I found out there's free food in my backyard. The wild onions (crow garlic? Onion grass?) are way bigger in my backyard than the ones in my side yard.
The first time I tried them was in some homemade chimichangas. They're potent and a little goes a long way, but it tasted good. These went into a hodgepodge ramen for lunch.
ready to invite alcohol back into my life in a ritualistic way so me and a friend are gonna make dandelion wine and drink it on the spring equinox next year
Apparently, the most populous weed in my backyard this year is a brassica?! I don't even remember seeing these previous years and now they are everywhere, and they have a delicious mild mustard taste.
Hey #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.
Today 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.
Extra information in the alt text.
Do not trust #ChatGPT and #LLMs with identifying plants. They can double down on declaring something non-poisonous even when completely wrong.
268K likes, 5,389 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 - itโs 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.".
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.
Mike McCaffrey 
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Mike McCaffrey