Aussie Bush Tucker - An Introduction to Common Native Foods of Australia

Mandy Onderwater said:
It looks pretty good! But I'm guessing you need high quantities to really bring out their flavour during cooking?
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Definitely. I used probably 30-40 berries in that one. Good colour, no flavour! As I said in my update, crushing the berries before cooking also might have improved both.
 
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I made the following adjustments to the articles today:

Article 2 - Lilly Pilly (added figure 13 - a cut fruit! Finally!)

Article 4 - Blueberry Lily (Added photographs, some sourced from ATLAS, of more species; remade my Dianella souffle with an additional process and superior result; will add a recipe)

Future updates will include some current experimentation with wattleseed (Acacia), which is in peak harvest season right now. I've harvested seed from a few unidentified varieties in my local area and I'm currently personally undertaking edibility testing. So far so good! I may need to expand the wattleseed material to include a separate article dedicated solely to the identification of edible and inedible species of this common native plant. It is a slow process to 1. locate plants; 2. wait for seed harvest; 3. harvest; 4. sift; 5. roast; 6. taste; 7. survive (or be prepared to take a day or two off sick, so that limits my experiment periods to weekends or public holiday periods).
 
I should have done this from the beginning (a shame on me since I am no slouch academic and knew better) but I'm making a decided effort to overhaul my articles with improved referencing (inspiration from my Edible Weed series, really). This includes removing (or updating) cited photography that is currently unreferenced, as well as making improvements to the text of each article to cite where I acquired information from, and adding a Further Reading section to each individual article. I may ignore information that I know to be true from personal experience, e.g. Tim Low says that geebungs (Persoonia) taste like sweet cotton wool; this is certainly a correct depiction of that fruit's texture and flavour from my own personal experience. Any item I have not yet tasted but I cite in my articles I shall endeavour to reference.

I am also planning to bifurcate the "Uses" section into Culinary Uses and Medicinal Uses, for those plants that have such an explicit bifurcation.

I have already overhauled the series Introduction (except adding reference works for medicinal applications - I ran out of time today!)
 
Updates for today.

Article 2 - Lilly Pilly (replaced photo of cut fruit with a better one; replaced photos of magenta lilly pilly flowers and psyllid damage with my own)
Article 4 - Blueberry Lily (added new photos of some large berries and the plant's roots)
Article 8 - Acacia/Wattle (added photos of various wattleseeds I harvested recently and a bowl of pumpkin & wattleseed soup!)
Article 11 - Geebung (added/replaced some photos of geebung flowers with my own)
Article 13 - Native Sarsparilla (updated text; replaced some photos of Smilax australis; added more photos of S. glyciphylla; updated/added photos of look-alikes Hardenbergia and the introduced pest/weed lookalike, bridal creeper, Asparagus asparagoides)
Article 15 - Native Grapes (added a photo of Cissus hypoglauca spring growth)

I'm now ready to move on with some new articles. What will it be first?

Saw Sedge
Grasstrees
Devil's Twines
Sea Almonds
Scurvy Weed
Native Heaths
Native Mistletoes
Kangaroo Apples
 
I heard that we aren't allowed to harvest grass trees from nature around here. I'd be interested in reading about them though.
And I think kangaroo apples look pretty cool :D
 
Mandy Onderwater said:
I heard that we aren't allowed to harvest grass trees from nature around here. :D
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Correct, you're not allowed to harvest the whole trees. Individual leaves, pollen & seeds, on the other hand...
 
I need to announce that I have now collated all of these bush food articles on my new Bush Food Forager Substack page, partially for redundancy purposes (text backups) and partially as I engage the genuine prospect of turning my new-found bush food skills into a community service with, full disclosure, for-profit bush food tours. I think I am still at least a year away from daring to charge anyone for the experience of a personally guided tour.

Important! Despite my decision to take this step, my bush food and edible herb/weed articles will continue to appear on Mark's SSM forum for the benefit of this growing community. They will continue to be free to anyone who wants to read them, both here and on my Substack. The content on both sites will be identical (fortunately I can literally copy-paste the content from SSM straight into Substack already formatted with photos and all), so there is no need for anyone here on this forum to subscribe over there on my substack. Of course, I do invite everyone who is interested to subscribe to Bush Food Forager and help me increase my reader base from its current zero. Paid subscriptions on my Substack are currently disabled. If or when I do enable it, I am thinking of granting free guided Bush Food Tours to paid subscribers as a way of saying thank you for contributing to my ongoing work and helping me become less reliant on my civvie job.

In the meantime, I am completely bogged down with our chronic staff shortage at work to spend as much time as I would like compiling new articles and overhauling the academic quality and integrity of my previous ones. I am hoping to get at least one new article completed before the end of January (Kangaroo Apples).

Cheers,
JP
 
That's amazing @JP 1983 and I wish it the best of luck. Though we would be appreciative if you keep uploading here too, if you want :D

And with the bush tours, if you want a larger amount of people to be able to pop in, I'd recommend doing foraging livestreams as well. That way people can ask questions real-time and you can show them how to recognise one plant from another.
 
Mandy Onderwater said:
Though we would be appreciative if you keep uploading here too, if you want :D
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I think you missed this part:

Despite my decision to take this step, my bush food and edible herb/weed articles will continue to appear on Mark's SSM forum for the benefit of this growing community.

And great idea about the possibility of doing livestreams. I'm at a stage where I am moving away from Youtube, however, due to their unrepentant enabling of various wicked crimes involving the monetised exploitation of human beings. That does not leave many other avenues for livestreaming other than one of the computer game ones (like TwitchTV).
 
I must indeed have missed it. My apologies. I'm happy to hear that though!
Yes, YouTube does have their downside I won't deny. Maybe Twitch could be a better option for you? I'm just not too familiar with Twitch streams and their accessability, but it's a very popular platform. (And just as I've finished typing this I see you already meantioned it - I'm having a great day, haha. Maybe because I need to get my glasses from the car and I've been too lazy to fetch them. Lesson learned, hah.)

I myself would most likely be interested too. I've already been greatly enjoying how informative your articles have been, I can only imagine how much more you might be able to do live.
 
What's in the works for Aussie Bush Tucker?

Well, I'm currently making my way through articles 2-23 and giving them all the promised academic revamp. Lilly pilly is almost done and the others will follow in due course. I am hoping to complete these updates by the end of March so I can move on to new material.

I have holidays coming up at the end of Feb into early March and I am very much looking forward to undertaking two field trips. One will be to Perth, WA (6 days), and the other to Eden & surrounds, NSW (4 days). Hopefully these experiences will add plenty more material, new and old.

I have a few extra articles planned for my edible herbs & weeds series as well.

Cheers,
JP
 
I found this article today while trying to find out if Rosella can be perennial...
I would love to have one of those giant varieties!
Aussie Bush Tucker - An Introduction to Common Native Foods of Australia


tropicalhousegarden.com

Rosella: A Wonderful 'Bush Tucker' Plant - Tropical House & Garden

Rosella fruit from the rosella plant (aka roselle) makes a wonderful jam but now there's a new variety that's larger and requires less sugar.
tropicalhousegarden.com tropicalhousegarden.com
 
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