so this is the real survival struggle, the daily grind when not taking flight into gardening in the late afternoon. not too well adapted to this niche, desperate measures, tactics must be employed, desperate kinds of creativity, like that of the peacock, as I try to dazzle, distract and seduce into compliance, the lazy, indifferent, blase, sleepy, tired inner peahen, so tempted to lie down.
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just put two new posts in garden diary, closing circles, about using recycled materials, how fantastic it can look and how you can get these hard landscaping features done really cheaply too. they soon look as if they have been there for centuries, weather in really fast, and then there is planting up, its looking untidy at present but shows you how to outwit a dog ...... hopefully
I'll be posting a picture of my greenhouse in olive exchange..... its really primitive and easy to make thank you for finding this Lizza ! http://myscienceacademy.org/2015/11/14/pedaling-for-a-hour-can-power-your-home-for-twenty-four-hours/ This article in live science very briefly describes the genetic survey of olive oil mitochondrial DNA and claims the first domestication occurred on the border of today's Syria and Turkey, 8000 years ago, and spread to the next hotspots of origin: Gibraltar, near East and Cyprus, and the Aegean.
http://www.livescience.com/26887-olive-tree-origins.html The following article is full of hints at interesting detail about the sacred uses of the olive, but incorrectly claims that the wild olive originates in Turkey, https://www.oliveoilsource.com/page/history-olive It is in fact indigenous to the whole of Africa, the middle east, China, even Reunion Island, (wikipedia The author should have said that the domesticated varieties originate in Turkey. An 'African' olive tree or wild olive Olea africana (a subspecies of Olea europea, or Olea sylvestris) in your garden will insure a good crop of your olive cultivar by allowing cross pollination. It does not need more than one tree to bear, being self fertilizing, but bears more fully... see more information on the sexual reproduction of olives below. They belong to the same family as Jasmine and Lilac, perhaps why I smelt such a wonderful smell coming out of the olive twig bouquet, a very 'un olivy' bouquet according to my preconceived notions this article states that the olive flower is perfumed, but that is all, strange given the exquisiteness of its perfume. flowers are either bisexual or male. https://www.crfg.org/pubs/ff/olive.html The following is I think based on a misunderstanding of male and bisexual flowers in olives like that in the description above. Recalling distant biology classes, the way plant sexuality is described... I'd moot that fruits are formed from female parts of the flower, There isn't such a thing as a 'male' fruit, anymore than there is a 'male' womb..... but in the Mediterranean where male pregnancy and parthenogenesis is modelled in the divine... the lowly olive may go along for the metaphorical ride http://www.italiannotebook.com/food-wine/secret-life-olive-trees/ http://www.efncp.org/download/OlivefarminginFrance.pdf
information on why there are so few olive orchards in France, relative to its neighbours, and on the arboretum for olive diversity ! and using olives to recreate natural riverine vegetation... this is so like the ideas local Olivistas are having for the Liesbeek and Elsieskraal riverbanks.... indigenous and harvestable vegetation ! job creation and conservation .... there is a new blog just for olive growing called the olive exchange on this website
http://www.collective-evolution.com/2013/06/05/european-commission-to-criminalize-seeds-and-plants-not-registered-with-the-government/
My friend and erstwhile employee from Germany who is a gardening products distributor and retailer has confirmed that the EU attempted to impose new very restrictive legislation on propagating from cuttings and from seed and from selling either of these, and that Monsanto was behind it all. I recently received a petition objecting to the draft regulations and shared it. If anyone has more information about why its doing the rounds now... let me know.
I repost it below https://secure.avaaz.org/en/petition/We_dont_accept_this_Let_us_keep_our_seeds_EU/?sZWMOab I've moved the pruning pictures to the top of the olive page, one had to scroll down too far, I think my computer isn't up to video editing just yet, for the video on pruning, its having trouble just downloading emails and editing is so heavy on memory. Also doesn't really say more than the pictures, except that you can see the cuttings falling on the ground and bouncing nicely ! ......so I'll leave the video for now and try and document the process of making cuttings with pictures. The first will follow, the cuttings from the pruning collected in a bucket, from which the magnolia fragrance emanates. I've already learned something, that perhaps leaving them in water for too long causes the leaf drop that my cuttings, but not Diane's are plagued by.
The oil painting is by my sister. Its a kind of dream scene of a post apocalyptic type of tent tent emitting soft yellow light in the half dark of a polar night, anyway that is the picture I see, but the brushwork is so free that it could be something else . Both Diane and Lizza are eco activist gardener artists. |
Authordraftswoman, recent student of Linguistics, Jill of all trades, planner of green new world.. Archives
October 2017
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