Food from national forests, part 2

Back to brainstorming options for food from national forests... I'll focus here on plant foods, since I don't much about hunting or ecosystem management for game animals. I see a range of strategies for harvesting plant foods. These different options have different risks in terms of impact on ecosystems already under assault from civilized humans, so I'll also mention some thoughts around those risks. I ordered the strategies from least to most potential impact:

• Gathering only what nature provides, being careful not to gather anything in ways which would negatively impact the community. This could include activities like harvesting camass bulbs to leave patches thinned out and healthier than when we arrived, carefully harvesting leaves or other root crops, and of course picking berries galore!
  
• Spreading native edibles:
  
  
  
  • Into clearcuts or other catastrophe-struck areas, to encourage regrowth of plants we can directly harvest down the line. We could sow seeds, plant cuttings, or plant starts. We might alter the terrain to some extent, to make spots with high organic matter content to hold water and nurture specific plants; or we could create seedbeds; etc. I walked a private land clearcut this year immediately adjacent to Tillamook state forest which I think someone cut last year, so I wonder how long it takes for companies to replant, or if sometimes they don't even bother? And same question for public forests? We would need different strategies for planting into replanted vs abandoned clearcuts.
    
  • Into second growth areas, in the same ways as above. I don't know much yet about second growth--how healthy are those communities already? Should we avoid messing with them? Are some second growth areas essentially monoculture tree farms for timber harvest, and if so would introducing more diverse edible natives enhance the community? In a monoculture tree farm, would we want to actually take down some trees to make clearings for planting diversity?
    
  • Into old growth forest areas. I suspect that we couldn't go too wrong with this strategy, but I feel very hesitant to mess with old growth! I'd need to learn a lot more before embarking on this.
    
  
  
• Spreading non-native edibles:
  
  
  
  • Into clearcuts and similar zones. Here I start to feel even more uncomfortable, because I really don't know enough to predict the impacts on the nearby plant communities! Obviously we'd avoid known invasive plants, but that still leaves plenty of unknowns. I can imagine planting root crops like jerusalem artichokes (native to the US) or parsnips (which have naturalized elsewhere in the US), fruit trees and shrubs, or nut trees like chestnuts and walnuts. We could even intensively manage an area with a full-blown food forest design. For herbaceous plants we'd need perennials which can compete with other vegetation, or annuals which can self-seed themselves, but in both cases we wouldn't want them to compete so well that they spread indefinitely to become a nuisance. Bringing in new species and establishing different combinations of plant communities in different areas could enhance regional resilience as climate change alters weather patterns in years to come, and existing plant communities begin to fail and open up niches. Pockets and sources of non-natives here and there will prove beneficial in the future, but maybe those pockets belong on private, actively managed land/homesteads, not in forests in the midst of communities struggling as it is?
    
  • Into second growth. Similar questions as with spreading native edibles into second growth, plus the issues of understanding the non-native plant behavior.
    
  • Into old growth. This just seems dumb to me. If old growth areas suffer from climate change and niches open up which non-natives should fill, then those non-natives can work their way in from the "pockets" I mentioned above. But I see no need to tinker with non-natives in rare old growth in advance.
    
  
  

By the way, I finally found the section of the library with books on pacific northwest native tribes, Oregon history, etc! I found some really nice books and encyclopedias giving details on individual tribes and their subsistence patterns through the year, including what foods they harvested when and their migration patterns. At some point I'll probably post a summary of resources and the most interesting information I find and conclusions I draw...but that could take me weeks or months before I get a chance to go through everything enough to pull it all together.

Some of my favorite nuts & seeds

I feel too tired tonight to finish up yesterday's post about food from national forests, so I'll just rank the nuts and seeds Theressa and I have been foraging in terms of food yield per time invested. I have not tried to calculate any numbers for how many minutes it takes to crack out a cup of each nut...I may do so in the future, but for now, I will just give rankings based on my working impressions.

Factors I consider include how long it takes us to harvest the nuts, how long to process them (if required), and how long to crack them out of their shells.

I rank nuts from most efficient meat yield to least efficient:

• Hazels (big nuts, super easy to crack, and I love their taste--perfect nuts if and when we beat the squirrels to them!)
  
• English walnuts (our staple foraged nut this past year)
  
• Chestnuts (I have only tried baking them in ovens and roasting them in fires. I still have some trouble peeling off the inner skin, which I can eat if I have to but which tastes bitter to me. Sometimes I get the cooking & cooling timing right and the skin crumbles right off when I rub it, but sometimes I either have to spend a bit of time on the skin, or just eat the chestnut still in its skin.)
  
• Black walnuts (Between husking them, then having to crack them in a vise instead of a regular nutcracker, then having to pick out the nutmeats with little picks, these take so long to process that even though I love their flavor, so far I eat way fewer of them than English walnuts)
  
• Beech nuts (lightly roasting them does facilitate shelling, but the small nut size means it takes a while to get much yield. Also, we still need to work out an efficient way to harvest them, such as a tarp/sheet to shake the nuts down onto; so far we have picked them up one by one which takes a while.)
  
• Prunus kernels (All the Prunus we've tried but the peach pits have very small kernels, and I have not yet figured out a way to hit pits with a hammer and consistently shatter the shell completely off. Sometimes it works out that way, but about 75% of the time I need to spend extra time pulling the kernels out of the cracked shell.)
  
• Sunflower seeds (small seeds mean it takes a while to get much meat out)
  

This season, we also harvested acorns, dock seed, and amaranth seed, but we have not processed them yet so I don't have even a gut feel for how much yield they give for time invested. I would love to try processing almonds raw from a tree, but have not had that opportunity. We hope to harvest some lamb's quarters (Chenopodium sp), butternuts, maybe heartnuts, and hickories this season to try out as well. I also want to learn when and how to harvest pine nuts and monkey puzzle nuts. And we hope that our yellowhorns will bear nuts next year so we can taste them for ourselves, plus of course learn how easy they are to harvest and use.

I will probably update this list in a few months after I try out some of the new nuts and seeds mentioned above. So consider this a rough draft!

Food from national forests

I posted a few days ago about our 3-5 year plan, to buy land adjacent to public forest land so we can set up a permaculture homestead on our own land, and hunt and gather on public land. I still have not spent as much time actually in national and state forests as I plan to, but I have made a preliminary observatino over the last year and a half of occasional outings: public forests have very little food diversity to offer humans! At this point I think I have a fairly good handle on native edible plants, but whenever I go out, I have a hard time imagining how we could get enough food from the forest to support ourselves. Obviously, with tracking, hunting, and fishing skills, we could harvest animals and fish. But still, I keep feeling surprised at how few edible plants I actually see.

I suspect as I keep learning plants, I'll see more edibles in the wild. I can also believe that a more thorough exploration of a given area would reveal more options than what I've seen so far. But I wonder whether some other factors also come into play...

Indigenous natives in the Pacific Northwest, probably like natives everywhere, cultivated food to some extent. Natives here routinely used fire to rejuvenate berry patches and to enhance hunting. Natives also maintained patches of camass bulbs and other root crops. I don't remember reading anything about natives cultivating plants other than berries in forests, but I have only scratched the surface of knowledge of how people lived here in the past, so I won't feel surprised to discover some level of active management of other plants such as filberts and oaks. So I wonder whether the forests today exhibit anything more than an echo of pre-European forests, and whether many of the native edibles occurred in much greater abundance where natives encouraged them. European genocide of natives (known as "settling the land") and genocide of forests (known as "logging") must have disrupted systems to an enormous extent.

Last year at anthropik.com, Jason basically stated that national forests in the US contain the land unsuited for agriculture, whether because of climate, soil quality, slope, etc. Jason expects some post-crash people to try cutting down forest to plant agricultural crops, but also expects them to fail so miserably that national forests will not suffer too much deforestation of this type.

That thought has stuck in the back of my mind, and I noticed when comparing Sunset's Western zone map to national forest locations that the national forests do coincide very closely with the super-cold Sunset zones, where people would find it very challenging to grow standard crops.

On our camping trip last week, I came across a fascinating section in Thomas Elpel's book Primitive Living, Self-Sufficiency, and Survival Skills. Elpel describes his early attempts to forage plant foods from the wilderness surrounding his Montana home. He kept finding himself hungry and frustrated, despite knowing all the edible plants natives did, plus edible european weeds. Eventually he realized that no native groups lived permanently in the mountains in which he foraged; all tribes known to use the area moved through it seasonally, harvesting certain crops at certain times of the year before moving tens or hundreds of miles to other areas. And even more to the point: "Many of the potentially sustainable [in terms of sustaining Elpel in foraging expeditions] wild foods on my list turned out to be species that grew only in the fertile, warm valley bottoms, around the farms and towns. This is no coincidence, since that is also where the native peoples camped. It is only us modern abos that expect to eke out a living perched on top of a mountain!"

So, if national forests do not currently grow many edibles, and if natives mainly used those areas for hunting or seasonal gathering of certain plant foods (such as berries), then we may need special strategies to live next to a national forest. The national forest itself may not support an unskilled tribe hunting and gathering, and the adjacent private land we buy may not be well suited to growing standard crops. (I still need to learn more about the private/public land interface.) I still think our plan for our private land makes sense: food forests designed using permaculture principles should give good yields next to a national forest where trees grow well. But the climate/soil/etc may limit our species selection, ruling out many common garden annuals, and even restricting our perennial species palette.

I feel totally exhausted (we canned apples and tomatoes well into last night (hence no blog post yesterday) and I didn't sleep in very late this morning), so I will finish up my thoughts regarding how the above ideas affect subsistence in a national forest in a future post. By the way, I always welcome feedback on any of these posts (even though I don't respond to every comment), but I especially welcome feedback on this one from anyone who knows more than I do (not hard to manage) about any aspects of this topic...

What's in bloom?

I want to start tracking what plants are in bloom at what times of the year, to identify gaps in bloom time and to help me with future designs. Supposedly I will walk around the yard once a week to write down what's in bloom. I'll post them here each week in case other people find the information useful!

Almost all these plants are blooming in the front yard only, since the back yard has many fewer ground layer plants due to chicken conflicts. I'll mark plants in bloom in both front and back yard with a *.

September 17:

• Calendula *
  
• Arugula
  
• Serviceberries in pots (presumably they bloom now simply because I potted them up into larger pots; the plants in the ground bloomed way back in spring when they're supposed to!)
  
• Yarrow *
  
• Foxglove
  
• Lavendar
  
• Garden Strawberry
  
• Alpine strawberry
  
• Bowle's Black violet *
  
• Weedy mallow (Malva neglecta?) *
  
• Oregano
  
• Peppermint *
  
• Tomato *, Tomatillo *, Wonderberry (Solanum x burbankii), Ground cherry
  
• Fireweed?
  
• Unknown yellow-flowered weed (8 petals & sepals & stamens, 1 pistil?)
  
• Lingonberry
  
• Basil
  
• Echinacea
  
• Wild carrot
  
• Daisy
  
• Radish
  
• Mullein
  
• Garlic chives
  
• Borage
  
• Skirret
  
• Edible chrysanthemum
  
• Monarda (we planted M. didyma and I think M. fistulosa, but I don't know at this point which survived)
  
• Sunflower
  
• thyme
  
• Squash, melon
  
• Jerusalem artichoke (Stampede & supermarket varieties just done flowering; Red Rover still going strong)
  
• Scorzonera
  
• Perennial Chamomile
  
• Beans *
  
• Cardoon (neighbor's yard)
  
• Comfrey
  
• Campanula rapunculoides?
  
• Nasturtium
  
• St. John's Wort
  
• Alfalfa
  
• Zebra mallow
  
• Dandelion
  
• Fennel
  
• Red clover
  
• Wapato (back yard only)
  
• Wolfberry (back yard only)
  
• Maximillian sunflower (back yard only)
  

Our 3-5 Year Plan

Theressa and I just got back this evening from a few days of camping. I'll post a quick sketch of our "three to five year plan". I won't go into nearly as much detail as we've thought through so far, but I will fill those in at some point in the future...

Basically, we've copied our "escape plan from civilization" from the Tribe of Anthropik. So you might start by reading their plan, then come back to ours.

The main differences off the top of my head between what we've been thinking vs Anthropik's plan:

• We will probably wind up living in the Pacific Northwest, somewhere in Washington, Oregon, or Northern California. We know the ecology of this area better than any other area; we live here already so can more easily transition from a city base to a rural homestead; the climate makes growing food and living as a hunter/gatherer relatively easy; and the population density seems much safer to me than in most of the rest of the US. Jason at Anthropik has written that he thinks the Pacific Northwest could have so many people move to it that the population density would rise to among the highest in the US, but I have a hard time imagining that happening. I do expect some influx of people, but I see most of the population increase occurring along the I-5 corridor, especially between Portland and Seattle. We want to find an area far from those population bases anyway.
  
• We want to buy enough land to be able to theoretically support a tribe of 10 people entirely from growing our own food using permaculture design. My number crunching so far suggests we'd need 2.5 acres per person for a paleodiet, so we'd need at least 25 acres of land usable for forest gardening and/or pasturage.
  
• We want to buy our land mortgage-free, and set aside enough cash to pay for 10 years of living expenses (taxes, hunting & fishing fees, etc). We don't want to have to work at all, though I expect we will generate some income from odd jobs for extra security, or to buy extra land, etc.
  
• We plan to buy land by the end of 2010, and to live permanently on it by the end of 2012.
  

Stupid raisin tricks

Over the last week and a half, we dried a batch of unknown-variety grapes we foraged from around town. We placed them on our house roof, on electric dehydrator trays, for about 5 days, then moved them onto screening in the solar dehydrator for a few more days after the weather turned mildly rainy.

Then we left the grapes in way too long, and they became super-dry raisins, with super-brittle stems. I started trying to pick the raisins out one by one, but found that took much longer than I wanted to devote to the project, as large pieces of stem broke off, attached to the raisins. I decided I didn't mind if I ate raisins with their immediate short stem attached, so long as I could separate out the rest of the grape bunch's stems. I found a method which seemed to work pretty quickly and efficiently.

Almost all the raisins had dried to such an extent that I could vigorously rub the entire grape bunch between my hands, crushing up the brittle stems. I did this over the mesh solar dehydrator screens, which allowed most of the stems to fall through the cracks, while catching most of the raisins. Some of the smaller raisins did fall through. But within a short while, I had the screen covered with raisins (many with short stems attached), and only some stem litter.

Next I shook the screen a bit to encourage more stem bits (and incidentally more small raisins) to fall through the screening. Finally, I spread a couple of dish towels on the table at the far end of the screen, tilted the screen so the far end rested on the towels, and shook/pushed with my hand all the raisins down onto the towels. Funneling the raisins from the towels into jars took very little time from there. I still had to pick through the stem litter on the table to pull out the small but usable raisins, but at least it took way less time than my original one-by-one method!

I assume people have perfected easier ways of processing raisins, starting with not over-drying their grapes. I wonder whether commercial growers selected certain raisin varieties such as Thompson's and Flame in part for ease of processing...I don't know much yet about what makes a good raisin grape. Plenty to learn...but at least I know one relatively quick way to deal with crisped raisins!

Locating trees

Theressa came up with a nifty method for finding trees of interest. Portland's Urban Forestry division maintains an online list of Heritage Trees of Portland. Heritage Trees have lived a long time and attained such majestic heights that someone nominated them and a committee accepted them for special recognition and protection. Besides inspiring awe, huge trees presumably give relatively huge yields of whatever seeds, nuts, fruits, or whatever they normally produce. So Theressa started looking through the lists for species which make human-edible products, and we've already started visiting some of the trees. Species of interest to us include: oaks, elms, beeches, monkey puzzles, chestnuts, hickories, pecan, butternut, ginkgo, and pines.

Similarly, Theressa found maps and tree listings for various tree walks (see bottom left of link) around Portland. She also discovered that when we participated in the Neighborhood Tree Liason program, we were given some tree walk maps not yet available online.

Although the public must have visual access to a Heritage Tree, the public does not necessarily have harvesting access. If Theressa and I get organized enough, we'll start adding some of the harvestable edible trees to the maps at Urban Edibles. Since I don't know how soon (if ever!) we'll get around to that, I thought I'd at least share those resources for people in Portland who may want to use them, and to jog other people's creativity in finding local resources of their own which may shortcut their way to finding interesting trees. Enjoy!

Cornus mas, Cornelian cherries

Theressa and I foraged some more this evening. Last year we identified three Cornus mas (Cornelian cherry) trees at the local park, but we found them too late in the season to really get a taste test. This year we checked on them about a month too early, and then not until tonight, about a month too late on two of them, but in time to harvest half a pound or so from the third!

The fruits we got taste very tart. I would have trouble eating a lot of them at a time. I think the fruits ripened fully on the tree, as many of them had fallen to the ground already , and those remaining came off very easily with just a gently tug (or inadvertently when we brushed a branch too hard!) Theressa harvested many from the ground; the ones I tried from the ground tasted slightly fermented, which I don't like, but Theressa doesn't mind.

Lee Reich says in Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden that "ripe fruits left to hang on the tree become more concentrated in flavor and sweetness. Some people prefer to allow harvested fruit to sit at room temperature for a day or more, in which case the flavor becomes sweet, but more sedate." We'll see whether our fruits sweeten up at all as we graze on them bit by bit the next day or two.

Reich also says that when the fruit was popular in Britain, only rarely did people eat them straight because sweeter varieties had not been selected. Usually they made tarts, sweetened syrups, or added the juice to cider and perry. I assume we did not find varieties chosen for taste; presumably our trees either grew from seed or came from an ornamental selection. So I still feel curious to try some of the other varieties One Green World sells, to compare the flavor and sweetness to those in the park.

Prunus Part Two

For the past few years I have viewed common laurels (AKA english laurel, AKA cherry laurel) as a great big evergreen shrub planted everywhere around Portland, with almost no useful functions. Sure, it makes a fine hedge, but why not plant something with multiple uses which can also act as a hedge?

Little did I know! Prunus laurocerasus turns out to have perfectly edible fruit! Although frequently-clipped hedges of the plant do not bear fruit (I assume the plant only fruits on second year growth and/or on growth of a certain minimum height), unmaintained hegdes bear racemes rich in numerous cherry-sized, black fruits. The fruits taste fairly good to me; I can eat a handful or two at a time and enjoy them, though I don't like them as much as cherries, plums, etc. I eat the inner kernel in the same way as the other Prunus species. So far our small tub of fruit sitting outside has stayed fresh for several days, so they seem to keep well.

I've learned a lesson from this (besides that I can eat the fruits). Several people have told me that you can not eat the fruits; I now know that unless I really trust someone's plant knowledge, I should always do at least the basic research of running a new species through the Plants for a Future database and Francis Couplan's Encyclopedia of Edible Plants of North America.

I also notice how rapidly my point of view has shifted on this plant. Where I used to see common laurels and think "rip 'em all out!" I now think "Hello, friend!" It scares me a bit that I formed my previous knee-jerk reaction from poor data, and I plan to pay more attention in the future to whether I have a solid basis of knowledge about plants or ecosystems I consider altering. I will definitely proceed more carefully with any future projects such as the tearing out of our own laurel hedge here a few months ago! Although I still may have decided to replace our laurel hedge in our front yard with the diverse array of evergreen hedge plants with edible berries, to add variety and more native plants and plants with nitrogen-fixing ability to our yard, maybe I would have kept some of the laurels...

European Beech

I will make all my readers wait with anxiously-held breath for part two of the Prunus revelations. Maybe I'll finish that up tomorrow. In the meantime...

Theressa and I went foraging today. We planned to gather acorns from various Oregon white oak (Quercus garryana) trees around town, since supposedly the acorns from these trees contain relatively few of the tannins which make the acorns taste bitter, meaning we need to put less time and effort into leaching the acorns to make them palatable.

However, we did not find any acorns under any of the 20+ Oregon white oaks we visited, which suggests that either the species did not have a good year this year (oaks in general have heavy mast years every few years, with intervening years seeing little if any yield) or we came too early to get a crop. We found gnawed, empty shells under a few of the trees, so at least a few acorns existed before the squirrels got to them! We can't see well enough and/or have not developed the pattern recognition skills to tell whether any acorns remain waiting to mature and drop from the branches above.

We did find plenty of acorns under a red oak of some sort, and collected a few pounds of those. We visited that oak before the bulk of the Oregon white oaks, so didn't want to load ourselves up with "inferior" acorns and not have room for the good ones. But it looks as if we may just have to content ourselves with red oak acorns, of which we should be able to easily gather hundreds of pounds just from the nearby neighborhood.

We also found a European beech! (Fagus sylvatica) It took us a few minutes to identify it; once we did, I climbed the tree and shook all the branches, causing a nutstorm below. Theressa took shelter, and once the storm passed we spent maybe an hour gathering as many as we could find in the grass. We decided we need to make a sheet or tarp standard foraging equipment, since spreading a sheet and shaking nuts onto it would allow us to gather nuts much faster than having to pick them up one by one.

The raw beech nuts remind us of large sunflower seeds, or raw pumpkin seeds. The relevant issue of Agroforestry News suggests not eating seeds raw due to their oxalic acid content, but Plants for a Future states no such concerns. We ate a few raw and they tasted just fine; in the future we may roast them lightly as suggested in Agroforestry News in case that does help with issues of toxicity, and because we suspect it will pre-crack the thin shell on the nuts, making it easier for us to get the nuts out.

I hope to weigh a batch of beech nuts pre- and post-shelling, to get some numbers on what percentage of the nut is shell vs kernel. Other than that, Theressa and I plan to enjoy eating them, and probably to seek out some more trees for harvest!

Mysteries of Prunus REVEALED!!!

My own thought a day

Inspired by my old high school friend Ben (WARNING: no rewilding content!), I embark on an attempt to post once a day with some tidbit concerning permaculture, rewilding, the collapse of civilization, or some such important piece of my life. I have never posted as often to this blog as I would like, nor have I ever emailed or called friends and family as often as I intended, so I don't feel particularly hopeful about my commitment to daily posting. (I don't recommend that you put any money down on it!) But I'll try to give it a good shot, and if it means I wind up posting once a week, at least I'll be posting more often than the once a month I've managed thus far! So...

Prunus presents

I now reveal the secrets of Prunus! Learn how to double the value of your prunes! Meet the mystery fruit, once hated as a useless pain in the ass, now my beloved companion!

Kernel of wisdom

As you know, botanists classify almonds in the genus Prunus, along with many of our common fruits including plums, cherries, peaches, and apricots. People grow almonds for their extra-large seed enclosed in (if I understand correctly) a thin layer of flesh which pretty much dries up and withers away once the almond ripens. The seed, when cracked open, reveals an...almond...a nice large package of nut!

According to Plants for a Future, you can eat the kernels of the seeds of just about all other Prunus species in the same way as almonds. Some cautions apply: "sweet" almonds cultivated for eating come from a type of almond species selected for low content of the glycoside amygdalin, "which becomes transformed into deadly Prussic acid (Hydrogen cyanide) after crushing, chewing, or any other injury to the seed." (Wikipedia) Wild, or bitter almonds, contain relatively high amounts of amygdalin and thus pose more danger of cyanide poisoning upon ingestion. Other Prunus species have varying levels of amygdalin, and content may even vary across individuals within a species. The more amygdalin, the more bitter the taste. So if a kernel tastes "too bitter" (PFAF's phrase--I'm not quite sure how to judge that!), avoid it! Again according to PFAF, "[amygdalin leading to hydrogen cyanide] is usually present in too small a quantity to do any harm but any very bitter seed or fruit should not be eaten. In small quantities, hydrogen cyanide has been shown to stimulate respiration and improve digestion, it is also claimed to be of benefit in the treatment of cancer. In excess, however, it can cause respiratory failure and even death."

I have heard second-hand (and therefore pass it along merely as rumour for you to evaluate yourself), that John Kallas (whom I perceive as responsibly anal when it comes to researching and making statements about foods with potential toxicity) says that since hydrogen cyanide is a gas at room temperature, that by crushing or cutting up kernels you can convert the amygdalin into hydrogen cyanide which evaporates off, therefore reducing or eliminating the dangers of eating kernels. I don't know how long you have to wait for the gas to evaporate, or how thoroughly you should crush or cut the kernels. Note that wikipedia seems to describe hydrogen cyanide as a gas only above 78.8°F, although other sources I found with a random web search state it a gas at "room temperature."

This seems consistent with citations I've seen in Daniel Moerman's Native American Ethnobotany and in Samuel Thayer's The Forager's Harvest that Native Americans pounded up various small Prunus fruits, fruit shell and kernel, then dried them as cakes for later consumption. I believe Moerman's book also mentions roasting or leaching as methods used to process Prunus kernels (or maybe I saw that in another source, or maybe I made it up). I generally figure indigenous people knew what they were doing, so this seems like good confirmation to me of the safety of consuming kernels in moderation, especially if processed in any of those ways. (Though I have to say that eating dried fruit with little bits of shell mixed in does not sound appealing to me.)

For the last month or two I have been eating kernels from cherries, plums, and a few peaches. I have eaten maybe 12 kernels per day on average, probably eating no more than 40 kernels on any given day. I have felt no ill effects, aside from mild frustration at the low yield! Cracking peach pits seems to give an equivalent yield for time invested to other nuts, but since cherry and plum pits give much less nut meat per seed, it takes a lot of hammer whacks and (most time-consuming) fiddling with the cracked seed to extract enough kernels to equal, say, one walnut. (I think I'll post a fuller comparison of nuts yields and so on at some point). Given that I do not have access to foraged almonds, I don't mind spending a little extra time (which can feel meditative--I like hitting things with hammers) to add variety to my usual walnuts & cashews with almond-tasting morsels. And I really enjoy the way this discovery extends the caloric and nutritional value of all these fruits we've foraged...I misled you above by saying you could double the value of your Prunus, but as a wild-ass-guess the kernels may yield 25% again of the calories of the fruit flesh, well worth capturing and eating if you have time to spare.

Enough for tonight...you'll have to tune in tomorrow for the exciting conclusion to our unique expose on PRUNUS!!!

Cascadia Wild, harvesting report-back on camass and coltsfoot

Since last fall I've been enjoying the classes, gatherings, and learning opportunities offered thanks to Cascadia Wild, a local non-profit whose mission is to "inspire personal connection to nature and community." Most of their activities center around peer-to-peer learning in a variety of formats. I've attended many of their Monday "community night" classes, where different people led discussions/classes on a variety of topics from bird language to plant tinctures to the primal mind. I learned a tiny bit of wilderness survival skills thanks to Aibric, who ran a few Saturday workshops leading up to an overnight wilderness survival trip to the woods, where we built debris shelters to sleep in through a drizzly night. It was incredibly empowering to realize that I could land in the middle of the woods with nothing and be able to make a shelter for myself to stay warm and dry, and I'm now experimenting with a debris shelter in our backyard to learn more about how it holds up in different seasons and what sort of ongoing maintenance is required.

One of my favorite Cascadia Wild associated activities has been the Ethnobotany Club. I joined them last fall for an outing to gather acorns and process them into flour, which was a lot of fun and included plenty of enjoyable diversions besides figuring out the acorn process! This year we've been meeting twice a month, once on a Monday afternoon to go somewhere local for scouting/learning/light harvesting, then once a month on a Saturday for an all-day trip to somewhere more remote where we can do more intensive harvesting. It's been a wonderful experience because it's a bunch of plant geeks with lots of knowledge and lots of books, with everyone sharing what they know, so I've learned a lot fast! I've sampled many new plants and been able to jump-start my plant identifying skills.

Harvest Results

Because I've found very little information, I want to share two report-backs on harvested roots I've tried on our outings: Camassia quamash, the common blue camass, and Petasites frigidus, the native coltsfoot.

Camassia quamash, Common camass

Our group found a dense camass patch in eastern Washington. My guess is that it was pretty heavily overgrown, as there were many camass plants smooshed together, and most of the bulbs we harvested were small, only 1/3 or 1/2 the 1" to 1.25" diameter size the bulbs reach at maturity. Probably after a couple of years of thinning via harvesting the patch will produce larger bulbs. Theressa and I harvested 1.25 pounds of bulbs, which was a relaxing task. I haven't made a digging stick for myself yet, and we didn't bring a spade or anything, so I just improvised with sticks to help loosen the soil and pop the bulbs out. The patch seemed to be in the middle of a very recently dried-up pond; the soil wasn't really wet or moist, but it hadn't dried to the hard surface of the other soil nearby, so getting the bulbs out was fairly easy.

The best information I've found on camass comes from Jon Kallas and can be found in back issues of his Wild Food Adventurer newsletter. Kallas describes the crucial skill of distinguising edible camass from death camass. For plants which weren't still exhibiting the giveaway blue flower, I carefully checked the leaves to be sure I was picking the right plant. I don't think we saw any death camass in the patch from which we harvested, though there were definitely death camass plants nearby. The other crucial task Kallas details is how to prepare the bulbs. Eaten raw they have a very starchy, mouth-clogging feel to them and aren't very palatable. Natives built large steam pits to cook 100+ bulbs, making a fire and then burying the pits to steam-cook for 1-2 days. In these modern times, when us white honkies can only come up with 1.25 pounds of roots at a time, a 2-day steam pit would be a bit silly. Kallas determined that pressure-cooking the roots for 9 hours gives close to optimal conversion of the indigestible starch inulin into digestible (and tasty!) sugars.

The other task we needed to do before cooking was to peel off the outer layer of dirty skin from each bulb. That seemed tedious, so the bulbs sat in a plastic bulb at room temperature for about three weeks before we got around to processing them. They didn't seem to deteriorate at all, presumably since they were essentially into their dormant period anyway. Removing the skins took a while, but got faster as I gained practice at kind of pinching and twisting to usually get the skin off in one movement. When it didn't work out it could take a little while to pick it all off. :/

When I had all the bulbs cleaned, we cooked them! I didn't know how much water the pressure cooker would steam off over 9 hours, so I filled it about one quarter full, covering maybe half the bulbs in water. I began cooking it in the evening, planning to let it cook overnight, but the swish-swish-swish-swish of the pressure cooker valve rocking back and forth quickly brought Theressa's head poking out of her bedroom asking if that racket was really going to continue overnight. So off went the heat, to be resumed the next morning. About eight hours after we began heating again the next morning, Theressa noticed it was smelling a bit scorched and turned off the heat. We'd run out of water in the pressure cooker. We decided to call that enough cooking and tried them out as soon as the pressure cooker cooled down.

I loved them! They were very sweet and I mostly just ate them like candy. Theressa wasn't quite as thrilled with them straight-up, though she thought she'd enjoy them quite well as proper dishes mixed with other foods. There was a slight butterscotch taste, but I'm not sure whether those were actually camass flavor or a result of having scorched slightly.

Petasites frigidus, Coltsfoot

I don't have much to report here, but since there's so little information I thought I'd pass along the little bit I discovered. We identified this species in wet soil along a river, so I pulled up four plants with rhizomes to try out. The roots were thin, not very substantial--a few inches long per rhizome and maybe 3-4 times the thickness of spaghetti. A few sources say that the roots were cooked by natives, but not many sources list this use and there isn't any detail as to how tasty they are. (One of the main citations was of roots being roasted by the Inuit, whom I believe were rather hard-up for any vegetables to eat and probably weren't too picky.)

It took about four days before I had a chance to roast the roots, and they'd dried out a bit and looked less palatable by the time I added it to a chicken dish going into the oven. We bake our chickens at 480 degrees in a Romertopf stoneware pot, cooking one hour with the top on, then 15 minutes with the top off. I tried one of the roots after the first hour, and it seemed cooked through and tender enough to eat. It wasn't bad, but it didn't make me want to gobble them down. I'm not very experienced at describing food tastes, so the only thing I can say is that it left me with an odd, slightly unpleasant aftertaste of...something like...fishiness?

Unfortunately, being the ignorant cook that I am, I didn't realize that the next 15 minutes of cooking with the pot top off greatly increased the heat blast on everything in the pot. 15 minutes later the chicken was nicely cooked, but the roots had been crisped to charred uselessness. :( (We've cooked lots of beets, potatoes, rutabagas, turnips, etc with chickens in the past and didn't have this problem; I assume the problem this time was the fact that the roots were skinny instead of large fleshy chunks, and/or the fact that we only had half a dozen roots cooking instead of the normal chock-full pot, where maybe a larger mass of roots would have distributed heat better.

I'd like to try the roots again, being more careful to pull them out before they overcook and getting some different people to try them and see what they think. I'd also like to harvest the roots in fall or early spring; I harvested them at the worst time for roots since most of the energy has already gone up into the leaves. That might result in larger roots, and maybe the flavor would be better.

Driveway-be-gone!

I am happy to announce that our driveway has disappeared. It did not, as my sister guessed, elope with the neighbor's patio. Rather it was murdered, most deliberately and cruelly. Damn but am I proud!

Background

Until three weeks ago, we had a double-wide landing strip of a driveway, 15' wide (plus another 8" worth of railroad ties) and 80' long, stretching from the street all the way to the carport. With another chunk of asphalt up against the street and a walkway leading to and along the front porch, we had about 1400 square feet of impermeable surface, happily leaching toxins from the crude sludge petroleum of which asphalt is composed. From the day we moved in last year, we knew that there was way more driveway than we needed, and that it was only a matter of time until we narrowed it down to whatever footprint we actually need. That, however, didn't stop us from filling it up with anything and everything--wood to be split, potentially useful scrap lumber, painted and pressure treated wood to be recycled, metal posts, potted plants, wood chips, river rock from the yard, etc etc...cleaning the crap out of the driveway was a project in and of itself!

As part of the overall yard design I put together last fall, we decided to remove everything except the strip along the porch, which is in year-ronud full shade anyway, and the few feet extra extending from that strip to the driveway. We considered retaining a 4' asphalt path from the street to the house, carving it out from the rest of the driveway to be removed. But we decided against that, since it would still be leaching toxins into the surrounding soil. It would also have made the project more difficult, as the designated path curves around trees, so carving the path out of the asphalt to remove would have required much more precision and care than a wholesale removal.

I didn't know the first thing about do-it-yourself asphalt removal, and was frustrated not to find any detailed information online. There's some general info in Richard Register's Depaving the World, but other than that the only reference I found was to going "low tech and high sweat, using heavy-duty hand tools." None of this was detailed enough to walk me through what we needed to know. :/ Another challenge was that I didn't even know how thick the asphalt was, what sort of gravel layer was underneath, etc. Our jack-of-all-trades genius neighbor Terry thought it was 6" deep, based on the amount of material he saw brought in a few years back when the driveway was laid down, but he wasn't sure. I dug out the soil in two spots at the edge of the driveway to see what the asphalt layer looked like from the side, and made one exploratory hole about 5 feet into the driveway, using a hammer, shovel, and pickaxe. It looked to me like the asphalt was barely even 2" thick, but I wasn't sure whether the edges of the driveway would be indicative of the depth throughout, whether different places even in the interior of the driveway might be different depths, etc.

Research

I started by finding out what the disposal costs would be. The closest place, about two miles away, costs $25 per pick-up load or $30 for a dump truck load up to 12 cubic yards. I estimated that if we borrowed a pick-up, it'd cost at least $400 just for dumping fees, plus gas and wear and tear. Renting a u-haul would probably be a bit cheaper but would put extra pressure on us to get the job done fast. Next, I called around to get a few quotes on what it would cost to have someone come in and do the entire job for us. I was calling in late summer, and all but one contractor said they were overloaded with work and couldn't give me a bit at the time, or said they'd call back and never did. The one fellow who gave an estimate over the phone said it'd be about $1200-$1400.

Theressa got prices from rental equipment places for demolition hammers (jack hammers) and walk-behind cutting saws. The demo hammers cost about $60 per day or $150-$200 a week and came in weights from 60 to 85 pounds for electric hammers. (Compressed-air hammers exist and give the option of heavier hammers for faster cutting, but we didn't get prices since we didn't want to mess with the noise, hassle, and extra rental cost of a compressor.) Walk-behind saws cost about $100 per day, plus an expected $10-$20 for wear and tear on the saw blade, depending on how thick the driveway was. (With Terry's help we ruled out the saws, since he thought if the driveway were only 2" deep the saw wouldn't work well, and if the driveway were of uneven depth the blade height would require careful adjustment to avoid punching through the asphalt and losing the "channel" of water required for the blade to operate properly.) I also called a sawcutter outfit, to find out what it would cost to have them cut the driveway into approximately 3' x 3' chunks for us, which would be about 650 linear feet of cutting. They quoted over the phone a $1000 cost if the driveway were 6" deep, or $672 if 4" deep. Definitely way more than doing it ourselves, even if it took a full week.

Theressa had the bright idea of asking for advice from a fellow neighborhood association board member who runs the asphalt recycling place nearby. He clued us in to the disposal option of having a 10 cubic yard dumpster dropped off on a Friday for us to fill up (asphalt only--no loose gravel or soil) and have hauled away again for $150 total. Bingo!

The Plan

So we had our plan: rent a demolition hammer with a 6" spade bit (essentially a 6" wide, thin chisel) to cut up the driveway in advance into 3' x 3' squares, small enough to be manageable by two people. We'd line up a 10 cubic yard dumpster over a weekend and fill it up. (At 2" thick, the 1200 square feet of asphalt should take up a bit less than 8 cubic yards.) Then a big work party to load the asphalt into the dumpster, and off it goes! It'd be pretty spiffy if we could coordinate things tightly enough to have a load of chips arrive just after the asphalt were cleared off, to have the work party spread the chips out, but we figured that'd be too hard to pull off, so the chip spreading would just have to be up to me in the days after the work party. We had seven trees in the design for planting once the driveway was cleared out. I was tempted to just plant them all as soon as possible, but decided to minimize chip-spreading work by allowing the chip truck to dump a load at the end of the former driveway closest to the house, spreading those chips in the immediate vicinity and planting the appropriate tree(s) in the area just covered, waiting for the next load of chips to be dumped up to the limits of the former pile's spread, distribute the new chips and plant the new tree(s), repeat etc repeat. Much less work than planting all the trees and having to wheelbarrow chips from the street up to the house.

We expected two major problems with the soil reclaimed from beneath the asphalt: serious compaction and potential contamination from the asphalt. For these reasons we decided the only plants we'd plant now would be the trees, from which we wouldn't eat for two years anyway. In the meantime we'll let the woodchips, worms, and soil life do some loosening up of the soil. We'll also try to establish some tap-rooted plants like chicory and daikon radish to bust up the compacted soil and send organic matter deep down. We'll also try to inoculate the woodchips with oyster mushrooms to help out with breaking down any hydrocarbons still present from the asphalt. After two years of such remediation, we'll feel comfortable eating non-toxin-concentrating plant parts from this soil (avoiding things like the leaves of mustard greens, which are said to concentrate lead from soil and may pick up other heavy metals too?). The understory guilds for a few of the trees include berries like blueberries (half-high and lowbush), lingonberries, and kinnick-kinnick. Depending on how difficult it is to dig in the soil, we'll plant them out either this fall or fall '08.

Execution

I rented a 65 pound electric demolition hammer and found that it cut through the asphalt with no trouble at all. Between myself and Terry, who came over to help out since he misses his old days of construction work, it took 5 or 6 hours max to do the whole driveway! I started by running the hammer a few seconds in one spot, lifting it and sliding it 5" along the line, running a few seconds, repeat ad nauseum. This was very effective. I also tried running the hammer continuously, nudging it along the line as it jumped around. It took me a little while to get the hang of this method, but it's what Terry used when he came over, so I stuck with it and found it to be a bit faster than going bit by bit. Much harder to control the cuts, though, so if you need a straight clean line the bit by bit method is the way to go. The hammer wasn't that heavy, and I didn't even feel sore afterwards. A 70 pound hammer might have been the ideal weight, making the job that much faster and easier without being much of a strain. More than 70 pounds might have gotten into the realm of hard work just moving the hammer around. Ear protection was important, but eye protection turned out to be unnecessary--no flying chunks of asphalt or anything.

A few days later the dumpster arrived and we were ready for the Saturday work party! We set up a few 2" x 6" boards as ramps to get wheelbarrows up into the dumpster. Theressa did a great job of sending out work party invites and rounding up wheelbarrows, sledgehammers, and flat shovels. The day of the work party we had 12-15 people throughout the day, some staying all day, others for a few hours in the morning or afternoon. People organized into teams to break up the asphalt squares into smaller pieces, load them into wheelbarrows, and unload them into the dumpster. My preferred method was to lift up a square on edge by myself or with another person, then hurl it back to the ground. Ideally it would break into two to four pieces, though often it would break into more than that, or require another lift and hurl. Other people propped squares up on rubble and whacked them with sledgehammers to break them up. Clean-up crews followed the main square action, scooping up crumbly asphalt bits into recycling bins to be wheelbarrowed and dumped like the larger chunks.

After just an hour or an hour and a half, we were already about halfway done! The only problem was that we had filled about 2/3 of the dumpster. Apparently there was a lot more dead space created in the dumpster as the asphalt was loaded in than I had expected. Luckily, the dumpster company was able to come out with an hour's notice to pick up the full dumpster and drop off an empty one. So by the time lunch rolled around, we'd filled the first dumpster to the top; while we ate the dumpsters were swapped out and we were able to resume work without a hitch. We filled the second dumpster about half to 2/3 full, so it seems like a good rule of thumb is to double the actual amount of asphalt to figure how much dumpster space it'll take up.

As the main asphalt moving work wound down, people raked and shoveled the remaining gravel into piles dotted across the driveway. It's a good thing we didn't have wood chips delivered, since although there wasn't a whole lot of loose gravel, we definitely weren't ready for spreading anything else out yet! The other final driveway task was to dig out the railroad ties, for which, conveniently, one of our helpers had a good use...so he drove them all away without our having to bother with craigslist, etc.

All in all, the work party was a wild success for getting rid of the driveway. After the driveway project was pretty much done, we set those folks who still had energy left over to hacking back the laurel hedge between the former driveway and the next door neighbor, to open up planting spots and light for a new hedgerow of evergreen edibles. My main lesson from the work party is the importance of advance organization of all the tasks we wanted to get done. We did a great job of figuring out as many of the driveway details as we could, but didn't do as good a job of arranging for pruning tools for the hedge, and didn't discuss in advance how we'd coordinate the two projects. There could have been teams of people working on the hedge while the driveway was still being moved out, preventing the bottleneck in tools we suffered by waiting until the driveway was done. There were also other small projects we'd thought of to which we could assign people, but we weren't organized enough to actually set anyone up with those projects. Directing people, answering questions, and making decisions to deal with unexpected situations takes a lot of your energy and focus!

The Aftermath

The piles of gravel went away via craigslist and the next door neighbor the next day. The revealed soil is almost as badly compacted as I'd feared, requiring a pickaxe to get through the first 4-8" (which seems to be some sort of fill layer of gravel & sand) before finding real soil. I've planted out the seven planned trees, making generous holes and trying to make sure the trees have enough room to expand their roots for at least the first year before hitting compaction. I've also hacked away randomly at different spots in the driveway to make a few starts of holes...hopefully that'll encourage water percolation, root penetration from the taprooted cover crops, and worm wriggling at least in those spots. A more focused application of the pickaxe has helped open up the soil right next to the street, where a natural trough creates a swale. When it was asphalted, we had standing water in heavy rains. After some hacking, the rain seems to be percolating, slowly but surely. Unfortunately, so long as cars are still operating, that area won't be fit for growing, as it's a natural gathering place for oil and other street-surface contaminants. :\ But we have successfully reclaimed a solid 1200 square feet of growing space...go us, and thanks to all those who helped!

Stuff Purge (or: "Stuff Sucks")

Warning: I don't expect this to be a terribly exciting post, so here's the Reader's Digest version: Theressa and I are getting rid of a lot of stuff, and we think it's pretty neat. Because stuff sucks.

To expand a bit...although I went through a big "stuff purge" before moving from Cincinnati to Portland (to the point where I was able to fit nearly all my worldly possessions into my Toyota Camry), that still left me with a lot more stuff than I really need. Over the last year I've been going through another ongoing round of intense sloughing. I sold off or gave away my stamp collection (damn near worthless) and baseball card collection from when I was 10 years old, my legos, my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic collection, about half my non-Zelazny science fiction/fantasy books and 25% of my music CDs (both already cut way down in Cincinnati), all my computer games (even Civilization, my multi-year addiction!), lots more clothes (I still have boxes of clothes, more than I really need--but mostly things Goodwill wouldn't even want since they're permanently stained with dirt or blood or already in tatters), and most amazing of all--a significant chunk of my Zelazny collection.

It's been really neat turning all these dust collectors into valuable books on edible plants and such! And most of the stuff has been really easy to part with emotionally--I find that I'm not really tied to it. It's mostly a relief to not have to deal with it ever again. The one category of exception is the Zelazny books--it was really neat having all kinds of foreign editions of his books with their pretty covers all lined up my shelf. But not quite neat enough any longer to overcome the not-neatness of taking up shelf space which could be holding resources about plants, tracking, wilderness survival, etc. And the non-essential Zelazny books aren't neat enough to be worth boxing up and storing when we start doing house renovations, or neat enough to be boxed up and carried to a new location if/when we move. So off they go, to new appreciative homes!

There's still room for more purging, espcially in the Zelazny and music realms...so I'll probably do another round in the future. But at this point I'm still attached enough to some of the items, despite knowing that I don't really need them, that they'll sit on the shelf a bit longer. And, ironically, one of the main items I moved to Portland to discard is still taking up a sizable chunk of space--my car. Although I don't drive it, Theressa still does, so it's still around. At least it doesn't weigh on me psychically or monetarily--I don't put a penny into it, and whenever Theressa comes home and says something like "the radiator is leaking, and if I don't keep putting water into it every 30 minutes worth of driving, the engine will explode and wreck the car", my response is "Cool! Maybe it'll blow up and we can beat the crap out of the remains with a sledge-hammer!" So I'm not too worried about the car still being around, but I do expect that we'll wean Theressa off entirely (she only drives it once a week at this point) in the near future and be rid of the car for good.

My goal is to get myself to the point where, mentally, I can leave all my stuff behind. That doesn't mean I'm trying to physically get rid of everything; I just want to have a relationship with my stuff such that I can dump it in a second if the life of a hunter & gatherer becomes the most appropriate for the situation. I'm sure that for a while I'll be tied to some of my stuff, if for no reason other than my complete dependency on books and the internet for knowledge of plants and other survival skills. But as I internalize more of that knowledge the books will become less crucial.

Theressa's been doing much the same as I, doubled (in proportion to her greater amount of stuff!) Lots of craigslisting, ebaying, consignment shop'ing, and donating to the local anarchist collective. We'll wrap up with a quote from the lady herself: "Shit bogs me down and sometimes I think I should just get a dumpster and leave one pair of underwear, one pair of pants, one shirt...shit's fucking stressful! [Note: she does not mean our humanure compost system, which she says is easy.] Figuring out what to do with it and how to take care of it. I wasn't a big stuff connoisseur before, never got too deep into consumer madness, but now I've backed off even further and I can pretty much say that 'stuff sucks'."

Book review: Mycelium Running by Paul Stamets plus our fungal plans

Review

I've finally read Paul Stamets' Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World, which has been on my list for some time. It's an excellent assembly of the ways in which mushrooms can be used for real-world applications, from growing in your yard for edible and medicinal use to filtering contaminated water to speeding the regeneration of clear-cut landscapes. A while back I started reading Stamets' The Mushroom Cultivator, mistakenly believing I needed to read his books in order. I was turned off by the book, finding its detailed descriptions of how to set up a sterilized mushroom lab boring and impractical for a world of energy descent. My friends Torey and Briannah recently assured me that The Mushroom Cultivator and Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms are not prerequisites for Mycelium Running, acting rather as companion volumes with details on laboratory-based cultivation.

Much of the information in Mycelium Running I had already picked up from friends, glancing through the book in the past, reviewing other Stamets and Fungi Perfecti writings, hanging out with permaculture people, etc. But it was good to read through it all at once and get an organized presentation of some of the possibilities. It's clear that the functions and human uses of mushrooms are only barely understood so there's plenty of learning still to be done.

I found it interesting comparing Stamets' world-view with some of my realizations and insights from other authors. Even though the book was published in 2005, Stamets doesn't seem to have been aware of Peak Oil while writing, or at least doesn't give any indication that he expects civilization to deviate from its course of ever-onward progress. He does express concern about various environmental issues, but doesn't say a thing about changing the behavior that causes the problems, either at an immediate direct-cause level or at a root-cause level. He simply presents ways that mushrooms can remediate some of the damage, allowing us to continue on our path. Several of these remediation techniques still rely on high-complexity organization for deployment. In general, Stamets' philosophy strikes me as a variation on "technology will save us", except that Stamets believes it's mushrooms that will save us (and as much as says so in the book's subtitle). There's also an echoed theme of faith in science as the path towards betterment of humankind.

Despite those big-picture blindspots, Stamets is one of the foremost mycologists in the world, doing cutting-edge research and dissemination of this sort of information, putting it into the hands of lay-people who can run with it. The book is an invaluable resource and I will definitely be buying a copy for my library.

Our Fungal Plans

Last September, in The Birds and the Bees, I mentioned the logs we inoculated with shitake and oyster mushrooms. We have since moved the logs away from the house, where our friends warned us they might attack the wood. The shitakes are now piled in the back yard, and we spread the oyster mushroom logs (several of which are already fruiting a tiny bit) through the front yard, half-burying them in the wood chips. Since oysters are very aggressive mushrooms, we're assuming that they'll continue to dominate the logs without concern of other fungi invading from the ground (which is why you usually elevate your mushroom logs on a pallet). In fact, the oysters may well start to colonize the surrounding wood chips.

I have a few other plans for fungal experimentation:

• Grow oyster mushrooms in buckets of coffee grounds, which we get for free from two local coffee places. We should be able to use our fruiting oyster mushrooms as inoculant for the grounds
  
• When we come across more fresh-cut wood, add some into the pile of shitake logs to be colonized by the existing logs. Maybe put some adjacent to the oyster mushroom logs in the front yard, too. As the shitake logs fruit, we'll at least shake spores onto the new logs, and maybe do a more deliberate spore-slurry creation and inoculate the new logs.
  
• We're taking out all the asphalt in the yard, which will free up about 1300 square feet of driveway and walkways for growing things. The ground underneath is probably somewhat contaminated by the petroleum sludge leachings, so we'll try inoculating woodchips across the whole area with oyster mushrooms, which break down hydrocarbons.
  
• I want to get Fungi Perfecti's "Three Amigos" Garden Pack of outdoor patch mushroom spawn. This includes the Garden Oyster (Hypsizygus ulmarius), the Garden Giant (Stropharia rugoso-annulata) and the Shaggy Mane (Coprinus comatus). We'll start them off by inoculating a wood chip patch for each type. As the mycelium spread through the patch, we can transplant clumps throughout the yard. In theory, so long as we keep them refreshed with organic matter, they'll naturalize and become permanent growers in the landscape.
  

Ever since I saw Dave Jacke's diagram of nutrient and material flows in a mature forest ecological community, I've been excited about the potential for harnessing the decomposer cycle. (I think I saw his diagram at a presentation; I can't find it in his book Edible Forest Gardens.) The diagram showed how the vast majority of energy in a system flows through the microbial level, especially decomposers. If that decomposer niche can be influenced towards species producing food for humans we can tap into a lot of extra energy. I look forward to continuing my baby steps in integrating edible mushrooms into the rest of what we're doing!

Book review: The Weather-Wise Gardener by Calvin Simonds

I saw The Weather-Wise Gardener: A Guide to Understanding, Predicting, and Working With the Weather in a used bookstore and thought it might be a helpful read to better understand the weather. (As an indication of how clueless and oblivious I've been to the weather, I thought it was really neat when Theressa predicted the afternoon's weather by simply looking up into the sky and seeing which way the clouds were blowing!) After reading the book, I definitely know more than I did, but found that I had a lot of trouble comprehending the book. It's extremely unusual for me not to be able to follow the text of a book--I don't think I've experienced that since the dark days of college depression, slogging through textbook pages not because I wanted to but because I "had" to. I don't know whether the problem with this book was because it's such a complex subject, because I wasn't mentally focused (noticing that Keeping it Living was also a slow, more difficult read for me than usual), or because the book doesn't do the best job it could of explaining weather systems. Another complicating factor for me was that the book is written from the perspective of an east-coaster, and in the author's rare mentions of the pacific coast he seems to think that that means California. It was very confusing to me whether the weather patterns described for the rest of the US really apply over here, especially to the Willamette Valley in which Portland lies.

That said, a few thoughts on the book. It begins by describing the cyclical patterns of individual storms. I'd never realized that weather tends to have a four-day cycle and is locally predictable based on the shifting of the winds, which rotate around in a clockwise or counter-clockwise cycle depending on how storms are moving in relation to your location. The book expands on individual storms to explain how storm systems travel across the US and through different regions, what different temperatures and barometric pressures mean, what the influencing ocean currents and marine and continental wind systems are, what all the symbols and descriptions on a weather map mean (at least in 1983), and of course how to put all this together for a crystal-clear understanding of what's going on at the moment and how to make reasonable predictions of what's coming.

The final portion of the book applies the larger understanding of the weather systems to interpreting weather forecasts and making your own predictions for your own garden. A lot of it is pretty straight-forward how-to-react to frost predictions, precipitation, etc. And some of it is how to extrapolate weather predictions from the city for your rural garden 200 miles from the nearest weather station.

Unfortunately, although I grasped the basics and now understand a lot of terminology and concepts I didn't understand before, I was unable to follow the examples of predictions given in the book for different starting conditions. I'll have to do more reading and studying, tuning in to the weather channel, and of course simply paying attention to the weather, clouds and winds overhead. I'll see where paying closer attention and casual learning takes me, and at some point in the future check out some of the other recommended books (or see if there are newer books which may be worth reading): Meteorology, the Atmosphere in Action by Joe R Eagleman, British weather in Maps by James A Taylor & R A Yates, Weather Forcasting by Alan Watts, and A Field Guide to the Atmosphere (Peterson's Guide) by V J Schaefer and John A Day.

Book review: Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why is a study of who makes it through extreme survival situations and why. The author, a life-long thrill-seeker by way of extreme sports, aviation, etc, mixes case studies of people in wilderness situations with psychology and information about how the brain works. Although the book focuses on raw, wilderness physical survival situations, the author's argues that the mental attitudes crucial to survival in the wild are equally important in dealing with financial crisis, a divorce, or presumably peak oil and the collapse of civilization.

I have a hard time putting into words the messages of the book. In fact, as I was reading it, I wasn't even sure I was getting much out of it...until I watched the movie Hotel Rwanda and found myself applying some of the lessons and theories of the book to the survival situation of the characters in the movie. This book needs to be read and experienced to get the full meaning, not just summarized in a book review. But I'll throw out some of my thoughts anyway, partly for you and partly for me as notes to jog my memory.

One of the interesting themes of the book is that we don't live in reality. We live in the mental construct of reality which we have assembled in our brains. Our mental map is updated with new information all the time, but there's also a strong tendency to cling to the map or aspects of the map even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the map is wrong. Examining what it means to be lost, in the woods for example, Gonzales observes that if you find yourself making up elaborate explanations for why your map of the hiking trail doesn't match what you're seeing ("that lake on the map could have dried up so I can't see it now" or "that huge boulder could have rolled away somewhere") then something is wrong and you need to stop and reevaluate where you actually are. This seems so obvious from the known position of my desk and my keyboard, but Gonazeles' warnings are invaluable preparation for embarking into befuddling new landscapes. It's important to know that our brains so desperately want to retain a sense of knowing where we are that they'll concoct ridiculous stories to force the contradictory evidence from the eyes into the pre-existing mental map. Hopefully knowing that this occurs will make it easier to break the spell when it actually happens.

A similar mental blind-spot to watch out for is when emotions surge and take over from the rational brain in dangerous situations. Gonzales gives an example of search-and-rescue snowmobilers returning from a successful rescue, revved up with adrenaline. Two of them decided to sled down a hill and up a far slope, despite having been warned that day of the risk of snow-slide on that slope. One of them died in the resulting slide. A similar urge comes when lost or when headed towards a comforting destination. The emotions and imagination of reaching water or of getting to safe, familiar home can cause you to rush forward, heedless of rational precautions of pacing oneself, marking a path so as not to get lost, or even whether you're actually headed the right way. Hopefully having read about the effect will make it easier to recognize it if it ever comes up for me in a wilderness setting.

Gonzales also dances a lot around the concept of "Positive Mental Attitude", a top item in the US Air Force's survival checklist. Positive Mental Attitude can't be defined or explained, but it's another major theme that he weaves into the tales of survival. He doesn't give any advice on how this can be learned or cultivated. It's not clear whether it's something you're born with and have or don't have for the rest of your life, or whether it's something you can deliberately develop. Closely related to this theme is that of using dark humor to prepare for or cope with difficult situations. Another indefinable quality is that of "cool", being able to stay calm and poised in the worst situations, coralling and maybe even harnessing the emotions of fear and anger while keeping the rational brain in charge of actions.

It's interesting how routinely civilized humans these days underestimate nature, with the ease of driving halfway up a mountain and walking out along a pre-marked sign-posted nature trail. This book was a good warning to me (with almost no experience in non-urban areas) that when I depart the carefully sheltered confines of the city, I need to be really aware of where I am and how vulnerable I am to the real world if I'm not prepared. A similar attitude will have to apply to homesteading, both on the main site and when hunting and gathering in surrounding wilderness.

Gonzales summarizes what survivors do:

1. Perceive, believe (look, see, believe)
   
2. Stay calm (use humor, use fear to focus)
   
3. Think/analyze/plan (get organized; set up small, manageable tasks)
   
4. Take correct, decisive action (be bold and cautious while carrying out tasks)
   
5. Celebrate your successes (take joy in completing tasks)
   
6. Count your blessings (be grateful--you're alive)
   
7. Play (sing, play mind games, recite poetry, count anything, do mathematical problems in your head)
   
8. See the beauty (remember: it's a vision quest)
   
9. Believe that you will succeed (develop a deep conviction that you'll live)
   
10. Surrender (let go of your fear of dying: "put away the pain")
    
11. Do whatever is necessary (be determined; have the will and the skill)
    
12. Never give up (let nothing break your spirit)
    

Kucinich for President 02008

Dennis Kucinich announced he's running for President in 02008! It's exciting to see how many people are voicing their support on his website forums, and I've already seen two people I worked with in 02003 express their support. I'm glad Kucinich and his voice of sanity will be present amidst the business-as-usual madness of national politics.

I'll definitely vote for him (except in the unlikely event someone with even more sanity runs), but I don't plan to work on the campaign this time around. Although I think it would be fantastic to have Kucinich as President of the US, I think it's too late to turn things around through national politics. Further, I've become more radical in my solutions to the coming collapse. Kucinich's policies are about the best that could be hoped for from a national politician, but they're still essentially band-aids to a fundamentally flawed system--civilization. Civilization needs to come down entirely, and people who see what's coming need to prepare their own lifeboats at a local level. Even if Kucinich took office with a fully supportive House and Senate, there are too many powerful forces arrayed against the fixes he wants to make for them to achieve a soft landing. Again, I'm not saying it wouldn't be good to have Kucinich as President. I'm supportive of Kucinich and will vote for him, but I no longer feel his campaign is the most strategic place for me to put my energy and time.

Book review: Keeping it Living by Nancy Turner & Douglas Deur

I'm not that well versed in her works, but Nancy Turner has for decades been researching and publishing books on Pacific Northwest cultures and especially ethnobotany. I believe most of her work has been in British Columbia, but her books usually cover down to northern California. She's on my list of "authors to check out more".

I just finished reading a collection of essays edited by Turner and Douglas Deur, entitled Keeping it Living: Traditions of Plant Use and Cultivation on the Northwest Coast of North America. The basic goal is to prove that indigenous peoples in this region were actively cultivating crops prior to European contact. Apparently the assumption amongst Europeans since the start, and thus subsequently amongst anthropologists through the 20th century, was that Indian people cultivated a local species of tobacco, harvested and ate and preserved a hell of a lot of salmon, and hunted and gathered a small amount of plant and other animal foods. This volume makes the case that plant foods were more important than previously realized, and especially that tribes deliberately cared for and cultivated berry patches and root crops.

I found the writing rather dry and had to push myself through a lot of the book--it's written by anthropologists for other anthropologists to debate fine points of anthropology. It's definitely accessible by laypeople, but not written for us per se. Not knowing much about anthropology and the details of the debates, I'm convinced by its claims, but what do I know? Anyway, I was mostly focused on practical applications to modern times. The main take-home points I got from the book are:

• As I've read for other Indians elsewhere (such as in Tending the Wild by Kat Anderson and Changes in the Land by William Cronon), Indians in this region maintained berry patches through pruning, burning, and fertilization. Berries included blueberries, huckleberries, cranberries, salal, Rubus sp (salmonberries, blackberries, etc), strawberries, currants, and gooseberries. Some berries were transplanted to the edges of village sites. Also, the native crabapples were maintained, although I only recall pruning and maybe fertilizing being mentioned for those.
  
• At this time, remaining Indians do not engage in the same kind of maintenance practices. Obviously prescribed burns are out of the question. Many historical berry patches have been wiped out by logging and settling, or made inaccessible because they can't be found anymore. Although Indians do still gather from the wild, the existing patches are too unpredictable for Indians to put energy into maintaining--they could be cut down next month for a logging road. This warns me not to expect that in a homestead situation we can reliably harvest large quantities of berries as people did in the past--things have been trashed, and the work required to achieve the productivity of the past in a given patch may not be worth investing so long as logging and other civilized destruction is still a threat.
  
• Fireweed shoots (Epilobium angustifolium) and Rubus sp shoots were prime spring vegetables. Indians broke them off at the base, encouraging further shoots. They knew how many rounds of shoots to harvest before leaving the shoots to grow to maturity. I plan to control domesticated blackberries, raspberries, etc by eating unwanted shoots, and to pay attention to how Rubus sp and fireweed respond to the shoot harvesting.
  
• Native people cultivated multiple roots by weeding, working the soil, removing rocks, pruning and removing encroaching woody plants, prescribed burns, replanting tubers, perhaps facilitating the spread of seed into turned soil, altering the environment in the coastal estuarine flats to expand habitat for desired plants, perhaps selecting superior varieties, and hunting or scaring off predaceous wildlife.
  
• Roots cultivated included:
  
  
  
  • Wild carrot (Conioselinum pacificum)
    
  • Camas (Camassia sp.)
    
  • Rice root (Fritillaria camschatcensis)
    
  • Chocolate lily (Fritillaria lanceolata)
    
  • Pink fawn lily (Erythronium revolutum)
    
  • Tiger lily (Lilium columbianum)
    
  • Wapato (Sagittaria latifolia)
    
  • Springbank clover (Trifolium wormskjoldii)
    
  • Pacific silverweed (Potentilla anserina)
    
  • Nootka lupine (Lupinus nootkatensis)
    
  • Brackern fern (Pteridium aquilinum)
    
  
  
• Some or many of the root plots were monocultures, though at least some were polycultures of these species. It's not clear to me how many were managed as polycultures or what the exact species mix was.
  
• It sounds like the Indians put a lot of work into their plots, making multiple trips to their plots during the year for preparing the beds, weeding, and harvesting. It would be nice to find less labor-intensive ways to grow these roots. Wapato seems to have been an exception, being pretty much a show-up-and-harvest kind of crop. (Though the harvesting method of wading into the water in the cold months of the year, sometimes as deep as one's neck, has its drawbacks.)
  
• All or almost all the root plots were owned by clans, kinships, families, and individuals. The most productive berry patches were similarly owned. This allowed people who put work into a particular crop to benefit from the harvest, avoiding "tragedy of the commons."
  

I'd like to try many or all of the native root crops listed. Half of them are aquatic or at least boggy plants, which makes it harder to experiment with them now, and limits their use to a homestead with significant water resources. (My ideal homestead site has, of course, multiple ponds for aquaculture and aquatic plants!) For berries, it seems we'll need to plan to grow most of the berries we consume, not relying on abundant harvests from wild areas until it's reasonably certain that industrial logging and civilization's expansion has ceased. Although I assume blackberries are a widely available weed in rural areas, as they are in the city...

Self-sufficient diet, rough draft

Note: see also my post on Self sufficient tropical diet, rough draft

I've been thinking about how much land would be required to give an adequate, roughly paleodiet (no potatoes, cereal grains, or dairy, minimizing annuals domesticated & bred within the last 10,000 years) in a homesteading situation. My first step has been to figure out what the diet would consist of, in terms of proportion of calories from fruit and berries, meat, tubers, vegetables, etc. I've worked up a very rough draft which I'll jot down here. I welcome input, and will post future drafts as I learn more, think more, and crunch more numbers!

As best I can tell, an ideal hunter/gatherer diet consists of about 50-65% meat, and 35-50% plant foods. Assuming we have some need for land efficiency, this seems unrealistic for a self-sufficient homestead, since it does take a lot more land to raise meat than the equivalent calories in plant food. So for now, I'm figuring a minimal level of meat from the "homestead", with, hopefully, supplemental meat available from hunting and trapping. I haven't tried to do a full nutritional analysis of what a "balanced" diet requires; I'm just figuring that with a wide variety of foods most of that will sort itself out. But again, I welcome input into any of this, especially if I'm missing some important macronutritional info!

In the table below, % of diet refers to calorie intake. "Per day" is about how much of the item would be eaten per day on average. "Cals/lb" is my estimate of how many calories per pound this food type provides. The column for "Land" is a rough estimate of how much space, in square feet, would be needed to provide an annual yield sufficient for 2500 calories/day using this category as a monocrop (not integrated with other foods).

% of diet	Food type	Per day	Cals/lb	Land	Notes
20%	Meat	5/8 lb	800	1 acre?	Good homestead options seem to be beef, chicken, sheep, and maybe goats. Beef & lamb relatively higher in calories, chicken & goat low. Maybe 12 chickens (young males and old stewing hens)/person annually, plus half a pound of other meat per non-chicken-eating day? And 1/3 of a steer per year or its equivalent. No idea how much land required, which obviously is crucial.
10%	Eggs	3 eggs	75/egg	1/4 acre?	Chickens or ducks (maybe other possibilities too?) For average 3 eggs/day, would need 4 or 5 fairly productive layers, or more older layers.
20%	Protein nuts & seeds	2/3 cup	2900	6900	Mostly thinking walnut, hazelnut, pine nuts, and sunflower seeds. Could also include hickory, pecan, almonds, pistachios, monkey puzzle, etc. Land requirement based on 1200 pounds/acre yield (I think very conservative, this could be doubled with good water/fertilization) and assuming 33% average kernel yield.
5%	Chestnuts	1/2 cup	900	1150	Land requirement assumes 2400 lbs/acre (could be more with grafted varieties) and 80% kernel (I can't find any numbers for this, but this seems reasonable). Acorns would be a nice complement to chestnuts, but don't seem realistic for planting and getting a quick return. (Definitely an option for gathering from existing stands, though.)
10%	Roots	1.25 lbs	800	1000	Ideally mostly low-maintenance perennials, but for now the common crops for which I can find data are: Jerusalem artichoke, beets, carrots, parsnips, camas, wapato, rutabagas, onions, turnips. Assumes a yield of 1 pound per 2 square feet. The calorie content varies widely for different tubers, so these numbers are very fungible depending on the crop make-up.
5%	Starchy seeds	1/5 cup	1600	600	Amaranth, quinoa, other chenopods. Avoiding cereal grains (grass family). Assumes yield of 5 lbs grain per 100 square ft (could get higher yield, but maybe 5 lbs is a good guess for a low-maintenance patch).
7.5%	Fruit	2-3 fruits	300	1000	Apples, pears, plums, persimmons, etc. Assumes 50 lbs per tree per year average, and trees and paths taking up a 16' diameter spread per tree.
7.5%	Berries	2-3 cups	200	1000	Gooseberries, blueberries, blackberries, grapes, kiwis, etc. Might include melons in this category? 1000 square feet probably an over-estimate, as vines can make use of vertical space.
2-3%	Greens	Large salad, 1 lb	70	350	I haven't yet experimented with weighing different greens to understand how much salad 1 pound of greens actually makes. Assume can get 1 pound greens/square foot.
5%	Squash, misc veggies	1.25 lbs	100	1000	Other veggies such as squash (including seeds, though maybe they should be included under protein nuts & seeds above, increasing that percentage of diet), shoots (asparagus, Rubus sp., bamboo, etc), tomatoes, peppers, etc. Land requirement assumes can produce 1 lb per 2 square ft.
7-8%	Misc	2 tbs honey, 10 olives, and 1/2 cup mushrooms		300	Miscellaneous calories from things like mushrooms, honey, olives, vegetable oils (processing seeds from grape for example, or surplus walnuts?), and whatever else I haven't thought of yet. I pretty much just totally made up the land requirement number.

So, my very rough conclusion thus far is that for each 2500 calorie diet, you need a bit over a quarter acre (13,300 square feet) for plant food production in a monocrop system, plus 1.25 acres to support 12 chickens for eating, 1/3 of a steer, and 5-6 laying hens (see comments below for my calculations on that). Grand total: about 1.5 acres per person.

The next main research thrust needs to be into how much land you need to support free-range, almost fully pasture-fed animals on a rotational system. (Chickens, of course, will get supplemental feed from kitchen scraps, maggot farm, etc. I also expect it'll prove economical to grow some patches of grains and other vegetation purely for the chickens to pick through or to cut and store as feed for livestock through the winter.) I've read a lot of Joel Salatin's work on integrated livestock systems, but can't remember any details of the numbers.

Another aspect to think about more is how much space can be saved by growing crops under trees, so that it's not 1000 square feet for fruit trees and another 1000 square feet for berries, but rather 1000 square feet of fruit trees with berries growing underneath them, plus maybe another 500 square feet of berries growing in the open, for a total of 1500 square feet instead of 2000. This, of course, is how we're already planning and planting in our food forest plantings on an urban lot...but without mature trees to experiment with, we can't get data from our own experience for what final yields to expect in such an integrated system.