Seeking my successful sit spot

I really enjoy identifying, perusing, obtaining, talking about, and even writing about good information resources. I've amassed a very nice collection of permaculture-related books, and a good start of a collection of naturalist skills books covering plant identification and use, foraging guides, bird identification by sight, bird identification by song, detailed life histories of birds, tracking guides, insect guides, mammal guides, reptilian and amphibian guides, mushroom guides, etc. But I haven't even cracked open many of the books, and I've put even fewer of them to any real use! I've reminded myself lately that at some point I need to say "enough already" with the resource accumulation, and actually get my ass outside to learn in the only way that ultimately matters, through direct experience. Not that books can't help point the way and help answer certain kinds of questions...but they don't substitute for experiencing the real world.

I also notice that I spend way more time on the internet than I want to, feeding my internal information junky its information fix. Every day I make the rounds of the news sites, discovering that yep, peak oil has still peaked, the housing bubble is still popping, the US dollar is still declining, the broad economy is still breaking apart on the rocks, we're still so very doomed, the Tribe of Anthropik is still on vacation, and Ran Prieur still posts about five minutes worth of reading every other day or so. Then, unless I feel especially motivated by some other project or Theressa kicks me off the computer, I start the cycle again, reloading the same damn sites in case anything has updated while I was checking the others. I want to start feeding my information junky good clean data about the birds and the bees instead of all this internet porn! (See the October 29 entry for the porn bits.)

So between yesterday and today, I spent many hours poking around for a sit spot at Whitaker Ponds. Tonight I'll just write up a quick description of how a sit spot works (or at least, how I intend to use it). I'll write more in a future post about my search and/or details about the spot I find. And I'll probably post a lot after that with specific stories from my sit spot!

I plan to use my sit spot to jump-start nature awareness. I'll find a comfortable and safe place outside where I can sit, stretch out, and simply observe. I'll go there every day (or damn near) to gain an intimate feel for one particular spot, becoming acquainted with the birds and plants and the bolder land-based animals like squirrels who call it home. Eventually I'll also learn about the reclusive or nocturnal mammals and other land animals who live there, mostly from tracks and signs. I'll cart along field guides as needed, to begin to match visual sightings with names in books. I'll compare the bird calls I hear at my spot to tapes and CDs at home to increase my bird song recognition skills.

I'll visit my sit spot for at least the next year, giving me insight not only into day to day changes, but into the big-picture seasonal life patterns of everyone who lives around the spot. I'll see plants come into leaf, flower, fruit, disperse their seed, and go dormant or die. I'll see some birds migrate away to rejoin us again next year. I might see young birds of year-round residence taking their first flights, and watch them grow older to find a mate, make a nest, and teach another generation of young. Maybe I'll even read tracks well enough to see some of the same patterns in the land-based residents of the place.

I've never had much trouble sitting still, but only because I usually live in my head (moreso in the past than now, but I still spend most of my time there.) Whether I read a book or set my brain to work puzzling over some problem, I go inside almost wherever I am and whatever I'm doing. That instinct has helped me through my life to hide from scary or threatening situations outside, but it also left me with minimal observational skills or awareness of my surroundings. Unless I specifically focus on what's around me, turning my sensory input into data to be processed by my brain, I tend to miss all the details around me. The past two years of urban foraging have given me the ability to recognize many food plants without trying, while simply walking or biking along as usual. So I feel pretty confident that I can switch from an internal existence to living in the real world, and sitting at my sit spot and deliberately opening up to the world around me should help a lot. To that end, I'll practice specific sensory enhancement excercises, to better use my senses of vision and taste and feel and sound and smell.

Although at this point I really dislike the idea, I'll at least try journaling. In his various books and tapes, Jon Young speaks and writes about the major benefits of writing down experiences, drawing maps, doing write-ups of track analyses or specific sequences of observations, etc. I never enjoyed taking notes in school (and usually didn't bother) and hate writing in general (hence the infrequency of my emails to friends and family, and the not-really-daily daily updates to this blog). But I'll give some of Young's recommended journaling excercises a fair try. If they do help with my learning process as much as he suggests, I'll try to figure out how to do them in such a way that I can enjoy it.

Although I expect to move out of the city within the next couple of years, and will leave behind the particular spot I'll have learned so well, the lessons of plant and animal life, the practice in opening myself up, and the ability to use all my senses with greater awareness should translate well to wherever we go to pursue our permaculture/hunter-gatherer life.

Sedentism, food storage, climate, human evolution, & half-baked theories

I don't have anything informative to write tonight, as I just blew all my energy researching a question to which I still have no good answers or even new pointers: what, if any, relationship do coldish (or temperate?) climates have to food storage, sedentism, warfare, and hierarchy in human cultures? I'll write more about hierarchy in future posts, as the current question came up for me because I want to understand why, when, and how hierarchy and other traits I perceive as negative arise in cultures. But for now I'll write a bit about my non-answers to the more specific question of climate's influence.

I read in Matson & Coupland's The Prehistory of the Northwest Coast that humans didn't migrate north of about 40 degrees latitude until about 40,000 years ago when they learned to make custom-fit clothes allowing them to brave colder environments. The authors made this statement as an aside, so didn't really go into much detail. After reading this, I wondered whether modern and ancestral human confinement to tropical and subtropical areas, where they could hunt and gather food pretty reliably all year long, resulted in evolution for not just hunting & gathering, but specifically fully nomadic hunting & gathering?

I say "fully nomadic" to distinguish from the semi-sedentary pattern seen both on the Pacific Northwest coast, and inland among the Kalapuya and, I think, of other inland people in northern California. The concentrated rainy season here would give a lot of incentive to adopt a lifestyle in which you actively gather resources during the dry and warm part of the year, and hunker down and relax under shelter during the wet and cold part. I assume tribes in other areas (of the US or of the world) also had semi-sedentary lives, but I don't know enough to find other examples yet. As I explore that more, I'll pay attention to the difference between horticultural tribes (cultivating certain patches of soil best suited to staple calorie production, thus setting up somewhat permanent residence around that resource) vs hunter-gatherers, relying more completely on nature's provision, with less intensive management techniques such as burning.

People in the Pacific Northwest had permanent houses in winter villages, which they used year after year. Some people, along the coast where they had water access to move things by canoe & raft, even had multiple house frames in different spots, and moved the planks of their houses from site to site through the year. Others migrated from the spring to the fall to different temporary, seasonal camps, but returned to their permanent houses for the winter. I imagine some people may have left their villages totally empty during the migratory part of the year, but others may have had people (maybe elderly?) in residence throughout the year, or tag-teams of coming and departing groups on resource-gathering expeditions.

I think that sedentism (semi- or full-) depends on food storage, since otherwise your group would seriously deplete the local environment as natural resources become scarcest through those winter months. FBy contrast, fully nomadic groups might travel in larger bands during the plentiful months, when ample game and plants could support a relatively high population density in a given spot. But for winter, they would break up into smaller groups, each group dispersing to take advantage of resources inadequate for the full, large group. The archaeological evidence suggests that for the first few thousand years after migrating into the region, pacific northwest people lived fully nomadic lives, leaving behind no evidence of permanent houses. Eventually they entered the pattern of semi-sedentism which continued until European contact.

People in tropical and subtropical areas don't have to deal with major seasonal shifts in food availability, so they wouldn't have much incentive to stay in one spot beyond its temporal carrying capacity. Why go to the trouble of preserving, storing, and safeguarding food when you know that you can always go out and find what you need, no matter what day of the year?

So, if we evolved as fully nomadic hunter-gatherers, with cultures which encouraged resource distribution amongst the tribe rather than stocking food away for lean times, what effect did storing food and settling down for the winter have? Could that explain the development of those traits I associate with civilization and with horticulturalists: hierarchy, slavery, and warfare?

Now that I've explained my question, I'll leave it at that for tonight. But I'll follow up soon with my feeble explorations of the answer!

Book Review: The Forager's Harvest by Samuel Thayer

I've been meaning to write up a glowing review of this book for some months now, because I absolutely love it! I've bought, checked out from the library, and flipped through more than a dozen foraging guides, but as soon as I started looking through this one I knew it had value way above and beyond any of the others and that I had to buy it. Why? The details! I love details! And this book has them!

The book starts with coverage of general topics related to foraging, such as safety in identification and sampling; differences of harvest, timing, and use of different plant parts (leaves, roots, seeds, etc); processing and storage techniques; and the shortcomings of most of the foraging literature to date. After extensive coverage of these sorts of topics, with a lot of useful information I haven't seen elsewhere, Thayer spends 32 chapters detailing 32 plants (a few more actually, since he covers some closely related plants together in the same chapter). For each plant, he includes multiple high-quality color photos of the given species plus lookalikes where applicable, gives a detailed description of multiple parts of the plant highlighting key identification traits, lays out the range and habitat, and describes his personal experiences (and sometimes information from existing literature where useful) harvesting, preparing, eating, and storing the plant. Very few books I've seen rely primarily on the author's personal experiences, and of those, even fewer go anywhere near as in-depth as Thayer does.

Thayer lives in Wisconsin, so we in the Pacific Northwest might not find all the plants he describes in the wild here. But we will find more than half of them out here, and of the rest, I have several on my list to deliberately cultivate (including Ramps (Allium tricoccum), Spring Beauty (Claytonia sp.), ground bean or hog peanut (Amphicarpaea bracteata), and Groundnut or hopniss (Apios americana)...maybe also wild rice). So the book has great relevance all around. So far the book has helped me immensely in harvesting wapato (Sagittaria latifolia), describing the best way to muck about in the swamp so as to actually get lots of tubers, not freeze my butt off. And the book's descriptions of processing small seeds has helped me a lot with amaranth and dock harvesting.

My only complaint about the book is that it doesn't cover enough species! But Thayer is working on that, with a second book due out in a year or two. In the meantime, I'll just content myself with rereading the details to pick up all the info I missed the first time or two through!


Table of contents of the book:

• • Introduction
  • The Meaning of Wild Food
  • The Purpose and Organization of this book
  • The History of Foraging and Wild Food Literature
• Getting Started With Edible Wild Plants
  • Why Forage?
  • Conservation
  • Where to Forage
  • Cooking With Wild Food
• Plant Identification and Foraging Safety
• Harvest and Preparation Methods for Wild Plant Foods
  • Greens
  • Shoots and Stalks
  • Underground Vegetables
  • Fruits and Berries
  • Seeds and Grains
  • Nuts
• Storing Wild Foods
  • Freezing
  • Canning
  • Drying
  • Cold storage
• Timing the Wild Harvest
  • Calendar
• Plant Accounts
  • Ostrich Fern
  • Cattail
  • Wapato, Arrowhead
  • Wild Rice
  • Wild Leek, Ramp
  • Smilax, Carrion Flower
  • Butternut
  • Siberian Elm
  • Stinging Nettle
  • Wood Nettle
  • Sheep Sorrel
  • Goosefoot, Lamb's Quarters
  • Spring Beauty
  • Marsh Marigold, Cowslip
  • Swamp Saxifrage
  • Serviceberry, Juneberry, Saskatoon
  • Chokecherry
  • Pin Cherry
  • Ground Bean, Hog Peanut
  • Hopniss, Groundnut
  • Black Locust
  • Sumac
  • Wild Grape
  • Basswood, Linden
  • Evening Primrose
  • Parsnip
  • Common Milkweed
  • Virginia Waterleaf
  • Nannyberry, Wild Raisin, Black Haw
  • Highbush Cranberry
  • Burdock
  • Thistle
• • References and Recommended Reading
  • Bibliography
  • Glossary
  • Index

Highlights from The World of the Kalapuya

Yesterday I mentioned the book The World of the Kalapuya: A Native People of Western Oregon. Today I wanted to write up some of the highlights I found most interesting.


FOOD

I hadn't realized that hazelnuts grew in abundance, maintained along with oaks in the grassland savannahs via prescribed burns by the Kalapuya. The natives harvested the hazelnuts in July or August while still green, then spread them out to dry for 3-4 days. That may give us the best chance of beating the squirrels to them!

The Kalapuya collected grasshoppers, conveniently killed and pre-cooked by the deliberately set grassland fires. Apparently they could store the grasshoppers for the winter, which I hadn't expected. I don't think I've read anywhere else about people storing insects for the winter. Unfortunately, the book doesn't give any details on whether the grasshoppers required further processing for storage.

The Kalapuya ate yellow jacket larvae! When they found a yellowjacket nest, they built a fire on top of it, which drove off or killed the adults. Then they dug up the nest and ate the roasted larvae or stored them for later eating. The next time I visit Mossback Farm (where I interned a couple of years ago) in the summer we'll have to try this one out!

I learned of a staple food I'd never heard of before! Apparently natives harvested multiple bushels per family of the seed of tarweed, Madia sp. (in the Composite family). Again, the natives used set fires to aid in harvest; the fires burned off the tar-like bits and loosened the seeds for easy collecting. I definitely need to seek out this plant and try eating its seeds!

The book mentions Kalapuya harvesting camas shoots in March for boiling. I don't understand whether they boiled and ate the green shoots, or if they boiled the root (or maybe the root and the shoot?) Plants for a Future database doesn't say anything about edibility of the leaves or young shoots...

I read of another bulb the natives ate, called Cat's ear or Pussy's ear in this book. Pojar calls it Subalpine Mariposa Lily or Mountain Cat's Ear, and gives the botanical name Calochortus tolmiei.

List of some of the other lesser-known plant foods mentioned in the book: camas, wild onion, wapato, yampah, wild carrot, cow parsnip, Lomatium sp., skunk cabbage (people probably ate it more as an early spring desperation food than for any gourmet qualities), lupine roots, cattails, wild mint and yerba buena, balsamroot, and ferns (especially bracken).

I found it interesting that very few salmon ran past Chinook territory, which ended at the Willamette Falls. Only in times of heavy enough rain for salmon to jump the falls and continue further up the Willamette did Kalapuya bands have access to salmon within their own territory. The Kalapuya did trade for salmon and paid to fish for salmon in other tribes territories, and bands on the west side of the Willamette probably had access to salmon runs in the coast range waterways. They also fished for some other species found in their territories. But they never developed a culture centered around salmon the same way other Pacific Northwest tribes did.

SHELTER & MIGRATION

The Kalapuya lived semi-sedentary lives, with main villages inhabited year round but with many temporary camps in different places from spring through fall to harvest, hunt, and fish seasonal resources. The permanent houses sound similar to others on the coast, built with wood framing and using planks, bark, grass, and dirt as siding, roofing, and insulation materials. They included opening(s) in the roof above the hearth(s) inside for heating and lighting. They usually built large houses for multiple families to share.

If temporary camps needed any shelter at all, the Kalapuya built quick & easy huts and windbreaks using brush, rushes, grasses, and branches of conifers. Sometimes they used mats (usually made of tule, maybe of other materials too?) which they carried from site to site to make temporary shelters. (They also used these mats for sleeping on and as dividers between different families in the permanent houses in the main village.)

MISCELLANEOUS CULTURE

I've read of some cultures where whites introducing competive games got funny looks or got killed for bringing in such a horrible concept. The book describes a hocky-like stick & ball game played by the Kalapuya. But the book doesn't give enough details or explore the culture of the game enough for me to know whether this clearly represented competition in a way some other cultures didn't have. (The book does quote an unidentified writer as saying '... the rules were that there were no rules.' and the book continues "People got hurt--sometimes seriously.")

Storytelling, as with all indigenous cultures without written language, carried the history and knowledge and wisdom of the tribe from one generation to the next. I found this interesting: "Storytellers followed rules which insured that stories were told correctly. In some bands, a story could not be told unless there were three people who knew it well. These experts could correct the storyteller if he or she made a mistae so that it would not be perpetuated."

THE KALAPUYA YEAR

This seems worth typing up almost verbatim from the book:

September: First month of the Kalapuya year. Small groups are still living in their summer camps scattered across the valley, collecting acorns, berries, and camas roots. Prairie burning begins for tarweed seed harvesting.

October: Month when "hair [leaves] falls off." Wapato harvest time begins in the northern Willamette Valley, and the northern Kalapuya groups move to camps close to the lakes where the wapato grows. Groups in the southern Valley complete their camas harvesting.

November: Approaching winter. The Kalapuya prepare their winter homes for the coming cold weather.

December: "Good month." The weather becomes colder but is still mild. The Kalapuya settle into their villages for the winter.

January: Month of "burned breast". The winter becomes cold and the old people sit so close to the house fires that their chests get singed. The Kalapuya spend much time in their winter houses, feeding the fires. Winter dances begin.

Februrary: "Out of provision month." The end of winter finds the Kalapuya short on stored provisions, and it is a lean time. Hunters spend more time in the woods trying to find game.

March: First spring. People begin to leave the winter village, making short camping trips to gather food, including the first shoots of camas, which are only finger high at this time.

April: "Budding month." The Kalapuya make more trips onto the valley floor to gather roots as the camas grows higher.

May: "Flower time." The camas begins blossoming as the Kalapuya leave their winter houses to camp out for the summer. The spring runs of salmon head up the Willamette River and its tributaries.

June: Month of camas harvesting. The camas becomes fully ripe. The women begin to gather and dry camas bulbs for the following winter, an activity pursued until September or October. The people also "catch all sorts of fish". Berry picking begins.

July: "Half-summer time." Weather is hot and dry. The Kalapuya begin to collect hazelnuts and caterpillars.

August: End of summer. The weather remains hot as the people continue to gather a variety of berries, nuts, and roots in preparation for the winter.

Resources on first peoples of Cascadia

Obviously, I haven't updated daily for a while now! I felt really whacked out after returning from California, plus I had lots of stuff to catch up on. My schedule and my balance feel more normal now, so I'll hopefully resume regular daily postings again.

I have started actively researching the natives who lived in Cascadia before whites came to this region. I want to understand how people used to live here, how they used to feed and house and clothe themselves; whether and when they migrated to temporary camps or stayed in permanent dwellings; whether and why they developed rank/hierarchical societies; and any other patterns which might influence the direction of my own tribe as we choose where and how to live. At this point, I have only read a little bit about natives in the area, so I'll just post here about resources I've found helpful or which seem promising.

Nancy Turner: much of her work focuses explicitly on issues of food and plant technology of first peoples in this region. I especially recommend Keeping It Living (examination of plant culvitation strategies of first peoples), Plant Technology of First Peoples in British Columbia, and her four-book Edible Wild Plants of Canada series with Adam Szczawinski (covering Wild Coffee & Tea Substitutes, Wild Green Vegetables of Canada, Edible Garden Weeds of Canada, and Edible wild fruits and nuts of Canada; her more recent Food Plants of Interior First Peoples and Food Plants of Coastal First Peoples cover much the same information, but didn't seem quite as in-depth and detailed when I spent some time flipping through the older vs the newer series). I also have her book Common Poisonous Plants and Mushrooms of North America (also coauthored with Adam Szczawinski), but I really haven't used it enough yet to recommend it or not.

Native American Ethnobotany: This book by Daniel Moerman gives encyclopedic information on plants used in different ways by different tribes. To learn how local tribes lived, you can look up the tribe in the appropriate section and browse through all the known uses of plants as drugs (for example: Burn Dressing, Love Medicine, or Venereal Aid), food, fiber, dye, etc. This book does not give much detail on how the plants were used, so you'll usually have to go to the referenced original source to see more information on how to process a plant.

Erna Gunther: wrote Ethnobotany of Western Washington, which I checked out from the library a while back and found interesting but haven't added to my own library yet. I don't have it here but I think it focused on coastal tribes (Gunther worked primarily with the Salish and Makah people.)

General pre-history & archaeology: I read The Prehistory of the Northwest Coast, by R. G. Matson and Gary Coupland, which gave me some good information mixed in with way too much detailed archaeological blow-by-blow history for what I needed. I skimmed over the archaeological details with eyes glazed, perking up for the summary bits or other interesting notes which jumped out at me. Also, when the book says "Northwest Coast", it means west of the coast range, not including the interior areas like the Willamette Valley, about which I feel most curious. I don't recommend this book unless you really want the archaeological stuff.

I've read halfway through a similar book, Peoples of the Northwest Coast: Their Archaeology and Prehistory. This one spends two chapters on much the same archaeological material but also spends eight chapters on theories and conclusions regarding how people actually lived. This book also covers only west of the coast range. I do recommend this one for info on coastal living.

So far I've only found one book specifically covering the Willamette and Umpqua Valleys: The World of the Kalapuya: A Native People of Western Oregon, by Judy Rycraft Juntunen, May D. Dasch, and Ann Bennett Rogers. Since I live in this area, I find this book particularly exciting! And since I don't expect my tribe to live on the coast, I find the information about inland first peoples more useful than that about those on the coast. I do wish the book would go into more detail on its subjects; the authors wrote 117 pages covering a wide range of topics, touching on many of them only lightly. Juntunen originally gathered information to provide to teachers and students. Although the authors rewrote much of the text to target a more general audience including adults, it still reads like a middle- or high-school book. It doesn't give botanical names for any of the plants mentioned, and warns twice: "Do not attempt to ingest any Willamette Valley native plant." Despite the somewhat simplified text and coverage, this book gives information I haven't found anywhere else yet, so I highly recommend it for this specific area!

Cultural Resource Overviews: I just discovered these! Apparently the US Forest Service released many volumes in the late 1970s into 1980s exploring the prehistory and history of different national forest areas. The volumes don't focus exclusively on first peoples, as they include recent white history, but they seem well enough organized that I can easily skip the parts about which I don't care. So far I've found mention of volumes covering the Siuslaw National Forest, Willamette National Forest, Siskiyou National Forest, BLM Lands in North-Central, northwestern, west central, and Lakeview District south-central Oregon (I don't know exactly which ares those BLM volumes cover). The Siuaslaw book through which I flipped had great detail on how natives lived. If they all provide the same level of detail they should help a lot in understanding lifestyles of micro-regions in this area.

Two broad-region resources I haven't read or used yet, but which look useful: A Guide to the Indian Tribes of the Pacific Northwest, by Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown, and Handbook of North American Indians Volume 7 Northwest Coast, edited by Wayne Suttles. Ruby & Brown's book gives short (one to a few pages) summaries of prehistory, history and current status (as of 1986) of many different tribes east and west of the Cascades. I notice that it has no entry for the Kalapuya, though it does mention them under other entries (for example the Molala and the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon). This definitely doesn't give great detail on individual tribes, but seems a helpful resource for a quick overview. Suttles' book covers primarily the coast, but has a chapter on the Chinook, one on "Prehistory of the Lower Columbia and Willamette Valley", and one on the Takelma also in the interior. The first part of the book covers general subjects of History of Research and History of Contact, before a few dozen chapters on specific tribes or regions.

What blooms? October 6

I got back to town last night! Today I did another yard survey of blooming plants, and found Miner's lettuce newly in bloom. Several plants stopped blooming, and I assume the lists for the rest of this year will simply record the decline in blooms as the season ends.

As before, I saw almost all these plants in the front yard only; I'll mark plants in bloom in both front and back yard with a *.

• Calendula
  
• Arugula
  
• Yarrow *
  
• Foxglove
  
• Lavendar
  
• Garden Strawberry
  
• Alpine strawberry
  
• Bowle's Black violet (back yard)
  
• Weedy mallow (Malva neglecta?) (back yard)
  
• Oregano
  
• Peppermint (back yard)
  
• Tomato *, Tomatillo *, Wonderberry (Solanum x burbankii)
  
• Unknown yellow-flowered weed
  
• Lingonberry
  
• Basil
  
• Echinacea
  
• Daisy
  
• Radish?
  
• Borage
  
• Edible chrysanthemum
  
• Monarda (in a pot, probably M. didyma) survived)
  
• Sunflower
  
• Squash *
  
• Jerusalem artichoke (Red Rover)
  
• Scorzonera
  
• Perennial Chamomile
  
• Beans (back yard)
  
• Cardoon (neighbor's yard)
  
• Comfrey
  
• Campanula rapunculoides?
  
• Nasturtium
  
• St. John's Wort
  
• Alfalfa
  
• Zebra mallow
  
• Dandelion
  
• Fennel
  
• Red clover
  
• Wolfberry (back yard only)
  
• Maximillian sunflower (back yard only)
• Miner's lettuce (in pot, unsure whether Montia perfoliata or M. sibirica)
  

No more posts for a while

I leave this week for my cousin's wedding in California, and I have too much to get done before I leave, so I probably won't be posting for a little while. But once I return and get caught up on other projects, I'll continue the post a day!

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!