The winter time in the Blue Mountains region is a good time to assess what you are growing and to start searching your seed collection for all those oddities you might like to grow into summer that may require a long lead time to get growing. Here are two interesting plants from John one of our long standing members who is now 94 and still going/growing strong. The first is the productive Luffa acutangular aka ‘Angled Luffa’ which grows as a typical squash like vine that is eaten as a young green fruit much like you would a Zucchini. You can also if you want let the fruits nature and then run a cut into the skin, drop them into a bucket of water and ferment them till the flesh rots off the internal structural mesh that then becomes your traditional Luffa. This can cause a challenging organic ‘odor’ when fermenting so it’s good to keep it somewhere with lots of ‘fresh’ air movement. It’s a good plant to get started early inside in mid winter with some protection as a seedling that will then grow furiously when you get it outside into the ground in spring. The other plant we are seeing here is ‘Curly Sue’ or Epiphyllum guatemalense which is an epiphyte and like most epiphyllums have edible fruits. They are quite small but still much like a classic ‘Dragon Fruit’ and don’t take up anywhere the same amount of space – and more importantly – are actually likely to fruit in our changeable climate. These seedlings shown were taken from fruit grown here in the mountains and are likely to have some interesting variation in growth habit and fruit taste when they in turn flower and fruit eventually. Fun can be had doing this kind of experimentation and you never know what the results might be – but it is not a hard thing to do and worth a try.

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It’s that time again!
This is just a quick reminder that the meeting for June 2026 of the Mid Blue Mountains SeedSavers is on at the Bullaburra Progress Hall this weekend.

Sunday 14 June 2026 from 10 am till Midday

Help celebrate the Blue Mountains Winter!

This meeting will be focussed on the practical aspects of seed saving including harvesting, filtering/sieving and cleaning seeds along with packing and storage.

Bring your plant material and seeds from this current season and we will discuss how to process them.

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.