Brother G's Garden

No I am not the only green thumb in the family - in fact my brother is blowing me out of the water! His latest email proves this :-) And yes he can cook too :-)

Hi the vegy garden is all planted and things are starting to grow, very exciting.

The list goes

Arugula; Beetroot, chioggia; Cabbage Mini; Capsicum seven colour mix; Capsicum mini sweet; Capsicum mixed Italian fryers;Carrots Baby; Carrots Western Red; Celery Stringless; Chilly hellfire mix; Cucumber Lebanese mini muncher; Eggplant Listada di granda; Eggplant Black Beauty;Lettuce Flame;Lettuce Mesclun mix; Lettuce Rouge d hiver; Lettuce provencal mesclun mix; Onion Creamgold; Onion Red; Spring onion red; Parsnip; Pak choy; Pea Purple podded dutch; Pea golden podded;Radish French Breakfast; Tatsoi; Tomato Hungarian Heart;Tomato Amish Paste; Tomato Cherry Roma;Tomato Siberian; Tomato Sugar Lump;Zucchini Black Beauty; Basil Sweet; Basil ornamental;Basil Lettuce leaf; Fennel Florence; Bean Blue lake; Bean Flageolet flangaro; Bean Sex without strings;Bean scarlet runner; Sweet corn baby- popping; Sweet corn honey and cream; Pea dwarf snow;Kale; Asparagus;Rhubarb; Pepinos; Cape gooseberry; English spinach;Brown onions; White onions; Artichokes; Broccoli; Parsley flat and curly;Kol rabispan;Lettuce oak leaf; Lettuce cos; Mizunaspan; Chinese cabbage;Potatoes ruby;Potatoes Nadine (from sprouted bought ones);Water melon sugar baby;Pumpkin japspan.

I also have in some green manure crop that is budgie mix at the moment I think that is mainly white millet, and jap millet that are up but there is linseed plain canary and a bit of panicum in it so time will tell what comes out of it.

On that soil and health web site I forwarded to you look for a book called soil fertility naturally is by a guy called Masanobu Fukuoka its 227 pages long heavy reading but what an eye opener. It made me question a lot of what I always felt to true and made me realize just how far we have gotten away from nature. If you have time have a look as there are some great little lines in there like, When the farmer forgets the land to which he owes his existence and becomes concerned only with his own self-interest, when the consumer is no longer able to distinguish between food as the staff of life and food as merely nutrition, when the administrator looks down his nose at farmers and the industrialist scoffs at nature, then the land will answer with its death. Nature is not so kind as to forewarn a humanity so foolish as this.

I realize we have no control over nature, we cannot create nature all we do is pull it apart to analyze some thing that we can never put back together again. He gave the example of a mirror which we break to see what it is made of. We still have all the parts but when we try to put it back together again it will never work like the original.

Have a read if you have time