Nature update
Jul. 19th, 2024 07:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anna_wing- The dragonfruit plants are fruiting again! Two from one of mine, and so far, four from the one in the office garden.
- The spirit-occupied mango-tree also produced some very good fruit this year. It needs pruning, so I was asked by the staff to explain things and ask them not to take offence at the gardeners, which I duly did before witnesses. So no problems are expected.
- A friend with interesting multi-stem papaya plants in his garden sent me some of the fruit. It's not bad, so we'll try growing the seed. Papayas are fussy, conventional wisdom is that the bird-sown ones that grow by themselves in random parts of the garden are always the strongest.
- I've also got seed for a nice double Clitoria ternatea in a lovely royal blue from my family's garden, which are now with the gardeners. There's a fashion for using them in tisanes, which I find vaguely amusing because they have no taste whatsoever. I grew up only knowing of them as a food dye. But if you put them in hot water to extract the colour, and add lemon or lime juice, the beautiful blue colour turns into a very pretty purple. So colour-changing lemonade is now popular in restaurants.
- My yellow Marvel of Peru/Four O'Clock Flowers (Mirabilis jalapa are blooming very well, and they have a lovely scent (moth-pollinated). I love them, they're so good about seeding and so easy to grow.
I have been very annoyingly ill off and on since April. Shingles, COVID, a really nasty cough that has lasted months (charmingly referred to by my GP as "Oh yes, the 100-day cough, it's going around"). The sole vaguely positive thing about this is that I have lost 2.5 of the 5 kilos that I need to lose to get to the middle of the lowest-risk BMI category, and through nothing more than being not very hungry. I might as well have been on a GLP-1 agonist for free. I have high hopes that maintenance will be easy, because if I can get to my target weight with just the current effortless adjustment to my daily calorie intake, it should stay effortless once I can get back to my regular exercise schedule.
I still have work-related meals, far too many this week, so next week meals at home are going to be chicken sandwiches or oden. I have now found a source of decent tofu, yay. Our version of oden is made with a couple of dried shiitake mushrooms, since I don't like bonito flakes, or occasionally chicken soup, and chunks of carrot, white radish, tofu, cabbage and the mushrooms, since I dislike konjac. It's particularly nice now, in the rainy season. I'll get Housekeeper to try cabbage rolls next.
Housekeeper saved a baby sparrow which fell out of the next and couldn't fly because it had some sort of fungus growing over one eye. She made a little nest for it, and its mother kept feeding it. eventually Housekeeper just picked it up and very carefully wiped the whatever away, and it flew off! So that was good.
The best part of rainy season is that both the nights and the days are cool, and the cats spend the evenings sharing a mat in a cat heap.
- The spirit-occupied mango-tree also produced some very good fruit this year. It needs pruning, so I was asked by the staff to explain things and ask them not to take offence at the gardeners, which I duly did before witnesses. So no problems are expected.
- A friend with interesting multi-stem papaya plants in his garden sent me some of the fruit. It's not bad, so we'll try growing the seed. Papayas are fussy, conventional wisdom is that the bird-sown ones that grow by themselves in random parts of the garden are always the strongest.
- I've also got seed for a nice double Clitoria ternatea in a lovely royal blue from my family's garden, which are now with the gardeners. There's a fashion for using them in tisanes, which I find vaguely amusing because they have no taste whatsoever. I grew up only knowing of them as a food dye. But if you put them in hot water to extract the colour, and add lemon or lime juice, the beautiful blue colour turns into a very pretty purple. So colour-changing lemonade is now popular in restaurants.
- My yellow Marvel of Peru/Four O'Clock Flowers (Mirabilis jalapa are blooming very well, and they have a lovely scent (moth-pollinated). I love them, they're so good about seeding and so easy to grow.
I have been very annoyingly ill off and on since April. Shingles, COVID, a really nasty cough that has lasted months (charmingly referred to by my GP as "Oh yes, the 100-day cough, it's going around"). The sole vaguely positive thing about this is that I have lost 2.5 of the 5 kilos that I need to lose to get to the middle of the lowest-risk BMI category, and through nothing more than being not very hungry. I might as well have been on a GLP-1 agonist for free. I have high hopes that maintenance will be easy, because if I can get to my target weight with just the current effortless adjustment to my daily calorie intake, it should stay effortless once I can get back to my regular exercise schedule.
I still have work-related meals, far too many this week, so next week meals at home are going to be chicken sandwiches or oden. I have now found a source of decent tofu, yay. Our version of oden is made with a couple of dried shiitake mushrooms, since I don't like bonito flakes, or occasionally chicken soup, and chunks of carrot, white radish, tofu, cabbage and the mushrooms, since I dislike konjac. It's particularly nice now, in the rainy season. I'll get Housekeeper to try cabbage rolls next.
Housekeeper saved a baby sparrow which fell out of the next and couldn't fly because it had some sort of fungus growing over one eye. She made a little nest for it, and its mother kept feeding it. eventually Housekeeper just picked it up and very carefully wiped the whatever away, and it flew off! So that was good.
The best part of rainy season is that both the nights and the days are cool, and the cats spend the evenings sharing a mat in a cat heap.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-19 01:46 pm (UTC)Sorry to hear about the multiple illnesses, though!
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Date: 2024-07-20 05:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-20 11:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-21 03:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-19 03:39 pm (UTC)Yay Housekeeper, savior if birds.
I think I once had a cocktail with thr colour changing ingrediant. I remember the lovely purple it turned.
So sorry about your string of health problems. The 100 day cough is not a stranger to this continent either and lord but it's draining. Hope you can shake it soon.
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Date: 2024-07-20 05:23 am (UTC)I googled, and yes, it appears that Clitoria ternatea is in most of them. Apparently you can get it in powdered form too (the mind boggles...). And of course its utter lack of flavour is a benefit in most cases. It's just a natural food dye.
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Date: 2024-07-19 04:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-20 05:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-19 09:06 pm (UTC)*hugs* for all of the health problems, which especially in a cavalcade like that are no fun. I love all of the gardening and bird and cat news and would definitely drink color-changing lemonade.
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Date: 2024-07-20 05:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-20 03:29 pm (UTC)I had that 100-day cough! I didn't think it was going to ever leave. I hope you're feeling MUCH better after such a challenging time this year.
I had to Google 'Clitoria ternatea'. They're really lovely. Thank you for the fruit/flowers/birds update.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-21 03:12 pm (UTC)When they were small, they had kitten-heaps, in my air-conditioned bedroom. They would start by tucking themselves into various bits of my anatomy for a while, and then would gradually migrate together to the clear space next to the pillows. Once kitten-heap was achieved, everyone could (finally) go to sleep...
Clitoria is gorgeous, and incredibly easy to grow. Very short-lived, but they self-seed so prolifically that you're never going to run out. Pretty good as nitrogen-fixers too. There are white and pale-blue cultivars, and a rare lilac form, which I've seen, but it wasn't seeding, so I never got a specimen. But of course if you want them for their traditional food-dye purpose, you need the original deep blue, the deeper the better. I don't normally like double forms of flowers that are properly single, but the double Clitoria of all colours is truly lovely.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/plant-science/articles/10.3389/fpls.2019.00645/full
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Date: 2024-07-21 05:59 pm (UTC)