What's outside

Wyau emu.
So I had never seen one of these before but this one was lying abandoned on of all places a dirt road so here it is. It was pretty heavy.

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lovely colour, huge, beautiful! Shame it will not hatch! Oh- airing cupboard like y ddraig fach in an sf story!

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Put in an incubator it just might.

Heddiw - today.

Orange balsam (drw gen i, dim enw cymraeg ar hyn o bryd - Sorry , no welsh name at the moment).

Helyglys per - Great willowherb.

Blodau a ffrywthau o Elinog - flowers and fruit of woody nightshade.

Cheers J.P.

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That’s why I mentioned the airing cupboard - the best approximation to an incubator in most homes! Your pictures are gorgeous! Orange balsam reminds me of nasturtium flowers. Is it also edible? I presume all of the nightshade is very poisonous. Those fruit look yummy! Are there many casualties?

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Yes, I would have done that on the desktop machine but I thought as it was a short reply I would do it promptly from my tablet PC and that doesn’t have all the features.:slight_smile:
Raymond

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No, Woody Nightshade has medicinal uses though the berries are not used for children.
But potatoes are the same family and it is not a good idea to eat ‘taty apples’ even though they look like little tomatoes!

Raymond

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I thought tomatos were part of the nightshade family, not potatos? What am I missing here?

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I’m not a botanist, @Sionned, but I believe tomatoes and potatoes are part of the same family. I didn’t know about nightshade or whether it is the same as our deadly nightshade. I believe someone was selling plants which had potatoes at the roots and carried tomatoes above, but I can’t swear to that! Google says belladonna, potato, tomato all same family!

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Ah, okay. I’m working off a very old memory about people who wouldn’t eat tomatoes because they were considered poisonous. Of course I have no idea where that originally came into my head from. Thanks, henddraig!

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Yes, that’s right - the family’s Solanaceae, the nightshades which includes all sorts of things including peppers, aubergines and tobacco according to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanaceae

In fact green unripe tomatoes are indeed poisonous to some degree - not sure if they’re just ‘bad stomach ache’ poisonous or ‘pop your clogs’ poisonous (although there are some varieties which remain green when ripe - confusing!),

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Oh dear - well they can’t be very poisonous. I grow tomatoes in my greenhouse. I did the same in the back lean-to on Gower. In winter, the House Coal and Good Welsh Anthracite were stored in the coal hole at the back of the lean-to and I basically had to move things around and strip the tomato plants out. There were always some green tomatoes left and my next door neighbour always eagerly took them in to make chutney which she ate, her husband and son ate and some got sold at Bring and Buys! I don’t like chutney, so did not eat any! Nobody suffered ill effects!

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Oh yes, and “fried green tomatos” are a thing here, using unripe ones. We don’t eat those, but my husband does grow the green varietals (among several others), which are rather tasty.

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I seem to remember that anything untoward in a green tomato is negated by the magical things that happen when you bung it in chutney.

Is that pronounced taity apples? Like tato from potato? Does anyone else call potatoes taities, or taitoes? And, whilst randomness is with me, the name reminds me of a book about a magic rabbit, set in Wales (although my version is English), called Tatty Apple!
Randomness over! :blush:

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I have lived in a lot of places in England and now in Argyll, scotland. I could not swear that I have lived anywhere where potatoes were NOT called ‘tatties’!

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Yes, tatties are ubiquitous, with a short A! Indeed!
We use the AY sound - tAYts, tAYties, tAYtoes, so a lazy English version of the tatty I think. In fact we often intersperse this with just tats. Not to be confused with tattoos obviously…

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I am reminded of the line in (the movie version) The Lord of the Rings - I think it is the second one, The Two Towers. Frodo and Sam, along with Gollum, are somewhere in the wilderness on the way to Mount Doom. Gollum brings in a couple of rabbits and Sam wants to cook them. He says something about wishing he had some “taters” (pronounced ‘tayters’), and Gollum asks “What’s taters?” Sam says “PO-TAY-TOES”. That has become a standing joke in our house when talking about potatoes.

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I’m pretty sure just cooking them destroys what poison there is

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That would make all kinds of sense. Just don’t eat green (as in unripe) tomatos sliced raw, which is how we eat fresh-from-the-garden (ripe) tomatos this time of year. (I must say I’ve never tried fried green tomatos and don’t really have any desire to.)

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You slice them? I pick mine and eat’em like the apples they were once called - or so I believe, “love apples”!

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Yes, In the far north of Northumberland we call them taties, but just over the Border, literally yards away they are tatties.

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