Plant Profiles – Page 3 – Gallifrey Forest Farm

June 14: plant profile: quinoa

2016/06/14 Danielle 0

No tasks completed yesterday, so here’s another plant profile instead 🙂 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. Although it’s used as a cereal grain, quinoa is actually a pseudocereal, like amaranth or buckwheat, meaning that it is not a grass. All true grains are grasses; quinoa is actually more closely related to spinach and beetroot. It grows 1 […]

June 11: plant profile: mulberry

2016/06/11 Danielle 1

Mulberries (Morus spp.) thrive in Perth, and they are (in my opinion) one of the most under-utilised trees which grow well here. Not only are their fruit edible, both to humans and to most domestic animals (all poultry and most domesticated herbivores and omnivores, plus not toxic to carnivores such as dogs or cats), 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. The leaves are also used in the silk industry, as fodder for domesticated silkworms. […]

plant profile: pomegranate

2016/04/15 Danielle 0

Pomegranates are a traditional Mediterranean fruit, along with olives, grapes, figs, plums, dates, and apples (yes, plums and apples are traditional Mediterranean fruit). It’s an attractive, multi-stemmed shrub or small tree, growing to be 6 – 10 m tall, with glossy green leaves and brightly coloured flowers which can be quite showy in some varieties. The fruit are quite large, between an orange and a grapefruit in size, and coloured pink to orange when ripe. There are multiple cultivars with slightly different fruit characteristics. The seeds of the fruit are surrounded by individual ‘bubbles’ of red or pink, juicy pulp. […]

plant profile: honey locust

2016/03/23 Danielle 0

I’ve just ordered another selection of wattle seeds, to germinate and plant out. These are all varieties with edible seeds, so they’re a pretty good multi-purpose plant. The idea is to plant about half of them in our Zone 5, along with holm oaks, cork oaks, stone pines, and a variety of other semi-wild food plants and bee forage plant species – the other half will go in the pasture/woodland area as shade trees. This pasture area is going to include a series of paddocks through which our poultry and the hypothetical future goats (and maybe cow!) will be rotated. There will […]

Polyembryonic Seeds

2015/12/22 Danielle 0

Plants grow from seeds, but what many people do not know is that not all seeds contain just one plant embryo. Many varieties of mangos, for example, have polyembryonic seeds, as do most citrus. A polyembryonic seed is one which contains multiple embryos. Poly-embryonic seeds produce a number of shoots, one of which originates from fertilisation. The fertilised seedling is often weak and stunted and should be discarded. The other seedlings are clones of the mother tree. Yes, clones – just like a cutting, only from seed. This means that if you grow a polyembryonic mango (such as Kensington Pride […]