Friday, August 30, 2013

Oxalis

Someone commented to our gardener family member  that the yellow flowers in our garden were looking lovely. They are - they are also a weed! And they spread out more and more each year.
Oxalis growing along the Eastern Freeway
I have dyed fabric with the flowers and can feel the urge coming over me to help with the eradication of the plant by cutting off the flowers and not allowing pollination but I have discovered that it spreads by bulbs, not seeds. So that won't be useful. So much for that urge.


I got good results last time by using frozen flowers. My family is not keen for me to do that again as I still have a biggish bag of hollyhock flowers in the freezer - and we don't have a big one. However, it is flowering season and I need to get them while they are around.  Maybe I should bite the bullet and just use them fresh. Get myself organised and use the frozen hollyhocks and the fresh oxalis.
Our glasshouse is being repaired, so I will have to find a new place to work for the time being. But if I leave it long enough, the glasshouse will be all beautiful and inviting and I might even feel enthusiastic about the dyeing.
We had to remove the hollyhock that was STILL FLOWERING last week, ready for the builders to trample all over the garden bed. Would you believe that it had buds?!

We went walking at Yarra Bend recently and saw a pink flower that looked a lot like oxalis, and had similarly shaped leaves, only flower and leaves were much bigger.
The picture was taken with my phone and I have great difficulty focussing it, apologies.

Then I noticed a slightly pinkish-white flower in our garden. It looks like oxalis too, only not yellow. That one has been got rid of, I can't imagine getting a good dye from such a pale flower.

2 comments:

parlance said...

As far as I know, that yellow-flowered oxalis is marginally edible, too, so after The Apocalypse we can color our clothes with it and get some extra nourishment, lol. So maybe we should leave it growing.
Gardening Family Member

Mary said...

Maybe we'll have to grow some hemp, to weave the clothes! Or, less controversially, some cotton - except that uses a lot of water which we'll be wanting to drink and use to keep the nettles, nasturtiums and dandelions growing, so we can eat them.