Photo – Barley – Hordeum vulgare. Barley is a useful and attractive grass cereal that will grow in a range of conditions and  if you are lucky you can get two crops a year from – one in late winter and one in late summer. It’s a lot of fun to see how these old food crops grow and thrive in our Mountains environment and you only need a small patch to get enough for at least a few hundred grams of seed to throw into your soups or cook like rice and eat as a warm salad with mixture of tasty greens. They mainly need to be left alone… so it’s not a challenging plant to grow. Some people put them in large containers like an old bath that is ideal for keeping the water levels up and consequently getting nice large seed heads forming. There are several attractive forms available including 2 row and 6 row (that’s the lines of seeds in the seedheads) varieties that represent genetic changes over thousands of years of cultivation – the one in the photo is a 6 row variety. if you want an interesting and attractive Australian edible alternative it’s worth looking at growing some perennial Kangaroo Grass – Themeda triandra which has a small seeded on a long graceful flower stem or the perennial large sedge Gahnia Grandis which has many beautiful lurid orange/red seeds on a very tall black stem. These grasses all grow well in what we would call ‘marginal’ soils and just simply grow and crop better when we look after them.

It’s that time again!
This is just a quick reminder that the next scheduled meeting for the year of the Mid Blue Mountains SeedSavers is on at the Bullaburra Progress Hall this next coming weekend.

Sunday 27 October 2019 from 10 am till Midday

Help celebrate the Blue Mountains SPRING!
Come along and talk about growing things with like minded people.
Hope to see you there celebrating the current productive growing season!

The address for the Mid Blue Mountains Seedsavers website is:
https://midbluemountainsseedsavers.org/

We do now have a Facebook page as well:
https://www.facebook.com/Mid-Blue-Mountains-Seed-Savers-1629533990602860/

These regular notifications are sent out directly from the website if you subscribe to that email notification list.