KOMBUCHA FROM RUSSIA

On Wednesday at our seedsavers get together, Mary brought a large jar full of a brown liquid and a container of awful, lumpy things like pale brown pieces of liver, slithering and sliding through a brown liquid. When it was her turn to speak she told us all about this amazing concoction from the Ural mountains of Russia and she passed around glasses of the tea for us to try. Here is the gist of the story...

Cancer researchers in Russia gathered data and plotted maps of the incidence of cancers in various areas of Russia. There were 2 areas which stood out noticeably as having virtually no cancer at all, despite having the same living conditions and polluted environmental conditions and recording the same, enormous amount of vodka being drunk as elsewhere. On visiting the areas they found that every family has a store of the kombucha tea brewing in a corner and that every member of the community drank it daily. Tests were of course carried out and it was discovered that this symbiotic colony of yeast and bacteria, fed by organic black tea and sugar, contains a potent detoxifying substance called glucuronic acid (as well as acetic acid and lactic acid) which acts as a dramatic immune system booster and body detoxifier.

Mary kindly shared her supply and now we all have a piece growing in our own homes and in a few days we will be able to strain off the slightly fizzy, fermented tea to drink and then, like with a sourdough starter, we will feed it and nurture it as it feeds and nurtures us, adding ourselves into the equation of the symbiotic relationship. Thanks Mary. Maybe it will help some of us live long and happy lives.

TARO

Last Wednesday Mary brought along some taro rhizomes she grew in her garden, (not a damp spot) down Port Adelaide way, to share. There was a bit of confusion as to wether the leaves where edible or not, so this is what I’ve found out from my book ‘Growing your own FOOD BEARING PLANTS in Australia’ by Selby Gouldstone.
Taro Colocasia antiquorum esculenta
‘A small lily-like plant universally cultivated throughout the tropics and subtropics for its edible, tuberous, starch-rich rhizome, and the large, fleshy leaves which are also edible when young and thoroughly boiled. Taro likes rich, damp soil and is commonly planted along the edge of small rivulets or swampy, boggy places. An excellent potato substitute taro can be either boiled or roasted. It is also delicious when fried in a little vegetable oil, particularly y over an open fire outdoors.
Readily propagated by division. Within one season the tubers should be ready for eating.’

VOYAGE OF THE VEGETABLE VAGABOND

Click on the link below to see my itinerary for the inaugural Voyage of the Vegetable Vagabond!

I am so grateful to the people who have invited me to stay with them and to others who have helped me with suggestions of other places to visit and things to do, especially through France. And, of course, to Patrick for organising the bloggers get-together in Oxford which was the thing that made me start out on the idea of visiting vegetables gardeners in all parts of the world.

It is going to be wonderful to garden in so many locations and to meet so many lovely people and I only hope I don't fall too far short of your expectations!

Who knows, this may be the start of other such trips by other bloggers and maybe also the first of several for me, the original vegetable vagabond. I would love to begin planning an Australian one - The Vegetable Vagabond Goes Native!

This link will be accessible in the list of Australian sites in the side bar:

Adelaide - Vegetable Vagabond
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A NEW LOOK AT THE POTATO

The other day on Landline I watched a great piece about potato growing in the Andes, in Peru. Here are some people taking full advantage of creative thinking so secure their food supplies into the future. It is a beautiful exposé of a life we rarely see. But also it features work done by the International Potato Centre, in Lima where they are preserving the biodiversity of thousands of potatoes with the idea of using potatoes as the food security crop of the future, for the world's poor, taking the place of wheat and rice and corn.

Please watch the clip by clicking on the video link on this Landline site, and fast forwarding a few seconds to the beginning of the segment on the Andes.

The gist of the whole thing...now how many times have I used that phrase on this blog??...I do like to read stuff and then talk about the gist.....anyway, the gist of it is that while wheat, corn and rice are traded globally potatoes are not. They are generally grown fairly locally and are not a global commodity.Therefore the prices are not affected by global pressures such as rising transport costs, international shortages or massive crop failures due to disasters etc. Moreover, there are still thousands of varieties being grown worldwide and they are a very diverse plant, with just about everywhere being able to grow potatoes of one sort of another.

This Landline segment is an acknowledgement that globalisation is not in the best interests of the poor (or anyone else), as I see it. People need to grow food and be able to supplement this with other locally grown food. Sure, if humanitarian aid is required, they need to receive it but there are so many other, smaller, more beneficial options and the global market just is not the solution. Potatoes provide an opportunity for sidestepping grains as the staple they have become in recent times (another topic for another day soon...) in favour of a nutritious vegetable grown by the people who need it most.

There is another interesting piece here, from the Cusco potato conference which I found on the excellent Bioversity International site.

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Willow house

I've finally got around to posting a story about the willow house.

A WONDERFUL WINTER'S MORNING

							a soft, silver silence
						trees splashed with a sprinkling of sunlight
							a gentle warmth melts away the night

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SEEDSAVERS WEDNESDAY

The question is - how can a group of people spend 3 hours talking about their gardens and what seeds / plants / produce etc they have brought from it to share with the others?









The answer is - when they are the Hills and Plains Seedsavers.We gather in the straw bale house and swap our goodies and eat lots of home-made food and talk, one after the other, about what we brought, what we have been doing in the garden and anything else of relevance.


I didn't take any notes because I didn't want to miss anything while writing, but now wish I had. Everyone...every single person there....had something interesting and often wonderfully entertaining or fascinating to say. We also had 3 new members.....and that reminds me I still have their $5 lifetime membership fees in my pocket.....anyway, they joined in as though we were old friends. Jan is decorating a spare ceramic toilet bowl which she plans to plant with herbs and put in her front garden! Ting, from Taiwan, brought us some delicious stinging nettle rice cakes and will put the recipe on here when I get around to sending her an invitation to post. Judy is digging up her front lawn and planting fruit trees...and so it goes on.



Cath brought a bucket full to the brim with yacon corms plus the purple roots to plant and a gorgeous basket that someone had creatively made suitable for carrying gardening tools; Deb brought a basket of assorted citrusand other things; Kath of the broccoli fame, brought spinach and other seedlings and Mary...now Mary brought something altogether unusual and I will write a separate thing about it but the gist of it is that it is a type of disgusting looking fungus that multiplies when you feed it black tea and sugar.





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You soak a small piece of the fungus in the sweet tea for a week durng which time it grows bigger and bigger and then drink the liquid for unbelievable health benefits, the most potent being its ability to fight cancers as discovered in a Russian village.....I will put the photos of this on a separate post.






Outside in the community garden it is a picture postcard type of place and all the vegetables are looking as good as the broccoli in this photo.

You could not hope to meet a nicer, more enthusiastic bunch of crazy food gardeners anywhere!
There are lots more photos here.



Being crazy food gardeners is good. Meet one soon and catch some of their enthusiasm!

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