Recent bed photo's

Here are some photo's of the veggie bed taken last weekend. It is amazing how much growth you can get in just one month. And if anybody can tell me how to keep black birds out of my beds please let me know. They are infuriating.

Bed 1 - root crop: carrots, onions, beetroot, leeks, potatoes

Bed 2 - companion plants: sweet corn & cucumbers, sunflowers, pumpkin, zucchini

Bed 3 - Acid loving plants: egg plant, capsicums, tomatoes

Bed 4 - Beans: butter, purple king climbing, bush beauty and French dwarf, blue lake climbing

Bed 5 - The mixture: lettuce and rocket, butter beans and snow peas.

The chickens have also arrived. We have three named Poppy (white), Henny Penny (red) and Chook chook (black). They seem to have settled in ok and we will allow some "free ranging" over the coming weeks.

The chooks adjusting to their new abode. They seem to be admiring my rather crappy woodworking skills.

Hopefully be the next post we will be eating more than just lettuce from the veggie garden, and feasting on fresh eggs. Yum!

Cheers

Photo's of the crop

Here are pictures as promised

Bed 1 root veggies

Bed 2 Companion plants

Bed 3 Acid loving veggies

Bed 4 Beans

Bed 5 lettuce and snow peas

Stay tuned for the next load of pictures.

In the veggie patch

Hi all

Been busy in the veggie patch the last month or so. I have decided to (at last) employ a scientific and rigorous 4 bed rotation system, with my smaller 5th bed producing odds and bods like celery, rocket, lettuce and snow peas. What I have also decide to do is "farm the front yard" so to speak. I have put a bed out there to start to try and make it productive, as opposed to a dry and baron waste land as it seems to be at the moment.
Firstly I dug up the winters crop, manured the soil with three bags of manure (sheep, chicken and cow). I have also added a little essential minerals, as it seems to be the right thing to do (we will see how this works). Veggies didn't seem to grow terribly well over winter, and I suspect that it is due to a lack of essential minerals in the soil. I also filled up the three existing beds with a damn good helping of compost, and a gentle sprinkling of sulfate of potash. This has helped soil moisture retainability remarkably. Now I know this is this case, and I have been doing it since I started to grow veggies, but it still blow's me away at how effective it is. I let it sit for a couple of weeks, while I germinated the seed with my kids (my fathers day present), and planted them out last weekend. Listed belwo is what I have growing in each bed.

Bed 1: Root crops. Namely potatoes (seed potatoes from the local produce), beetroot, parsnips and carrots. These last three crops were direct sown, with the parsnips yet to raise their heads. I re-seeded this weekend.
Bed 2: Companion plants such as zucchini, sunflowers, pumpkin, cucumbers and sweetcorn
Bed 3: The acids. This bed I put down some pure sulfur in addition to the sulfate of potash, then planted eggplants, capsicums and tomatoes.
Bed 4: Legumes, namely butter beans, Purple King climbing beans, French dwarf beans and Blue Lake climbing beans.
Bed 5: Lettuce, rocket, celery and snow peas (all direct sown).

I have regularly watering the corn with seaweed fertilizer, and started to reduce the water to the tomatoes. Fingers crossed for a bumper crop this year. I love nothing better than giving my Nan and beautiful big bag of juicy sweet tomatoes.

Here are some pics of sowing seeds. I'll post photo's of the patch and herb garden this weekend, monthly as it goes through the summer. It doesn't look like much at the moment, just bird netting, but next month will see a big change. Hopefully the chickens will arrive soon to for our currently empty chicken coop. Until then, please let it rain.

Cheers

NP



Starting to sow seeds in trays for the little greenhouses



Connor and Tim planning the next phase



Molly busy at work



A finished greenhouse

Bitter melon to control diabetes

Recently here in the land of Oz there was a report on a local current affairs program call the “7:30 report” about some compounds that were isolated from the Chinese bitter melon. Aside from the howling mistake of the structure of the compounds “being solved by scanning electron microscope” (Well bugger me!) these babies have some interesting activity. For those of you that are unaware, Traditional Chinese Medicines (TCM) are currently all the rage in the world of natural products. And why not! TCM’s have been a drug lead bonanza over recent years, and have yielded such gems as artemisinin, the current antimalarial drug of choice for treating malaria that was isolated from the Chinese shrub Artemisia annua, which is fast acting and highly effective against multi-drug resistant falicparum malaria.
So for me it comes as no surprise that the latest “wonder drug lead” comes from some form of Chinese vegetation. The bitter melon has long been known to exhibit antidiabetic activity. As you know doubt are aware type II diabetes is almost at epidemic proportions as we in the western world gorge ourselves and get fatter and fatter. Currently, the two drug classes of choice are the thiazolidinediones and the biguanides. The thiazolidinediones have the rather unfortunate side effect of weight gain – not the greatest side effect in the world for treating diabetes, so novel treatments are a must. A group at the Garvan Institute in Sydney, working with dudes from Bayer in Germany and the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica got together and explored the old bitter melon and found a whole heap of cucurbitane glycosides that accounted for the activity of the extract. Check out the structures below, and here is the reference for the journal article: Min-Jia Tan, Ji-Ming Ye, Nigel Turner, Cordula Hohnen-Behrens, Chang-Qiang Ke, Chun-Ping Tang, Tong Chen, Hans-Christoph Weiss, Ernst-Rudolf Gesing, Alex Rowland, David E. James and Yang Y, “Antidiabetic Activities of Triterpenoids Isolated from Bitter Melon Associated with Activation of the AMPK Pathway” Chemistry and Biology, 2008, 15, 263 – 273

This got me thinking. Do we analyse the “drugability” of compounds to much. In terms of further development, these guys are a medicinal chemists worst nightmare. To lipophilic, to many chiral centres, etc etc etc. Do we rationalise everything far to much in western medicine at the expense of both serendipity and more traditional pharmacognosy based drug discovery? For me the answer is a resounding YES! These cucurbitane glycosides got me thinking of another triterpene glycoside isolated from the Hoodia cactus, the imaginatively called p57 (see below). This fella has great appetite suppressant activity, and the San people in southern Africa eat the cactus before they go out on their long hunting and gathering capers. There is also considerable overlap at the molecular target level between obesity and type II diabetes, with drugs against one therapeutic area having activity against the other.

Could the western world fatties turn to the good ‘ol triterpene glycoside to solve the obesity/diabetes problems? Should somebody undertake a massive screening campaign looking at trying to identify as many of this structure class as possible that is active against molecular targets implicated in these two disease states? Is this a nail in the coffin of such stupidity as the screening of vast arrays of synthetic libraries to find novel drugs? Has (as I suspect) nature done all the work for us, and all we have to do is conserve a little bit of it, explore it chemically and biologically, and let the medicinal chemists use their skills and talents at manipulating and tinkering around the edges with what nature has provided us to come up with ultimate drug winners? I think so. And just think of the medicinal opportunities that have been lost through the mindless slaughter and marginalisation of Australian aboriginals. It certainly makes me sick.

Welcome to The World of Natural Products

G'Day

I love natural products chemistry, and everything about it. I also truly believe that nature has evolved all the templates for medicines that we require, and all they need is to be isolated, elucidated then tickled a little with some medicinal chemistry. What I hope to do is bring a spasmodic highlight of from the world of natural products, discuss it and promote it. Hopefully some like-minded people out there will get something from this. I also would like to hear from the not so like-minded. I also want to be able to dispel the myth that all natural products are good and beneficial.

So please stay tuned as I begin my ad hoc and irregular ramblings about natural products chemistry, as well as irrelevant but hopefully interesting side discussions on Australian native plants, my garden, my veggie patch, my family, and anything else that takes my fancy.

Cheers

NP