Cattail Pollen

 We collected a little cattail pollen today. The top pic shows a cattail in full bloom. The top yellowish part is the male part which produces the pollen. Directly below is the female part which will become the familiar brown seed head later on. The male part above will shrivel up to almost nothing after doing it's job. To collect the pollen we use empty plastic milk jugs. We simply slide the whole head into the jug and give it a few good shakes. A lot of the pollen falls into your jug. It adds up a lot faster than you would think. We collected about 3 cups in two hours, including drive time. This year is sort of strange, there being plants already setting seed and no pollen left, and plants just starting to form the blossom next to them. We jokingly call the pollen corn MSG because it enhances the flavor of corn so much. Ann adds it to corn bread, pancakes,etc. Probably other stuff too but she is secretive about her recipes! Below is our days haul. The pic doesn't really do justice to the color.

It was a beastly hot day so wading around in the cattail bog was a pleasant way to escape the heat. We have permission to collect in a huge stand of cattails close to home but they don't seem to be blooming yet. This is definitely one of those wild foraged foods that is most useful for it's novelty effect rather than a big addition to your diet.

Elder Flowers

There seems to be hope for a big crop of elderberries, Sambucus canadensis,  this year judging by the amount of blossoms on them. We picked several grocery bags full today. We will dry them for a pleasant tasting tea and I will make a large batch of elderflower wine. I'll put that recipe on the recipe page soon. When picking blossoms of any plant bear in mind the fact that if you pick all the blossoms there will be no fruit. We generally adhere to the rule of taking no more than 1/6 th of the available crop. The second pic is of the same area after we were done picking in that area.

The blossoms are also sometimes eaten in pancakes and fritters. Other than the ripe fruit and blossoms ,the plant is considered somewhat toxic. Despite this, there are quite a number of historic and folk remedies using various parts of the plant. I stick with the blossoms and fruit and don't worry about it. One thing that we must at least be aware of, if not actually worry about, is the fact that there are a few plants out there that are genuinely killers. Water Hemlock, Cicuta maculata, is one of them. I took the bottom pic 10 feet from the elderberry plants. They obviously have a superficial resemblance to each other.

POISON!!! Water Hemlock

If you have trouble distinguishing between a head of lettuce and a head of cabbage, maybe foraging is not for you. For most of us, there is no difficulty telling them apart. The real danger lies in not paying attention and accidentally picking the wrong blossom along with the one you want. The best insurance is to learn to identify any plant in your area which is toxic. If you know how to ID a plant there is little chance you will pick it by mistake. After all, our ancestors did it for thousands of years!

Get To Work!

 The foraging season has kicked into high gear with dozens of plants waiting to be harvested. This pic is of Wood Sorrel, Oxalis stricta, often call shamrock. The leaves and seed pods make a great addition to a salad, contributing a nice sour note. Unfortunately the leaves fold up almost as soon as picked so you don't get the cool shamrock visual effect. While not a staple food source, there are many wild plants and "weeds"  waiting to be made into a very nice salad. Dump the iceburg lettuce, and come over to the wild side. Your salads will be tastier and you will save a few dollars too.
This week we have several items we want to harvest. Elderberries are in full bloom and we will pick a lot of those. Some we will dry for tea. I make a elder flower wine also so I need  bunches for that. I'll post that recipe just as soon as I find it! Seems to have been misplaced. The basswoods or lindens,as they are sometimes called, are blooming too. I hope our bees find them, it will be great tasting honey. We will pick those too, for tea. We have had enough rain lately so I will be watching for several species of mushrooms which should fruit now.

Here are a couple medicinal plants I spotted yesterday. This one is Round-Leaf Pyrola, Pyrola rotundifolia, which I have never used. It does act as a styptic among it's other uses so that is handy to keep in mind. It does contain arbutin, which the body breaks down into hydroquinone,which is toxic. It is also a proven antibacterial agent. If I were to use it at all it would be in a salve for skin eruptions.
Below is Common St. Johnswort, Hypericum perforatum, popular now as a anti depressant, and used for that quite extensively in Europe according to some sources. It does cause photo sensitivity so use with caution if you're outside a lot.  It contains 6 or 7 known biologically active compounds. I'm sure once drug companies figure out how to patent some of them it will be used more extensively in western medicine.

Wild Food Summit

We got back from the Wild Food Summit at White Earth, MN. yesterday. It was a positively great event again this year. Getting together with a hundred or so people with mutual interest in foraging wild foods and some of the top teachers and experts in the field for four days is a hard event to beat. Add to that great food, much of it foraged on the spot, and prepared by outstanding chefs with all volunteer staff helping. Here are a few pics I managed to snap between classes.

Top is bannock, a quick bread, being baked in dutch ovens. It was delicious! Next pic is the bread of course. Back to top pic ,that kettle off to the side is full of acorns being leached to remove excess tannins , this was from a class by Sam Thayer. He is a outstanding teacher. If you are interested in foraging wild foods, get his books, there are none better.

Here is a pit oven that was used to bake 22 chickens for the hungery hoard. I didn't get over in time to get a pic of chicken coming out, root vegetables are just coming out in pic. The chicken had a very delicate smoked flavor that was fantastic.

 Here is a demonstration on black walnut preparation.   This session was by Mike Krebill, another nationally known teacher in the field with many awards to his name. Both Sam Thayer and Mike are really very modest, down to earth guys, despite the many awards they have earned. In this pic are nut crackers capable of taking on the black walnut. It was very nice to be able to try the different brands in case you were planning on buying one. My personal choice would be the nearest one.

 Here is a sulfur shelf, a.k.a., chicken of the woods, that was found near by.

And here is a totally awesome moth I got a pic of. No idea what it's name is as I haven't had time to research it yet. So, enough of my vacation pics. If you are interested in wild foods attend some event of this kind. Not only will you learn, you will meet great people with similar interest and if you are lucky you will make new friends as we have every time we attend.This particular event feels like a family reunion to me! AND, you lucky folks, I happen to know of such an event coming soon. Check it out.
   The Midwest Wild Harvest Festival will be another great event. www.wildharvestfestival.org

Comfrey

Comfrey, Symhytum officinale, is a large rooted perennial with large rough hairy leaves. As you can see from the pic it has purple-blue bell like flowers in clusters. It can have pink or white flowers depending on the variety. Comfrey is a widely used medicinal plant but one with a bad reputation. All though comfrey contains allantoin, which is known to promote healing, it also contains compounds that may be carcinogenic. In it's defense, a cup of comfrey leaf tea contains less carcinogens than a beer. A real danger with fatal consequences is mistaking the first year rossete leaves of Foxglove (Digitalis) for comfrey. The plants in the pic are decedents of plants my grandfather put in for grazing his sheep. It persist despite my uncle's continued efforts to eradicate it. I dug up a few of the offending plants several years ago and now have several patches of this versatile healer established. As with any plant you may decide to use for medicinal purposes, study the plant, respect it, research it, and don't get the foolish notion that natural necessarily means safe.

Strawberry Season

Yesterdays picking from the strawberry patch totaled up to 8 gallons. The patch is approximately 50 by 25 or 1250 square feet. The plants are all second year mothers and their daughters. The rain we finally got last week really made a difference, the berries are much larger  than they had been. Ann has already made 30 pints of strawberry jam and also dried some berries from previous pickings. She is going to make more jam and will make fruit leather from some of these. We will take a few gallons along to the Wild Food Summit we are attending later this week. Certainly not a wild food but every one brings a dish to pass for the first nights meal and we thought strawberries and fresh cream would make a great dessert. We have been eating our fill for about two weeks now and should get at least two more big pickings from this patch. At current you-pick prices our patch has produced about $350 worth of berries so far this year. That is at non-organic prices. Most strawberries are not organic because strawberry plants don't do well if the weeds are not kept out and the only way to do that organically is to pull them by hand. Ann spends several hours a week keeping our patch weed free.
Here is a admittedly fuzzy pic of a fuzzy visitor we had last week. I took the pic through the window screen so it didn't come out very clear. He had one messed up ear. He was not terribly worried about us talking only 30 feet away so I hope he doesn't turn into a problem bear. We will keep anything he might consider food put up so he does not develop a habit of visiting us! He is probably a cub from last year, about 90-100 pounds I'd guess.

High Tunnel

We have been busy as little bees here this week. We finally got in the last of our tomatoe and pepper plants on Tuesday just in time for a frost Wednesday night. Since we have over a acre and a half of garden we couldn't cover everything so we took our chances and didn't cover anything. Bad decision. Frost got a lot of my squash, most of the cucumbers, and about half of my tomatoes. I finally got the plastic over this high tunnel Wednesday morning which saved the fifty or so plants in there. This was a great project for a tightwad like me. The frame is made from two yard barn size canopy type frames. I got those from my sister-in -law after they had been wrecked by the wind at their house. I made a base for them by putting in post every eight feet and then cutting them level. I then nailed a landscaping timber across the tops of the posts. The frame was then fastened to the landscape timber with screws. Since the frames are spaced rather far apart I was worried there would not be enough support for the plastic sheeting. I used plastic baling twine to make a support grid between the metal frame, after the plastic sheeting was on I put another grid of twine over it. This seems to have done the trick as the cover stayed on Thursday night despite the 35 mile per hour winds we had.

Looking inside you can see I laid plastic sheeting on the ground to keep the grass down. This is scrounged material too. It is empty silage bag which is some TOUGH plastic. Then I set in my scrounged plastic buckets and we were good to go. I put some pallets across the ends to act as wind breaks. I am hoping this will give the tomatoes and peppers the extra warmth they need to mature a little earlier. This year I just used common construction type plastic sheeting . I plan to replace it with regular greenhouse film next year. It has UV inhibitors which extend it's life considerably. This project cost me less than $100 . Landscape timbers$40, Plastic sheet $25, Twine $25,1" Conduit to repair frame $8= $98.00

Here is a pic of the flax in bloom. It is not as tall as we thought it would be but we have not had much rain. It may grow more while in bloom too, we have not raised it before so we don't know. Guess I better get busy and build Ann the various tools she will need to process the fiber.

Seasonal Eating

We like to try to eat with the seasons. With strawberries starting to ripen that will be no problem for a while! Despite a couple of frosts it looks like we will have a decent crop. Strawberries are a great home gardener fruit. They are relatively easy to grow and produce a nice size crop for the amount of space they use. I was hoping for a excess  of berries this year since strawberries make great wine but I don't think that is going to happen. We don't have a irrigation system and we haven't had as much rain as we could use. When you start carrying water in buckets ,only the newest transplants get as much water as they want. We are looking at several types of pumps to irrigate with but haven't found what we need yet, at least not at a price we can afford.

Peas will be ready in a day or so also. I love them fresh from the garden and eat a lot of them right on the spot. Those that do make it home get frozen. I do not care for peas that are canned. We have been having spinach salads from the garden for a couple of weeks and will have lots of lettuces soon. The radishes are very nice this year and I will put in a second planting of them and spinach today. I will put a floating row cover over those after they sprout to help keep both of these cool weather plants in the shade. Bugs of several sorts are turning into a problem early this year, especially the Colorado Potato Beetle. We are picking those by hand  now but will begin appying thuriside and diatenaceas earth this week to help control them. We would prefer that the insects do their seasonal eating elsewhere!

Apple Tree Grafting

My grafting experience this year went fairly well, producing twelve new fruit trees at a cost of $25.00, the approximate cost of one tree at the nursery. The grafting stock was  from limbs I pruned out of my older trees during their annual spring pruning. I stored the limbs in damp sphagnum moss in my root cellar until I was ready to graft them.I bought 25 root stocks but only had enough scion wood to make twenty grafts. Of those twenty grafts, twelve took. Of the remaining eight that I tried to graft but failed,  seven sent shoots up from the roots. These, plus the five I didn't use, will be planted in the orchard and grafted on to next spring.  The root stock was all EMLA 26 apple rootstock from Raintree Nursery (www.raintreenursery.com).I went together with others to buy a larger quantity for a better price but prices are reasonable for even small amounts.  In the pic, ungrafted root stock on the left, growing grafts in the center, bad grafts that sent up new shoots on the right.

Organic Herbicide

We have fencing around the area we are starting our orchard in to prevent deer damage. Since it is an electric fence with a solar charger I need to keep grass and weeds from growing up on to it. This year instead of spending a lot of time clipping the weeds once every week or so I am trying something different.The brown streak of dead or dying weeds shown under the fence was caused by spraying it with vinegar. This was regular food grade vinegar with a small amount of common liquid dish soap added. The pic was taken about 48 hours after I had sprayed. There is quack grass, june grass, canary grass, clover, golden rod, ox eye daisies, and plantain along the fence line. The vinegar seems to have knocked them all back. I don't know yet how long this will last but it is a lot easier than clipping under the fence so I'll be using it again. I used one large squirt of dish washing soap in one gallon of vinegar. I applied it with a small pump up type hand sprayer and probably used about a quart total under about 800 feet of fencing. I don't think it will eliminate the weeds entirely but it certainly looks like it will help me control them. I have no idea if this is certified for organic use but it seems like it would be. Maybe you would have to use organic soap in the mix. I think it is a reasonable choice for anyone wanting to eliminate the more toxic chemicals from use on their property.

Dead Squash

 This is a tiger swallowtail, Pterourus glaucus, feeding on chive blossoms. There are a lot of them around this year and unlike a lot of other butterflies, they sit long enough for me to get a pic! I have seen a lot of butterflies earlier than normal this year which I suppose is because of the warm weather in March. As usual, Wisconsin weather is making life interesting. The weather forecasters predicted frost overnight  Wendsday so we spent a hour covering any thing that might be damaged. The actual low temp. here turned out to be 41 degrees F. There were not any frost predictions on the same channels Thursday and the low temp. was predicted to be 43 F., so needless to say, we did not cover anything. As you can guess, that was a mistake. There was enough frost to kill all of our squash  transplants. They seem to be the only thing that got it so I guess I shouldn't complain. Our green beans are up and they are not very frost tolerant either. I do have part of a flat of squash that were still in the green house so we will have some to set out. I am not sure if the peas, which are blossoming, were effected. Fortunately, the strawberries, which are starting to ripen, don't seem to be hurt.