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Imaginary Shopping
It’s Thursday morning and I’m at the grocery store with my elderly neighbor. The parking lot is a vast sea of pavement, but we park close to the entrance since she has a handicapped tag.
Her knee was the problem. The knee got fixed, but somewhere along the way she began to lose her nouns. The verbs and pronouns stuck around, but the nouns have gone missing.
Produce is our first destination, but to get there we have to pass the floral display. My friend loves flowers and she gazes at the colorful blossoms with reverence. She has forgotten all the flower names except for “orchid”, because, as she explains every week, “My husband used to grow orchids”.
I have the odd feeling that the flowers aren’t real. I have to touch some of the petals to see for myself. It's the colors. They come in the most unnatural and gaudy colors and look like children's plastic toys.
Then we are off to the produce department to pick up a plastic bag of iceberg lettuce pieces. There are lots of plastic bags and boxes full of various green items. Amazing how the leaves are encased in plastic, sealed up and turned into 'products'. Everyone seems comfortable with plastic bags and boxes, though – they have brand names, bar codes, lots of printing and pictures. And the pictures are usually a lot more colorful than what is actually inside.
We venture into the part of the store where no trace of real plant material can be found. Except on labels. At the great wall of salad dressing, each bottle is wrapped in pictures of heavenly salads or scenes from the “Italian countryside”.
Onward to cereal. Even at 10 am the cereal aisle is busy. This is where the drivers of those little motorized vehicles congregate. Their hands reach up to the colorful boxes with the weirdly open, smiling cartoon mouths. i
We are searching for “the one that looks like that other one”. Fortunately, I understand what she means. Last week, we used a coupon to buy a box of Frosted Flakes, with the smiling tiger face instead of her usual Raisin Bran with the smiling sun. She was disappointed when she opened the box that “there weren’t any of those things”, meaning the raspberries pictured on the package.
While she was sorting her coupons I checked the ingredients on some of the boxes. They all seemed to contain substances that were once plants, but through scientific ingenuity and vast amounts of fuel and human effort had been transformed into something else, entirely. Flakes, spheres, little woven pillows and multicolored micro donuts.
My neighbor has her cereal. Now she's ready to buy her peanut M&M's with the smiling candy characters, and her cookies with the happy smiling elf.
Thistle Juice
Thistle is growing all over the field in back of my neighborhood. Thanks to a book I just read,
THe Wild Wisdom of Weeds I have learned that these prickly leaves make wonderful juice.
The juice is super simple - just put the leaves in the blender along with some water and vroom. The result is very green and mild.
The field became my own private grocery store this summer. But then the mowers came through. In a few minutes, these foot-high plants were reduced to a stubble.
I was upset, but I still managed to find a few remaining plants along the edges, enough to collect and blend. Then, after a few days, they started growing back.
My neighbors walk their dogs in this field and are curious about what I'm collecting. When I tell them, they are baffled, as if I said I was collecting moon rocks or fairy dust. Even the most health conscious, who buy organic and make smoothies with hemp seed had never heard of anything as weird as eating weeds.
Especially thistle.
Thistle is not the only weed given the spotlight in The Wild Wisdom of Weeds". The author describes 13 species that are found all over the world. She makes the point that these plants grow just fine in the most unhospitable conditions, are edible and nutritous, and might represent a sustainable food supply. Instead of spending so much time and money trying to eradicate them, in favor of inferior crops, we might be better off harvesting the weeds.
I was impressed with the author's success in not only getting the message out about the value of weeds, but convincing other people to give them a try, or a least let them be.
I'm inspired - maybe one day my field will be full of neighbors foraging for thistle leaves, and maybe the mowers will be long gone. And no one will think I'm strange
Recovery
Last winter, the maintenance crew dug this hole and scraped away all the topsoil.
Supposedly, they needed a drainage pond for our geothermal units. I could see it right out my window, and it looked disturbing. Like an injury.
As the weather warmed, cracks appeared in the bare ground. The blanket of growing things was missing.
But then I noticed some little sprigs of green. No one tried to help by scattering grass seed over the area, but plants were showing up anyway - weeds.
I visited often, marveling at their industriousness. I had read that weeds are Nature's Bandaid - showing up when there is damage to be healed.
Day by day, more weeds popped up. They came in all shapes and sizes. Gradually, a protective green blanket began to cover the wound.
By now, in September, the injury is invisible. All I see is a verdant green field bursting with life.
I am amazed at the variety of weeds and the way they are distributed. There's a clump of grasses here, a stand of goldenrod, there, some wild flowers intermingled with the rest. I count dozens of species all sharing the ground in a dazzling array. There seems to be room for everyone.
Like a team of specialists sent from Headquarters to solve the problem.
Squirmy and Smelly
Look at all this stuff! Banana peels and cauliflower cores and pepper seeds and damp teabags... It all needs to go somewhere, but I can't bring myself to dump it all in the trash, the same trash as the junk mail and used kitty litter.
Somehow, the idea has gotten lodged in my brain that organic matter from food waste should go back into the food chain.
Before I became a condo-dweller I tried keeping a composter in my back yard. Filling the bin was easy, but keeping the contents balanced was not. In the summer the aroma was noticeable. Would the neighbors complain? Would buzzards start to land on top, since it smelled like death?
When I moved I was relieved to pass my composter on. But where to put all the scraps? Worms. The marketing material looked great. Just feed them apple cores and banana peels and they will squirm around happily in some out of the way spot.
They started out in the kitchen until the fruit flies made a permanent black cloud in the corner and orange mold started creeping out the sides. The worms were fine, but their home wasn't.
If I was really good at worming, maybe it wouldn't be so smelly and buggy. Right now, it's in the garage. The worms are still wiggling, even after a few cold snaps.
They seem to have a limitless appetite for coffee grounds, tea bags, and shredded junk mail. The odd thing is that I have become quite fond of them. They are actually kind of cute in a pink, slippery way, and I find myself talking to them when I empty out my scrap bin. Sounds like the makings of a movie - "Talks with Worms".
Weaponized Vegetables
My kitchen is a graveyard of dead veggies. Bin and bags of carrot tops, potato peels, cantelope rinds, slimey lettuce, shrivveled oranges and brown apples cover the counters. It’s starting to get kind of gross.
Good thing I have a Bokashi composting bucket.
According to the Planet Natural Research Center: “Bokashi composting is an anaerobic process that relies on inoculated bran to ferment kitchen waste, including meat and dairy, into a safe soil builder and nutrient-rich tea for your plants."
They don't mention one other feature...the smell. But smell is not the right word. In fact, there is no word in the English language that comes close to describing what emerges from the bucket when you get ready to drain it.
The other problem is what to do with the finished compost. It still smells pretty awful. My strategy has been to empty the bucket into an outdoor planter and cover it with potting soil until the second half of the process is complete. True enough, the stuff does become dark crumbly compost, but it needs to hang out with dirt and worms for several months first. In the meantime, it’s a great source of toxic fumes!
Addition: It's not supposed to smell bad!!! I just read that I'm not putting enough of the probiotic powder into the container. OOPS!
Fashionable Insanity
I recently visited a pioneer house, turned into a little musuem.
Along with hand made furniture, wagons and farm tools there was a display of women'ts dresses. My tour group, clad in jeans and t-shirts, shared a collective sense of disbelief at the tiny proportions of these heavily layered garments with the rigid corsets underneath.
We wondered how anyone could even breath in clothes like that, much less do any physical work. So much fabric to carry around. We learned that the the water buckets near the fireplace were for putting out skirt fires.
Our guide explained that this clothing was what was society expected women to wear. Anything else would be regarded as quite improper.
We could all agree that this was a case of fashion insanity. There seemed to be no good reason for a human being to cloth themselves like that.
So I look out at our carefully trimmed lawns and wonder - in 200 years will this look just as insane? Will the people of the future understand the destructiveness of these large smooth areas of monoculture grass, drenched in fertilizer and weed killer and assaulted by fuel gobbling machines dumping their exhaust into the air.
Maybe there will be museums where the visitors can gasp in horror at the typical suburban lawn
Fashionable insanity.
War for the World
The mowers came through today with their weapons of grass destruction - deafening and monstrous. But the "landscape" must be maintained!
While the racket was going on, I had a thought - what if we replaced "landscape" with "conquered nation"?
It felt as if the countryside was being subdued. The defeated citizens were being beaten into submission. Mass executions were taking place. The conquerors can't have uppity plants trying to take their land back. No - ruthless control is the only option.
Well-behaved shrubs and flowers are like citizens who live under colonization. By being meek and submissive they are allowed to live.
Weeds are like the brave resistance. They rise up and fight again and again despite poisons and yanking and pre-emergent chemicals.
You can laugh, but if you learn a little about weeds and about the effect of mowing, this might be your perspective, too.
Weeds appear to be nature's Bandaid. When the land is injured, they are the first aid team who aerate and rebuild the topsoil.
Weeds are experts at regenerating stressed lands. They were hired by nature specifically to be there because each particular weed is the most qualified for the task at hand...the wild weeds are succession plants and after performing their job of re-fertilizing and re-mineralizing the soil, will move on to new disturbed lands. They also provide forage and nectar for pollinating insects, a critical element in sustaining life and food sources on Earth for many species, including humans. Their life's work over the years will create a new fertile habitat for other species to move in and thrive.(The Wild Wisdom of Weeds)
Mowing has widespread destructive consequences, too. Without constant mowing, our open spaces would soon be full of growing trees. Mowing creates forest fragmentation, as if the conquerors want to prevent the invaded peoples from getting together and fighting back.
Forest fragmentation is the breaking of large, contiguous, forested areas into smaller pieces... The effects of fragmentation are well documented in all forested regions of the planet. In general, by reducing forest health and degrading habitat, fragmentation leads to loss of biodiversity, increases in invasive plants, pests, and pathogens, and reduction in water quality.(Forest Fragmentation)
Although you don't see this story in the news, areas of our country and planet are losing trees at an alarming rate.
Forest in my backyard and state and region and continent started dying: not just a few trees, but trees by the millions. They are still dying....Take a minute to imagine if every tree around your home, your city, your state were to wither and die. What would the world be like?... Forests hold the natural world together. They have cradled the existence of our species since we first appeared--trees and forests are the highest-functioning members of ecological society, irreplaceable players at the apex of the complex ecological web around us. They are the ecosystem engineers that create the conditions for other forms of life to exist on every level.( The Man Who Planted Trees)
Forest are the 'lungs of the earth'...The forest is not simply a random group of trees. It is a vast complex of organisms which have lived together and differentiated their forms and relationships over millions of years...When forests are cut, the rainfall, which the trees had moderated, rushes over the are surface of the Earth carrying off the loose soil...All of the major forest ecosystems of the planet are under severe attack. (Final Empire by William Kotke )
Instead of wringing our hands over the destruction of the Amazon rainforest or the evils of industry, what if we started with our own yards? What if we stopped the assault? Turned off the war machine. Allowed the land to heal.
What would it take to make that happen?
Rescued Weed
I found this sprig of lambs quarters on the side of the road.
It's amazing that anything could grow in a thin layer of soil over asphalt. It lived in a pot on my deck all summer but didn't grow much bigger.
Then, the following spring, lambs quarters started showing up all over. I put flowers in the pot with this one as a disguise. Even the ever-vigilant landscapers missed this blatant weed hiding in plain sight.
Eyes and Ears of the Land
Last weekend I went on a wild foods adventure and got to meet one of my foraging heros, Samual Thayer. I had read his books and watched his videos and when I learned he would be an instructor at the Nature Wonder Weekend at North Bend State Park in West Virginia, I signed up right away.
I'm so glad I had this opportunity. Our little group of 'gatherers' hiked the wooded mountaintops for hours, learning about the plants that were there and the ones that were missing. Deer were rampant and had grazed away much of the greenery under the trees. The park was organizing a cull, but we learned that it might be years before the native species returned, if ever, since so much damage had already been done.
There were still many treasures to be found - a multitude of mushrooms, berries and roots.
But what I remember most was Mr. Thayer's discussion of the wider implications of foraging: "Foragers are the eyes and ears of the land". He talked about how foragers spend time outdoors, in relationship with the earth, walking the paths, touching the ground, noticing the patterns of growth, interacting with the multiplicity of life. The forager is the first to notice when something is wrong in a place because the forager has been paying attention to the life of that place.
The weekend kept me busy with workshops and presentations, and a chance to sample many kinds of wild foods, but these words have remained with me - 'the eyes and ears of the land'.
When I wander my own little patch of field, that's how I feel, too. I notice the day to day patterns in the community where each species takes it's turn in the sun. When a disaster happens - mowers coming through or a patch of ground being sprayed with weed killer, I feel the loss, as if these plants are family and I cheer them on when they start to recover.
I'm beginning to find that foraging is not so much about finding things to eat as spending time hanging out with the 'family'.
Mr. Thayer's latest book on Amazon:
Incredible Wild Edibles by Samual Thayer
Wild vs Tame
Wild grapes are growing in the field behind my condo. I was a little hesitant to eat one, but they weren't bad - kind of sour with big crunchy seeds.
Nothing like the grocery store variety which are huge and come in a plastic bag..
The contrast was even more apparent since I just finished reading this book, "The American Way of Eating, which included an eye--popping account of life in the California produce fields.
I learned that those perfect little bunches of grapes didn't just get there by themselves. They were picked by real people crouching in the heat, plucking each bunch from enormous rows of vines somewhere far away.
As a grocery store customer, the produce aisle just is. The overhead lights and the piped in music and neat stacks of fruit are so familiar that I never even thought about how it all got there.. Grapes were just another product, always found in one spot, tight bunches tucked into plastic bags.
But this book gave me a peek behind the scenes. And I was bothered that our produce is picked by migrant laborers and transported great distances, when so much could be grown nearby in our own fields and yards.
I wondered why it food is supposed to only come from the grocery store? Why yards are just ornamental. The apple and pear trees in the neighborhood are designed to look pretty and not produce any fruit.
It's as if food production is so messy and unpleasant that we keep it segregated to "farm land" or "orchards" where it won't ruin the landscape. The yard is a food desert. Yet here is a corner where food has sneaked in and I can sneak out and gather it!
The wild grapes are not very sweet, but they grow by themselves. They are not just for me either. Birds have been eating them too. If I want to eat them, I have to pick them myself.
A friend who is a chef said he he was familiar with foraging, but that most people prefer that it come in a package. I say they don't know what they are missing.
Just Toss It
I’ve been watching a squirrel on my deck. He was eating a nut and tossing pieces shell over the side.
He didn't worry about keeping the deck clean. He didn’t look for a trash can, or sweep and vacuum. He just left the mess where it landed in the great outdoors.
Must be nice. When I slice up a vegetable, I git rid of the scraps, too. They go into the trash can. Unlike the great outdoors, the trash can fits under my sink. But it serves the same purpose — receiving the bits and pieces of things that I don’t want. Which is a lot, now that I’m paying attention.
Instead of returning to the earth, my scraps get embalmed in a ‘sanitary’ landfill. In the meantime, more organic stuff is taken from the earth to start the same process over again. Imagine zillions of kitchens, with people tossing endless seeds and skins and leaves, sending them all on a one-way trip.
Oddly, I never thought about this for most of my life. The trash can was just part of the environment, like the sun — probably created on the 3rd day, right after the plants, so Eve wouldn’t mess up the garden with apple peels.
And those naughty people who litter?
We have to be taught not do that. We aren’t supposed to interact directly with the outdoors. We have institutions to do that for us — farms and grocery stores on one end and garbage trucks and landfills on the other. We are in the middle. The outdoors is ‘landscape’ — we don’t actually live there.
But wait a minute — why does the squirrel get away with littering and we don’t? One reason — our litter isn’t like nutshells that go back into the topsoil. Plastic straws are forever.
Now imagine you are driving along sipping your mocha latte. When it’s gone, you open up the window and toss the cup out. Imagine that in a few hours, days, some span of time, that coffee cup begins to behave like a dropped leaf. It crumbles and rejoins the earth. You have actually done a good thing by littering. All that is required is different materials that are not immortal.
Instead of ‘zero waste’, let’s let up on waste, and respect it’s place in the ecosystem. Reusable containers are immortal, too — the idea doesn’t really match the way nature works. They only reinforce the idea that nature is ‘out there’ and we are not participants. That we are perched on some lofty ledge, looking down on the earth.
I'm looking forward to a time when 'littering' is proper behavior and nice people don't throw things in the trash.
Aloe Magic
I read long ago that aloe juice was good for the skin and especially burns. Ho hum - there are so many claims for healing this and that - I never paid attention.
Then, I got burned.
I'm not even sure how it happened. I lifted the lid off some steaming vegetables and yikes - a blast of hot steam blew right across my hand. I knew immediately that it was badder than bad.
Cold water was my first idea, but then what? I could see my large aloe plant across the room, beckoning. Ok, I thought - I'll give you a try.
I sliced off the lowest leaf at the stem and rubbed the juicy end over the burn. Kind of stingy, but cool. Then I went back to fixing dinner, expecting to have a painful hand for a long time. Oddly enough, I got busy and completely forgot the burn, since it stopped hurting.
I applied the aloe juice several times that evening. In the morning there was a huge blister. But it didn't hurt as long as it was covered in aloe.
Over the next few days the blister broke and things began to look really nasty and oozy. Is it time to go to a doctor? Will I end up with an infection, the dreaded MRSA, laid up in a hospital with an IV?
Since I didn't really have time to go through all that, I just kept slathering on the aloe.
Well, the ooze dried up, followed by a big ugly scab, and after a day or so, that peeled off and voila - perfectly good-as-new slightly pink skin.
How odd that the juice from the leaves of this mysterious desert plant, when spread upon damaged human skin would work such magic. There is no reason this should happen. It may sound silly, but I like to think it's just the kindness of the plant.
Dirty Secret - I Hate Gardening
"What?!? You don't enjoy digging in the dirt? It's such a satisfying, healthy and noble pursuit!
But to tell the truth, I would much rather be doing just about anything other than digging in the dirt. It's not just a lot of work, either. To me, gardening feels artificial. It's a way of coercing nature into growing what we want where we want it.
Houseplants bother me, too. There is nothing sadder that a potted plant in a house. Don't plants belong outside with other plants? Not crammed into a pot and dependent on me to remember when to water. I don't usually get that right and they wilt.
That's why I like foraging. You can leave nature alone and accept what happens to be around at the time. Nature knows far more than I ever will about tending to plants - so I decorate my house with plastic imitations and have lunch on the lawn.
Bokashi the Right Way
No more DIY bokashi composting - this time I'm going with the official system.
It was either that or give up. After 2 years of lugging around 5 gallon hardware store buckets full of partially decomposed kitchen garbage, I finally realized I was doing it wrong. First, my nested buckets had no spigot so draining was a huge nuisance - picking up the inner bucket which weighed a ton, finding a place to set it - really nasty and stinky, and pouring what was in the bottom bucket into the bushes outside.
I should have had a spigot and I should have used smaller buckets. But my first mistake was not using enough bokashi starter material.
Now that I am using an official kit with instructions, I know to add a lot of starter. And it works. The bucket is in my kitchen where it's convenient and believe it or not, it hardly smells at all. Even the liquid from the spigot is not too putrid and my houseplants seem happy to drink it up.
I you want to know why I am really doing this, it's because it's a kind of religious practice. During the few weeks between almost giving up on composting and the arrival of the new bucket, I was throwing away my kitchen waste. Hauling off the coffee grounds, limp old vegetables, banana peels... They were destined for the landfill.
Somewhere, a voice was asking me - why? Why is this organic matter being buried in a massive tomb? Why is it not going back to the earth to make new soil?
I don't know who the voice belongs to. But I find it hard to ignore. Sometimes I think the symbol of what is wrong with our world is the trash can.
Flugar
This is my grandmother's cookbook - the classic of southern cooking, Mrs. Dull's.
Holding it brings back my grandmother's voice, her dusty apron, the green beans and potatoes simmered on the stove while corn pone toasted in the oven. The food she made was always wonderful, and every meal was finished off with a treat - lemon cookies, ice cream, coconut cake, divinity fudge, pound cake, pecan pie, and every kind of cookie you could imagine.
As long as I could remember, the women in my family made treats and goodies - cookies, candy, date bread, muffins, pound cakes, and pies. I assumed these were the essential elements of family care. This is the cooking tradition that I grew up with and I even had an updated version of Mrs. Dull's cookbook.
True to my lineage, my kitchen was well stocked with flour and sugar. These two ingredients formed the backbone of all of these recipes, two kinds of white powder that seemed to always go together - Flugar.
As a young mother in the 1990's, I kept a canister of homemade chocolate chip cookies on the counter. For breakfast, I make pancakes and biscuits from scratch. My bread machine cranked out little golden loaves for dinner. There was always banana bread or muffins or pound cake or a new cookie recipe.
I used a lot of flugar.
My family was happy with the situation, but we weren't healthy. We all had terrible teeth. Mine were painfully sensitive and full of root canals and fillings. The kids were always at the dentist or orthodontist and my husband developed gum disease. I was getting fat. And my joints hurt.
Then, about 7 years ago, I started reading about gluten and sugar. Out of curiosity, I decided to lay off the flugar
I had never indulged much in goodies, but now I was avoiding flour, too. My friends and family thought I was crazy. I got lots of exasperated looks.
But things started changing. I started losing weight. My joints felt better. But the best part was when I went to the dentist and there was nothing wrong - the first time in years.
So I kept it up. Every six months, the dentist would sadly inform me that my teeth were fine. It's been seven years since I stopped eating flugar. Seven years without a single cavity. The sensitivity is gone, too - cleanings used to be so painful that I needed novacaine.
Oddly, neither my dentist or hygienist showed the slightest curiosity about what had changed. But oddest of all is that my lifestyle is looked upon as completely bizarre. I do my best to keep my habit private, but when someone finds out they are often horrified.
They can sort of understand gluten intolerance, but sugar? It's as if I decided to give up tv or toothpaste (oops - I gave those up too....). Flugar seems to be the main ingredient in all our food.
When I recently attended a Wild Foods Weekend in West Virginia, there was a fascinating presentation on the history of food among the early settlers in the area. Over and over again, there were references to the disturbing lack of bread. Even with all the other foods available, the settlers felt a compulsion to grow wheat so that they could have bread. And growing wheat in that part of the country must have been a challenge.
How much easier their lives would have been had they harvested the abundant wild foods that we enjoyed that weekend - nuts, berries, fruit, acorns and cattails, venison and fish - some of the many foods the Native Americans enjoyed.
I remember my grandmother, shifting her false teeth in her mouth and complaining about her stiff knees and hands and all the pills she depended on for her many ailments, and I wonder.... would her life have been easier without Flugar?
Spring Harvest
Lesser Celandine is ready to harvest! I've been gathering a basket full every day and there's no end in sight. Tonight I made soup:
Lesser Celandine and Asparagus Soup
- Rinse about 2 cups Lesser Celendine leaves
- Add to steamer with about 1 cup asparagus shoots, chopped up.
- Steam about 10 minutes.
- Puree in blender
- Add a little salt and pepper
Voila!
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