even temperate areas (New Zealand). It requires around 600mm of rainfall or irrigation per year, but can survive extended dry periods.

• Sunlight – sword fern, like most ferns, prefers a semi-shaded position, protected from the harsh light and heat of the midday sun. It can survive in positions where it gets full sun on the morning, but is shaded during the middle of the day, but prefers filtered light.

• Soil – Sword ferns can survive as epiphytes, and do not require rich soil. They need reasonable drainage, but will do well in damp areas. Tuber production may be lower if water is constantly available.

• Space – Sword ferns are not large plants. They can be grown in pots or small garden beds, and will spread to fill the available space.

• Warmth – Sword ferns are damaged by very low temperatures. They don’t like frost, although they can survive a light frost – and as they are classed as invasive in New Zealand, it seems safe to assume that they can survive quite cold weather.

What sword fern has to offer:

• Edible tubers.

• Attractive, hardy groundcover plant for landscaping.

• New ferns, from spores and rhizomes.

For more info, see the following sites:
• Eat The Weeds site
• Radix 4 Roots

Images sourced from Wikimedia Commons:
File:Quinault_Small_Waterfall.jpg
File:Nephrolepis_cordifolia_tamasd02.jpg
File:Tuberous_sword_fern.jpg
File:Nephrolepis_cordifolia_%28Sori%29.jpg
File:Nephrolepis_cordifolia1.jpg
File:Starr_030405-0138_Nephrolepis_sp..jpg

It’s the middle of summer. Nothing much is happening, because nothing much can happen – everything (including us) is just trying to make it through the heat. Waiting for rain, waiting for cooler weather, waiting for the sea breeze in the afternoons.

We’ve been heading up to Gallifrey every second weekend with barrels of water to top up the water tubes. So far, most of the baby fruit trees are still alive. Even the apple tree that the bloody kangaroos / wallabies tried to kill is still going, having shrugged off losing its entire top and being ringbarked during a week of 40 degree + temperatures. Clearly that one is a winner. Two of the four fig trees don’t seem to have made it, after severe damage from heat and grasshoppers and wallabies, but the other two are thriving. The dates look good, and the olives clearly know that they belong in a climate like this.

Currently our main focus is on starting the process of building the house. We’ve got our planning approval from the council for the entire distributed house plan, with no conditions. That was easy, where I expected it to be one of the hardest parts. Now we need to (a) get engineering and energy efficiency drawings and specifications done, and then (b) get building approval, (c) convince the bank to extend our mortgage to cover the cost of building, and (d) get a builder who won’t charge so much that we can’t afford to build at all. Not necessarily in that order.

The plan was to owner-build, but it turns out that the amount the banks are willing to lend to owner-builders is “up to 60%” of the total end value of the house and land. None of my calculations can make that one work out, unfortunately. With a building contract and a builder, the maximum loan becomes 95% of the total end value, so even though we don’t need a builder (we can project manage the build ourselves, and deal with tradies and contractors) and it’ll increase the cost of building by 30 – 100%, we pretty much have to have a builder.

We have a valuer looking at the property tomorrow, who will then tell us how much it’s currently worth in the eyes of the bank. That, in turn, will tell us how much we can possibly borrow. And that will tell us what our budget is for the per sq m cost, since builders all quote per sq m. Current calculations indicate that we need the builder to charge $1000 or less per sqm m, which may be difficult. We’ve had one quote so far, of $2000 per sq m. If that’s normal, I don’t know how anyone can ever afford to build. And our house is non-standard in design and materials, and not within the normal suburban radius of town. It’s a little depressing.

In parallel, we’ve been talking to a few drafties and structural engineers about the building approval. Current best quote is about $5000 to do all the drawings and specs we need, from a lady who is very professional and seems to know all the things. I’m inclined to go with her, but I have another quote coming this week, and I’m waiting for the valuation to be done as well.

So much waiting, interspersed with flurries of contacting people and politely asking them to just tell me how much it’ll cost to do the things rather than waffling around the numbers. I hate waiting.

Just over a week ago, I went to a workshop on fermented foods at Perth City Farm, run by the awesome Bonnie Wykman (of PeaceTree Permaculture). The workshop was a great overview of fermented and cultured foods, from yoghurt and kefir through to sourdough, ginger beer, and mead, as well as the history and some of the health benefits of eating active (probiotic, i.e. containing live microorganisms) cultured foods.

Bonnie also gave us all samples of her sourdough starter, kefir culture, and water kefir culture. And then a friend of mine gave me some of her kefir grains as well, so I have two different strains which I’ve merged. For science!

I’ve been thinking about trying some lactofermentation for ages, but getting the starter cultures meant trying it now – and led to a massive bout of making and eating fermented probiotic foods. Since the workshop, I’ve made all the things. Kai & I have even (as of last night) started experimenting with lactofermented pickled vegetables. So in about 3 weeks we’ll be able to try them and see if it worked, and if adding a few olive leaves has the same keeping things crunchy effect as grape leaves apparently have. Watch this space.

My sourdough starter is doing amazingly well. I started off feeding it organic spelt flour, because that’s the only organic flour I could find at short notice, and it seemed to like that. I now have some organic rye flour (rye is recommended, because apparently it ferments more easily than wheat or spelt), and that’s even better. It’s like having a pet, except instead of playing with it or petting it I use it to make bread. So far I’ve made Bonnie’s quick & easy ‘crumpet loaf ‘, and a basic sourdough fruit loaf from the Bourke St Bakery recipe book (which was amazing), and now – as in it’s in the oven right now, and smells delicious – a straight sourdough loaf from the same book.

My first attempt at kefir smelled a bit funny when I strained the kefir grains out. Not bad, just not the way I thought it should smell.. so I dutifully put the grains in fresh milk, and then left the kefir to continue to burble to itself for a few days. And as a result I ended up with over-fermented super sour kefir which is inedible (for me) but seems to make excellent hair conditioner. (Thank you, Natalia, for that idea)

Batch number 2 worked much better. I left it in the fridge during the day, but on the counter at night when “room temperature” was cooler. I now have some very drinkable kefir (functionally equivalent to drinking yoghurt) in the fridge; half of it has some apple syrup and cinnamon added, and the other half has some cooked up strawberries & nectarines added, and both are delicious. I’ve also got some kefir grains in some cream to make cultured sour cream, most of which will then become cultured butter to take with to the family meal events at Xmas.

I also tried eating a kefir grain. Weird. Chewy, like a gummy sweet, but not sweet at all. Quite nice, in that I’m not sure what just happened kind of way. The water kefir grains are much less odd to eat, just mildly sweet and bland with the texture of a strong jelly. Not chewy or sticky, just .. there.

Water kefir appears to be the easiest thing in the world to make. Dissolve some sugar in some water, add a little piece of clean egg shell or a pinch of bicarbonate of soda, and stir in the water kefir grains. Then leave it for 1 – 3 days, strain out the water kefir grains, and add something tasty and seal it for another 2 days or more for a second fermentation. Adding ginger to the first fermentation seems to make the water kefir grains very happy; they multiplied almost twice as much as the grains in an identical bottle without the ginger.

I’m hooked. This is awesome. And since I can’t have a dog or a cat or chickens yet (we’re still renting until our house is built, and rental agents are pretty much universally anti-pet), these microbes (and the worm farm and the houseplants) are the next best thing.

(water kefir image source: Wikipedia, author Simon A. Eugster; all other images are my own)