Seven hot wild greens in a winter soup

Seven weed soup

Today, feeling the need for a healthy soup and having the time for a quick forage near home, I took a bucket and knife to the park to pick what might be best be called a mess of hot greens. There were seven of them, none picked further than 200m from the flat, and all considered to make at least some sense for a soup with onions, potato and buttermilk (or sour cream); the kind of thing where either spinach or cress might first come to mind. The mix was only partly planned, with some mind given to how much was peppery, how much could be bitter and how much plain spinach-like bulk it might need. Beyond that, any basket of wild greens this diverse would likely never be the same twice and end up always somewhat arbitrarily based on mood, location and season.

From left: Dandelion, watercress, mustard, nasturtium, sow thistle, chickweed, native spinach

I don’t know a lot about the different herbal healing and healthful properties of all the plants involved, but I do know that they are there in varying degrees. I also know that all of these greens are ones that you can overdo; in terms of flavour (bitterness most particularly), potentially unhealthy side effects (like excessive oxalates and saponins), or both. And I am absolutely convinced that all wild greens should be consumed in diversity, small amounts at a time, and fairly regularly. In Michael Pollan’s In Defence of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto  he offers one particular overriding piece of dietary advice: ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants”.  To this I would add (if he hasn’t himself in the follow up Food Rules): ‘as many different types in small amounts as you can’.

When our Boy first went onto solids, and as parents busy with other jobs as well, we made up batches of baby food and froze it in muffin trays. As an ignorant first-time parent, there was only one thing that always went into every one of those mixes – a minimum of 6 species, preferably more. I’m certainly not suggesting I am a go-to-guy on baby feeding, but rather that I think diversity is a way to get by with limited detailed nutritional knowledge (in a culture still trying to find its way back from babies eating whatever they put in the jar). When your diet gets as diverse as a really good diet should be (double figures for contributing species number in every meal, as my guide), it is enough to know how to make it all come out tasty without being able to repeat its full nutritional profile.

In any case, here is what found its way into the ‘mess’:

Sow thistle (Sonchus oleraceus)

Sow thistle (Sonchus oleraceus) is a plant I have little experience with, but it seems to have some popularity as a wild green in North America (see here, here and here) and in New Zealand (here) where a native species (S. kirkii) is a traditional Maori food known as puha.

Native spinach (Tetragonia tetragoniodes)

Native spinach (Tetragonia tetragoniodes) is something that I have written on before as having limits to its nutritional utility but would certainly still rate as an excellent inclusion in a ‘mess’ for its solid spinach-like reliability. There is quite a lot of bitterness and pepperiness in the other greens that might want some taming, so the whole mess is at least ¼ native spinach.

Chickweed (Stellaria media), the small leaves tucked in to the left of the sow thistle flower and above the native spinach

I have previously written of chickweed (Stellaria media) as the ‘the winter green’ – but obviously it is not the only one, particularly if cooked greens are included. The stuff I gathered almost got involved  incidentally, not being a first thought for soup, but it was growing in among native spinach and sow thistle and practically begging to be included.

Watercress (Nasturtium sp.)

Watercress (Nasturtium spp.) is doing really well at the moment and there are some good spots near us on the coast where clean water filtering out of sandstone seeps makes it easier to trust than where it might be in any old storm water runoff.

Nasturtium (Tropolaeum majus)

Nasturtium (Tropolaeum majus) you may notice has a common name that is actually stolen from the botanical name for watercress. It is Latin for ‘nose-twister’. Its other common name of Indian cress continues the obvious theme of the two plants being pretty similar on the palate, despite being unrelated. I have yet to test them out head-to-head and am happy enough with just a bet each way at this stage.

Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale)

I am not the fan of dandelion greens (Taraxacum officinale) that some foragers are, probably because I don’t like bitter very much. People say you just have to get it at the right time; just as it is unfolding at its tenderest (and even then it has some bitterness); but without an obvious enough spring here in Sydney, I have got it wrong just a few too many times to keep trying. Still, I have no doubt that it is good for me and have no problem with it cooked in a ‘mess’; diluted basically.

Mustard (Brassica sp.)

Wild mustard greens (Brassica spp.) can be bitter, except for a brief window in spring (according to Euell Gibbons in the American foraging bible Stalking the Wild Asparagus), so I have always gone pretty light on them as a leafy green. I will leave it to another occasion to go into the more interesting uses of picking enough of the little clusters of flower buds to have some peppery mini-broccoli, and the gathering of ripe pods to dry and extract mustard seeds from.

As for a recipe, I am just cherry-picking from the internet and suggest that you do the same if you feel inspired towards a wild greens soup. I have gone with a watercress soup recipe, advised by a few looks around at spinach and nettle soups as well:

Recipe: Onions (and leek if I had it) are sliced thin and cooked low until softened, garlic added for the same purpose but with a little less time; add a little spice (smidgeon of nutmeg, chilli, cumin, coriander – again, little skerricks of diversity) and some chopped potatoes (and other roots if you like – I had a parsnip to spare) followed by stock (or just water if you want to add miso later instead) and then the greens (keeping back a little bit of the cress); simmer for 20 minutes (yes this is a long time to cook your greens if you are going healthy, but some of the bitter ones want it and you are hopefully making up for any losses by there being so much of the stuff); let it cool slightly, blend (having added any cress that you previously held back) and stir in buttermilk or sour cream. Garnish including a sour cream dollop) and season as takes your fancy (this is actually where I add my sea lettuce and salted fish roe because the Squeeze is a seaweed disliking proper vegetarian); and serve.

7 weeds and potato soup, garnished with sour cream, sea lettuce and salted fish roe.

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Sea lettuce (Ulva lactuca): The miraculous multipurpose sea herb

Sea lettuce (Ulva lactuca)

Sea lettuce (Ulva lactuca) has an essentially pan-global distribution, is thoroughly palatable and very good for you. If you live near the sea you probably live near it and yet you probably haven’t eaten it. In Australia, it is not eaten now and the evidence is pretty strong that it was not eaten in any great amount by early settlers (despite a strong seaweed eating tradition in the UK and Ireland from whence settlers and convicts generally came) nor by Aboriginal people (for whom there is well-documented use of bull kelp (Durvillaea potatorum) in Tasmania but not much else).

There was a time nearly twenty years ago on an 11 day wilderness walk on New Zealand’s Stewart Island when on very light rations (due to a food packing glitch we discovered 2 days into the walk but pressed on through) that a lone Japanese tramper in the same back-country hut as us brought in seaweed that he had foraged to help us through. Lone Japanese outdoorsmen really do pop in the strangest places. It was sea lettuce, I recognized it, I knew it from home, and I hesitated because I simply didn’t yet know it as food. Only briefly though – I was really hungry (foraged mussels came to a more substantial rescue a couple of days later). I didn’t know at the time that the carbohydrates in seaweed are largely indigestible by people, and that I was mostly getting a huge serve of vitamins and minerals rather than much energy, but I was converted. I have nibbled at it when I see it on clean shorelines ever since. And more recently I have been making a fantastic dried condiment from it.

Where the Ulva grows

Because rock fishermen targeting blackfish (or ‘luderick’, Girella tricuspida) use it as bait, and perhaps because they will take it regardless of regulations, sea lettuce is specifically the only intertidal thing that may be collected in the Marine Reserve near my place.  Out on the headland, there is  a fairly consistent flow of seawater essentially like a river fed by surging waves on the higher side of the rock platform, and in it grows some of the best sea lettuce to be found anywhere. My son now expects to snack on it when we are out there on the miniaturized safaris of searching in rockpools, and I will always chew down a few ‘leaves’ whenever I am there fishing. And sometimes I will harvest a bowl full, to be dried and tucked away as a surprising delicious condiment.

Fresh sea lettuce

Last autumn, going crazy on saffron milk cap (Lactarius deliciosus) harvesting, I bought a dehydrator. Just a cheap and probably inefficient one (a better option described here), but it has already earned its keep on dried mushrooms that we are still using 4 months later. It turns out that it does an equally grand job on sea lettuce. Previously I have oven-dried it, but I am now convinced that dehydrating is better.

Sea lettuce on the drying racks

Dehydrated sea lettuce

Oven dried sea lettuce

Dried sea lettuce falls somewhere in between being a salad green, a condiment, a health food supplement or something as everyday as a sandwich filling (see here for the partner condiment of salted fish roe). You may be familiar with having a few strips in miso soup – although this is usually with wakame (Undaria pinnatifida), sea lettuce works very well too. It is easy, it is delicious in its mildness at best and inoffensive at worst, and as a result it is just plainly and simply odd that it is such a relatively unknown food. That said, it probably couldn’t bear too much popularity on city shores where heavy harvesting might make it suffer. So perhaps I should throw some active discouragement into the mix and warn you – there will be amphipods; like little alien spawn of fleas and prawns hopping about on your food, burrowing down away from the light and out of sight, somehow defying the capture of every last one before you might eat it. Or you could just see them as some extra protein, or very very very small lobsters perhaps.

Amphipods commonly found on sea lettuce

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Kangaroo (Macropus spp.) tail stew: An almost forbidden fruit

Eastern grey kangaroo (Macropus giganteus)

You may well have heard of kangaroo (Macropus spp.) tail stew, but chances are you have never eaten it, because it is unfathomably hard to get a hold of the key ingredient. It is shame, being in my opinion far and away the most delectable part of the animal. The only places I have seen it sold have been in the Northern Territory and South Australia, in both cases near Aboriginal communities – where people have very well informed preferences when it comes to kangaroo cuts (and buy tails with the skin on so that they can better cook them in the coals of a fire). I have no idea where the rest of the tails of the one and a half million kangaroos commercially harvested every year go other than a few that end up as dog treats.  All I know is that it is a shame that none of them seem to go to a butcher or supermarket near you.

A kangaroo is in effect pentapedal (five-legged), using the tail like a limb while walking and a counterbalance while running – it is no meagre appendage

The alternative to buying a kangaroo tail is of course to go out and get one from a kangaroo yourself. But you are not allowed. If you own land you can probably get a permit to shoot some as a culling exercise and ‘pest control’, but these cannot be eaten and must be tagged and left to rot in the field. If you accidentally hit one with your car, you are not allowed to subsequently cut the tail off and be ‘in possession of it’ – something that applies to all native fauna.  And you cannot (with the exception of some wallabies in Tasmania) hunt one. This one peculiar fact and its passing almost entirely without protest from the carnivorous public says all too much to me about the sad disconnectedness between most Australians, their environment and their food:

Alongside the government supported shooting of some one and a half million kangaroos a year, the world’s largest terrestrial wildlife harvest, it is illegal to take one for your own pot.

A kangaroo (or wallaby) tail – the best meat is not the obvious thick butt of the tail but the small nuggets in under the wrapping of tendons; with the unctuousness that comes out of these tendons, and the bone and cartilage of the vertebrae, they aren’t just tender but also lip-stickingly silky

I will own up to having hunted kangaroos and having harvested parts from fresh roadkill (backstrap and tail), and do so with a completely clear conscience. But I will leave it to yours as to how you might get yourself in possession of a kangaroo tail. Truth be told, I haven’t sought them out to buy with much ardour and when (not if, trust me, people will eventually catch on) the market knows enough to ask for it, the wild game processors will respond. I am not suggesting the lack of roo tail in the shops is some cruel conspiracy; it is simply a product of a non-Aboriginal culture in most parts of Australia only a decade or so into the rediscovery of the culinary delights of its national emblem.

Browning the sections of tail gives some caramelised glutamate edge that combines with the sweetness of the ‘vegie juice’ stock

There are probably more roo tail stew recipes online than there ought to be given how rarely it must actually be cooked and you could alternatively adapt something from an ox-tail, ossobuco, or other shank recipe where you are trying to draw out the unctuousness of bone, marrow and/or cartilage. You might well do better than using my recipe (for example I am going here for my next tail), but here it is if only to explain what is in the pictures:

Recipe: The aim is to have the tail and nothing else (except some garlic cloves) as far as solids go so that when you share this with people likely never to have tried roo tail before they get to focus on it. I think that this still needs a rich broth and for this I do a ‘vegie juice stock’: 2 onions, 4 carrots and a half bunch of celery through the juicer. A bunch of parsley, 5 bay leaves and a few sprigs of thyme simmered (or just steeped like a tea in boiling water) for 5-10 minutes. I might also put the juicer pulp in with the simmered stock, but it does make it cloudier in the end. (If I were to buy a stock in, it would probably be beef, possibly with some stout poured in). This time I also put in 140g of tomato paste but might otherwise have deseeded some whole tomatoes through the food mill (or just used passata); all together it is about a stock that ends up sweet and with a bit of a tang. Brown the chunks of roo tail, pour in the liquids and pop in 5 cloves of garlic. My view on browning is that it is to cook a little caramelisation onto it that gives some sweet glutamate / umami flavour without it becoming a burnt bitterness. Stew for a very long time (4-12 hours). Serve with some of the broth, cracked pepper, bread and good supply of napkins.

Stewed kangaroo tail: Strips of tender light meat infused with the silky unctuousness of long-cooked integument and bone

It is perhaps true that I make a bigger deal of a good roo tail stew than many would because other than hunted meat, I don’t actually eat mammals or birds; no ox tails, veal shanks, bacon or fatty duck, nothing that has been farmed against which to compare this native delicacy. But I have shared it with enough people who do eat that stuff to know that I am on some fairly solid ground when I rave about it. It is hardly likely that you will be able to knock one up tonight, but if the opportunity ever presents itself, you should really give it a go.

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Winter flathead (Platycephalus spp.): Stillness, wildlife and salted roe

Flathead (Playcephalus sp.)

Despite a rough run of weather leaving many Sydneysiders missing the stormless drought, crisp, sunny winter’s days with gentle westerlies flattening out the sea were always going to make an appearance at some stage; it’s just La Niña after all, not the apocalypse. The Pacific Ocean is all too often a dreadfully misnamed body of water, but occasionally it lives up to its promise. With the cool water, trolling lures for pelagics like summer and autumn bonito doesn’t yield so well; but long relaxing drifts across the deep offshore sand for flathead (Platycephalus spp.) and the occasional other interloper (like leatherjacket, flounder or rays) comes into its own.

A calm winter sea, held flat with offshore westerlies

We motored in the tinny (aluminium dinghy) to the north end of a surf beach, stopped and threw out the drift anchor (like an airstrip windsock on a rope) to slow the wind’s westerly push. An offshore current pushing southwards did the rest of the work – setting us off on a long relaxing 2 hour drift to the southeast. We’ve done this often enough not to worry if the fish aren’t biting because soon or later on a 3 kilometre journey ending 2 kilometres out to sea they always eventually will. As the shore receded, the quiet solitude of the open ocean started to envelope us. On the edge of a huge city, bobbing in a seemingly endless calm, fishing heavily weighted paternoster rigs in inky blue depths of around 50 metres.

A modest but legal-sized flathead in the net

Often distracted by tending my line, bringing up or netting the occasional legal-sized keeper and releasing back the equal or even greater number or undersized ones, I would sometimes look up like someone waking surprised in a wilderness. Whales, seals, penguins and albatross (in addition to the usual shearwaters and gannets have all been seen in these winter outings, like the great cold south has come visiting (even though the penguins are local). This time a Wilson’s Storm Petrel (Oceanites oceanicus), landing by our lines and ducking its head under to see what was going on down there, diving and underwater flying for any skerricks of bait within reach. Then a Great Skua (Catharcta skua), a strangely fat mongrel-brown maritime scavenger from the south, sitting like a feathered stray dog waiting for cast-offs, not begging nor even hardly acknowledging our existence; just waiting with the patience of an opportunist.

A scavenging Great Skua (Catharcta skua)

Over time we lost count of the number of keepers in the box, muddled by the calm rhythm of the fishing, the numbers of undersized returns and the hypnotic slap of water on the metal boat. But we knew we were doing well enough, with enough to need to open the freezer for, and the catches only getting more consistently legal-sized with either distance offshore or the light fading towards sunset or both. Keeping just enough time to do the boat ramp thing before darkness we reluctantly headed in: 12 good flathead (bluespotted I think; Platycephalus caeruleopunctatus) and 1 flounder (Pseudorhombus sp.).

Back in the kitchen, each fish is carefully opened rather than quickly gutted, each time a 50-50 party game with the prize being a female’s roe. I have a peculiar love of these, buried in salt in a bowl and put in an oven on as low as it goes for however many hours it takes to suck it dry. The salt dusted off it can be simply chopped finely and sprinkled as a garnish (particularly if mixed with dehydrated sea lettuce (Ulva lactuca) given the same treatment) that tastes deeply of the sea; of the deep sea no less, of fish hauled up from 50 metres below. Problem was, from my cut of 6 fish, only two females, one very light with roe. That said, this stuff goes a long way.

Salting flathead roe

Salted flathead roe – the taste of deep water in a condiment

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Chickweed (Stellaria media): Winter’s edible weed

Chickweed (Stellaria media)

When most of the wild greens are gone for the winter, chickweed (Stellaria media) will always provide. You can’t stop it if you try. To be honest, like a sterotype child I sometimes have to be forced to eat my greens, even if it is me who does the forcing. So here is how it works: I make a sandwich and head out the door, grab a handful of chickweed from the current wildness of the shared apartment block herb garden and throw it in. In the picture below it is with burningly garlicky hummus and marinated roast capsicum made on the weekend. The Squeeze bakes the bread. Time out of my day: 15 seconds. Foraging is in the spare time; now it’s time to get a kid to daycare and me to a desk, but 15 seconds I can obviously do.

Hummus, roast capsicum, chickweed and sorrel sandwich

Chickweed is yet another one of those surprisingly under-utilised foods. Many vegetable gardens would have more of this taken out as a weed over winter than conventional vegetables (at our community garden there is something of an unwritten rule that at least it goes to the chickens – who adore it). It is juicy, tender and mild, with a favour from close to nothing to having a little tart edge to something that does somehow manage to be an undefined taste of a weed. Or perhaps that is just the taste of raw greens – like I say, I’m no connoisseur. Richard Mabey (in Food for Free, the indisputable British wild plant food bible) prefers it simmered and finished with butter, lemon juice and seasoning including a little nutmeg, as an accompaniment to rich meat. The Cribbs (in Australia’s equivalent bible Wild Food in Australia), also describe it as mild and benefiting from butter and lemon. Earthwise Herbal will tell you that is close to a heal-all. Ted Manzer, botanical font that he is, will tell you just about anything you might need to know about it (here). Me, I don’t know much, except that if I can bring some very healthy fresh greens to my diet with it, most people can.

Chickweed flowers are usually given as the best way to identify it – 5 deeply notched petals that look like 10

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Sadness of the Commons: Mud crabs (Scylla serrata) and the lure of the dark side

Mud crab (Scylla serrata) – a reluctant meal¬ armed with finger-crushing claws…

… the irony being that those claws are what make it the delicacy that it is

Way up in the winding backwaters and mangrove swamps of northern New South Wales rivers, mud crab (Scylla serrata)trapping manages to bring out the shady side in people. Not straight away, but seemingly inexorably over time. Between crabbers, stealing from others’ pots (traps) is rife and even stealing their pots altogether all too common. Because of what is then needed to get around the thieving minority, even the most law-abiding person is likely to end up effectively poaching to some degree. Somehow you either break the rules or are broken by them. I have tried both sides of the rule book, most recently the legal side, the results of which are again luring me back to the dark.

The secret spot of the only successful pot – hidden from pot-robbers up a channel too small for most boats at most tides

It seems at first like something where a code of honesty might prevail. You get your pots, write your details on the float, bait them up and usually leave a night and a tide or two to pass before checking to see how things have gone. Everyone is playing the same game; we all have the same hopes out in the water. While it will come down competitively to where we personally choose to place our chosen style of pot (or home-made construction) with our chosen bait and how diligently we monitor them, the potential is still there that we might all cooperate to get by and to get on, like people with cattle grazing the commons. But all it takes is a few to greedily or nefariously up their share, for a ‘tragedy of the commons’ to prevail.

This term, ‘tragedy of the commons’, was coined in a famous essay by Garrett Hardin as a metaphor for the tragic resource destruction when resource competition and individual agenda enter the equation with human management of natural environments. The original paper came out in the journal Science in 1968 and only becomes more relevant with each passing year (which is not to say I would endorse the arguments for further privatisation and extra-communal regulation that the paper is used to support). Let’s say that we are in the same community entitled to graze animals on a piece of public land (the commons). In circumstance of modest demands and pressures and with some basic cooperation we might all get on fine for a long time, just as this land system did in many places for many centuries (and for that matter continues to do so in some places). But if one or some of us decide to up our stock numbers, anyone left playing by the old rules is condemned to being worse off. From your one extra cow you derive all the benefit, while the detriment is shared. Everyone else’s choice is to then either to accept being worse off individually or to join in the fray that will make everyone eventually worse off together.

A mud crab lured by decaying mullet head and destined for the plate.

Up on the River last week, 2 pots first went out for our family; one pot up a small channel hidden deeper in the mangroves gets 2 crabs, another out in the main channel goes missing, stolen. 2 more pots added to the mix get nothing, one of them obviously raided (the pot-robbers didn’t even close it up again after themselves) and the other empty – suspicions reasonably strong that it had not been left untouched. What to do? We could check them more often, we could accept our losses with resignation, or we could do what many other people on the River do and hide them. Hiding a crab pot means that it is an illegal one. You put it in without a marker float and retrieve it from the murk with a gaff hook. Then Fisheries doesn’t know what they want to know (partly about the pressure on the resource and partly that they are in charge), and so they occasionally patrol the river with metal detectors, confiscating any unmarked pot. Your relationship first becomes adversarial with pot-robbers and then becomes adversarial with Fisheries. The response to losing the pot to Fisheries is the same as if it were stolen by thieves and tensions escalate. The next step is to make them with no metal, or to hide them better – perhaps some decoy metal, or into the deeper backwaters. This in turn might draw you into the closed Marine Reserve areas (where many locals choose to interpret ‘Reserve’ as meaning reserved for them), but you have started down the dark side already and it has become every man for himself. Thus pitted against almost all others, you might start to see marked pots as those of naïve fools, destined to be robbed by someone so why not you. It becomes not so much whether you will go to the dark side, but how far.

A pot checked at night, there being no guarantee it would have still been there the next day

My pots are packed away again now. This time I played by the rules and was partly beaten. Two modest but easily legal-sized crabs, one missing a claw (wherein lies the best meat). They were devoured in that messy way that crabs must be, simply boiled for 15 minutes and torn apart with hands, pliers and knives; the three sweet claws dished out as treats to the oldest and the youngest with the remaining skerricks laboured out of legs and bodies. Washed down with white wine, their delectability made up somewhat for the meagre volume. But with the plate and glass now empty I can’t help thinking that next time I will swap the marker floats for a GPS and a gaff hook. I’ll stay out of the Reserve, obey limits on pot numbers and size of crabs and would never rob a pot. It is not a perfect solution but neither is it destructively anarchic; I can do so knowing that by still supporting the reserve system at least, the commons is not doomed by my actions. Despite taking sole gain whilst delivering a shared detriment of one less crab in the system, I am comfortable that this is still in the realm of sustainable use, rather than long-term diminishment, of the common resource. The point being that my proposed approach is not a tragedy, because that resides with the prevalence of theft in crabbing. Where I now find myself in the crabbing spectrum is more simply marked by a ‘sadness of the commons’, based more on what it says about people than about the future of mud crabs.

Straight into salted boiling water for 15 minutes, a death so close to instant that any euthanising efforts like freezing or brain stabbing seem nothing more than ill-informed myths that are probably crueller options

If you were on the boat you get a share, however small

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Lemons (Citrus x limon) and an idea of usufruct

There is a wonderful concept called ‘usufruct’ that relates to a right to enjoy the benefits of another’s property as long as that use is not to their detriment. It comes from Latin roughly as it sounds from ‘use’ and ‘fruit’. Strictly speaking it should be properly understood in a context of legal theory and history and doesn’t literally deal with actual fruit more so than any other derivable benefit from  property. Nonetheless in my mind it captures the idea of a general community right to pick fruit hanging over other people’s fences. Like lemons.

Lemons (Citrus x limon)

It seems about as Australian in a garden as a ‘Hills hoist’ clothesline and a barbecue to have a lemon tree, often down by the back fence. And in older parts of towns where that fence backs onto a lane where once the outside toilet was accessible to the ‘dunny man’ who collected the contents, lemon trees often enough hang over into quiet parts of the public domain. There they are, neglected old trees producing more fruit than required for the residents’ occasional garnished drink or seafood dinner.

Parking infringements aside, there’s no sin in picking a back lane lemon

You don’t actually have a proper legal right to the lemon and it does remain technically the property of the landowner on the other side of the fence, let me make that clear. But what about a moral right? Where would a consensus view of our society sit on the idea of usufructuary rights to lemons over back fences? I would suggest that we are largely all for it and that we simply haven’t codified it in law because too few people care. Should you go around and knock on the door and ask? If it were me I’d prefer you exercised what strikes me as an obvious moral right rather than come around feeling sheepish while I felt interrupted.

Lemons overhanging by a main road… if only you could reach them

You can tell the trees that are fair game, they will appear obviously neglected and/or unused; marred with scale insect damage, nutrient deficient signs of yellow, curled or sparse leaves, or look well overdue for a prune. Ironically those that may seem to have the most to share might actually suggest the least usufructuary entitlement because they are being well cared for to boost production that the owner has plans for. But you can also bet 19 times out of 20 that those ones aren’t hanging all blotched over the fence. With just a modicum of conscience you can generally look at the lemon tree, think about right and wrong, and if you feel it is right help yourself to a modest degree. But you should ask yourself every time to beat the urge to move all too easily from being a usufructuary to being a trespasser.

If it doesn’t hang over public land it is not fair game (even if you can still reach it)

Citrus planted on a verge by a neighbour for anyone to share – cutting out any uncertainties about the fence

The reason this all comes up is because it is citrus time in Sydney and this week’s childcare day has consisted of hunting back lane lemons with the Boy en route to the zoo. I appreciate the irony of the fact that I consciously use these days to instil certain values and did so by cruising back alleys in search of opportunities technically on the shady side of the law. Perhaps the value is that sometimes it is better to do right by your own reckoning than to do simply as you are told.

Jackpot – scrappy, more-than-they-need, back lane Meyer lemons

Were I able to afford a house with a garden, and that garden did not have a lemon tree, I might even turn up at the auction with one to plant within a minute of a gavel slamming down in my favour [postcript: I do now own a house and a lemon did indeed get on it pretty promptly]. Until then, or perhaps when I have had one planted on the verge long enough to bear fruit for anyone, early winter will mean usufruct lemons (like early spring will be mulberries).

Another beautiful lemon – a ‘Lisbon’ at a guess [a lemonade as it turns out; you live and learn]

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Blackfish (Girella tricuspidata) spearing: Youth revisited with a grownup toy

Blackfish (Girella tricuspidata), the rabbit of the sea – under-appreciated, algae-grazing small game

Blackfish grazing on a seaweed bed

There are 2 ways I know how to get blackfish (Girella tricuspidata), also known as luderick: One is to fish with a float dangling a tiny hook off rocky shores baited with sea lettuce (Ulva lactuca) – a technique I have yet to succeed at; and the other is to get in after them snorkelling with a spear. This last method was a favourite of mine as a teenager around Sydney, and then again in my early thirties as a student doing research on the North Coast. I would use a hand spear (‘Hawaiian sling’ or ‘gidgee spear’) – an aluminium rod with barbed spikes at one end and a large elastic loop at the other that you slide up the shaft to propel the spear when released. They require getting close to the fish, stalking them, a snorkelling version of creeping, around rocks and through kelp, predicting their movements, and taking quick-reflex shots in the tiny window of time before they flee. The elastic digs hard into the space between thumb and finger, still scarred on my right hand from the broken blisters that failed to heal well with the saltwater and repeated wearing away at raw skin. Now, for the first time, I have stepped up a notch with the gear, getting the most basic of spearguns. Now a long thin stainless steel shaft with hinged barbs is loaded up with an elastic loop released by a pistol-grip trigger – double the power, double the distance. Accuracy will probably double too once it becomes the spear that I am used to.

A speared blackfish with an old barbed hand spear head

The favourite blackfish lagoon

For my first outing with the new toy I ventured into my favourite blackfish spot – a pebble beached lagoon, the most beautiful piece of shore I know, a hidden paradise kept still by a rock reef behind raging seas. The water, although at times crystal clear, was murky from recent storm seas and floodwaters off the land. Armed with the speargun, my shooting range was actually further than I could see, drifting slowly, stalking around rocks, making out the familiar shapes, sometimes their distinctive stripes, and all too often the way that they turn on their side to flee from view and from range (a technique that allows them to escape through the shallowest of water that would bar a larger predator – like a shark… or me in fins). My first shot is too late, delayed by vain hopes of a better opportunity to shoot until it becomes a last ditch hope of hitting a fading shadow in the murky gloom. The next is at a fish perfectly side-on, still cruising away but not panicked; and it hits, down towards the tail, threading the fish body on the steel needle inescapably. With my not unjustified paranoia of holding quivering fish in water where sharks may take an interest, I lift it flapping clear of the water and swim on my back to shore in seconds to dispatch it, beach it, and plunge back in. After two more misses, a clean shot hits close to centre (actually not a perfect shot because of damage to good meat) and a second fish is landed. The second of two fish I would not have got with the range of the old hand spear.

A speared blackfish with the new weaponry – the cheapest speargun in the shop

The truth is I have spent a lot of outings launching old bent, degraded-rubber, blunt tipped hand spears vainly at blackfish just that little bit too far away to hit. And so it is also true that I really do like the new edge I get from the speargun. The challenge remains and I’ll take a bit of credit alongside the weapon, gleaned from having hunted these little sea rabbits (because they are jumpy, sea lettuce eating small game) on and off for a quarter of a century. I will not go so far with spearfishing as to head offshore for bigger targets (I’ve a mate who has jumped off ocean-going boats to spear big game fish and then be towed for an hour around the sea dreading the appearance of sharks); but I will keep hunting blackfish, knowing that I’m not the lithe predator I was in my youth, but recalling those days with fondness every time; tasting it in the small boneless fillets fried fast in butter almost burning then quenched with lemon juice and served within half an hour of the kill.

A closing tip: If you are going to cook a blackfish whole, the black gut lining needs scrubbing off – conveniently done with beach sand

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