Paul FenwickHey #Narrm #Melbourne folks. It's autumn, and a lot of yucca is starting to bloom.
What you might not know is that the flowers are edible, and honestly pretty good. You can eat them raw, but they are *much* better cooked.
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SeverinToday we found 4 nerf darts, one of which had seen some car tires and went into the proper trash, but we got 3 working ones.
I don't feel like calling this #urbanmining because that seems like an active thing which this is clearly not. #urbanforaging would feel right but seems to be focused on food only. Is there a decent term for it?
I might be a bit too tired to do a full write-up, but there's a tonne of basket grass (Lomandra longifolia) in seed right now.
I collected a number of seedpods, threshed and winnowed them, soaked and boiled the seeds, and added them to porridge. They were very inoffensive, and could be eaten on their own, but needed lots of boiling to soften.
Apparently they can also be milled and made into bush bread, but I don't have good milling tools, so porridge it was.
This is a plant you see everywhere in urban Australia, as it's a very hardy and low-maintenance native. It's also widespread in the bush.
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Mike McCaffreyDo not trust #ChatGPT and #LLMs with identifying plants. They can double down on declaring something non-poisonous even when completely wrong.
@RawBeautyKristi on YouTube on Instagram: "SHARE EVERYWHERE. Chat GPT NEARLY k*lled my best friend by telling her that POISON HEMLOCK was CARROT. It not only said it was POSITIVE it doubled down over and over CONFIRMING with ABSOLUTE certainty that it was in fact NOT poison hemlock - that it was IN FACT wild carrot. - spoiler - it’s poison hemlock. Which there is NO antidote for and is EXTREMELY deadly. This is why AI is so dangerous. Spread this far and wide so you can let people know that it will lie. It will deceive and it will SEEM confident in that incorrect information and deception. BE CAREFUL OUT THERE."
61K likes, 1,522 comments - rawbeautykristi on January 21, 2026: "SHARE EVERYWHERE. Chat GPT NEARLY k*lled my best friend by telling her that POISON HEMLOCK was CARROT. It not only said it was POSITIVE it doubled down over and over CONFIRMING with ABSOLUTE certainty that it was in fact NOT poison hemlock - that it was IN FACT wild carrot. - spoiler - it’s poison hemlock. Which there is NO antidote for and is EXTREMELY deadly. This is why AI is so dangerous. Spread this far and wide so you can let people know that it will lie. It will deceive and it will SEEM confident in that incorrect information and deception. BE CAREFUL OUT THERE.".
Mike McCaffrey 
Found a bush with beautiful lavender berries, which is apparently a #BeautyBerry. Unfortunately, I can't tell which type it is, which is sad because the American Beautyberries can be made into jam, while the Chinese ones cannot.
Janine couldn't find bay leaves at the store, but luckily I know there is a #BayLaurel tree growing in the baseball backstop of the school across the street.
POISON or SNACK? Winter Fruit Edition! ✨❤️🩹
A tiny bit of flour and into the pan, and the result is actually edible!
It's nutty with fresh notes of sand, and the slightest hint of figs. It definitely feels like something you'd only eat when there's not much else available, but it's much better than I was expecting. Even Mr 8 had a piece and came back for seconds.
So Moreton Bay fig seed meal as a component in bush bread is definitely a possibility, albeit a high effort and gritty one!
FIN/🧵
Yeah, this has way too much water in it, and it's just dissolving in the oil.
The result tastes good, though! I wasn't expecting that. It's nutty and crunchy.
So not good as the sole ingredient in a bush bread, but certainly has it's place in a mix.
Next step is to add a little flour as a binder, to see what that's like.
And after some hand milling it looks even less palatable now. I think I'm going to discover why nobody does this.
As usual for anything involving seeds, I have a bird supervising me.
