Have you tried the tree “Moringa Oleifera”?

It has edible tuberous roots fern-like leaves, and seed pods resembling musician drumsticks. It is fast growing and possibly the most nutritious of all leaf crops, the leaves are 7% protein and have extremely high levels of folates, vitamin C, carotenes, calcium, iron, and niacin. The seeds yield an edible and high quality oil. Very tolerate of drought, for info on this tree see:

http://www.treesforlife.org/our-work/our-initiatives/moringa/moringa-book/moringa-book

I have just picked wild Loquats for the first time, this year we picked over 30 Kilos and processed into amazing Chutney and fermented the rest for distilling into a fruit schnapps (Its legal to distill where I live ; ) They have to be the best wild crafted fruit available in the spring when no other fruit are available.
I have planted over 60 seeds and had good germination which will be planted into my hedging systems and Food Forest. ( I may graft known cultivars onto the seed root stock or I may just take a punt with the wild genetics and see what mother nature brings forth.

Go Jack, you are right on the money with all your podcasts, Good luck at Permaculture Voices, I hope you have a blast
Cheers

@Jon (McBrayn) – Thanks for posting the links to those shows on the Wiki! I started watching the Tudor Monastery Farm series last week, but I didn’t realize how many other series there were as well. Nice have a place to jump to all of them from one spot. I’m thinking that the WWII farming series will be really interesting as it’s much more like what many of us are dealing with–reclaiming land that isn’t being used for farming and making use of urban spaces.

Found this YouTube channel that has 12 of the Victorian Kitchen Garden episodes. I don’t know if that’s all of them or not, but its enough to keep me busy for a while.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhizWGaYArfR88UNe6EcC1WwLjN_oWHpL

Does anybody have the link to the Mushroom site that Jack had purchased the oyster and king strophoria mushrooms from. I listened to the audio a couple times and couldnt find the section he talks about putting the sawdust spawn into a jar and keep adding coffee and more spawn until it sprouts a mushroom. He mentioned the source, but I keep missing it or cant find it, thanks.

Jack,
did you just basically say that I can graft scion wood from my cornelian cherry onto my dogwood tree? I’m trying it…

Jack,

RE: the “Manor House” as found in pre-WWII England ….

The very best fictional film I have ever seen which ACCURATELY depicts what life in such a manor house was truly like is the Oscar-winning movie “Gosford Park,” written by Julian Fellowes. The title of the film is the name of the country manor house where the story takes place. As for the time frame of the tale, it happens during a 3-day weekend back in the summer of the very early 1930’s (either 1931 or 1932).

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0280707/

Screenwriter Julian Fellowes won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for that movie script. He was already a respected writer prior to “Gosford Park.” But after he won that Oscar he became a very hot commodity.

On a very personal note, I bought a paperback edition of the screenplay for “Gosford Park” from B&N back in 2001, and then spent several weeks watching the film at home on DVD again and again while reading along with the script each time I watched –it’s THAT well written. And I also indulged myself in a repeat-viewing of the “Screenwriter’s Commentary” version of the film on the DVD (Don’t bother with the “Director’s Commentary.” Robert Altman isn’t that interesting to listen to, but Fellowes is an amazing voice-over speaker during his screenwriter’s commentary.) He’s just a drop-dead spectacular writer. And he was hand-picked by the late great film director Robert Altman (the director of this great movie) to write this particular script because Fellowes grew up in England with a unique insider’s knowledge of life in those manor houses. Fellowes himself was not a member of the noble class, nor did he live in a true manor house, but his parents had money and so they were known in English society as being members of a class called “untitled gentry,” what we Americans would call “upper-upper middle class” or “very high-net worth middle class.” And even though the Fellowes family held no titles of nobility, they did have many aunts and uncles and cousins who did hold various titles of English nobility (dukes and counts and lords and earls, etc), so Fellowes and his parents were often weekend guests at such manor houses. And so all through his childhood and teen years, growing up as first cousins with nobility, he saw first hand how those houses operated and what the servants did and what each servant’s role was, etc. But still, Julian Fellowes was very sharply trained by his parents from very early on not to be a snob or to be in any way cruel to the servants. And his parents would often quietly share with the young Julian their own discreet disapproval of the ill-treatment they sometimes witnessed inflicted on the servants by not just the lords of those manor houses, but even by other house guests (house guests who were often blood relations with the Felloweses). Fellowes fully admits that several of the fictional noblemen and noblewomen he writes about are in fact based upon his real aunts and uncles and cousins with whom he socialized at those manor houses, and he depicts them in all their glorious snobbery.

He writes scripts from the point of view of the various beleaguered servants of such houses, showing their crappy working conditions, the lousy servants’ quarters, and the uncalled-for measures of belittlement and abuse the servants suffer at the hands of their employers (rich assholes, as you called them in today’s podcast) as well as their employers’ house guests (even more rich assholes, most of the time). But Fellowes doesn’t paint the servants as persecuted saints with glowing haloes over their heads either. The servants also get shown in all their true colors as being abusive toward each other too, even stealing from their employers at times. We see the nasty food chain/pecking order in the manor houses, getting a glimpse into who is top dog and who is low-man on the totem pole.

His scripts are deemed the most accurate in Hollywood as far as showing precisely how daily life was conducted in such manor houses.

Fellowes is now the creator and executive producer of an ongoing BBC TV series called “Downton Abbey,” also about a manor house, and the title of the TV series is once again the name of the manor house. “Downton Abbey” is regularly broadcast on American public television right now. Superb cast. (I adore the actress Maggie Smith –she always plays a British snob with utter perfection.)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1606375/?ref_=nm_knf_t1

So … I highly recommend anyone who wants to learn more about those manor houses should certainly go for non-fiction stuff like the “Victorian Kitchen Garden” series you mentioned in this podcast. But anyone seeking a fictional portrayal would do very well to watch the movie “Gosford Park” and the TV series “Downton Abbey.” I am not in any way trying to say that watching a fiction is better than watching a documentary. I am instead trying to say that far too many Hollywood films have utterly inaccurate and uninformed portrayals of English manor house servants, but “Gosford Park” is the rare exception where we can see an excellent portrayal, very well-researched and thoroughly trustworthy.