Sponsored by
Peter Vardy
June 2016
NEXT MEETING
FORTHCOMING EVENTS
Dundee Botanic Garden
Saturday 4th June 2016
Annual Coach Tour to Gardening Scotland
Leaving 9.30am from
Dalgety Bay Community Centre
Returning approx. 5.30pm
Saturday 4th July 2016
Annual Summer Coach Tour by Car
The Secret Herb Garden, Lothianburn
Leaving from Dalgety Bay Community Centre
at 9.15am
(Please note: this is a change from previous years
when the coach trip took place on a Friday
evening)
Speaker - Clare Reaney
Friday 3rd of June at 7.30pm
Dalgety Bay Community Centre
Saturday 23rd July 2016
Allotments Open Day
2pm - 4pm
ANNUAL COACH BY CAR TRIP
SECRET HERB GARDEN
The Annual Coach Trip by Car takes place on
Saturday 4th of July and leaves the Community
Centre at 9.15am.
Owners Hamish and Liberty
have this to say about their garden.
Friday 5th of August at 7.30pm
Scottish Association for Mental Health
and EATS Beds
David Ross
"We wish the Secret Herb Garden to be a place
where people can ‘open the door to the magic of
herbs’. To relax, enjoy and feel embraced by the
herbs whether that’s sitting amongst them in the
glasshouse or walking among them in the gardens.
The Secret Herb Garden offers something for
everyone: a place to enjoy and be embraced by the
surrounding herbs, plants and nature.
DBHS Annual Show
2nd - 3rd September
7th October at 7.30pm
Tattie Talk
John Marshall
It offers a haven to sit, enjoy and contemplate, or
a place to get involved and learn how herbs and
nature have an important place in our daily lives.
The environment is relaxed, a place where people
can come and enjoy and just be, to enjoy the space
inside and out.
1
The glasshouse
is
a magical
experience
full
colour
and
beauty
with
intense aroma, it
offers
an
interactive area for children and adults to enjoy alike,
to experience herbs from around the world and to
learn about their different medicinal, culinary and
decorative attributes.
Michael Gourlay (full contact details on page 4). The
passengers usually give the driver around £3 each
towards the cost of petrol. Meet up at the
Community Centre to be allocated to cars and to
collect the directions at 9am. Leaving time 9.15am.
RHUBARD AND CUSTARD CAKE
I haven't made
this recipe yet but
have tasted it and I
can report it taste
really
delicious.
Yummy.
The School and
herb
drying
room is used as
an educational
space
with
courses running
on
various
subjects
including growing herbs, bee keeping, candle making,
foraging as well as Festive and seasonal courses.
Ingredients
 1 quantity Barney's roasted rhubarb (see Tip
below Method)
 250g pack butter , softened, plus extra for
greasing
 150g pot ready-made custard (not the chilled
kind; I used Ambrosia)
 250g self-raising flour
 ½ tsp baking powder
 4 large egg
 1 tsp vanilla extract
 250g golden caster sugar
 icing sugar, for dusting
The drying room is used to preserve herbs and
flowers though the drying process, they are
then used within the café and for sale in the shop in
the form of herbal teas, other herbie products.
The café is a family friendly environment with
fresh, seasonal, home-made food grown and
produced where possible at the Secret Herb Garden.
The environment is relaxed, a place where people
can come and enjoy and just be, to enjoy the space
inside and out.
Method
1. Make the roasted rhubarb first, carefully
draining off the juices before you let it cool.
Butter and line a 23cm loose-bottomed or
springform cake tin. Heat oven to 180C/fan
160C/gas 4.
The shop supports the
products from
the
Garden
such
as candles, honey, teas,
coffee, culinary and
medicinal herbs as well
as freshly cut flowers.
They so support Scottish producers, artists and local
craft makers.
2. Reserve 3 tbsp of the custard in a bowl. Beat
the rest of the custard together with the butter,
flour, baking powder, eggs, vanilla and sugar
until creamy and smooth. Spoon one-third of
the mix into the tin, add some of the rhubarb,
then dot with one-third more cake mix and
spread it out as well as you can. Top with some
more rhubarb, then spoon over the remaining
cake mix, leaving it in rough mounds and dips
rather than being too neat about it. Scatter the
If you are interested in going on the Coach Trip
by Car either as a passenger or driver please contact
2
rest of the rhubarb over the batter, then dot the
remaining custard over.
the blight that hits the spuds.
The midges and mosquitoes,
The nettle and the weeds,
The pigeon in the green stuff,
The sparrows on the seeds.
3. Bake for 40 mins until risen and golden, then
cover with foil and bake for 15-20 mins more.
It’s ready when a skewer inserted into the
middle comes out clean. Cool in the tin, then
dredge with icing sugar when cool.
The fly that gets the carrots,
The wasp that eats the plums,
How black the gardeners outlook,
Though green may be his thumbs.
Tip - Barney's roasted rhubarb
Heat oven to 200C/fan 180C/gas 6. Rinse 400g
rhubarb and shake off excess water. Trim the
ends, then cut into little-finger-size pieces. Put in
a shallow dish or a baking tray, tip over 50g caster
sugar, toss together, then shuffle rhubarb so it’s in
a single layer. Cover with foil, then roast for 15
mins. Remove foil. Give everything a little shake,
roast for 5 mins more or until tender and the
juices are syrupy.
But still we gardeners labour,
Midst vegetables and flowers,
And pray what hits our neighbours,
Will somehow by pass ours.
WHAT DO PANDAS EAT?
The first version of this story is the official
Edinburgh Royal Botanic Gardens' description of
their new project and the second version is CBBC
Newsround's take on it.
THE GARDENERS HYMN
(by Barbara Robinson)
The diet of the
Giant
panda
(Ailuropoda
melanoleuca)
is
highly specialised
on bamboo, but
there
are
hundreds
of
different bamboo
species and over
60 of them are
eaten by Giant panda. The bamboo species
consumed vary geographically and seasonally and
even individuals appear to differ in their choices. All
these different bamboos vary in their nutritional
content and digestibility and Giant pandas can be
very picky about which bamboo they eat and when.
To further complicate things panda may also feed on
other plants, fungi and even other animals, and we
have no information on the importance of these
non-bamboo foods to panda health and breeding.
All things bright and beautiful
All creatures great and small
All things wise and wonderful
The Lord God made them all
But what we never mention,
Though gardeners know it's true,
Is when he made the goodies,
He made the baddies too!
The greenfly on the roses,
The maggots in the peas,
Manure that fills our noses,
He also gave us these.
The fungus on the goose-gogs,
The clubroot on the greens,
The slugs that eat the lettuce,
And chew the aubergines.
The drought that kills the fuchsias,
the frost that nips the bud.
The rain that drowns the seedlings,
Researchers have been investigating pandas for
decades and we do know a lot about them but the
3
finer details of the diet have eluded us – so far.
CBBC NEWSROUND
There are two key difficulties in assessing panda diet.
How studying poo is helping to save
pandas
1. the full range of items consumed is difficult to
determine from watching panda due to their
reclusive nature
2. bamboo species are very difficult to tell apart,
especially once eaten and digested by a panda.
Sunshine and Sweetie in Edinburgh Zoo, are the
UK's only giant pandas.
Now they are taking part in a special smelly
project! The pandas are having their poo collected
and investigated by the Royal Botanic Gardens in
Edinburgh as part of a project to understand more
about the animals' eating habits.
Researchers from Edinburgh Zoo and the Royal
Botanic Gardens are also collecting poo from pandas
around the world.
But we now have tools to answer this
complicated question
Using DNA-based methods to investigate diet, we
don’t have to find pandas, only their scats (their
poo). We can extract the DNA from the scat,
sequence it and then compare the scat DNA
sequences to the DNA sequences of known bamboo
species, or other plants, fungi or animals to work out
what was eaten. However, this process is particularly
complicated in bamboo because they are difficult to
tell apart even using DNA. So first we have to
develop methods to focus on the parts of the DNA
sequence that will allow us to distinguish between
the different bamboo species. Once we can
accurately tell them apart we will be able to find out a
lot more about bamboo and the species that eat
them.
They want to extract DNA from the poo, and try
to trace the different foods pandas eat. This research
will give zoos around the world better information
on the best things to feed pandas, and could even
help to breed new pandas!
It's a smelly business but someone's gotta do it.
GRAPEVINE
Editor: Sharon Greig
Phone: 01592 640987
Write: 10 Ben Alder Place,
Kirkcaldy,
Fife KY2 5RH
Email: [email protected]
In stage 1, Yáng Guāng (meaning “sunshine”) and
Tián Tián (meaning “sweetie”), Edinburgh Zoo’s
two giant pandas will be helping to develop these
methods by providing samples to test these new
methods on. This is an important step. We know
exactly what has been fed to these captive pandas so
we can determine how accurate and reliable our
methods are. Then we will move onto stage 2 –
using these methods to investigate diet in wild panda.
Society website address:- www.dbhs.org.uk
Full contact details for Mike Gourlay are:
Chairman:
Phone:
Mobile:
Write:
This project is an international collaboration
between RBGE and several organisations.
We are only just starting this exciting project but
it has already attracted a lot of attention. Check out
the short segment from CBBC Newsround!
Email:
4
Michael Gourlay
01383 823425
07790 182847
89 Steeple Crescent,
Dalgety Bay,
KY11 9SZ,
[email protected]