Redux Redux
My elderly mother had a mild stroke last week.
Up until that point, she had been working hard to compensate for my father’s reduced capacity after his hip replacement and steady cognitive decline. I am lucky to live next door to them, and was prepared for the day when I would need to step in and contribute more to their day to day lives. It appears that moment has arrived.
It is lucky timing that I recently read Carol Deppe’s Resilient Gardener, since she outlined how she adapted to a similar situation, nursing her mother through the final years and reorganising the garden in preparation for unpredictable demands on her time. I am still getting my head around the new reality, but to be honest I already felt overstretched. My series of “redux” posts, focusing on different aspects of the farm and prioritising what works, was part of this process. That trend needs to intensify, so I can continue the highest priority projects, maintain the useful ones, and discard the fluff.
The first place to focus is the livestock. Ceasing high intensity rotational grazing, and training the new does to suckle their kids, are both major moves to reduce labour and increase flexibility. The plan to work on two species of poultry has to be re-evaluated. I see the geese as having a greater advantage to positively impact the rest of my cropping projects, so the plans to expand chicken breeding will be shelved. I will be prepared to sustain the penned geese on concentrate from the store, for those periods where daily fodder cutting isn’t an option. My partner also enjoys working with the geese, so I will make sure they are in the loop as a back stop if I am preoccupied with carer duties. Setting the geese up so they can muddle along for a few days without attention is a priority (for example making sure they have a basic automatic water source and the fencing is set up to allow free ranging at short notice.
With the staple crops, I have to finally admit how demanding and unreliable maize has proven to be. I hate to abandon the genetics since it is something special and difficult to replace. But the many months I spent preparing the last crop only to get nothing back has to be looked at with clear eyes. I won’t rush to throw out the seed. Instead, I will repackage it for the deep freeze so it can put a few more years on the clock for resowing. This move will free up a huge amount of time that I can reinvest into the true star- Canna. I need to push this crop forward faster, and invest more energy in assessing starch yields and extraction, and other ways to eat the tubers.
I was saving the results of a funny experiment for another post, but it seems fitting to share it here. The new Canna tubers are currently filling out, meaning they are extra tender. I was roasting some chickens the other night and decided to try cooking up those juicy tubers. The tender growing tips were cubed, while the rest was grated, then sprinkled in the baking trays to soak up the tasty meat juices. Canna has a very powerful browning capacity. This is part of a plant’s immune system, designed to seal wounds by converting amino acids into polymers. While a cut apple might take a few hours to noticeably brown, cut Canna tubers do this in seconds. I wasn’t too surprised to see the cubed Canna tubers turn an unappetising shade of grey when baked.
More surprising was the grated material which turned into something resembling asphalt. A few exploratory nibbles revealed that both forms of the Canna tubers tasted great. No stomach complaints followed either. I had visions of barbarians raiding a village at dinner time, seeing the black goo on the menu and quietly excusing themselves. This kind of work is slow, often unrewarding and difficult to prioritise when you are exhausted from weeks of planting maize. Canna plants persist for years without attention and their seed store for decades, so on all fronts they outclass maize, and the work I am doing breeding them is so unusual that I have to make it a higher priority.
Other annual staples will be deprioritised, just ongoing small beds in the vegetable garden when the season and my schedule allows. Maize suffers from inbreeding if it isn’t planted on a large scale, but chia, celosia, sunflowers and chenopods are more forgiving. I will also put backups of of all my valuable seed into the deep freeze so I won’t have to worry about losing genetics if life gets complicated. I will also prioritise hand crossing Lomandra hystrix and longifolia when they mature. Looking at the handful of plants I have established this should happen this spring. Critical controlled crosses like this cascade into diverse F2 grow outs and selective breeding. Like Canna, Lomandra grows like a weed and persists for years without attention, so is likely to be worthy of effort. Also like Canna, nobody I know of is working on this genus as a potential crop.
Bunya breeding will continue to get my attention when the stars align, but I have to be honest that the chance of my own farm being the nucleus for a mass diversity hybridisation event is at best 50/50. On the upside, the trees establish and grow without much effort in my goat paddock hills, so this project can continue to creep forward even if I get distracted in coming years. If I am not preoccupied when the next masting season arrives (it has been a few years with almost no cones setting) then I will do as much field work and propagation as possible to fill in the many remaining gaps on my land. I will also continue to promote the idea of domesticating bunya to everyone who will listen, since the involvement of others increases the chance of the project eventually finding success one day. I recently got an email from another farmer doing a similar project a few hours away from me, so there is hope on that front.
With the vegetable garden, I hope to use the geese to reduce the amount of weed clearing work in the future so I can continue to grow a limited selection of high value, highly reliable crops. The Tulbaghia breeding project will continue to be a priority. I am not sure how much progress I will make on the Ethiopian kale and tomato breeding this year. The restoration of bush frame genetics in the latter has proven messier than hoped. Turns out punnet square diagrams are a gross oversimplification of how life works most of the time. My first planting are fruiting now, so I will be saving seed from the most promising plants for all traits, and hopefully back crossing to Principe Borghese next season if life isn’t too complicated. The F2 Ethiopian kale went in a bit late and aren’t showing their full potential, but the texcel greens traits seem to be dominating so a back cross to the slower growing Ethiopian kale is likely on the cards when circumstances allow.
It is at times like this that the zero input approach really shines. Managing such a huge chunk of land, single handed, without machinery or irrigation, humbles you in the short term. But in the long term you begin to understand the power of catalytic change. Seeds I once held in my hand are now towering trees that are transforming my previously degraded landscape. A few crops that were once fanciful theories are now at least half way to reality. Livestock which was once a mystery are mostly known quantities.
If I miss the occasional weekly post in coming years I hope you will understand my new circumstances, but I will make every effort to keep this project going and share the results with each and every one of you.
What's your intention with the lomandra? Are you breeding for food fibre of both? I eat the immature seeds blanched or steamed. I call them asparagus peas. Delicious, and you get a long season with no pest damage. The ones in the sun are ready first but shaded clumps are much slower to ripen so even after some are hard and dry there's still green ones to be picked down by the creek.
Regarding the browning of the tubers, maybe blanching then baking the cubes would be helpful to arrest the enzymatic reaction if one had neighbours coming for dinner.