Transplanting Cranberries

Last fall while picking wild cranberries I also brought several plants home with me. My thought was to establish a bed of cranberries on our land . I had previously found a few plants in one small area. This pic is of one of the plants I moved last fall. The viney plant with the little leaves is the cranberry. There are two species of bog cranberry in our area, the large cranberry ,Vaccinium macrocarpon, and the small cranberry, Vaccinium oxycoccos. Commercially grown cranberries are the large cranberry and they are the same plant as the wild one. I didn't know how to tell the two of them apart last fall . Having learned more about them since then I now realize that most of my transplants are the small cranberry. I will try to find some of the large cranberry to transplant here this year. Needless to say all of the plants already growing here are also the small cranberry and I have found them in at least two other areas on our property since then. It always amazes me how once we have learned to recognized a plant it seems to be every where!

One of the tell tale signs that this is the small cranberry is the fact that the flower buds are at the end of the vine. They are the two little pink dots at the end of the vine. Large cranberry tends to have them along the sides of the vine.

Mud Oven In Use

With the hot weather we had this week we were encouraged to try the mud oven I built last year rather than heating the house up while baking bread. We only tried using it a couple times last year and the results were so-so. Like most things in life, baking in a mud oven takes practice. I got a little carried away building this one and made it way too big. After some practice though we are starting to figure out the operating  directions for our model. Because of it's size and mass the fire has to burn for a long time to bring it up to baking temperature.

I started the fire the evening before and banked it with a couple of biggish pieces over night. This had the oven at about 200 degrees in the morning. I added a couple more big hunks of wood and left it burn slow until early afternoon.A hour before Ann was ready to start baking I built up a big blaze with small very dry wood that burned for about 30 minutes. Then I cleaned it out and let the heat soak in. When I opened it up for Ann to put in the scones , top pic,  it was at 450 degrees. They came out and five loaves of bread went in. After the bread was done in about a hour, Ann put in potatoes to bake, they were done about an hour and a half latter. The pic of bread isn't very good, the loaves were the same beautiful golden brown as the scones. There is a previous post about the mud oven in the archives, January 2012, if you want to see more about the
oven.

Oyster Mushroom Yum-Yum

Here's our first edible mushroom this year. The Oyster mushroom, Pleurotus ostreatus, is a great mushroom. It is not only tasty ,it is also fairly common and fruits from now 'till hard frost. Most of these were a little on the old side but they still made some fine cream of mushroom soup. All of yesterdays finds were on smallish aspen trees. We found many on trees that had them on last year which is common. Remember where you find them, they will probably fruit there again this year.We pick another variety of oyster that appears to prefer maple trees and only seems to fruit in autumn. We ended up with a couple pounds of usable mushroom. We had a good hard rain last night which should start a lot of mushrooms growing in a few days. Most wild mushrooms are very good dried and it is time to replenish our supply.
We found one other edible on our walk, the Pheasant Back, Polyporus squamosus , but it was much to old and tough to eat.  As always, a word of caution, if you can not positively identify it, don't eat it.

Swamp Salifrage

This early spring edible, Swamp Salifrage, Saxifraga pensylvanica, is found in swamps and other wet areas. I didn't know it as a edible before reading Samuel Thayer's first book, The Forager's Harvest. That is also the name on his website. While the leaves are edible with cooking I agree with Mr. Thayer that they are not very palatable. The crispy flower stalk does make a great trail side snack though.I found this one and about a dozen more along side the ditch in our local national forest. It seems to be fairly common but the flower stalk is only available in the spring of course.
The thing that always amazes me after I learn about a new plant,is that I was not even aware that it existed in many cases. My wife and I do a lot of foraging for edible and medicinal plants and we live in the woods. One would think that we would know every single plant that grew in our area but we are constantly finding things we have never seen before. Last year after hearing about a plant called winter berry we went looking for it in a area with the right type of habitat. This was about 100 feet from our cabin. We found a dozen or more winter berry plants! I am sure I had never noticed this plant before despite living here for 23 years.  Really LOOK around and you will be amazed at the diversity and abundance of the natural world.

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Winter Berry

Delicious or Deadly

The False Morel, Gyromitra brunnea, has caused deaths in Europe yet is eaten in parts of the U.S. with no apparent bad effects. It is known that the toxin in the False Morel stays in the body and can build up to a deadly dose if enough mushrooms are eaten. It does not really resemble a true morel that much. It has wrinkles and folds rather than the pits found on morels. We found this bunch which was quite large while picking Ostrich fern last week. For my part I am not eating any mushroom that "might" kill me! As with all wild mushrooms, if you are not 100%, absolutely  positive as to the ID of a mushroom, DO NOT EAT IT. Hopefully we will find some edible mushrooms one of these days and show you some pics of them. Mean while ,Ann just told me we have more baby goats in the barn plus we brought home another calf last night  and we have baby chickens coming tomorrow. I guess I'd better get to work.

Alpine Doe and Kids

Our Alpine doe, Caramel, freshened Sunday. She had twins, a buck and a doe. The buck is the black and white one. The doe is solid Saneen white as was her sire. The sire came from a well known milking line so hopefully the doe inherited some of that. Caramel had her babies on her own with no problems and both kids are nursing and doing fine. We now have to decide how long to leave the kids nurse. The easiest and fastest way to socialize those kids to humans is to bottle feed them. They soon accept people as mama and usually grow up to be nice friendly goats that do not mind being handled. We have a excess of milk right now so do not need to take any of Caramel's milk for our use and it would be one more item on the daily list of chores. Caramel's pen mate, Cupcake, is due to freshen in a few days also. I guess for now we will just have to allow some time every day to play with the baby goats!

Threshing Wild Rice

It seems like a strange time to be writing about wild rice since we harvest it in August.Wild rice is versatile in that respect however and keeps just fine in the hulls as long as it is well dried.We had a lot of rice left over from the year before and were busy last fall so we stored our dry rice until now. This first pic is of Ann stirring the rice in our parching pan. Parching is the first of three steps in threshing the rice. There is a small fire below the pan and the rice is being  heated to desiccate the hull making it easier to remove. The second step is treading the rice, traditional done in a hole lined with leather. A small amount of rice was placed in the hole and then gently treadled on while wearing leather moccasins.The friction between the leather surfaces ripped the hulls loose. This process requires young men and women with stamina to tread for hours so I have resorted to the contraption in the pic at left.It works on the same basis as an old flour mill with rubber disc substituted for the stone burrs. The top 20 inch diameter rubber disc has a hole in the center allowing the grain to be fed in. As it rotates the rice is rolled between the moving top disc and the stationary bottom disc. It works fairly well but not as well as I would like. I'll have to do some tweaking on it. The third step is winnowing. This requires a good breeze or a fan. It being a calm day, you can see the rice being poured in front of the fan allowing the lighter hulls to be blown away.We save the rice hulls to use in the chickens nest boxes. The rice usually needs to be ran through my treader two or three times.

Wild Orchids

Pink Lady's Slipper, Cypripedium acaule Ait. ,is a perennial orchid. I have been trying to modify the habitat in areas where I have found this beauty in order to encourage them to spread. This plant was used medicinally and over harvested for many years. That plus habitat loss caused it to become quite rare. I now have a small patch of it on our property. After clearing underbrush to encourage cranberries to spread a number of these came up two years later. I am now trying it in another area to see if more show up. I am not sure whether the area getting more sunlight or the disturbance of the sphagnum moss humps is the key factor. This year I am going to try collecting some seed and spreading it in similar areas.I might also try start a few in the green house.
  We have been busy the last couple of days collecting ostrich fern fiddle heads. The season is pretty short on them so you have to get them when you can. We will dry them all this year. We have canned them but the texture does not lend itself to much but soup after canning. They do make a great cream of asparagus type soup though.
Here is a pic of our take from Monday.  Free food! I like foraged foods but many of them give poor return on your investment of time. These provide meaningful amounts of food and are easy to preserve.

Honey Bee Update and Quiche

A little update on our honey bees. Despite cool and wet weather, both hives have been flying quite a bit. They have started building comb. One of the bees in the pic, lower right,has a nice full pollen basket.They have been bringing in a lot of bright orange pollen this week, not sure what plant that is from. I am very happy with these bees, they are nice and calm and have not been upset by me making minor adjustments on the hive boxes.On the next nice warm day I will try to get a pic of the comb they are building. I don't want to open the hive when it is cool out, that would chill the hive and could harm any brood that may be there.

We have been trying to eat only food we have grown or foraged as much as possible. Our lunch the other night was this fabulous quiche Ann made. The eggs and cream were home grown. It had ostrich fern fiddle heads, ramps, and our home cured ham in it also. The only part that wasn't grown or foraged by us was the wheat flour for the crust. We will probably try growing a small patch of wheat this year. That would eliminate one more thing we have to buy and move us a little closed to self sufficiency. Last night Ann used some of the fiddle heads we picked last week and dried. They worked very well in the wild rice dish she made. We will be foraging some more of those since they dry well.

Hen V/S Incubator

We don't have a incubator, we rely on these little hens. Almost any of the bantam breeds will make good brood hens as the instinct to nest has not been bred out of them to increase egg production. These two hatched out nine chicks between them and seem to be mothering them as a team. We have several turkey eggs under another hen and it is always hilarious when mama's chicks are bigger than her by the time they are two weeks old. When they get cool they go under mama's wings to warm up and it is comical watching her trying to accommodate her" babies".These little guys will eat a lot of bugs, including ticks, while growing up. Besides, how can you claim to be a farm and not have baby chicks?

Ostrich Fern Fiddle Head

 The ostrich ferns in our area are finally starting to emerge. We have been checking one of our favorite foraging spots for several weeks now and were starting to think the ferns were never going to come up. The pic on the left shows a typical ostrich fern stalk from last year which helps to locate them.You can see from it's shape why the fern has the name it does,the stalk resembling a ostrich plume. The fiddle heads are emerging at it's base. The pic to the right shows the tell tale mark of the deeply indented stalk which looks like a stalk of celery and identifies this as the edible ostrich fern fiddle head. The fern is not edible after the fiddle head unfurls.Ostrich fern fiddle heads can be used in any recipe that uses asparagus.

Ann has made a very good cream of asparagus soup substituting fiddle heads for the asparagus.
Last year we canned quite a few and this year we are trying drying them.
This pic shows a small part of a patch we like to pick. It is on a river flood plain and has very rich but sandy soil. This patch cover a couple of acres so we can usually pick all we want.