A Revived Farming Life Blog
The sour cherries are in various stages of ripening, but no matter what color they are they are a bit too sour for me to eat too many at a time.
Most of the very ripe (and tastiest) will go to the birds in the next few days, but human hands will grab the ones in reach.
The short season is basically defined by the birds’ activity and not so much about how many we pick for our pies and our freezers.
The secret, abandoned, out-of-the-way blueberry patch that I wrote about three years ago? Yeah, forget about scoring any berries there anymore. The patch has blown up, the word leaked out and spread out like the tarps and sheets we used to use in the gathering of those sweet little blue spheres.
Kristin and I took our friends Monica and Nick down to Wilmington with one of our “missions” of the trip being the collection of vast quantities of berries. This wasn’t meant to be.
A recent rain had knocked what was left of the ripe berries to the ground for the ants to carry off. What little was left were slightly under ripe and tangy, not worth more than a few pops here and there. The people had invaded and stripped everything else away.
At least it was a nice day – cool, sunny, perfect just for being outside and walking around. The focus quickly changed from the blueberries to the downtown farmer’s market and to fig gathering at the beach.
Jean says:where at the beach did you find figs?
Just about every yard has a few fig trees.
Last month while chasing pigs through the woods (a story that I will write about soon) I stumbled into a large area filled with Common Mullein – Verbascum thapsus. Mullein likes to grow in recently disturbed areas, and this place was really disturbed – trees uprooted and bulldozed away into giant piles.
Mullein is a fascinating plant. It easily colonizes disturbed areas, but its growth requirements prevent it from becoming invasive. Too much shade and it is all over for this plant. Rapid succession from other plants will crowd it out.
This early succession plant can actually make itself less viable by its own presence. A study in the Journal of Ecology conducted in our area concludes that as the years progress, the plant will become smaller and smaller and seed production will drop off significantly each year. According to the study, the first generation produced five times as much seed as the third generation.
Our friend Nick came over, so he and Kristin decided that we should go out to the spot and harvest some of the mullein leaves. These first generation plants had some giant leaves, meaning less time harvesting and more time picking the ticks off our legs.
Mullein has many medicinal properties – it can be made into a tea or smoked to battle a cough. Sounds counterproductive, right?
The plant is also referred to as Nature’s Toilet Paper, but the irritating hairs that cover the plant make me think that you would need to be in some dire need to use it for that purpose more than once in a while.
The dried stalk contains many oils that supposedly make it a good torch. I am going to try it out this Fall after the stalks are up.
Impressive and inspiring. Now I was wondering why I always thought that Nature’s TP was the burdock leaf (the explanation is, I’ve used it myself, please do not ask for details.)
Both are much better than the nettle for that particular use, although the nettle can be boiled for human consumption (just as you prepare spinach), or freshly mixed with grains for yard fowls.
Which ones of these do actually grow in the Carolinas? (obviously, besides mullein)
We do grow nettles in our herb garden, using them for tea and for food (great in scrambled eggs). We are still attempting to grow burdock. I think the trick is finding the correct micro-climate for it to last in the hot summers.
I was hoping the cold winter would help limit the tick population. Many afternoons in the woods with Max has proven me wrong!
Yes, they like the cool weather near the forest, but not inside the forest, since they don’t have enough sunlight there.
The only such place I can think of is near a creek or a lake, if you have one nearby. I still don’t know how well they tolerate humidity.
I never thought to put nettles in eggs, but that does sound good! I really like a sautee of nettles with apple cider vinegar, garlic and butter. There is also a trick to folding it up and biting down on it to eat it raw. Supposedly, when you bite it a certain way it deactivates the stinger, but I have always ended up with tingly gums.
The ticks have been horrible this year. None of the weather fluctuations did anything to drop the population. While the pigs were in the woods they became fully covered in ticks. They still pick them up in the tall grass, but the ticks are much easier to control and pull off.
In my line of life you have to embrace some level of hypocrisy. Anarchism is an imperfect ideology, especially in day to day application. In regards to food, we build momentum against industrial agriculture, monoculture, neocolonialism, global food distribution systems and chain grocery stores while building regional food systems, community gardens, CSAs, and cooking for Food Not Bombs. I work on the latter all while relying heavily on the waste streams of the former.
The whole dichotomy came into focus (again) as I was hauling ten pounds of bananas out of the dumpster, taking in a nice and cozy 2600 mile diet subsidy. We are building a farm with a focus on self sufficiency. Since that goal is way off, we rely very heavily on the waste stream.
I have written about dumpster diving in the past, but the level of food and resource rescuing we do now is pretty unprecedented. The chickens eat it (bananas and melons are their favorite), the goat eats it (cabbage trimmings are always available) and we all certainly do our part to go through as much of the food as we can. The pigs are coming soon; they will eat whatever we other critters cannot get through. Clothing, shelving, buckets, cardboard, wire, dishes, and a billion other things get converted into feeders, mulch and everyday farm equipment.
Artichokes, red peppers, starfruit, melons, red bananas, eggplant, avocado, asparagus – a sampling of the seasons from around the world, all held up by petroleum and horrible working conditions – picked, packed, shipped and then thrown away while still edible. It is basically a punch in the face of all the work done … The wasteful practices are illustrated over an over again by the sight of good food going to the landfill. But we intervene, daily, breaking the waste chain, feeding ourselves and others while the world dies around us.
Yesterday – in ten seconds in the grocery store dumpster – I pulled out an entire case of tomato sauce. Twelve jars with an expiration date sometime in 2011, undamaged and unopened, thrown away simply because it was delivered to the wrong store. So it gets thrown away. Not donated, not given to employees, not sampled out. If a punk wasn’t there to rescue it, it would be on its way to the landfill at this moment, the jars broken on the sides of the trash truck and contents stuck on the gears and plates and pieces of a wasteful world.
But if that waste stream stopped suddenly (like we want it to), our current food paradigm would change radically. We are not yet growing enough to feed ourselves. Entire subcultures are built on the availability of trashed food, websites and blogs are devoted to one thing only –
Every year in the US nearly 100 billion pounds of edible food are sent to landfills by retailers, restaurants, and consumers. It’s also estimated that only about 4 billion pounds of food would be necessary to eliminate hunger in America.
Don’t get me wrong, a huge pot of dumpster veggie soup is delicious, but with Trashy Gourmet I hope to show that dumpsters offer an endless array of options for your culinary delight. So start diving, get cooking, and stuff your face while you help save the world! Eating against capitalism tastes so good.
Can we eat our way out of capitalism? Can we reconcile our goals with our current actions? Pass me an avocado and we’ll talk about it later…
that is such a wonderful picture of what is now under the wolves den waiting for me to come home and hope that noel is cooking some.
I really enjoyed watching Kristin describe her diving technique for the Greenhorns documentary a couple of weekends ago. We also discussed the philosophical pros and cons of living off the largesse by dumpster diving.
Thanks for putting into words what we are all thinking as we straddle the unstable ground between the world we strive to create and the one we wish to leave behind.
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Our land is still pretty mysterious, not knowing what is around or who is around. With each trip some of the little secrets are revealed, and I feel that we are becoming more and more part of the sparsely inhabited community.
We met a neighbor who told us a little about the trail network that crosses a dozen or so properties (ours included) and found out more of the family history of the place we bought. The trails are miles long, dumping out onto various properties or ending up at creeks and roads.
As a start, we walked west on the trail that leaves our property. It was apparent that the forest had been clear cut in recent history, more recent on the properties south of this particular trail. Many of the older trees were spaced in a way that indicated that the land had been used as a pasture. Almost all of the large trees had scarring from when they had been used as fence posts. Others were just big and dead.
The recently cut forest gives great glimpses of how succession works in our area. We have several models in action though. Since clearing land for pasture usually leaves the remnants of hardwoods in the area, what would usually be pine dominated growth is now a heavy mix of young hardwoods.
Also, since we have not begun farming our open space yet, fast growing scrub and trees are coming up all over. Sweet gum, tulip poplar, sumac and cedar are already a few feet high in some places.
So, with the research I was able to look through, I figure the forest around us was cut more than thirty years ago but less than seventy years ago. I could be wrong as I am also relying on some things that I learned twelve years ago in ecology classes.
Along the trail we found some late ripening wild blueberries. If I had to guess, they will probably ripen around the first of September. I haven’t been able to find the name of the wild berry that ripens late.
We also saw quite a few wild creatures, from deer to beetles to spiders. Several large spiders made great use of hollow tree parts for their webs.
This luna moth (Actias luna) was at the end of its life, having lost its tails. The adult moths live only a week, long enough to mate. They don’t even have mouths to eat with, such is the singularity of their purpose.
Noel caught a crayfish (Cambaroides sp.) big enough to use as fishing bait but not big enough to make a very good meal.
The stony creek at the end of our walk deserves much more exploration. I imagine we will all spend a lot of time there poking around among the rocks and pools.
From the looks of the high banks, it also looks like we could have some nice little swimming holes if the rain would cooperate.
As usual there is an end of the line, which we will be sure to adhere to until we can get some permission to trespass. It usually isn’t hard to get such permission as long as the owners know your name and intentions. It should come in time, but we have enough space to explore for the time being…
Trees, creeks, crawfish, deer…….wild blueberries in september….hmmm…
I randomly ran across your very interesting website. NC grown living in OR. I love your dead tree picture. Would you give permission for me to paint it? Check out my website and you’ll understand why I _had_ to ask. 
Dendrology in acrylic is my current addiction…
Sure
Yesterday we got the bug to clean up our room and get rid of some of the piles of papers and such that had collected over the last few months. I am pretty big on creating piles of crap – receipts, fliers, magazines, various notes, paystubs, etc. – but I am not so big on cleaning them up. The rain outside facilitated our cleaning rampage, and I even had time to roll up a few dollars in loose change.
In the afternoon the weather turned, and we decided to “blow off some stink” and take a walk to the train bridge. The rain had been pretty intense so the massively polluted Burnt Mill Creek was pretty high.
On the walk to the bridge, Kristin grabbed some honeysuckle and started eating the nectar. It is really good, but you don’t get a lot out of it.
You basically just pick the flower off the branch and pull out the filaments.
When the filament comes out of the flower, a drop of nectar will form at the base.
Among other uses, honeysuckle vines make strong cordage.
Along the walk to the bridge there are a huge number of mulberry trees, all hybridized into various shades and tastes. We found red, black, pink and white, some tasty and some not so tasty and others that we pretty gross. I thought the white mulberry had the best taste, but a few of the trees we sampled had no flavor at all.
Here is a white mulberry ready to pick –
Me picking black mulberries, sporting a well-worn AK Press t-shirt –
You can see all the various shades and sizes of the ripe berries in the sum total of our picking –
Unripe mulberries are hallucinogenic. With the hallucinations come severe nausea and cramps, so it might not be the best idea to run out and get some unripe fruit. Also, large amounts of ripe fruit can act as a laxative so take it easy unless you need that sort of thing.
Our walk brought us into contact with a bunch of creatures, most notable a huge amount of young frogs. The frogs were no bigger than a fingernail, and they were everywhere under our feet.
We also ran into a family of geese near the flooded creek.
While I was taking pictures of the geese, a man came down from this house to ask if we had seen the alligator that had come out with the flood. We hadn’t. He said it was about six feet long and traveling slow.
The next creatures we had to dodge were the fiddler crabs hanging out in the grass near the creek. Since the creek is inter-tidal and brackish, there are usually thousands of these crabs hanging out in the mud. With the flooding there were plenty in the grass and puddles as well.
And of course the flooding also brings out the record of human progress. Plastic bottles, Styrofoam to-go food containers and plenty of basketballs rush towards the ocean at low tide and back into the neighborhoods at high tide. The trash never really makes it anywhere as it builds up into floating rafts of debris or settles into the mud on the sides of the creek.
This is our legacy. If you contributed (and we all have at some point), thank you for helping build this pile of shit. If you need a reminder of why you should use refillable containers, why you should use the recycle bin or simply use a garbage can, then just come back and look at this picture…
Ashley DeLaup says:Would it be possible for me to use your trash picture in a presentation about how we are feeding wild animals? Thanks for your consideration!
ashley.delaup@denvergov.org
Kris Kiessling says:Curious… it is more than a year later. Is the trash still there or, since you know where it is and it is accessible to you, did you get friends together and clean it up, recycling what you could and properly disposing of what you couldn’t?
I no longer live in Wilmington, but I visited this past weekend. I went out to the trash area and it was actually pretty minimal. A few stray bottles here and there. Either the city has started cleaning the water up or something else is going on. Without access to a boat it wasn’t possible for me to get to the trash. It would be more effective to get a group of school kids out there to clean it up to remind them that trash doesn’t go into some ether world when they throw it out the car window or off their bike.
One of my favorite places in Wilmington is a train trestle that bridges a tidal creek, specifically Burnt Mill Creek, near my house. My profile picture is of me and Kristin throwing rocks off the bridge. The trestle is only a short walk or bike ride from my house, so I end up there fairly often. It is a great foraging area most times of the year, and I went out today expecting to find something good. However, I got sidetracked and ended up exploring instead of foraging.
Under and around the train trestle are a series of above ground waste water pipes, pushing storm water and human “waste” from downtown and the surrounding area out to the Northside water treatment plant. I have walked on several of the pipes over the years, ending up in all kinds of interesting places. One of the pipes ends up behind the back lot of Screen Gems studios where you can see the prop buildings and various other crap from the movie and television industries. Another pipe weaves around the backyards of homes and businesses. Another goes to a small, but fairly often used homeless camp.
Today, since the tide was low, I was able to hop on one of the pipes that I had not followed very far in previous explorations.
My intent on these walks is to not have an intent. Walk the pipe and see what happens. I basically walked until the vegetation growing around the pipe grew too thick and I couldn’t get by. Again, since the tide was low I jumped to the side and got to some dry high ground.
The edge of an estuary is the perfect habitat for the cottonmouth, the high grass able to hide those venomous little pricks of misery. I saw one about six years ago near the train trestle, but that was the first and last time I had seen any type of snake out there. This trip was no exception; just a few birds and the widely scattered remains of a deer.
Also scattered all over the place were various plastic flowers and ribbons, scattered into the grass never to decompose, only fade in the bleaching sun. They joined the hundreds of plastic soda bottles and aluminum cans, deflated basketballs and Frisbees floating in the estuary and piled on the ground.
I came to a gravel trail that seemed pretty well traveled by vehicle and feet. With the brightly colored potato chip bags scattered about, barely touched by the sun, and the fresh boot tracks in a somewhat dried mud puddle, I figured folks came back here all the time.
Back here, everything is kudzu heaped over dying trees, the vines themselves browning after the first frost. In the summer the kudzu piles become mountains, climbing and killing everything. The vines’ march is stopped only by the estuary. If kudzu could grow on water it would.
The kudzu opened up and I stumbled upon a discarded pile of those grave side stands that hold funeral flower wreaths. After finding a few more pieces of evidence and getting my bearings, I figured out that I had ended up behind Oakdale Cemetery.
I followed the path more, passed a dozen piles of chopped up trees, pallets and freshly dug dirt. I guess it makes sense that the unused dirt from a grave has to go somewhere. Might as well be in a pile that will eventually be colonized by kudzu. The path finally ended behind a chain link fence. The loosely locked gate had my favorite sign attached…
The view through the fence wasn’t that inviting, so I decided not to jump it. The cemetery is several hundred acres, a place I could easily explore using the front gate. The one time I actually went in, the guy at the gate gave me a map since it is pretty easy to get lost in the labyrinth. I didn’t make it far that time, but if they allowed bicycles I might consider another try.
At the gate I turned around and headed back home. Well, headed back home after throwing a couple hundred rocks from the train trestle. The other things of note for the exploration were a rope swing near a waste water pipe…
a thick stand of river cane…
and a plant in the mint family that I haven’t figured out yet.
It smelled like mint, but a bit “gamey”. It wasn’t catmint, and it wasn’t wild mint. I did find wild mint (Mentha arvensis) nearby. The closest picture I can find online is for apple mint. I couldn’t smell any apple. Anyone know what this plant is?
That mint looks like the wildly invasive stuff we accidentally planted in our garden a couple of years ago. Well actually- the planting wasn’t an accident, we just didn’t know that it would take over like it did.
We got it from Home Depot, and the tag says simply: Aromatic Herbs. Helpful. Ours has a strong, heavenly smell when you rub it.
Trace says:All mint is invasive (or it just grows really strong and well, depending on your viewpoint I guess). Some people bury plastic pots or bricks in their garden and plant the mint in that area in order to contain the plant. I would rather just pull it up and make some tea. The mint always makes it out of containment anyway…
You know, after reading that, I got to thinking. All that land the cemetery takes up could be prime real estate for a nice sprawling housing development. Call it, “Oakdale Acres…where the quiet and serene are never disturbed.”
This is actually apple mint.
Marcin form Poland says:Today I found also this mint in my garden a LOT of this mint and after some reserch in internet also I think that it is Apple Mint. And you know what its perfect for MOJITO! much better than peper mint so Im very happy that I have this mint in my garden
You are welcome for Mojito Party in my garden 
Dennis says:The unknown mint-like weed is Henbit (Lamium amplexicaule), and is indeed a member of the mint family. I am not aware of any commercial or culinary value, but that’s what it is.
Elaine says:I used to pick that mint growing up to make tea, never knew what the true name was. I’ve looked everywhere for it now and can’t find it growing wild anymore.
It’s officially fall…
It is that time of year. Plants are starting to die out in my flower beds. I pulled out the calendula carcasses; the irises and sunflowers are long gone, the mint is disappearing and the potted fig trees are starting to go dormant.
This is a great time of year to be a forager. Spring is awesome for fresh greens, and there are still some greens to be had, but fall is time for stocking up on winter protein sources. The area around where I live is full of pecan, hickory and black walnut trees. The trick is to get to some of the nuts before the other creatures clean house.
The squirrels managed to completely remove every pecan from our backyard tree, picking and eating the nuts before they were even ready to drop. This isn’t bad news necessarily as the tree is pretty small compared to all the other neighborhood trees. In looking around at the giant trees, it looks like this will be a good year for pecans, which is great since there has been a drought of the nuts over the last three years. Last year there weren’t any at all.
I am pretty sure that I can pick up at least twenty five pounds of pecans this year. I have plenty of plans for them including trying to make some cooking oil and also lots of baking ideas. Supposedly it takes four pounds of nuts to make one pound of oil.
There are also signs that the hickory nuts are starting to drop right now. Last night I took a walk to the closest tree and saw plenty of the nuts smashed in the street. I will start checking the area every day from now on in hopes of netting a few pounds of the hickory meat. These nuts are great for baking, but it is too much of a pain in getting everything out of the shell to make good out-of-hand eating. A hammer and pliers are needed for hickory and black walnut whereas the thin walled pecan can be shelled pretty much intact.
Another thing to look for are ground nuts, also known as chufa or yellow nutgrass. These are not really nuts, but rather a grass-spreading tuber. These small tubers are used to make traditional horchata and can also be roasted or even eaten raw. There are plenty growing in my front yard. Most folks try to rip out nutgrass, but I have been encouraging their growth ever since Noel pointed out the abundance. The tubers will get bigger with some management, but right now they are pretty small.
If anyone is interested in foraging in the city, let me know. I am always looking to learn to identify new wild edibles in an urban environment.
Oh my god – I will give anything for pecans and walnuts!! Do you know if there are any trees around here that I can pick without being shot at?
The park at GE in Castle Hayne has a bunch of huge trees. Also, any tree that hangs over a city or county street or sidewalk is fair game for anyone. Homeowners with backyard or frontyard trees that don’t overhang the street are usually pretty open to folks picking through their yard as long as they are asked nicely. If they say no just leave it at that. There are plenty of trees out there. If you want to go pecan hunting let me know.
I want to go!
Daniel says:Hey, In regards to urban foraged foods, I came across mass stands of Jerusalem Artichokes growing in an old deserted flood plain area in Boston Mass. They look like a more rustic sunflower and produce great tubers harvested around the same time as potatoes.
I’ll just say it; kudzu sucks. If you have ever had to pull it out of a field or garden then you know what I mean. Kudzu (Pueraria montana) is the vine that ate the South, and it is really hard to eliminate without the use of heavy duty herbicides.
The original intention of its introduction to North America was to feed foraging ruminants like goats. It turns out that goats aren’t fond enough of kudzu to keep it in check, and the vine literally grows while you watch (I didn’t believe it either). This adds up to a serious problem for native plants and any tree that happens to get in the way.
There are, however, a few uses for the invasive vine. Baskets, cordage, root starch and additional honey bee forage all come to mind. You can even make a jelly from the purple blossoms that are at their peak at this time of year.
And, of course, I decided to give the jelly a try.
At its heart, jelly is basically slightly boiled sugar. Kudzu blossoms don’t have much in the way of sugar content, so every recipe I found for making the jelly called for several more cups of sugar than cups of blossoms. I decided to modify this in a few ways. One was to use honey and to use way less than is called for in a typical jelly recipe.
1 – Collect the blossoms. To make six half-pints of jelly, you’ll need to start with at least four cups of kudzu blossoms. There is a huge patch of vines adjacent to the part of the bicycle path nearest my house. I pass by it everyday on my way to and from work. Gathering blossoms wouldn’t be a problem for me, but you may have to ask around to find a spot of vines. If you don’t know what to look for, here is your target:
A bag and a pair of scissors will make quick work of the collection. In about ten minutes I had all the blossoms I would need.
2 – Remove the blossoms from the stems and place is a colander. Rinse with cold water. Actually, I let the colander sit outside for a half hour in order to give the ants and other creatures a sporting chance. Otherwise they would end up in the rinse water, never to climb another plant or gather another speck of pollen. Then I rinsed the blossoms.
3 – Boil four cups of water. Place the blossoms in a glass dish, then pour the boiling water over them.
4 – Cover and refrigerate the blossoms and water over night. By the time you are ready to make the jelly, all the color will have washed out of the blossoms. The water will be very fragrant and will hopefully transfer that fragrance to the jelly.
5 – Strain the blossoms and dump them into the compost. Their job is done.
6 – To the blossom water, add one tablespoon of lemon juice. This is for aesthetics (color) so it can be skipped if you don’t have a lemon tree or a bottle of concentrate in The Stash. You’ll also need a package of pectin. You can make your own if you have access to local apples. I used a box of commercially made pectin that I had in the cupboard.
7 – Bring this mixture to a rapid boil, stirring constantly as the boiling point gets closer.
8 – Most recipes call for the addition of five to six cups of sugar at this point. I used three cups of local honey. Bring this mixture back to a boil, stirring all the while.
9 – Remove from heat. By this point in the process, you should have your canning jars prepared.
10 – Fill the jars to 1/4″ of the top, seal and process in boiling water for ten minutes.
The jar in the picture is what I had leftover after filling six jelly jars. The end result still tastes an awful lot like the honey I used, but it also has enough of a flowery taste to consider it a success. Next time I will probably use more blossoms and even less honey.
This recipe is adapted from various online resources and further modified to fit my restrictions.
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Marie Morris says:I was very pleased to find that there are other people who appreciate the fine qualities of a good kudzu blossom jelly. I have been making kudzu blossom jelly for a number of years and through many experiments have found that you can actually produce two flavors from the flowers. One looks and tastes a lot like a nice concord grape jelly with a floral taste to it, and the other looks and tastes like apple jelly. If you use all fresh purple blossoms and no stem tops on the blossom, you get a nice purple kudzu jelly. If you use the little greenish tips as well with your blossoms, it will give the jelly a golden cast to it and it tastes a lot like apple jelly. Both are delightful. I have followed the usual recipe of 4 cups of the juice to 4 cups sugar, 1 teaspoonful lemon juice, and one box of pectin, but I like to make two batches at a time and have found that you can do it successfully if you double your recipe, but you have to add a little extra pectin to the double batch. I use 3 boxes of pectin to a double batch and it works really well.
Very happy to have found your delightful blog.
Marie
Hi,
I am going to try to make my first kudzu jelly. We have a lot of kudzu around us. The purple blossoms smell so fragrant. I am going to follow your recipe. Hopefully, it will turn out good. I do not want it too sweet though. Should I cut down on the sugar?
Brenda ( Georgia Girl)
You can cut down on the sugar, but the taste will be heavily floral. It seems that the floral taste diminishes over time though.
Susan says:Oooo…nice! I think you could probably do this with Wisteria blossoms too. They are quite similar to Kudzu and they also lose their color when soaked in water. Wisteria is done down here in N FL this year, but I’ll have to try it next time around the sun. -sukey
Ivanhoe, NC, population 311, doesn’t have much of a downtown scene or a place to get an organic fair trade hot chocolate or even one of those traffic light things, but it does have Black River Organic Farm.
The first time I visited the farm was back in 2003. I had been dealing with Stefan, the farm’s owner/operator, for about a year at that point. I was buying produce from him for a small organic produce buying club that I ran out of the basement of my house. Every other week I supplied about 50 families with a large box of produce that I bought from various sources. Stefan was one of those sources.
On my first visit to Black River I went with my friend Daniel, who was my predecessor as produce manager at the co-op. We went out to hand cut some kind of wheat or rye cover crop that Stefan grew. The only things I really remember about that trip was picking a billion dandelions and raking up a bunch of wheat stalks to haul home for mulch. Oh, and Daniel running over an irrigation line and causing a flood in one of the fields. We left in a hurry, mainly because we didn’t have much help to offer in fixing the broken pipe. Stefan kind of shrugged it off, but I could tell he was fairly irritated at the situation.
It wasn’t until the middle of this year that I actually went out and got a tour of the farm as a whole. During that trip, Kristin and I picked a few handfuls of elephant garlic that had gone feral around some walnut trees, snacked on just ripening blackberries and watched Stefan’s dog Bunny swim back and forth across the Black River.
There was also some grazing on sungold tomatoes from one of the greenhouses and some searching through the withering strawberry plants for that one last fruit. It was what I envisioned as the perfect day off on a small farm – a swim, a walk, a bit of foraging and maybe a little planning for the week ahead.
I envisioned our next trip back to be a bit more focused and intensive, for me anyway. Of course that always falls apart at some point, the point on this trip being when the goats showed up with their beards and their waddles and their urgent needs to befriend anyone on two legs. That sort of thing takes a good hour to get over, and by then the focus of the rest of the visit is more or less hazy.
My only goal for this trip was to dig up some sassafras root for tea. The taste and smell of sassafras is something that I love; my favorite drink right now is brew it as a tea with some mint and honey and add it to ice. I also recently made some root beer using a small handful of sassafras, some fermented ginger and some maple syrup from The Stash. Kristin, Danielle, Noel and I dug up enough of the root to last for quite awhile.
After the digging, we walked through the fields of eggplant, peppers, corn and beans, Kristin eating some corn and me searching the sun beaten bean rows for that last handful of yellow and green.
At the mid-point of the walk, we all ended up at a patch of sweet corn at the far end of one of the fields. We all selected a few rows to scout for and pick what would amount to several pounds of corn smut (Ustilago maydis) or Huitlacoche. Corn smut is a fungus that grows on individual kernels of corn.
It is edible even though it looks like some crazy stuff. I wasn’t about to eat it, what with my corn allergy and my general aversion to mushrooms, but I would pick the infected ears until the sun went down if I had to. Picking any type of produce or pulling weeds is a bit therapeutic for me these days, but I’m sure that would change if did it all day every day like I used to.
As with every visit to Black River this year, we ended up bringing home more than we intended to. Thrown in the back seat of the car were a jar of yaupon, a bag of unwanted koji rice, a bunch more feral garlic heads with their flowers, a large bag of sassafras and a larger bag of corn smut.
Kristin ended up cooking the corn smut with a bunch of onions, peppers and garlic then making it all into a curry with rice. She served it to some friends who all seemed to enjoy it. I will post the recipe soon…
did you head butt the goats?
Trace says:They are more into rubbing their faces on you than they are into head butting…
I am, at best, a wanna-be food forager. I am really more of a scavenger, doing much better in dumpsters than I do surrounded by trees and weeds. In times gone by I have relied heavily on dumpstered bread and bagels, both as a way to save money and also to feed lots of people. In reality, just about any type of food can be found through dumpstering and curb shopping. Unexpired canned foods are common as are perfectly fine fruits and vegetables, ice cream, chips and juices. Granted, this is the realm of a dedicated few, some of whom rely on scavenging for survival, while others, like me, think of it more of a hobby just like foraging.
I have foraged with modest success on various occasions, with most bountiful results coming from fruit and nut collection. Wild blackberries, mulberries, pecans, chestnuts, black walnuts, hickory nuts and figs are all found in abundance around Wilmington.
* Pecans can be tricky to find because the trees can go for years without producing nuts. I found this out when Noel and I picked up probably 100 or so pounds of the nuts three years ago, and we haven’t seen anything since. But hickory nuts are pretty much a yearly find as are black walnuts, though it is often a race with the squirrels for the walnuts.
* Figs are in abundance at the beach and down a few alleys in my neighborhood. They are often neglected, the fruits going unpicked every year. Most folks don’t mind if you pick your fill as long as you don’t make a mess. As if fallen, rotting fruit isn’t a mess…
* For greens, our weedy areas and yards have a selection of plantain (seeds), lamb’s quarter, chickweed, mints, dandelion, sunchoke and wood sorrel. Dandelion can be used for many purposes –
“The plant can be eaten cooked or raw in various forms, such as in soup or salad. They are probably closest in character to mustard greens. Usually the young leaves and unopened buds are eaten raw in salads, while older leaves are cooked. Raw leaves have a slightly bitter taste. Dandelion salad is often accompanied with hard boiled eggs. The leaves are high in vitamin A, vitamin C and iron, carrying more iron and calcium than spinach.[3] Dandelion flowers can be used to make dandelion wine. The recipe usually contains citrus fruit. Another recipe using the plant is dandelion flower jam. Ground roasted dandelion root can be used as a coffee substitute. Drunk before meals, it is believed to stimulate digestive functions. “
Source – Wikipedia Danedlion article
* Sunchokes, also known as Jerusalem artichokes, are a member of theHelianthus(sunflower) family, grow on roadsides and near ditches. Here in Wilmington I find them all the time on the bike path behind Time Warner Cable and also along Park Avenue, usually surrounded bykudzu, another plant with some edible parts.
“It is perfectly valid as a food source,” says Regina Hines, a fiber artist in Ball Ground, Ga. “In the springtime, I like to gather the little shoots, and I will saute them with onions and mushrooms. They taste almost like snow peas.”
From the article “Kudzu:’Vine that ate the South’ is also good eating“
* Kudzu is an invasive plant, much maligned these days. I haven’t tried kudzu as of yet, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t try it soon. I’m discovering that I am becoming more open to trying wild edibles even if only to confirm my dislike of something. In the case of wild mushrooms, I would like to confirm my dislike for the thousandth time.
* Mushrooms are everywhere, but I am not a fan of mushrooms, wild or cultivated. I am fan of looking for mushrooms though, or looking for any other edible substance. It is the learning aspect that I often crave more than the actual eating experience.
I want to know how to identify the food, learn its habitat and then store that information for a time when I could really use that particular knowledge. I guess I am that way with many things, as there is so much to learn and so much more feral to become.
My grandfather and I used to eat tomato and dandelion flower sandwiches in the summer – white bread out of a bag, a fresh garden tomato and a handful of recently opened yellow dandelion flowers squished together with some mayonnaise and mustard. Today I would skip the white bread and figure out a substitute for the mayo and mustard, but the effect would be the same, a sandwich composed of the wild and domesticated, not unlike the life I strive to live.
I am trying to shake off more and more civilization and domestication as I grow older. In many ways this is in sharp contrast to most of my generation, the vast majority of whom would be scared and grossed out if I offered up a handful of dandelions and called it lunch. To fear the wild and its food is to be disconnected and removed from the realities of what is out-of-doors. I learned that the hard way, after brief flirtations with the normal life.
The normal life is nothing of the sort; an amalgamation of the dream of getting ahead, of long working hours, of half-hearted friendships, of lightning fast meals prepared thousands of miles away. Food in the normal life is devoid of nutrition and might as well be considered a nuisance. Who has time to make a soup from scratch when there are so many other things demanding our time? You know, the important stuff, like television and instant messaging.
There is a disconnection going on, a food chasm of much greater importance to the health of the world than any compact fluorescent light bulb ever will be. Spread along the chasm are a growing number of folks after the same sort of ideal – locally produced sustenance within a community minded atmosphere. These are the folks that “normal” people would call crazies, but I would, and do, call my people.
I tried living in the normal world, in the disconnected way my parents raised me, to want a white picket fence, a garage door opener, a water softener and a cabinet mounted can opener. It all seemed fine to begin with – fresh out of college, moving to a
new city, joining the larger community. Dissatisfaction came quickly though, the realization that real choices had to be made – a pound of apples or a microwavable personal pizza (buy one get one free), a bag of carrots or a box of cereal, a head of cabbage or seven boxes of mac & cheese. Taking into account the previous conditioning by my parents, the choices were obvious, but conflicting. I wanted to know why these choices were not correct, and so began the long road to where I am today. Many, many boxes of mac & cheese were harmed along the way. Too many to count I’m afraid.
But I can’t live in that disconnected world anymore – carting home grocery bags full of packaged foods made from corn and soy fillers, grown for shelf stability and not nutrition, or taking useless synthetic vitamin supplements and waiting for the diseases of civilization – diabetes, high blood pressure, high levels of “bad” cholesterol – to invade my body so I can fix the problems with prescription medications. Maybe if we all ate a dandelion once in a while instead of a Hardee’s Chicken Biscuit, we’d be much better off –
“The [dandelion] leaves are more nutritious than anything you can buy. They’re higher in beta-carotene than carrots. The iron and calcium content is phenomenal, greater than spinach. You also get vitamins B-1, B-2, B-5, B-6, B-12, C, E, P, and D, biotin, inositol, potassium, phosphorus, magnesium, and zinc by using a tasty, free vegetable that grows on virtually every lawn. The root contains the sugar inulin, plus many medicinal substances.”
Source – Common Dandelion by “Wildman” Steve Brill
May 28, 2011 at 8:39 am
I love sour cherries! There’s nothing like sour cherry jam on your toast in the dead of winter to remind you of summer. I’m down to my last 2 jars of sour cherry jam, and sadly will miss the harvest this year because I’m moving south. Enjoy them while they last!