Saturday, May 31, 2008

garlic and mizuna


I bought some mizuna seed last year because the catalogue said mizuna grows in winter and it is green. So it ticked my winter gardening-healthy eating boxes. The fact that I'd never knowingly eaten or seen it was inconsequential.

The mizuna I have grown looks pretty, as seen in my raised punga bed above, though it has been eaten or diseased by something I haven't yet identified. But it isn't very tasty. And for a nearly tasteless green plant, it uses up too much space in my garden.

So this afternoon I cut it all off to go into tonight's chickpea and kumara curry and then pulled the roots up. Maybe I have too much for one curry, but there will be a green opportunity tomorrow night I'm sure.

In place of the mizuna, I planted the garlic cloves which I received from Koanga Gardens earlier this month. I planted Takahue and Kakanui. I notice that some of the cloves (from my own stock from last season's crop and from some organic garlic grown in Karamea which I bought) which I planted about three weeks ago have sprouts showing. All good.

I'm still thinking about food issues. I'm not entirely convinced by the locum doctor we saw. He might be partly right about the problem, but I'm less convinced by his proposed solution. The food part is okay, just not sure about the prescription.

Maybe I need to look again at growing our own mushrooms. They don't need sunlight do they? I might have a spot which would work...

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