Sunday, July 09, 2006

Day 70
Ralph and I walked the loop. We passed a stand of olive trees which were alive with currawongs. We went over to have a closer look and found one tree was covered in small, ripe, black olives. Ralph loves olives and seeing the currowongs so enjoying themselves, asssumed the olives would be tasty for him. I told him otherwise but he was already heartily chewing one - he couldn't get the disgusting, bitter thing out of his mouth quickly enough and the flavour took ages to disappear.
There are quite a lot of olive groves around Canberra, owned by hobby farmers looking for easy crops to fill niche markets. In South Australia, where they have been grown for much longer, they have become feral pests. It's a dilemma - we're being encouraged to move away from English garden plants and grow drought hardy species but these can then survive in the wild and may become pests - even Australian plants can become pests out of their source regions. 6 km

5 comments:

Lin said...

SUPER SUPER SKETCHES!!! I love the children and the olive tree story! Congrats on your weight loss!!! All done without chocolate!! Such a tribute to walking!!! BRAVA!!

Julie Oakley said...

I read somewhere there's some incredibly complex process that olives are put through to make them taste edible. Makes you wonder how humans worked out what to do.

Jana Bouc said...

I was just catching up on looking at your blog. It's so neat seeing pictures of such exotic things from the other side of the world! Your drawings are so delightful. I loved the two bird stories.

Penny said...

Well said Alison about feral olives, here now all new olive farms must not be within a few Kilometeres of bushland. We grow a few olives and pickle them have to use caustic soda first to get rid of the bitter taste and then in brine.

Julie Oakley said...

There you go, who on earth thought this fruit tastes foul but if I pickle it in caustic soda first and then in brine, it'll taste delicious