Our suburban food forests : turmeric harvest

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

turmeric harvest

I'm very pleased to have just harvested turmeric. It may be a spice plant of tropical south and southeast Asia, but I have a nice crop here at 35 degrees south.

A member of the ginger family but very distinctive foliage. It has grown well in the chook pen, near the overflow corner of the buried bath they have as a large drinking water supply.

Here is a photo taken last February, through the wire of the hens' run, broad leaves, white flowers. The plant died back completely with the arrival of winter.

Here is a photo of the rhizomes as were when digging them up. Looking rather like Jerusalem artichokes.

and a photo of the rhizomes washed. Now to consider best ways to eat and and store them. Currently drying on outdoor sink bench. Their medicinal value may help with recovery from pleurisy (June-July) and current Golden Staph infection.

And I will have to plant in more locations! Running out of locations!!

1 comment:

Liz ArgallSeptember 6, 2013 at 12:23 PM
Showing your website to American friends with joy :-) love to see all the photos and things.
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Looking forward to your thoughts, write as much as you wish, ask questions. Comments do not appear until moderated. I will try to do that quickly. Thanks for looking and thinking!!

Dennis Argall, the writer here, is a retired ambassador etc who has also been custodian of a small certified organic orchard and who obtained a Permaculture Designer's Certificate in 1993. Now applying skills and happy hopes to discover just how much life can be loaded into a town block.

Dennis's partner Helen Backhouse is a social policy activist and regional manager for a non-clinical mental health services organisation who has a long term passion for planning and growing a garden and getting dirty in it... and whose garden displays art as well as plant life.

Having two gardens means we can enthusiastically support each other's vision and efforts rather than squabble over one. :-)

Dennis began writing the blog in his garden, but Helen's has often been much more interesting!

some guiding thoughts...

These three quotes from an old site of mine:

The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops,
but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.
Masanobu Fukuoka

The richness of our lives depends on our surroundings and what we fill them with.
Jackie French

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology,
but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.
That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long-known, but latterly often forgotten.
Aldo Leopold

And borrowing from Todd's Big Blog of Gardening:

"Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed.

Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is.

We lose our health — and create profitable diseases and dependencies — by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving.

In gardening, for instance, one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus makes eating both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive, and keeps the eater from getting fat and weak.

This is health, wholeness, a source of delight. And such a solution, unlike the typical industrial solution, does not cause problems.

The ‘drudgery’ of growing one’s own food, then, is not drudgery at all. (If we make the growing of food a drudgery, which is what ‘agribusiness’ does make of it, then we also make a drudgery of eating and living.) It is — in addition to being the appropriate fulfillment of a practical need — a sacrament, as eating is also, by which we enact and understand our oneness with the Creation, the conviviality of one body with all bodies.”

Wendell Berry