Question
I love the smell of Stinking Roger, but my neighbour says it’s a weed to get rid of. Please do tell me what use I can make of it.
Kelly, Facebook
Tag Archives: Cook
Green Potatoes: Are They Dangerous?
Question
“My question is about eating potatoes that have gone green.
I have cautioned at least 3 times over the past 18 months my local supermarkets who mark down the bags of green potatoes to sell. I am fearful the very people who would go for such a bargain are the poor & uneducated who do not realise the harm these could do to an unborn baby.
I checked out my concerns via the CSIRO site & they seem to back up what I say. But even so everyone else thinks I’m crazy. I won’t buy green potatoes myself; my concern is for other who unwittingly does so not knowing they can be harmful.
Am I right to go on complaining at the point of sale?”
Christine
Adelaide, South Australia
Windfall Kaffir Lime Marmalade
The hardest part of making jam is waiting for it to cool, fending off beasts so you can try some out yourself…
Today the fun has been making good use of the kaffir lime windfall, fruit that dropped in the cold snap (9C last night). This also gave me an opportunity to justify warming the kitchen and to try my first pickings of Australian sweet lime. More mild than genuinely sweet, I thought they’d make a pleasant contrast with richly-flavoured kaffir lime.
Small, Sweet Cucumbers – Almost Without Effort
I enjoy trialling new crops, and this season one of the most outstanding plants at ‘Bellis’ has been the West Indian gherkin, Cucumis anguria.
This trial had a shaky start, with only one seed germinating from the packet I bought from Eden seeds. I gave it well composted, freely draining soil in a raised bed in a sunny position. Sown on 24th October, I planted my seedling in December.
In Production Today – February 2012
One regular question I get asked by subtropical gardeners is what to grow during summer. Summer is when I grow the smallest range of crops. It’s not because you have to regularly control grasshoppers and caterpillars, I just stick with ones that fare well if we get baked…or flooded.
Jute (Egyptian spinach) Corchorus olitorius
Jute (aka Egyptian spinach, left) provides juicy leaves and tender shoot tips in summer. To germinate the seed of this tropical annual, sow in summer and keep the seed saturated. I kept my seed tray standing in water. Seed germinated in 28 days. Plants require constant moisture to thrive. In Bangladesh jute grows in swampy conditions, just like rice.
This January the weather had two weeks of both conditions. In the first fortnight everything got singed, and it reached an unusual 37C on 10.1.12. The following fortnight we received twice the 50 year average fall for January. The wettest day since I moved here in 2003 was on 24.1.12 when the garden received 157mm.
Growing And Cooking Plantains (and other green bananas)
Cooked plantains are an important alternative to rice in Afro-Caribbean cuisine.
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