>>2854174Diabolical, but I believe in you. Sample a bit of soil around the orchid to try and get the symbiotic mycorrhizal fungi if the genus needs it to grow. There's some good papers on propagating different orchids (researched thelymitra, in my case). As for food, look for old indigenous or settler's accounts too, there's some surprising things you can eat (macrozamia comes to mind) but they usually require an assload of prep first, hence most people (and animals) don't bother.
>>2854178Assuming you're south or west of Newcastle, there's a good abundance of edible species in wet forest and rainforest, literature helps but yams are more common than you'd expect, you just need to know what to look for and how to prep it. They (and native raspberries) don't exactly taste great, but that's better than most edible natives that just taste like utter dogshit. Don't go super hard on the dianella fruits though, unless you like laxatives. There's other things (lomandras, syzygium, cissus and many more I can't be assed to remember) but always do your research first, there was a website dedicated to bush tucker that was pretty thorough, especially around the Sydney area - I'll try and remember it.
Failing that, there's a metric fuckload of deer running rampant along the coastal fringe and out to the Watagans/Yengo and there's no bag limit on introduced species, so get savvy taking them out.
On topic, did you know lots of invertebrates glow under UV? I got a UV flashlight for workshop and uranium hunting recently, and like to go strolling out in wet forests with it. Lichens look phenomenal with it.
