They're easy to grow, but I keep losing the fruit to grubs that live inside the fruit, where my wasps can't get them.
I was going to rant on about ways to defeat the little buggers, but it occurs to me that this is a cost/benefit issue. I have no trouble harvesting vast quantities of basil and lettuce, now that my wasps are on patrol. What else can I grow that's easy to bring to table? This is all about eating when there isn't a community to produce food for me.
I sometimes think about the production of seafood too. If it were just me and a small community of people concerned with eating well and having a clean dry place to sleep, potable water and not having to work terribly hard to keep all this, then there are a few obvious options.
The introduction of robust food organisms like Nile Perch to waterways that are already screwed up, such as the lower Fitzroy, would mean no-one would have to eat catfish. There are other issues here. Lake Victoria in Africa is a very pertinent study on the ecological side effects of this strategy.
You could also get systematic about harvesting: rather than slinging a net across a creek, what about a big semi-rigid plastic grill? Fairly big mesh; you don't want the tiddlers. All on a big cantilever, with a sort of mesh bucket on the bottom. You'd soon learn when and how long to set it down.
The key here is husbandry. You don’t want to maximise the harvest, you want to harvest no more than you can use. The harvesting mechanism is so effective that it is very easy to fish the creek out.
Economics (I don’t mean the bullshit with money that they teach in universities, I mean the management of ecologies) is complicated and difficult. You are trying to control dynamic balances in what is essentially an emergent system.
Heavy fishing may reduce fish stocks, but this has the desirable effect of inhibiting predation and parasitism by limiting the food supply for parasites and predators. This can actually increase the harvest tonnage. On the other hand, the parasites and predators may serve other purposes in the local ecology. Also, reducing predator populations will boost the populations of all of their prey species, which may in turn produce a spike in predator populations.
It’s all too complicated. The only useful conclusion that can be drawn is that it’s a bit like carrying a shallow bowl of water: move slowly and gently. Natural damping will sort out the complex ripples.
Abundantly, that's how my garden grows. The weather has been kind; not so hot, and with frequent moderate rain. A pity I didn't have these conditions when I put in my first failed crop of coriander, but you can't have everything. Both types of basil are thriving.I have more leaf than you can poke a stick at. I made pesto. Lots of pesto. It's pretty good.
One of my wild lettuces gone to seed has inexplicably produced another crop of leaf. That's bizarre, but I'm not complaining.
The wasps are proliferous, and my plants suffer very little infestation. It is hard to believe how effective they are. Companion planting works, but not on the scale on which people try to apply it. You need a colossal garden to achieve a stable microecology. The wasps, on the other hand, are a focussed weapon. Their activity centres around their nest, which happily is right in the centre of the patch I have under cultivation. For simple bioeconomic reasons they don't forage further than they have to, so anything right under the nest has a life expectancy measured in minutes. The location of the nest is probably not coincidental. When they arrived, my garden was grub-central.
For a while I worried about getting stung, but I've noticed that the wasps are aware of my presence. They turn to keep me in view when I walk past their nest. It was quite unnerving when I first noticed that they were watching me right back. But the fact that they know I'm there and they are content to watch me pass is reassuring; I am neither food nor foe.
The avocado sprouted, got too much sun, wilted, sprouted again and produced several leaves. It reached ten centimetres before I decided it needed planting out. This isn't our yard and it's entirely paved, so I took the sapling to Brett's place and commended it into Jeanette's loving care, with detailed instruction on the care and feeding of sun-sensitive saplings. It's still in the pot but that's ok, I've seen them kept indoors.It stunts them but the point is that a few more weeks in a pot won't worry it. This gives us time to organise a livestock resistant sun shelter as well as a silage.
That's the Hass, but what of the superior breed behind the Bowls Club in Rockhampton? I spoke to Stephen, who said he was up there the other week and the fruit is still green. I suggested sulphate to bring on fruiting, but I suppose it has already set plenty: the only thing to do now is let them ripen. The other thing to do is get Dad to bring more advanced specimens from Jeff in Bundaberg, if he can spare some. Jeff is a commercial grower, so his stock is no doubt high yield but prissy grafts onto Nemaguard rootstock, and probably not worth the bother in the long run. But it might do as a gap filler while we wait for the better trees to mature.
My mulberry cuttings are thoroughly rooted (stop snickering) and one budded leaves. I let it get too much sun one day and it died, but the others seem ok. I think I put too much sulphate on the fruiting capsicums. Some of their top leaves look burnt. The pots are pretty well drained so I've been flooding them with rainwater to flush the excess. We'll see.