Our resident blue tongue lizard, Barry, has returned.  Barry lives somewhere behind our back fence.  He likes to hunt in the vegetable patch and sun himself by the clothes line. This is fine by me because he keep snails, slugs and caterpillars to a minimum plus he’s good company.

He often likes to stick his tongue out at me, so I just stick mine out right back at him. Although, my pink, pointy tongue is nothing on his fabulous blue one. Barry’s tongue poking is probably more to do with him feeling threatened, rather than just wanting to be rude. (more…)

It’s raining here in Sydney, which makes a wonderful break from the intense heat we’ve had recently.

There’s nothing I love more than gardening in a light summer rain. The garden comes alive with dripping lushness and the soil smells sweet and earthy.

Today, I planted some of the native spinach I found last week into one of my vege patches. It’s in a spot I don’t really use much so I am hoping it will spread out quite a lot. This is an experimental patch to see how the spinach grows.

My son helped plant it, so we’ve called it Liam’s spinach patch. It was lovely watching him fuss over it, and then spend the rest of his time trying to catch rain drops on his tongue.

Today, when I was taking my son to his swimming lesson, I spotted some native spinach (Warrigal Greens) growing next to the pool’s car park.

A month back I wrote about finding native spinach at Smiths Lakes and I was annoyed with myself for not taking a clipping to plant back in my garden. Ever since, I have been on the lookout for native spinach in Sydney.

It was by sheer accident while I was getting the pram out of the boot that I saw the little green plants growing by my feet. They looked a lot healthier than the specimens at Smiths Lake, no doubt due to better soil and some shade.

I pulled up a few plants and transplanted them into pots back home. I have great plans for these little beauties. I want to use them to create an edible ground cover over some of the less productive sections of my garden.

I must admit spotting native edibles is quite exciting and something I could get addicted to. Anyone know of any other good edible natives that people can find growing wild in their local areas?