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@feralgrowing
montgomery county food council
lately i have been very interested in understanding food security more within my own county, and so i was delighted to find out about the moco food council
besides all that is on the website, they also have some pdf readings available online including:
a food access report from 2015
a food hub study from 2016
a food security 5-year plan from 2017
This cocoa recipe incorporates the nutty flavor of chestnuts and is inspired by European-style hot chocolate - thick, rich and just sweet en
much like chicory blended into coffee, i am always curious about well-known drinks with internationally-grown base plant ingredients (like coffee beans and cocoa), and how people use other plants to make different versions or tweaks on those original recipes.
i was reading a fictional satire young adult book ("no country for old gnomes" by delilah s. dawson and kevin hearne) and it mentioned chestnut hot chocolate, which led me to looking up if that was a thing or not.
when it's chestnut season, i might play around with this recipe or others, and see what other variants i can whip up
i am sort of obsessed with tulip poplars
i think their leaves are a cute shape and their flowers are stunning (love me some orange), which led me to be curious about what the history and lore of tulip poplars might be. they seem to grow quite easily (given the amount i see appearing in the garden and woods).
here are some fun blog links i read to get some brief history & lore:
they are a native tree and were often made into canoes, hence once of the common names, the "canoe tree"
they are a good source of nectar for the bees (and us?)
apparently they don't have much of a magical history but the wood is strong and have been used in all kinds of human woodworking in the past. and they are a mid-succession tree that can grow up to 190 feet
Garlic Mustard (Alliaria petiolata) of the family mustard family (Brassicaceae)
in europe, this plant was enjoyed for its radish-like flavor. it was used to spice fish, put in salads, and made with roast lamb. medicinally it was seen as a diuretic, and environmentally it was used to help with erosion. in america it has spread (since the mid 1800s) like, well, wildfire, and thus has made it on the non-native invasives list.
generally it seems that the major method to slow its growth is chemical (e.g. herbicides)
in my romantic mind, ideally we would become a culture that pollutes our house areas less and thus can start eating our edible growing neighborhood friends... especially as garlic mustard apparently toxic to herbivores. i hear the roots can be prepared like horseradish.
the ecological issue with garlic mustard goes as followed (or so i've heard in my local area): since the deer and other herbivores don’t eat the garlic mustard, but they do eat the toothwort (Dentaria sp.), the garlic mustard finds new spaces to grow where the toothwort was eaten away. as it does, the butterflies (Pieris virginiensis) that would normally go to the toothwort, instead go to the garlic mustard for their nectar needs, but alas, something in the garlic-y ways causes the plant to be toxic to said butterflies larva. thus you have a pollinator species decreasing.
as a person who loves stories, i think that feels like it is a bit too myopic. i don’t doubt that that chain of effects are happening, i just think we need to introduce other players. for example, we have no predators here (obviously given how suburban it is now) so the deer population has expanded insanely. they are barely responsive/fearful to/of humans and are often found chilling and eating anything they can in our front yards. the community response has been to allow some (trained, i’m assuming) individuals to hunt them via archery during specific times of year, but i don’t think we have many archers here. so a surplus of deer means they are going to eat their available food sources in greater amounts than ecologically desired.
i also read a study (Waller and Maas, 2013) that indicated we can’t just pull all the invasives out and think our natives will come back before we’ve addressed the deer population.
next factor: our local woods are also at the bottom of a hill of many houses and streets. almost every house around the area sprays their yards with a whole cocktail of herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers, and then there’s the runoff from road management s like remnants from whatever comes off of tar driveway maintenance and the salt from snow prep (the latter which is a tracked problem in the watershed). and of course there are a bunch of sewer pipelines in the woods and some old bridges and whatnot (i believe initially the woods were once mostly agricultural spaces but i’m not quite sure, though that’s important because what can grow post-agriculture varies).
so what’s missing in this garlic mustard eco-snapshot? one, a focus on human influence. the number of effects different herbicides and other chemicals can have is not well studied (at a baseline i know glyphosate has a chelating effect- meaning it can bind up the nutrients which means plants can’t access them, including natives).
the thing with invasives is they tend to be a bit hardier. garlic mustard is know to grow in disturbed spaces- ones where you have a bare patch. that includes floodplains, but more likely their journey started where native plants died as a result of erosion and suburban runoff (and by the massive deer population). houses in our area don’t just abut the woods, they are basically on them (i’ve seen people growing super green grass in december up to the creek line)- so any lawn maintenance is going right into the woods.
and with the human influence, there is this assumption that humans will pay exact attention to how much of a chemical treatment they are using, whether or not they should be spraying or lightly painting their undesired weeds, but that hasn’t born out. people take the path of least resistance.
also are they using the right products for their environment all the time or mixing and causing new reactions? and the whole problem with chemical maintenance is one, we both don’t know what else is in herbicides and pesticides if you get the already-made cocktail ones (companies not legally required to list all the ingredients), and two that means most of what’s in them isn’t studied.
pulling it all together, if we are creating a more unfriendly environment, both due to additions of chemicals and from more herbivores, how will our natives survive?
because then it’s not surprisingly new plants, with fewer to no predators will show up and take over those spaces. if we aren’t tackle the top of this trickle-down chain, will focusing all our energy on adding to that chain near the bottom slow garlic mustard or other invasives enough to allow our beloved species to proliferate? unlikely. (and that’s not even getting into the question about whether our efforts to control different species is fighting the nature cycles of ecology anyway - environments are not stable on a species level forever).
if we are truly interested in preserving the original ecological balance (which again sets up a whole story of why we chose a specific point in time to call something the origin), we’d first have to reduce our chemical management techniques in all avenues to prevent confounding influences that we really can’t track. we’d then probably have to slow the deer population (you’d think venison would be big here- people coming from montana, like my partner, are so baffled by us not hunting to eat the deer). that way the toothwort and other plants that we consider desirable could have a chance to grow and not be razed down by hungry herbivores at such high rates.
and again, i strongly believe we, as the species that brought it to the country and who ate it back in europe, we should be eating garlic mustard here. but obviously these are not possible because we are mostly removed from our foraging roots (plant identification mostly) and we’ve added things to the ecosystem that we should not ingest.
and one parting thought i've been pondering. honey bees. i haven’t personally seen it studied if garlic mustard is a pollinating flower for honey bees. i remember anecdotally reading from an environmental non-profit that honey bees get nectar from ALL mustard species plants. if that’s the case, does the environmental impact of garlic mustard have some good? like keeping a source of food for our beloved non-native honey bees?
an awesome historical living library of herbs in MOCO... though most of the herbs are tied to Culpeper. it would be awesome to include more herbs tied to the indigenous people and native plants...
when you want to learn more about trees...
free:
treemuskateers provides a good online infographic
the VA tree stewards has a 100+ pages of tree information readily available too in pdf form
$: for those living around DC, casey trees’ little laminated guidebook (but this one does costs money)
Tsukamoto Konami, Japan's first female certified tree doctor, has treated and transplanted hundreds of giant trees, including 130-year-old w
who i want to be when i grow up.
more on her here
thoughts on emerald ash borers
i was skimming the wiki about emerald ash borers during some bout of insomnia (i'm pregnant) the other night. the wiki page mentioned how trees with more tannins fare better as well as trees that trigger their ecological defenses, but mentioned how our american ash types (all but blue ash?) seem to not even RECOGNIZE when they are under attack.
so one thought i have been pondering: if japanese pines need their needles removed from the ground a bit to let the new seedlings and matasake mushrooms take root and grow* (the shrooms then strengthen the immunity of the pines against foreign-originating nematodes… who would otherwise make holes that the native pine-eating beetles can get in and decimate the pines), could there perhaps be a more similar relationship for the emerald ash borer and the american/european ash trees?
again wiki makes me think yes, because our destructive industrial/development habits have made for weaker trees and poorer soil, so how do we know the decline of the ashes by the EAB might have been less prophetic had we been caring for our ashes and soil, rather than poisoning them and inbreeding (breeding monocultures of) what’s left? *learned from reading "water, wood, and wild things" by hannah kirshner
It’s about time that someone wrote a guidebook to “mothering while arting.” I’ve been calling myself a writer for most of my life, but only
travels through motherhood, race, nature.
her book was amazing (her way with words, is delicious) and this interview was as well
pondering a near extinct art-form of Igbo women
uli was an art form named after the indigo dyes used to make the paintings. it was done by women, like Eziafo Okaro, who would painting on both bodies and walls. the paintings were supposed to envoke "nature and issues in existence".
At Woodlands Cemetery in Philadelphia, green-thumbed volunteers participate in a unique program.
i wish we had personal gardening for all graves (though not necessarily of victorian era gardens)
thinking about forest fires...
Around the world there is a forlorn feeling of impending doom and generalized sense of widespread grief . The creators of this deck believe that this grief wells from the loss of connection between humans and nature. Humans have a unique and expansive talent for abstraction, rationale, and ingenuity. This can be magnificent, but it has also led our species to set itself further and further apart from the rest of life on earth. There is so much noise in the human world it has become deafening.
The Juhu Beach Club chef talks about what they hope will be their next big project: a farm restaurant centered on people of color and non-Eu
watching Waffles and Mochi with my little one, and getting inspired by all the various chefs, and farmers, and food-eating people.
coppicing and sustainability
i recently read in "feral" by george monbiot, that coppicing evolved in trees because of selective pressure from elephants (and his theory was that that’s also how we know there were elephants in europe because of the abundance of coppice-able trees).
i’ve read of it as a "sustainable" wood harvesting technique but somehow that doesn’t ring true with me. sure you don’t need to replant said tree, but you’ve drastically changed its behaviors and strengths, and given it more susceptibility for infection- though of course, with trees, all these things can take years to see.
i’m not saying it shouldn’t be done, just that the lens in which we view it as sustainable should be taken with a grain of salt.
pondering how to use this idea base in my own home state...
our too-young and too-new america, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our america is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. it hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness. am i damning my native land? no; for i, too, share these faults of character! and i really do not think that america, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe into its most fundamental beliefs.