Re: botanical babble
elischer@town.nd.edu.au writes:
>Well, here in Western Australia (still marginally part of the continent
>I think) Oxalis pes-caprae is, as someone mentioned, "sourgrass"
Oxalis pes-caprae really only gets going here (my house) when it gets
regular water. I just have straight sand as soil (Its amazing what this
soil will grow...ive grown pumkins before and they did well). Anyways,
i dont water unless a plants really struggling. FOr me, the oxalis dies
out by may and doesnt show up until we get steady rainfall. Its
actually fairly well behaved in my yard. Actually its confined to the
side yard ( about 4 x 20 ft. ) and about a 3 X 10 ft strip in my front
yard. I usually keep it out of the sand "stream bed" bye cutting it
back with a hoe. It's never gotten farther than that in the five years
its shown up in my yard (the WHOLE front yard used to be Kikuyu grass
(Pennesetum clandestinum (i think thats it) five years ago...), so that
kept it confined to the side yard..
Here in Marina, as a kid we used to call the Oxalis "sour grass"
because of the sour juice in the stem. We used to munch on the flower
stems whenever they popped up in the winter. Wel also thought the
flowers were buttercups too. A teacher told us that if you put a butter
cup under your chin on a sunny day, the yellow would be reflected, and
thats just what happened when we did it with the oxalis flowers. So
thats why we thought it was a butter cup!
