Today's Joke

Oh by the way, here is one that might help y’all have a chuckle. In the coming Year, 2012, both Groundhog Day and the State of the Union address will occur on the same day. This is an ironic juxtaposition of events. One involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to an insignificant creature of little intelligence for prognostication. The other involves a groundhog.

The cost of butter.

Bella,our jersey milk cow.

   As a former dairy producer I've always known that dairy farmers get ripped off terribly at the price they are paid for the milk they produce. It has really been demonstrated to me recently. Our little Jersey cow is not a high producing cow. In all honesty, we have had goats that milked almost as much as she does. She has one great saving grace however, her milk is very high in butterfat. We do not "push" our cow to produce more milk or butterfat. She gets a very reasonable diet of pasture in season or good well made hay along with a small amount of grain at this time of year. From this modest feed she gives us around two and a half gallons of milk per day. This is about a fourth of what cows in most commercial dairies are expected to produce but as I said her milk is very rich and creamy.
   Each day Ann places Bella's milk in wide mouth gallon jars. From a day's production we will use about a half gallon after skimming the cream off as whole milk and the cream from it for our coffee,etc. This leaves two gallons which we skim the cream off of and make butter from it. It will produce about a pound and a half of butter. The skim milk is then used to make mozzarella cheese and those two gallons produce about 1 3/4 pounds of fresh cheese. From the whey produced making the mozzarella a whey cheese called mysost can be made which will yield about another 1-1 1/2 pounds.SO.... lets add this up.

   1/2 gallon whole milk.....$2.00                                    Feed for Bella per day
  pint cream......................$1.50                                     hay...............................$2.50
  1 1/2 pounds butter........$5.00                                     grain.............................$1.50
  1 3/4 p. mozzarella.........$5.00                                         total..........................$4.00
 1 1/2 p. mysost...............$5.00
   Total..........................$18.50
 This is from about 20-22 pounds of milk, 2 1/2 gallons. Farmers are currently getting about $17-$18 per one hundred pounds or about twelve gallons of milk.  Convert that using the figures I did for our production and the farmers 100 pounds of milk will yield about $88.00 worth of product. This explains why I no longer farm for a living!
  Please note that I have never seen mysost in a store here so I'm guessing on that price. The other prices are what we have paid though not recently as we don't need to buy any dairy products!

Clothes Drying Rack

Here is a handy easy to make clothes drying rack. It is real handy for drying gloves, mittens, and socks. As you can see from the pic is simply a bicycle rim with every thing removed and then has some type of line strung through the spoke holes. Add a wooden clothes pin on the end of each string. Three strings go to a ring or tie a loop for hanging. We have it along side our wood stove.
  I have seen some made by local Amish craftsman that have a smaller rim inside the large rim to increase the capacity. They also used chain to attach the clothes pins but I thought that was much heavier duty than we needed. It is nice to have dry gloves when you need them and it is a quick,easy, and effective recycling project. 

Foraging 2011

 

      2011 was a good year for us foraging wise. Our year started out with maple syrup season. We cooked syrup from March 15th  till April 15th. We ended up with 9 gallons of syrup so have plenty for ourselves plus some to trade. We have made sugar some years but didn't this year. In mid  May we gathered ostrich fern fiddle heads and Ann canned 56 pints of them. We use them as you would use asparagus. We also dug wild ginger the same day. We enjoy the taste of wild ginger in our Labrador tea. It adds that extra zing. By the end of May we were eating nettle greens which I like better than spinach. It is very good steamed with a little bacon grease and some rice vinegar.
  June  was productive also with our first mushroom find of the year when we got 5 pounds of oyster mushrooms on the 22nd. Wild strawberries were abundant this year but they take so long to pick that we quit after we had a pint and a half. Ramps are easy to find early in the year before a lot of under growth gets going and we picked a couple of quarts on the 20th.
   The foraging year kicked into high gear in July , I had 14 entries in my foraging journal for the month. More ramps and nettle greens start off the list followed by lambs quarter greens, cattail pollen, elder flowers, june berries, wild blueberries, and wild raspberries. I counted up 57 pounds of wild berries in July and the first week of August. We picked some hazelnuts the last weekend of July but sad to say that was jumping the gun and they were not mature yet.
   August started out with 11 quarts of black cherries found when we were scouting wild rice. There was very nice rice on one of the flowages we checked this year although it was tipped in every direction by strong winds early in the season. It made harvesting the rice a little tricky but we are happy with our harvest of170 pounds of dry rice. We still have to thresh much of that but that is another post.
   September turned out to be our best month for mushrooms. We found more oysters, hen of the woods, pig snouts, hedge hog and honey fungus.  All together we found about 12 pounds of mushrooms in September. We also picked about 20 pounds of nanny berries which yielded 25 pints of puree when Ann was done.
   42 pounds of bur oak acorns topped the list for October but the four gallons of hazel nuts , dehusked but in the shell, was a close second. We picked a cup of wild cranberries at our boat landing which got us enthused to go hunting for more the 5th. of November.
   We considered the hunt a success when we brought home 7 quarts of cranberries. We found some creeping snow berry so had to try a tea made with the vine and berries. It was not as good as we had heard it might be. The coup de gras of the season was Ann's. She brought home 8 bushels of black walnuts gleaned  from a neighbors lawn. I just finished a piece of chocolate fudge with black walnuts.

Trailing Arbutus

Epigaearepens L.,Trailing Arbutus is one of the first plants to bloom in our area in north central Wisconsin. This pic does not show it but the blossoms are often a pale pink and they have a beautiful scent. It is a trailing perenial with oval leathery leaves. The tubular five lobed flowers are in clusters. This member of the Heath family contains arbutin which is a urinary antiseptic but it hydrolyzes to hydroquinone which is toxic.

American Indians used leaf tea for kidney disorders as do some folk remedies. It is a plant I always look for as a sign of spring but I have never used it medicinaly and do not recommend it.

Living Simple

Living Simple
  This is a link to one of my former blogs. Same sort of topics. Got busy and didn't update . Started Forest House Farm blog to promote our CSA and I enjoy sharing a little info now and then.

Labrador Tea

We pick Labrador Tea year round if we are out but usually try to pick our years supply in the winter. It is easier since labrador tea,  Ledum groenlandicum, grows in bogs and swamps and it's easier when the swamp is froze over. The leaves stay on year round. It often grows on sphagnum moss humps in association with leather leaf and wild blueberry. The leathery leaves have edges that roll under and the bottom of the leaf is cover with much white to rusty or gold hairs. The shrub is up to 3 feet tall and has very fragrant flowers between May and July. It makes a nice tea with a citrusy, piney, sort of flavor. We like to add wild ginger and either chaga or turkey tail mushroom. Since we heat with wood a pot of it can sit on the stove all day to stay warm. Don't let it brew too long as it will get very bitter. This is a fairly common plant in our area.

Tom, Jerri, and Henrietta

Trio of bourbon red turkeys

 One more piece of the homestead puzzle is in place with the great find Ann made on Craig's List. We picked up this trio for only $50 which is very reasonable considering that day old chicks are almost $10 each.This is a heritage breed and one we have been considering getting. We are hoping that these can breed unassisted since they haven't been "improved" for industrial farming. They are supposed to be much more docile than some of the other breeds. We had a tom turkey once [ not sure what breed] that would chase my daughter when she went to get on the school bus! lol After a while  it was not so humorous and so we ate the turkey.  We have raised the broad breasted whites and had some success but we hope to pasture raise these if we get a hen to lay and set. We are going to get one of those little stryofoam incubators if the hens lay enough eggs to be worth doing it. These are about two and a half years old. Not sure if that is old for a turkey or not. Anyway they are certainly attractive birds so we'll just wait and see what happens this spring.

BACON!

Top picture is bacon hung to dry after coming out of the cure and getting rinsed off. If it is still wet when it goes in the smoke house it gets sort of streaky. Next pic is of bacons after about 4 hours in the smokehouse.
I will smoke these about 10 hours. A internal temp of at least128F. is required to insure that trichinosis will be destroyed.

 I like to use maple wood for smoking hams and bacon. I've tried different fruit woods like apple but they seem to give to heavy of a smoke flavor with my smokehouse setup. My set up uses the wood fire for both the heat and the smoke unlike "modern" smokers that heat with electricity or gas.

Here's a pic of my primitive smokehouse set up. The cylinder to the left is a old water heater jacket which is my fire box. The white box going off the right edge is the smoke house. There is about six feet of heat duct pipe between them. This helps keep from getting it too hot in the smokehouse which will shrink your bacon and cook some of the fat out if it's very high. When I first built this I had the fire box directly below the smokehouse. Bad, bad idea. To hot, fat melts,drips in fire box, smokehouse in flames!
  I will post recipe and instructions on Recipe/Remedy page tomorrow.

Coming to visit,bring your snowshoes.

 This is a pic of the trail into our cabin. It is about a half mile to the road and in the winter there are two options, snowshoes and ski. Well, three if you have a snowmobile, but we don't. If it stays cold enough the swamp will freeze up which will give us a route shortened to about a third of a mile. The swamp trail is much nicer since you are out of the wind most of the way.
  We use those big plastic sleds to haul in what ever we need. They are also handy for hauling firewood to the cabin. A lot of our property is black ash swamp so the only time we can cut wood there and get it out is after it freezes. The weather forecast for the coming week shows night time temps around 5-10 F. so it should start to freeze up. A lake drains through the swamp and running water is slow to freeze.
  I don't have enough fire wood cut yet so it would be good if it does freeze. I try to only cut dead trees or badly damaged trees and most years I get enough fire wood from them. I've spotted several dead elm trees and a couple dead pin cherry to cut. I also have several yellow birch blow outs but they may not be dead yet. I'll cut them but if they are still green they will be next years wood.

How to be self sufficient

Our son, Dane, with trophy size potatoes.

  A big goal in my life since the Y2K scare back in 2000 has been to be really self sufficient. We have a big garden, about a half acre, and raise chickens, hogs, goats, and cattle. We are off grid, heat and cook with wood cut on our property. We do occasionally use a propane stove in the summer to keep from heating up the cabin but my wife is a excellent campfire cook so a lot of meals are cooked outside in the summer. I loath waiting for my coffee in the morning so I often put the perk on the propane stove to get it done sooner but I suppose I could survive without that if I had to!
   So what else can we do to be more self sufficient? We are big bread eaters so raising our own wheat is on the agenda for next year. We raised our own grain corn this year which was a partial success but has room for improvement.Sunflowers, the oil type, are also planned for next year. We use lard from the hogs for some of our needs but don't have enough usually so we want to try extracting our own cooking oil.
  We are still far short of our electrical generating needs. We have a chest freezer for the meat we raise and a clothes washer at my wife's son's house. These are two big power users that I have not figured out how to do away with.  Clothes washing is a big job on the homestead and even with the washing machine it uses a lot of my wife's time. The freezer provides the means of preserving hundreds of pounds of meat , fruit, and veggies that it would be hard to preserve quickly otherwise. We are trying to can more but we already can a couple hundred jars a year. We are also trying to eat more seasonally but we have five months of winter here. Our growing season is only about 90 days. We use a root cellar for a lot of produce too. More on this subject  as the winter goes by.

Butchering Time

 It is the traditional time of the year for us to get our butchering done. This year we butchered a steer and we have three hogs to butcher this weekend. This will be most of the meat two families use this coming year. A few chickens went in the freezer earlier. We will also be able to share some with our adult kids.
  Butchering is one of those jobs that I'm inclined to try to put off but can't. I feel a deep obligation to administer a quick and painless death to any animal I raise for meat.I have had people ask me how I can kill an animal I have raised and then eat it. I wonder how they can eat meat they have not taken responsibility for raising and slaughtering. My animals all have names and are pampered and treated kindly. Being sad that you are ending their life to continue yours is a good thing. Being aware that the circle of life also has death in it is also a good thing. Before any vegans out there get on their high horse, remember that all seeds are alive, actual embryos, waiting to start growing. That bowl of granola ends lots of lives too.
   
 

Chaga

 

 Upper right is typical black charred look of  the outside of a chaga conk.

The chaga conk, Inonotus obliquus, that part of the mushroom we see, is not the fruiting body of  the mushroom but rather a breaking out and hardening of the mycelium. Occurring mostly on  living birch trees, the conk  looks like a stub branch that is charred or like a black wart. The actual fruiting body is very seldom seen and usually occurs after the tree has died.
  Gathering chaga often requires a hatchet to remove the conk from the tree. They can be fairly large, twenty pounds is not unheard of, ten to fifteen pounds being common. The inside should  be a light reddish or yellowish brown, more or less the color of the birch trees cambium layer and sometimes streaked with white. It is believed that the chaga conk concentrates certain chemical compounds, including betulin, inotodiol, and active polysaccharides, from the birch tree. Betulin has been used to treat cancer in Russia since 1955.
   We add chaga to our teas as a antioxidant and for it's role as a immune system support.  It has a pleasant flavor reminiscent of cooking down maple sap. Don't make it to strong as it becomes bitter. We usually use it as a additive in our tea rather than the main ingredient but that's just us. We know several people who use it as their beverage of choice. We view it as another ounce of prevention. I have seen no reports of toxicity but as usual, all things in moderation.

Turkey Tail Mushroom

A turkey tail , typical color variations.

The turkey tail, Trametes versicolor,  is found through out North America and in many places around the globe. It may be the most widely studied medicinal mushroom in the world. It is very adaptable and grows in a variety of colors which accounts for the versicolor in it's name. This beautiful blue example was collected about 50 feet from our cabin.
  They have a very thin leathery flesh so they are usually used as a tea although some people will chew them as they stroll through the woods.  This mushroom is highly valued for being the natural source of the anticancer agent PSK. This mushroom is known in oriental medicine as Yun Zhi and is highly regarded. It is also considered to be an immune system modulator and is known as a powerful antioxidant.
    I have not found any reports of toxicity and so we add it too our teas occasionally. Would I spend big bucks to obtain it, probably not, unless I had been diagnosed with cancer. In our case it's an easy to obtain ounce of prevention.

Black Walnuts

Black walnuts after dehulling

  The foraging year is winding down here in north central Wisconsin but we still have lots to do. Ann found a neighbor with black walnuts covering their lawn. A short conversation with the owner lead to Ann spending several hours picking up almost six bushels of nuts.  After several days and a few evenings of removing the hulls, we now have very stained hands and about three and a half bushels of black walnuts. If you have never cracked black walnuts they are quite difficult. We use a hammer and a big block of firewood as a anvil! A little practice soon lets you control the force of your blow to crack the nut without smashing it. Even though they are tough we can produce clean nutmeats much faster than when cracking hazelnuts because of the size. Black walnuts have such a unique taste it is hard to decide what they go with. After some experimentation, Ann and I can recommend chocolate and maple syrup! Ann used them in a carrot cake which was very good. I am pushing for maple syrup fudge with them in it now. Today we had walnuts in our wild rice which was very good although I like hazel nuts better in my wild rice. Next year I'm hoping we can find butternuts. We found a few this year but only a handful. Unfortunately, there are few large mature butternuts around here because of a disease called butternut canker.

Shelled black walnuts

Cows and Cranberries

  Bella, the newest member of our homestead. We have milked cows and goats, both for our own use and commercially, over the years. For the last ten years or so we have just had goats. They are so much easier to handle and we think more economical for the homestead. The price of butter made us reevaluate that. While the goats we have been milking certainly produced enough butterfat to make butter making possible, separating cream from milk with goats is a difficult process. We have a separator, a 1940's Montgomery Ward Chief that holds 5 gallons at a time, it is just not worth the work it takes to clean up after running the milk through. If you were doing ten gallons or so it would be alright but when you are only milking a couple of goats it just isn't worth the effort. Which is why we now have a beautiful purebred Jersey cow. We simply let the cream rise in gallon jars and skim it off. Now we have to keep up with the butter making. We churn almost ever day with each churning producing about 1 1/2 pounds of butter. We don't pasteurize so care is needed to prevent our butter from going sour. The pigs certainly like the extra buttermilk they get in their food. Not sure yet that we will do with the extra milk after the pigs are in the freezer.

Two buckets of wild cranberries we picked yesterday.

On the foraging front wild cranberries have been a goal for several years. As the pic shows we were successful this year even if we were a bit late to get a lot of them. Wisconsin has two kinds of wild cranberries, large and small, that were both in the bogs we picked in. They both taste the same as cranberries you get in the store. Those are just a strain of the wild large cranberry that are cultivated. The pic below shows one of the bogs we picked in. This is a typical wild  cranberry bog. 

FORAGING REPORT

A bumper crop of wintergreen berries!

   It has been a good year here for most berries and apparently the wintergreen thought it was a good year too. Most years I see one or two berries on a few plants but a small patch along the side of our trail really went at it this year. We actually picked a pint of berries from a area about 5ft. by 30ft. Every where else I looked it was the normal one or two berries.
   Our big find on the foraging front this week was burr oak acorns. We found one big old tree at a county park that had dropped enough acorns to literally cover the ground. We picked two grocery bags full for a total of 38 pounds. We intended to go back the next day but we didn't make it. These acorns are very good, not bitter at all. We were munching on them as we picked. Since we don't have a nut sheller we hand cut each one into halves and then remove the nut meat to dry. It's not the fastest way to do it but we got the job done. It was cold a couple days after that so we were able to get them dry with the our wood cook stove. They smell so good when they are drying. They are slightly bitter now that they are dried down totally so we will leach them once or twice.
    We did find some hazel nuts still on the bush last week also. After getting them out of the husk we have about five quarts. I love them in wild rice with cranberries and maple syrup.NOM NOM! We picked lots of them earlier this year but most have been wormy when we opened them : ( . Still hope some of them will be alright.

Nanny Berries

Typical ripening on a bunch of nanny berries.

 Today we picked nanny berries. It was a very good year here for most berries and nannies were no exception. We almost waited too long to pick these. I think the cedar waxwings and blue jays will have them finished off before long. We picked about 20 pounds today and plan to pick again tomorrow. They are about the easiest berry to pick that I can think of, especially when they are totally ripe as most of these were.I was able to pick entire clusters at once rather than sorting out the ripe berries one by one. You wouldn't know it from these pics but it was raining on and off and the wind was gusting to about 30 miles per hour. We would have picked longer if it hadn't been so nasty out. Hopefully it will be nicer tomorrow. Nannies are one of those wild foods that you can gather in meaningful amounts and that are easy to process and store. We make a puree and can it. Ann makes a great cake with it.
 

 Nice fully ripe clusters.

Alternative Farming Systems Information Center

Alternative Farming Systems Information Center

Top Rated Annuals & Biennials For Edibility

Top Rated Annuals & Biennials For Edibility

Wild Food

Ann and I love to forage for wild foods. A lot of people eat a few wild foods, wild raspberries or blueberries, maybe a wild black walnut or hickory nut, even maple syrup might be called a wild food. It does come from wild maple trees after all, but those common wild foods are just the tip of the foragers iceberg of wild foods.
   One wild food most people have heard of is wild rice. It is one of our favorites. It can be gathered in an amount that is meaningful in reducing your food budget, it is delicious, it lends itself to many traditional recipes, it stores well, and we think gathering it is fun.This year we gathered about 170 pounds dry weight. We spent about14-15 hours, spread over three days ,to gather that amount. There is a downside of course,we have to thresh it out yet, but that can be an enjoyable job too.Some people have their rice threshed out commercially but we prefer to do our own. I'll be doing a in depth blog on wild rice at some point in the future.
   The wild food we are hunting now is a common plant but not one that is eaten commonly. The acorns from all oaks are edible,though admittedly, not with out some preparation. Acorns have too much tannin to be eaten as they come. In order to remove the excess tannin, the acorns are hulled, ground,and then leached by repeated bathes of cool water. Once enough tannin has been removed the nut meats are dried and can then be stored to use ground as a flour additive or they can be pressed for a edible oil.
   We have made several jaunts in search of lush acorn pickings but have not found much yet.We have found several other select wild edibles while out looking for acorns though. Mushrooms! Yummy mushrooms of several varieties have sprung up in the last week. Ann found a few of our much relished honey fungus yesterday and that sent us into the woods in search of more. We didn't find any of those but did pick a ice cream pailful of Entaloma abortum,or pig snouts as we call them. They will make some great mushroom soup.
   I would not pick any mushroom to eat until I had been out with someone knowledgeable for several seasons. We only pick six mushrooms and none of those have any poisonous lookalikes, assuming you look at them closely and have learned what to look for.Eating wild mushrooms is like parachuting, if at first you don't succeed, it's not for you! Wild mushrooms are great, you just have to do your homework to get the reward.
     I'll be adding a lot more foraging blogs this winter after we get the garden to bed. Lots to do there yet. The horses and pigs have finished off the sweet corn. Now we have to get every thing cleaned up and prepped for spring.
 

Homepage | Freerice.com

Homepage | Freerice.com

First Frost Sept.15

Carrots,Sugar beets,and Corn.

  Time to start prepping the garden for next year! We still have one row of fingerling type potatoes to dig as well as lots of carrots. Our experimental crop this year was sugar beets. They grew really well, now we just have to learn to process them. Dane is going to do a post about that. Our sweet corn did very good this year too. We were not able to use it all up even though we gave corn to every one we know who wanted it. Now the steer and horses are eating the stalks and the pigs get the cobs.Our biggest failure this year was squash and pumpkins. We got them in late, then had a torrential rain [ 5 inches/24 hours] which packed the soil . Then we had hot weather at blossom set and most plants didn't set fruit until the second flush of blossoms weeks later. We do have a few butternut squash that look like they are mature enough to keep. Most of rest will be pig feed.
    Our other big problem this year and last was vercicillium wilt .We got hit with it last year and lost most of our tomato crop. We removed all the plants when we cleaned the garden, and we moved to a different part of the garden but not far enough I guess. We have a fix for it next year. We are putting another garden on a sand hill about 300 yards away. Wider spacing, drier growing conditions, better air flow, as well as using resistant varieties, should prevent another bad tomato crop.We will have to irrigate there but it should be better for peppers too so it will be worth the extra work.We have ten big round bales of hay rotting for mulch which should help with soil moisture issues.

Potato Harvest

Today was tater diggin' day. We already dug several rows last week. We will have around 1000-1200 pounds total when we finish digging the last row. The potatoes are very nice this year. That daily trip thru the potato patch all summer to squash potato bettles paid off. Looks like all the kids get taters this year for x-mas!
   We don't waste any, the real small ones and any damaged ones get cooked and fed to the hogs. They like them with the excess milk we have from our goats. Most times by the time the hogs get the milk it is sour so I guess it is just like sour cream on your spuds.
   We did get a little bit of slug damage but that was our fault for not getting some diatonaceous earth spread on time. We use heavy mulch on our gardens and that does tend to harbor slugs. We also use a product called SLUG GO which is a organic iron compound that is toxic to slugs. You have to reapply it after rain.
   That's our son Dane in the bottom pic with his biggest find for the day.

AROUND THE FARM

The beginning of our orchard.

Not too much going on today here on the farm so I thought I'd post a few pics of the stuff we have growing. This pic is of one of three apple trees we put in two years ago. They were just loaded with blossoms and I should have taken all of them off but I couldn't resist letting them put on a few apples. We put in 10 more apple trees, two pears, two cherries, and two plums this spring. One of the plums didn't make it so I will replant that next year. We will probably add at least ten more apple this coming spring. I'm going to wait and see how things go on the pears,cherries, and plums before I put in more of those.
 We also put in blueberries, raspberries, and gooseberries. None of the gooseberries made it so I will have to try those again next year too. We started strawberries, asparagus, and rhubarb in the garden. I guess that end is now devoted to perennials.
      While we are not certified organic, we do use organic methods of production on all our property. Part of that process involves using hogs to cultivate next years new garden space. We also go over those areas with chicken tractors to add fertility.

A chicken tractor at work.

Piggy cultivators taking a break.

I have to get busy and get another chicken tractor built. This one is getting too crowded. Part of these birds are a Cornish cross type broiler and some are laying hens. Well, part of them are hens and part are roosters as we bought straight run chicks. We hope to be able to include eggs as part of the share on our C.S.A. In the future we will offer pasture raised chicken as well.We are still considering pork as part of our offerings.

    We are really happy with the job the pigs are doing on the future  garden space. With any luck at all they have eaten most of the quack grass roots and it won't be to much of a problem.
   
I will move them out of this area soon, rototill it,and plant oats on it as a green manure crop. We need lots of organic material on this plot to improve the tilth on this heavy clay soil. This plot will be used for corn next year. We will inter plant some pumpkins and squash in it too.

A job well done.

    This is the maiden voyage for my new blog, Forest House Farm,  hopefully it will live longer than some of my earlier attempts! I will be blogging about whatever is going on here on our homestead including garden updates as well as foraging reports. Today ended up being a great foraging day. Ann and I had gone to check how ripe the nanny berries were and made a little side trip to look for acorns. There were not many acorns dropping yet but we found some really nice mushrooms including chicken of the woods, oyster, and lions mane. Ann is going to make mushroom soup with the oyster {nom nom}and dry the chicken of the woods. The lion mane was too old to use.
    On a earlier note, the nanny  berries are starting to ripen. Ann makes a wonderful banana less banana bread using a nanny berry puree instead of the bananas. It's definitely the best use we have found for the nanny berries. Add some wild hazel nuts or butternuts and would be a foragers delight!
   All for now, hope to get this whipped into shape over the next couple of weeks. My goal is to present info here on our plans for next years CSA and foraging gardens and workshops. I hope to get lots of input from any potential customers out there in the Rib Lake,WI area. Come on people, talk to me!