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Healthy Garden Food Newsletter - October 2010

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Healthy Garden Food Newsletter - October 2010

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2010-10-01 04:20:45

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Healthy Garden Food Newsletter

Editor: Bev Buckley

OCTOBER 2010

A true story about birds

One of my favourite gardening stories is about the time I found snow peas (the pods only, the peas had all been neatly removed) carefully placed in piles near my trellises of snow peas. The careful piles of peas really puzzled me until one day, I saw several king parrots carefully removing the pods from the vines and eating them. I decided that the king parrots had to be responsible for the pea piles but to this day don't understand their rules of housekeeping.

As a new farmer with an orchard of 60 apricot trees, James Fernleigh of Bunbury in Western Australia discovered that parrots caused a lot of damage in his orchard when the fruit started to ripen. He would be picking the fruit in one tree while in the next tree the parrots were busy eating the fruit.

Actually, "eating the fruit" wasn't quite what they were doing. They were actually taking a peck out of as many apricots as they could so that the damage they caused was extensive.

A few years later, things have changed in James' orchard. Rather than pecking the fruit and damaging it, the birds are eating the fruit, one piece at a time and leaving the rest undamaged. During the morning visit they each eat half an apricot, enough to fill their bellies, and then they leave. In the afternoon they come back and finish the apricot they left half eaten earlier in the day. The pieces of fruit on each side of the one that is being eaten aren't damaged except when occasionally the parrots poop on them.

James estimates he loses 5% of his crop to bird damage. Previously the damage was huge. Why the change?

James Fernleigh is one of 18 Australian farmers interviewed for the book "Transition Farms." All of them have made the transition from conventional farming methods using chemical fertilizers, pesticides, weedicides and fungides to more sustainable farming practices.

The farmers talk about the strategies they have used and continue to use to re-built tired and infertile soil, improve soil carbon levels and bring the soil minerals into balance, control pests and diseases and improve productivity.

James' explanation for the change in bird behaviour is that birds are nature's garbage removal experts. Their job is to destroy vegetables and fruit that shouldn't reproduce because the seeds do not contain the essential minerals needed to grow a healthy new tree or vegetable. They do this by eating the poor quality vegetables and breaking the skin of fruit. Puncturing the skin provides an entry point for bacteria, which causes the fruit to rot.

As James has improved the quality of his soil, the quality of and taste of the fruit has improved and the birds no longer need to destroy it. Of course the birds still need to eat and they take what they need - but only what they need.

Isn't this a miraculous system? Nature provides a range of garbage disposal experts to ensure that unhealthy trees and food plants do not reproduce. The garbage removalists include birds, insects, diseases, and even animals. Food that is healthy and capable of reproducing in a way that will maintain the vitality of the species, is immune to disease and not touched by insects, birds or animals.

King parrots visit my garden at the end of the season when the plants are losing vigour because the soil has lost some of its nutrients.

The story James tells about the parrots is just one of many similarly amazing anecdotes told by the 18 extraordinarily innovative Australian farmers interviewed for "Transition Farms," which is now available in downloadable form from www.growinghealthyorganicfood.com.

"Transition Farms" will be available as a paperback from mid October.


	Radish and Daikon Radishes belong to the mustard family and include daikon which are an Asian variety. French radish is usually red with white flesh. Radishes are more than 90% water yet they contain potassium, calcium, magnesium, copper, manganese, iron, phosphorus, zinc and sodium and provide many health benefits because they are rich in anti-bacterial and anti-fungal properties. Radish is an effective remedy for digestive irregularities, liver and gall bladder problems.

Roasted Daikon with Soya Sauce

Ingredients
2 large daikon
1 tablespoon soy sauce
2 spring onions, chopped finely
1 tablespoon of sesame seeds
1 tablespoon coriander chopped finely

Method
Slice daikon into rounds and coat with olive oil. Roast for 25 minutes until tender and beginning to brown. Drizzle soya sauce over the daikon and add spring onions. Roast for a further 5 minutes. Sprinkle with sesame seeds and coriander.

Root Vegetable Salad

Ingredients
8 radish
3 beetroot
½ radiccio
3 carrots
1 fennel bulb

Dressing
½ teaspoon of chilli powder
1 tablespoon of olive oil
1 tablespoon of lemon juice
Leaves from a sprig of mint, chopped finely

Method
Make the dressing by putting all the ingedients in a jar with a lid and shaking. Finely slice or shave the beetroot, carrots and radish. Slice the celery, radiccio and fennel. Toss the salad in the chilli dressing and garnish with fennel tops.

Radish and avocado Salad

Ingredients
8 radish
2 avocados, skinned and sliced
1 medium red onion
2 cloves of garlic
2 Roma tomatoes
2 tablespoons of olive oil
Sea Salt and ground pepper to taste.

Method
Slice radishes finely. Put them in a bowl and sprinkle the sea salt over them. Add avocadoes, minced garlic and sliced tomatoes. Add olive oil, salt and pepper to taste. Mix all ingredients and chill for 20 minutes before serving.


	Growing Radish the bio-nutrient way Radishes are fast growing and extremely tolerant of a wide (70 - 320C) range of temperatures. They are pest and largely disease free. Radish can mature in as little as 3 weeks. Intermittent watering causes the roots to split and use of fresh manure, when preparing the soil, causes the roots to fork. Seeds are direct planted about 2 cm deep and because they germinate and grow so quickly, can be planted among other, slower growing salad crops such as lettuce. Thin to 2 cm part when seedlings emerge if you are growing the red-skinned French varieties. Daikon, an oriental radish variety, has very deep roots and can grow up to ½ metre in length so the seedlings need to be thinned to 10 cm apart. Because the roots tend to push out of the ground, hilling of the soil is necessary to keep roots covered. Daikon are much slower growing than the red French varieties and take between 9 and 10 weeks to mature.

A story from San Salvador

Los Naranjos is an impoverished subsistence village in San Salvador. The first crop from the new community garden was more than 1100 radishes. On the night of the first harvest, they ate potato and radish tops soup because radish leaves have more nutrient value than the actual radish. The next day radish cakes, invented by one grandmother, were on the menu. Finely chopped radish leaves, egg, tomato, onion and cornmeal were made into little cakes, which were then fried. Instead of complaining about having too many radishes, now everyone was fighting over them.

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