SWEET SALVIAS

Yesterday Jing Jing (Alex's girlfriend) arrived while I was out in the vegetable garden and she pointed to my pineapple sage (from Barb). She said that this was the flower she was telling me about the other day - the one with the really sweet spot where the flower joins on. We both picked a gorgeous red flower and bit of the end and sure enough, it is deliciously sweet; in fact the whole flower is sweet. Birds love them and now I know why. Jing Jing said she used to pick them on the way to school, in China, but she didn't know the varieties, only that they had red flowers.

She has just moved out of a flat into a share house and she is keen to plant some vegetables. I will give her a few of my seedlings to get her started with a little, manageable patch she can easily water with a retched watering can and there, we will have another convert ! She takes photos of the things she cooks with the vegetables I give her and maybe I can encourage her to put them on the recipes page. She says she isn't much of a cook but I always love the things she cooks for us.

She told us a very disturbing thing about the vegetables grown in China. Evidently the government issues a substance to everyone that you should soak your vegetables in before eating, to remove the huge amounts of chemicals that they are grown with !! Now, we all suspected this was the case but it is worse than even I thought. Her mother tries to buy organic food whenever she can. When they visited Australia last year her parents couldn't believe how 'real' our vegetables looked - evidently they have completely lost that now, in China. Soon there will be 2 billion people with cancer and other dreadful, industrial illnesses. So sad.