The pigeon pea is one of those ubiquitious permaculture plants. It’s a nitrogen-fixer, incredibly easy to grow, chicken forage, a quick pioneer, and yields the very edible lentil-like pigeon peas. It’s nearly harvest time at the farm.
The delicious Dragonfruit (see a picture of the pink dragonfruit) grows on this plant, a strange cross between a vine and a cactus.
Imagine cooking a pot of rice in thirty minutes simply using the sun. It sounds unlikely, doesn’t it? Last week at the farm I saw just that done using a solar cooker, simply a few sheets of corflute covered in silver mylar and placed to reflect the sun’s rays in a concentrated spot.
Why one of these cookers isn’t part of every camping or disaster aid kit, I have no idea.
The demonstration also included cooking pikelets over a space-age looking solar cooker. An old satellite dish had been lined with dozens of tiny mirror tiles and had an adjustable arm affixed to one side. Oriented to the morning Queensland sun, it set a piece of paper afire in the five seconds and cooked pikelets in a not unreasonable time.
Another sunflower, this time with a bee at work.
This time last year, during the drought, Kohl Rabi was one of the few vegetables that survived to be eaten. This year there are many more lunch options, but the humble kohl rabi keeps on growing.
The Rollinia is a Custard Apple variant from South America. It’s supposed to taste like lemon meringue pie, so I wish they’d hurry up and ripen.
Thursday at the farm was a day of bananas. First we harvested a bunch of Ladyfinger bananas before the bats or possums could eat them, which involved cutting down the tree (and cutting my finger).
There were around 70 bananas in the bunch - it’s a good thing they ripen more slowly than at the height of summer.
Later, we planted two Goldfinger suckers in a greywater trench.
And - next week, I’ll be designing a guild for a banana circle.
Permaculture isn’t completely unaesthetic. There just needs to be a reason for it.
