A 'smell walk' in Melbourne

And how to get rid of fungus gnats.

Confession time: I haven’t really felt like cooking this week.

I’m not exactly sure why. It might be due to a bit of burnout, or the changing seasons. A struggle with transitioning from hearty plates to lighter dishes. Haven’t quite made friends with salad – although it is a goal for this summer season.

If you do indeed find joy in cooking, it is something you have to consistently work at. It’s easy to relegate it to a chore and from there, lose interest. To stop experimenting with flavours, or find yourself in a bit of a lull, uninspired by your usual failsafe cookbooks.

And as a society, we are clearly not good at giving yourselves time for rest. Every little slice of time is viewed as an opportunity to get stuff done! Time spent not doing anything is considered time wasted. It isn’t; rather it’s kinda necessary to function and idk, actually enjoy your life a bit?

With this in mind, it’s been nice to honour this current feeling of indifference and not beat myself up for indulging in some easy meals, that are perhaps not of the highest nutritional value. To accept that there’s been some mindless eating on the couch taking place, but this has created space to indulge in a new TV show, or catch some reading time, in an otherwise hectic schedule.

To accept that this is what this week looks like. But it doesn’t mean next week will be the same, or the week after that. Life is ever-changing and seasonal, after all.

Parliament Gardens… presumably where the delicious scent of spring was lingering.

Taking a smell walk into Collingwood

Longtime readers might remember when, earlier in the year, I dedicated quite a large portion of a newsletter to raving about Annabel Streets’ 52 Ways to Walk. That was fun, wasn’t it? Since then, I’ve been looking for opportunities to try some of her recommended ways of walking (nighttime rambles after dinner have become a fast favourite).

A few weeks ago, I found myself with both a random Friday off, and a voucher to a spa in Collingwood (an inner-city suburb of Melbourne) burning a hole in my pocket. A LUCKY GAL INDEED.

To get there, I trained it into the city, where I was to swap onto a tram. The sun was shining, it was the first day of spring and indeed, with a bit of a spring in my step, I decided I’d walk the half hour to the spa instead of going the distance on a tram.

As I strolled along to my destination, I began to follow one of Streets’ recommendations. I was taking myself on a smell walk.

And what is a smell walk? Allow me to quote myself here (thanks): it’s where you stroll through a city, making a mental map of its particular scents and I suppose in some cases, stenches.

For my Melburnians in the room, I’d disembarked at Parliament station and from there, wandered through the top of Parliament Gardens, up Gisbourne street and past St Vincent’s Hospital. From there, I continued up Brunswick Street, along Gertrude Street, and then my mother called me and I got distracted and stopped taking my ‘smell notes’.

This is what I wrote down over the course of about 20 mins:

• sweet smell of springtime flowers

• metallic scent of industry

• waft of coffee (yuck) from a pop-up takeaway truck

• cigarette smoke, courtesy of a tradie I passed on a corner

• Gertrude street blossoms.

Great way to be commemorated. Spotted on a park bench in Fitzroy.

Overall, I found the process quite meditative; I was listening to the world around me as well as smelling and so, very present in my surroundings. Not unlike Forest Therapy. Try it yourself, especially if it’s still spring where you live. And feel free to let me know how you went.

How to rid yourself of pesky fungus gnats

It’s that time of the year where you’ll be cooking up a meal, reading a book at home, watching TV, lounging in the bath… and a fungus gnat or three will suddenly buzz into your line of sight.

The tiny flying adults are super annoying but in the words of Douglas Adams, mostly harmless. It’s the larvae under the soil you have to watch out for. Left to multiply in numbers, they can do real damage to the roots of your precious plants.

I have had houseplants for years and so, have been dealing with these uninvited guests for quite some time. And let me tell you, I’ve tried near everything to exorcise them from my life.

Some things have worked. Some really haven’t. After many rounds of trial and error, I’ve discovered a method that does seem to keep them under control.

As follows…

Don’t over-water your plants

First up, don’t create conditions where larvae can thrive. They love wet, moist environments… like the soil of an over-watered houseplant. Only water your plants when the soil is dry. You can test it by sticking a finger into the topsoil; if it does indeed feel dry, it’s probably safe to saturate.

If you want to get techy, you can use a water meter. Stick it into the soil and it’ll tell you if you need to water, or if the plant is fine to wait a few more days.

Happy houseplants.

Isolate infected plants

Uh oh, gnats got your plant(s)? Remove it from the others, perhaps putting it in a sheltered location outside for a few days, while you treat the infestation.

Use neem oil to kill the larvae

First step – kill the larvae, drink their blood (note: this sentence has been written for dramatic effect, it is not actually recommended you drink larvae blood).

Neem oil is great for this and readily available at local garden and hardware stores. This organic insecticide is made from the seeds of neem trees and is usually sold as a concentrate.

Dilute it into a spray bottle and label it clearly (if you’re like me, you’ll have plenty of random spray bottles with green witchy concoctions laying around).

Then soak the top of your soil with your spray once a week, for 6-8 weeks.

Create a barrier between soil & gnat using neem granules

Nekt step – stop adult gnats from getting kinky in your soil and breeding more larvae (for any pedants out there, yes it is actually the female fungus gnats that lay eggs in the soil, but again, dramatic/amusing effect).

Neem granules have not worked as a lone method for me; neem oil is a far more effective product. However. I have found it helpful to sprinkle some granules around a plant you are treating, in order to keep the ladies out.

I also advise sprinkling some of this magic dust on any plants that were near the infection guy before you isolated it, just in case.

Houseplant Hoarders sell neem granule packs, which you should find at a local indie plant store.

Trap adults with sticky paper…

Sticky paper is a godsend when it comes to dealing with these annoying intruders.

I’ve used fly paper in the past (the type you hang from the ceiling; in turns into an interesting part of your interior decor or overall aesthetic, littered with the corpses of your enemies and all). More advisable are the sticky paper traps you simply insert into the soil.

Gnats are pretty dumb (honestly, house flies and mozzies seem way smarter) and will fly onto this paper, getting well trapped.

Aussies can buy packs of sticky traps from Bunnings. Elsewhere? Try your local garden and hardware store or again, support indie plant stores.

…or carnivorous plants

And here’s a way to be somewhat environmentally friendly and add to your plant collection, hurrah!

I love canivorous plants because unlike my other houseplants, which just sit around looking pretty, they work hard for my love.

There’s a range of these plants available, but the ones I’ve found most effective for dealing with gnats are sundews (drosera) and butterworts (pinguicula). Pop a pot near the infected plant and let them work their magic.

Monkey cups (nepenthes) can also be effective; plus they’ll lure in other annoying pests like flies and moths.

Plus, if you feel bad about trapping gnats on sticky paper, carnivorous plants can help assuage your guilt. The gnat’s death isn’t wasted; it’s a process of feeding, rather than having them feast on your plants. Circle of life stuff right here.

Last resort: repot the plant

If it’s a heavy infestation and you’re not having any luck with the above, consider repotting the plant. A fresh start may help.

Working away from your other plants, simply remove the plant from the pot, making sure to dust off any potentially infected soil from the roots. I like to wash out the infected pot with hot water, before adding new soil mix and replanting.

Keep in mind, your new soil may also have an infestation because there are no real winners in life (apart from fungus gnats). Thoroughly recommend adding a sticky trap and doing a neem treatment for a couple of weeks. Just to be safe.

A quick hack

Do you love lemon water, first thing in the morning? Me too! I’ve been juicing the lemons from my over-eager tree and freezing it into ice trays, then popping the lemon ice into a glass jar.

Wake up, boil the kettle, pop a lemon cube into a mug and pour. Hey presto. Instant lemon water.

Just don’t do what I did last week and allow the jar to slip out of your fingers, smashing onto your tiled floor and sending glass and lemon cubes everywhere. It is not recommended.

Credit: A24

Some recommendations

These cool things however, come with high praise:

• Read: After devouring RF Kuang’s bestselling Yellowface on the plane home from England earlier this year, I decided I pro-bab-ly should read her entire back catalogue. Why not, what else am I doing with my time? Babel, or the Necessity of Violence is set in a slightly alternate-reality England in which the country’s colonial supremacy is not fueled by guns and I guess, sheer audacity, but by the use of magicked silver bars, powered by similar words translated into different languages. The story is mostly told from the perspective of Robin Swift, orphaned in Canton and brought by a ‘generous’ English benefactor to Old Blighty, raised in multiple languages and sent to the university’s Royal Institute of Translation. So we are taking a deep dive into the dark undertones of academia, Victorian-era racism, colonialism, class… Sounds like a lot, right? And it is indeed a tome, which while I very much enjoyed, probably could have been whittled down by around 150 pages (in all fairness, I think both no book should be longer than 276 pages and no movie longer than 93 minutes).

• Watch: After not having been to the movies in aaaaages (ok, so like six weeks but that’s a long time for someone who has a GRADUATE DIPLOMA IN FILM EDITING THANK YOU), I finally broke my dry spell with a viewing of Past Lives at one of Melbourne’s (thankfully many) gorgeous art deco cinemas. It’s a delicately beautiful romantic drama spanning over 24 years (not literally, as not everyone is Richard Linklater). Na Young (Seung Ah Moon) and Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim) are 12 year old academic overachievers who share a crush, conveniently on each other. Na Young’s family immigrates to Canada and she changes her name to Nora Moon. After 12 years, they track each other down over Facebook and form an intense relationship over Skype. Very 2012 indeed. Nora, feeling overwhelmed, asks for a break and we are propelled another 12 years into the future where the two are set to lay eyes on each other for the first time in decades. They’re not friends, they’re not strangers, they’re not really exes, so who are they really to each other? It’s a beautiful mediation on relationships and (the concept of) soulmates that is – as a bonus – only 106 minutes long.

• Listen: Consider yourself a bit of a yogi, but at times, feel somewhat embarrassed about what Western culture has done to yoga? Pop in your earbuds and tune into Yoga is Dead. Two American-Indians somewhat eviscerate modern yoga, exploring how power, privilege, race, cultural appropriation and capitalism have infected this ancient practice. Did white women kill yoga? Was it vinyasa or… perhaps vegans? Dive in to find out.

• Eat: Nothing much to report really, due to my aforementioned confession of not feeling at all like cooking. I did however, go out for xiao long bao twice in one week; it was an accident that I absolutely do not regret. And hopefully by the time you read this, I’ll be tucking into this for breakfast.

Thanks for reading. There’s a few interesting projects in the pipeline, which will be great fun to write about, I reckon. And hopefully help me get my cooking mojo back.

‘Til we meet again, stay well and well-fed.

-Celine

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