All creatures green and tasty
I've got a mulberry cutting from a big healthy tree. I'm going to try and strike it in some potting mix. It can't stay potted forever but I'll have a while to think about it. Possibly out at Brett's place, since he has adequate water and plenty of room on land he owns. I also have an avocado in a big pot. Curiosity overcame common sense and I excavated it to see whether it was germinating. It's cracking like a hatching egg, exactly as I've read. Roots had yet to emerge but were clearly imminent so I replaced it and watered it in.
So what's this sudden fascination with growing things? Well... the other day I stood in a supermarket in the fresh fruit section and a mother said to her child that something or other didn't grow on trees. Avocados, cherries, apples, peaches... all delicious, all nourishing, all horribly expensive... all grow on trees. How can they be so expensive when they do grow on trees?
The answer, of course, is middlemen. From my point of view, even the farmer is a middleman. When I was a kid, for six months out of the year we didn't buy butter. We used avocados, because they do grow on trees. There was an enormous tree at the bowls club where my dad worked, and I was allowed to keep anything the old men couldn't reach, which was most of the crop.
We didn't buy ice-blocks either, because it's easy to make them from mangoes. Which grow on trees, in such quantity that we had to freeze them to keep them from dropping and fermenting on the ground. Not the stringy ones, either. Bananas...well, ours weren't terribly palatable. Not compared to the avocados and mangoes. We used to trade boxes of avocados for boxes of bananas. Someone a couple of blocks down had a better strain of banana.
I also have a herb garden, which contributes daily to my diet. Parsely, sage, thyme. No rosemary (what is this, a song?) but I do have two strains of basil, not to mention loads of capsicum and a couple of chili bushes. I put in coriander but the heat sent it bolting before any crop. Not to worry, I'll collect the seed (which is a spice in its own right). I don't have any marjoram but I do have its close relative oregano, which is not so much thriving as out and out rampant.
It's too hot here for stonefruit, more's the pity, but maybe I can grow apples in the shade of a couple of avocado and mango trees.
I''ve been thinking about building a screened shadehouse out at Brett's. It will mitigate the sun, provide a frame for a watering system and repel various creatures great and small that might otherwise munch on my herbs.
The trouble with commercial cropping is quantity. They grow massive monocultures of a single gene line, and when a disease comes along to which that bloodline is susceptible, the carnage is terrible to behold. Also, they're driven to an extent by merchandising; the fruit must look good on supermarket shelves. Hot chick syndrome applies: they're expensive, difficult to keep and disappointing when you finally take 'em back to your place.
By contrast the fruit on our trees wasn't quite as pretty but it was bigger and the flavour was just decadent. The mangoes in particular tended to be fly-specked by fruit flies. You can stop that with netting but it didn't seem to affect the flesh of the fruit, and you don't eat the skin, so nobody bothered. It's amazing how much nicer, and simpler, the world is when money isn't involved. The best part was not-paying-tax. No tax at all, since there was no transport, no warehousing, no cultivation beyond collecting the fruit and no money changing hands.
We used to make ginger beer too. That wasn't free, since we used sugar from a supermarket, but it occurs to me that we could have fermented mangoes, of which we had vast supply. Note to self: plant mangoes.