Eating Weeds – How Do They Taste?
Eating weeds is either a fascinating idea (food you do not pay for), or a repellant one to snobs who cannot see how a weed could possibly measure up to foods that you buy.
The biggest fear that I’ve noticed in people, who might want to try them, is a fear that they might taste horrid. They somehow feel that if it has been overlooked as a commercial food, that it must not be palatable. That simply is untrue.
The fact is that most cultivated foods are not cultivated because of their superior flavor or ease of growth. Some DID have a superior flavor at one time. Long ago. Before they were bred for durability. Durability and flavor do not go hand in hand. Most produce items on the store shelves are there simply because they can be shipped long distances without breaking down rapidly.
The foods listed below are all classed as weeds. But they are also edible foods. They are best when eaten very fresh – same day, or within minutes of picking. Some may be preserved by drying for later use. They don’t really pack and store very well though.
I don’t think anyone can truly answer the question of “What does it taste like?” for someone else. I can tell you what I think it is similar to, or I can tell you that I liked it. I cannot tell you whether YOU will like it.
I can, however, reassure you that I did not stick any of these in my mouth and grab my throat making gagging noises. Most are fairly bland, unremarkable, with familiar flavors that are nondistinctive, much in the same way many lettuces seem to be.
Clover, Trefoil
Blossoms, stems, and leaves are edible. Leaves taste bland, stems may taste tangy (pleasantly sour). Cooked, clover quickly darkens to a rather unappetizing color of dark olive green. It gets lost if you mix it with other cooked greens, and you won’t be able to taste it specifically. In a salad, the fresh smaller leaves look pretty, do not seem to have a distinctive flavor unless you run across a stem. Clover sprouts or microgreens taste similar to alfalfa sprouts. I ate clover blossoms as a child, do not remember them as being anything special, just one more thing to nibble on if you found them. They lose their color, and they go gray if cooked, and are prettiest used fresh and raw.
Clover is probably not distinctive enough to feature it in a recipe. It is pretty enough, either leaves, or blossoms, to use for garnishes and to add visual interest to fresh food. I think it is worth using, because it grows so well, is nutritious, and easy to find and harvest. And less costly than buying vegetables! It is up and thriving very early in the spring, before spring vegetables are even thinking about giving you anything to eat.
Purslane
Some people describe it as lemony – but to me, it is just that common tangy flavor of some wild greens. Tart – either mild, or strong. Some say it depends on the time of day when picked, with stronger tang in the morning, lighter in the evening (there’s a scientific reason for this having to do with how it stores and uses nutrients). Our purslane has been very mild flavored, crispy and a pleasant addition to a mixed salad. I’ve only eaten it fresh and uncooked, have not tried it in stirfry, which is the other very common way to use it.
I find this to be good enough to grow intentionally. I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about a succulent, but it is just really good. I eat a lot of salads, and appreciate some variety in the greens. Purslane grows so easily in such poor conditions, without any encouragement on our part, that it just makes sense to take advantage of it.
Chickweed
Can be eaten cooked or fresh, most commonly used fresh. It tastes… green. Sort of grassy. If you pick it, wash it, and store it in the fridge, it can develop a tangy edge over a few days time. Cut off sprigs, and snip them up into a salad. Or, if you want a very pretty way to dress up the top of a salad, cut just the top 1″ off the sprigs, and scatter those across the salad. I have not tried it cooked. It just did not seem to appeal to me.
This is a green that I’ll be using again and again. It grows well without help, is EVERYWHERE, and is easy to cut and toss into a salad. It tastes good and the ends of sprigs look lovely. It is very pretty with blossoms on it as well.
Henbit
The whole plant is edible, but the tops, with the flower buds, make a very nice garnish. Uncooked it has kind of a fuzzy feel which I don’t much care for. It has a rather non-descript flavor. Cooked, it is similar to spinach, but a little chewier. I like this one best with an assortment of wild greens, tossed in a skillet with some butter and a sprinkle of garlic powder, and heated until the greens wilt. The flowers lose their bright color, but the greens have the same kind of non-spicy flavor as spinach. It would also be good cooked and spritzed with vinegar, or stirred into scrambled eggs.
I don’t think this is anything special, either nutritionally, or for taste. But it is so plentiful where not much else grows, and does make a fairly good all purpose cooked green. For that reason alone, it is one that I am using on a regular basis. I’ll also be drying it for use in the winter.
Mare’s Tail
We picked just the lighter green tips from the plants that were not even close to setting flowers. You can eat this fresh, or cooked, but cooked is recommended. It has the same texture as mature blades of grass – kind of rough, but not stringy. Cooked, it wilts into a green that has a milder flavor than spinach, but remains a little chewier. It can be used in the same kinds of dishes as spinach, where a milder flavor is wanted.
This weed can spread very rapidly, and it seems to me that picking out the tops and harvesting it instead of letting it run rampant and go to seed is an excellent way to get some use out of it while controlling the spread. It is a good edible, and can be used in enough ways that it is one that I’ll continue to look for and take advantage of. It has some medicinal uses, so I’ll also be drying some for tea.
Plantain
Plantain leaves are a good cooked vegetable. Very similar to spinach, with a flavor that is pretty close as well. It can be used interchangeably with spinach.The main problem we had with eating Plantain was getting enough of it to really use. It is not a prolific weed – it does grow in poor conditions, but does not spread aggressively.
I don’t think I’d cultivate it for use unless I needed it for medicinal purposes. If I run across it on a forage, I’d happily add it to a basket, but I don’t think I’d go out of my way for it, and it really isn’t worth creating recipes around due to the small amounts gathered at one time.
Sheep’s Sorrel, and Wood Sorrel
These two wild leafy plants taste very similar, but look very different from each other. They both have a pronounced sour flavor (not unpleasant), better used as an accent than as a feature. The chopped leaves can be sprinkled over a salad to add a bit of tang, or they can be cooked as a pot herb. I have heard of making gravy with them. I have never eaten these at table. I’ve nibbled on them while playing in the woods as a child, and while hiking when I was older. We referred to Wood Sorrel as “Sour Sorrel”.
I don’t think I’d use these as frequent foods. They are fairly distinctive in flavor, and best suited to grabbing to enjoy something fresh on the trail. If I ran across them on a forage I would gather them sparingly, but not in quantity. They aren’t something you’d want to make an entire dish from.
Purple Dead-Nettle
I’ve tried one raw leaf of this rather fuzzy plant. Could not do more than that, the fuzziness of the leaves puts me off. I have also cooked it, used it in a smoothie, and eaten the raw blossoms. The blossoms were a tiny delicate treat, and I did enjoy them. The cooked vegetable has a strong green flavor, with a slight bitter edge. I suspect this weed may taste different depending on the climate, and growing conditions, because I’ve heard it described differently. Either that, or there is no accounting for tastes! It was not bad in the smoothie, just adding a green background flavor.
This isn’t something I’d go out of my way for. It isn’t nasty or anything, just not something I could say I really liked (except for those tiny blossoms). It is something I’ll use in mixed greens or cooked dishes though, just because it is plentiful and often THERE, and it is a free vegetable. It isn’t unpleasant – other than that fuzziness, which is kind of a personal tactile thing.
Wild Garlic
I love the flavor of wild garlic in mixed dishes. It is a little more complex to me than domestic garlic, and adds a nice savoriness to foods without any heat. Use it as a seasoning, and not as a feature.
I like this so well I transplanted some into my gardening pots. Not only is it good food, and has some nice medicinal effects, but it also helps deter some bugs in the garden. Wild Garlic has tube leaves, very like chives, but taller and stiffer – they stand straight up and don’t bend down.
Wild Onion
Like Wild Garlic, this one is easy to love! We have a white and a purple flowered wild onion where we are now, and they are both tasty. I gathered some to put into containers so I could keep them going, and the white bears every year, coming back to give me leaves and bulbs. The leaves are FLAT, not tubes, and they smell so much like onion that you can’t miss them.
Cleavers
Fuzzy clingy stuff, is edible raw, but I am just not into eating hooky velcro. Cooked, it tastes kind of green, slightly fresh pea flavored. The flavor does not seem to darken with cooking.
Cleavers also has some good medicinal effects, but it depends very much on the type – there are many many varieties of it. I’d use this again if I needed food. Not sure I’ll go out of my way for it under normal circumstances though. It gives me a bit of itch when I pick it, so I don’t like handling it.
Wild Mustards
All of the wild mustards I’ve used have had a bitter flavor that I do not care for, but I can eat them at least a little. They are a pot herb, which means you either boil them, or sautee them in butter with either garlic, or some Redmond Real Salt Seasoning Salt (trust me… this one is the bomb!).
Tansy Mustard, Rough Mustard, Smooth Mustard, and Blue Mustard all grow out here, and mostly we pick and dry for our rabbits for winter feed, but once in a while I just have to try it because it is the only green thing out there.
Wild Asparagus
It isn’t really. It is just growing naturalized. Tends to be skinny unless you have a well established patch. But go for it if you see it. It is just asparagus, and divine when cooked same day fresh!
Foraging wild asparagus requires you to train your eyes to see it. It has about three different appearances. Small new patches, with skinny clustered stalks. Mature patches with thick or very tall stalks (some of it gets enormous). Asparagus going to seed, with tall feathery fronds waving in the wind. Once you train your eye, you’ll see it in specific locations, where it returns year after year.
I’ve eaten other wild foods – mostly berries. The particular foods listed here are remarkable because each one is considered a weed, and many are considered to be invasive pests. Eating them seems to be particularly smart – they are plentiful and free, and unwanted, so you can’t over-harvest.
There are an astonishing number of weeds that are edible, and they occur all across every country in the world. Vegetables are getting harder to afford, and knowing just a few of those edibles can help to offset the cost of greens on the table to a significant degree. Half of the green food I’ve eaten in the last week has been weeds! That is a significant amount of food!
It is worth a try. Make sure of your identification, and then go try them out. Taste a leaf. Then sprinkle some on top of your lettuce salad, or toss some in with your spinach or collards. You can get creative and find recipes that use them if you want – they are all over on the internet – but using them in simple ways will help you know if you like them or not.
Grab your basket, and go hunting!
Another Weed Salad – Eating Chickweed
There are actually quite a large number of edible weeds. I don’t like many of them – I dislike the taste of dandelion (though I do use it as a medicinal herb), and the texture of a few edibles is less than enjoyable (mullien is just too fuzzy, thank you anyway). I like Plantain, but can’t find it growing here. I’m pretty sure the prolific weed in our flower beds is Mare’s Tail, but there are so many similar weeds that I am not absolutely sure if my identification, and not quite confident enough to toss it in the bowl or pot until I am certain.
Last night though, we walked outside our front door, and looked in an area we’d previously ignored (being hidden by our neighbor’s cars), and found chickweed. A lot of chickweed. Some of it is in an area we would not want to use it from, but there are a couple of really lush plants in the corners that I am going to transplant, and put to work. When I showed it to my neighbor, and explained what it was, she said, “I’ve been trying to kill that!”. This is actually kind of funny, because she has been trying for years to get something “edible” to grow in that spot. I suspect she may decide to serve up the Chickweed with dressing instead in the future.
Edible weeds are terrific because they are tasty, free, and they grow exceptionally well without any special care. Many are very high in vital nutrients – more so than more popular cultivated greens. Some have special properties that will aid in recovery from 21st Century illnesses.
Chickweed is just such a plant. Proliferates easily, healthy for most people, and has some special attributes.
It has long been associated with weight loss. It contains saponins, which aid the body in breaking down and releasing fat. This means that for certain people, overconsumption could be a problem. Our neighbor’s husband has difficulty retaining weight, so he’d not want to be chowing down on chickweed every day. Because of this attribute, and how the body rids itself of excess weight, people with liver or kidney ailments would need to exercise caution in consumption as well. A cup or so of fresh leaves a day is MOST likely safe, even for people with medical problems of this kind. You just don’t want to go hog wild on it and try living on chickweed salads if you have this kind of medical issue.
Along with purslane, and Lamb’s Quarters, chickweed is another plant that we’d do well to stop fighting, and start using. Every part of the plant above the ground is edible – stems, leaves, flowers, and seeds. The roots are sometimes used medicinally.
The leaves and flowers taste “green”. There is no other word for it, they just taste green! The stems are crispy, the rest has a texture more like leaf lettuce.
It is valuable not only as a food crop, but as a forage crop for animals. It is an aggressive seeder, so gathering seeds from it in the fall means you can easily toss out seed to extend the range of this friendly weed. Poultry loves it, and it is good for cattle and goats, and of course, pigs love it.
If you absolutely cannot find any near you, there are sources for seed online. It will thrive in a pot, or pretty much anywhere. It does well in poor soil (sandy or gravely, even clay), and bursts forth in lush green each time it rains. It produces tiny white flowers which are enjoyed by bees and butterflies.
Definitely something of worth, which should be rediscovered and appreciated.
Be a Good Kid and Eat Your Weeds
There are a surprising number of weeds that are edible. Two of the most common everywhere are Lamb’s Quarters, and Purslane.
Once you learn to identify these weeds, you’ll realize you’ve pulled them out of your gardening beds for years. I remember pulling both from the gardens as a child. If only I’d known they were good food, I’d have told my mother to let them grow and harvest them with the lettuce!
Interestingly, both of these weeds may also be known as Pigweed. They also have other common names in various regions of the world.
They are both drought tolerant, and will grow in poor soil, and heat does not make them flinch. Purslane is a succulent, and stores water in the leaves and stems (the image above is of Purslane in a pot – it grows flat to the ground and spiders outward from the center when grown on the ground, and the stems are typically more red than what is shown above). Lamb’s Quarters uses a different tactic – sending down a long and tough taproot (this makes it a valuable plant for helping to keep good deep soil condition).
Both plants are highly nutritious for both people and animals. Purslane could be classed as a superfood, for the amount of Omega 3 alone.
I scored some Purslane in a pot today. Funny thing about Purslane. If you have a garden, it will pop up pretty much anywhere there is bare ground. When you are not looking for it, it is everywhere!
But if you live where you do not have access to much bare ground, it can be hard to find. Some garden stores are now carrying it as a drought resistant ground cover, or as an edible herb, and a few online sources are carrying seed.
You won’t find anyone doing that with Lamb’s Quarters. But it seems to grow everywhere too.
Both can be grown from seed – you can save it from plants one year to seed in the next year if you feel the need. Both are such useful plants, it just may be worth it to do so.
They are both annuals, so they require reseeding each year.
Purslane will also easily root from cuttings. It roots faster than just about anything else, and doesn’t even need to be buried in soil to root! As long as it stays on top of damp soil, it will root just laying there. It will root in a few days in water. If you break off a branch to root (or eat), it will branch and come back stronger than ever.
Now, what do you do with them?
Lamb’s Quarters is edible raw or cooked – in general, the younger tender leaves can be used in salads, while the older tougher leaves make a good boiled green, just like spinach (only they need to be boiled longer – 30 minutes is recommended). This is a high calcium green.
The seeds from Lamb’s Quarters are also edible, and may be used like Quinoa (in fact, they are from the same plant family). The plant produces an impressive seed plume, similar to amaranth, but far coarser. Each plant will produce enough seed to be well worth the effort.
As an animal feed, it is also excellent. The greens can be fed to pretty much any farm animal. The seeds also make a great grain replacement for poultry. The plants can be harvested and dried, and bundled for use in the winter, either before they send up seed stalks, or after but before the seeds mature. Free animal food. It doesn’t get easier than that!
Now, what about that Purslane?
The entire leaf and stalk is edible, and so are the flowers and seeds. It is crisp in a salad, but may also be cooked, and is sometimes used in stir fry where it is just barely cooked. It has a tangy flavor, but chances are if you add it to a mixed salad you won’t even notice a difference in flavor, though you might run across a crispy piece now and again. There are actually recipes from a wide range of cultures which call for Purslane.
It is also a useful animal feed, though it is so small that it may be difficult to gather enough to make a significant difference if you have a large number of animals. Ducks and chickens absolutely love Purslane, and treat it as candy! Deer and goats also like this crunchy treat. It is good for rabbits, but they don’t seem to be as crazy about it as the ducks are.
Summer is coming, so watch for these two useful weeds, and make them work for you instead of spending all your time fighting them!
There are many other edible weeds as well. I spotlighted these two because they are so common, and so easy to recognize.
The Difference Between guru and Guru
Waxing nostalgic today, remembering the early days of learning to use a computer, and eventually developing expertise at it.
When our Math teacher in high school had us working with TRS-80 computers for about 2 weeks, I failed miserably. Made no sense, and I just could not understand what he was telling us to do, or why it had to be so difficult just to get text to scroll across a screen. Or why I’d want to spend 10 minutes writing an instruction to make it do that. Confusing. Pointless.
Then about 10 years later, my father-in-law gave us his used Mac Classic. I read Macs for Dummies. Then More Macs for Dummies. Then Mac Secrets. Within two years I could quote the statistics for every Mac ever made up to that point. I could do that for about five years. Until the iMac, when models and specs were no longer synonymous.
Somewhere early on, I started rebuilding Macs and Mac Laptops. I did a lot of online support for them, helping people troubleshoot issues. Even though I was in the middle of nowhere, the internet opened up the ability for me to develop that expertise anywhere.
One day, a guy contacted me. Said that he had pretty good Mac skills, but considered himself to be more of a “Mac guru-small g” type expert, and he was looking for a “Mac Guru-big-g” level expert to go to when he could not figure things out, and that is why he had called me.
Considering that up until that point I had considered myself to not even BE a “Mac guru” yet, I was really flattered. I’d just been having fun learning this stuff and figuring things out!
I kind of thought it was normal for Mac enthusiasts to be able to quote specs off the top of their head at the mention of a model number (I still know that the Quadra held the most RAM of any pre-PowerMac, and what the initials RISC stand for – and if you know what that means, you are really geeky). Geeky doesn’t begin to cover that… I know. But I didn’t realize that when I was answering emails off the top of my head, the other guys were looking it up before they answered. I had also failed to notice the number of times I jumped into a forum thread and gave some simple answer that everyone else had overlooked, and I happened to get it right on the first try.
It dawned on me… He thought I could be his…. DAVID POGUE!!! Only a girl.
I soon realized that he was not the only one who thought that. I found references to my skills increasingly by other people when they could not solve the problem themselves in public forums. In fact, even four years after I owned my last Mac, people on one forum were still referring to me as the Mac expert.
It really changed how I felt about my skills at that time. Gave me the courage to go on and do some other things I might not have otherwise.
But it was a different day then. Becoming an expert was easier when there were fewer of them (and fewer people pretending to be them). The internet was different. Less crowded. Easier to find a quiet corner and get to know people.
I went on to develop outstanding expertise in other fields – Joomla, SEO, Small Business Website Automation, and some other oddball areas. And I’m off again in a new field again (sometimes literally), in the area of small ag, mushroom foraging and cultivation, and small scale manufacturing. But I never again really felt like I achieved an uncontested status of Guru.
It is harder now. You can still rise to the ranks of “Guru-big-g”, but it tends to be within a certain online or offline circle. It is far harder to do on a global, or even national basis.
It still feels perfectly normal to quote specs off the top of my head, but today it is animal breeds, fish species, plant growing parameters, the latin names of edible mushrooms, and digestive system biology. Maybe, someday, someone will need me to be their “Guru-big-g” for something I’m learning now. But if not, I’ll keep learning, because no matter what anyone else thinks, the learning is still a lot of fun!
**For those of you who do not know, David Pogue was the “Mac Guru to the Stars”, with a list of Hollywood clients that read like People Magazine’s top 100 list.**
Why Seed Bombs and Seed Paper Don’t Grow
It is SUCH a cute idea! Seeds embedded into paper, or other materials, shaped into cool shapes, or just made into cards. Give them to your friends, they say. They’ll love the surprise plants that come up, they say. Spread a world of color and growing things!
Only one problem. The recipe to make these things goes something like this:
Put paper scraps and water in the blender. Blend to make a sludge. Stir in seeds, and pour onto a paper making frame. Alternately, drain the sludge to make a paste, mix in the seeds, and form into neat little shapes. Let the shapes or paper dry, and you have a nifty thing to give away.
PROBLEM!!!
Seeds + Moisture = GERMINATION.
Germination + Drought = DEATH
If you mix seeds with water, and leave them in a moist environment for several hours, they germinate. They come out of stasis, stimmulated by the moisture. And then you let the environment dry out. So they die. All of this happens silently inside the seed hull – because you’ve given them enough moisture to bring them to life, but not enough to grow enough to be visible. And then you KILLED them.
And then you give them away to someone else who buries it in some dirt, and watches, and nothing comes up, so they figure they forgot to water it or something.
There are a VERY few seeds that can actually survive this – those meant to survive a wet season before they germinate, or those that require fire, or other exposure to remove a seed coating prior to germination. Your average garden seed, either edible plants or not, simply cannot survive this.
I’ve pointed this out to people promoting this project. The response I got was that people make these all the time, and I was directed to many websites showing how to make them.
They are right. People DO make these all the time.
But people NEVER actually GROW these things. They try, but they don’t grow.
Ok, so why did someone come up with this idea in the first place? Either deception, or ignorance. In this day and age, it could easily be either one.
I’m thinking seed paper had to have been deception, because it started with one of those trendy “green” companies (and scams are rampant in that arena – sorry folks, but they are, and people who REALLY want to live lightly on the land are the first to admit it!).
I’m thinking some crafty homeschool mom or kindergarten teacher came up with the seed bombs, figuring if paper, then why not bombs? They likely made one up, then ran straight out to test it, before it dried. Voila! It worked! And they never even thought that it would not after it dried out, even though they teach their little students to make sure their plant gets water when they send them home with a bean plant in a styrofoam cup!
But then, a dying just germinated seed that hasn’t even put out roots yet doesn’t visibly wilt, wither, and turn brown when you forget to water it. It just quietly expires and leaves you wondering why it never came up.
So what is the REAL lesson here?
We KNOW that if you get a seed wet, and then let it dry out again, it will kill it, and it will not germinate. Every gardener knows that! Every person who stores seeds knows that – they know that you have to protect them from getting wet. We know this so well that we’d NEVER think of taking a packet of seeds, soaking it in water, letting it dry out, and then send it to someone to plant! But that is just what this project does!
Some very smart gardeners have passed this project on as a neat idea. Why would they do that? Why don’t they apply what they KNOW to this project?
Sometimes when information comes from a source we view as “an authority”, or from someone who says it works, it can cause us to doubt our own knowledge. We think of what we know, then we dismiss it, thinking maybe they know something we do not! We LET someone else cause us to doubt FACTS THAT WE KNOW.
This actually happens a lot. This is why wordmasters and Politicians can twist things around. This is how an entire nation can be persuaded to set aside elementary school math and buy into a political scheme that hasn’t a hope of giving them what they want. This is how drug users can persuade themselves that their actions aren’t hurting anyone but themselves.
So the first lesson is, don’t bother making seed bombs or seed paper for gifts if the process involves getting the seeds wet (I’ll bet there are plenty of other creative ways to make seed bombs).
The second lesson is, trust what you know to be true, no matter who is saying otherwise. And if you still doubt, TEST IT!
Making Winter Farmer’s Markets Work
Many people experience a sense of let-down when the farmer’s markets end in the fall, and look forward with anticipation to the rewewal of them in the spring. There are places where they run year-round, and it is possible to do so pretty much anywhere, if a few requirements are met.
In warm climates, the climate solves the problem itself. Outdoor markets are possible all year, crops produce all year, and the rest of the products and handmade goods that populate the markets keep right on coming. It is really the cold climates that present the challenges, but they really aren’t complicated to solve.
- You’ll need an indoor venue if temperatures drop below about 50 degrees. In every city there is somewhere that can host a market weekly or monthly. It may increase vendor costs somewhat.
- Local producers would need to get on board with producing more winter crops. This includes microgreens, winter stable crops (lettuce, spinach, arugula, and about 30 other crops can tolerate temperatures down to 15 degrees), and greenhouse crops.
- Local producers can store and sell winter root cellar crops (cabbages, carrots, turnips, onions, garlic, potatoes, squash, apples, and other cold storage crops).
- Local growers also have the option for dried and locally preserved crops (dried fruits and veggies, nuts, legumes, etc), and home canned vegetables, soups, chili, etc.
- Farmer’s markets are a haven for pickled goods, jams and jellies, locally produced sauces and condiments, and other preserved goodies. This is applicable year-round.
- The usual baked goods are still salable, along with fresh baked pizza, ribs, etc.
- There is scope for local handcrafters to use the markets for sale of a range of crafted items.
- There is also scope for expansion of the winter markets into locally produced fibers, hides, farming by-products such as compost, corn stalks, leaf piles, and straw bales for holidays, and other items which can be locally produced but are typically stocked at big box stores and hardware stores.
- Farmer’s Markets may wish to allow home businesses, or farm gate or farmhouse businesses other than just farm raised. I have heard of a local flea market that was allowed in because he sold AND bought local second hand items at his booth, and offered appraisals. He often sat next to a watch repairman, and an antiques dealer who also bought and sold.
Winter Farmer’s markets could easily provide a more versatile outlet for the sale of locally produced items in tune with the seasons of the year. It would allow local producers to take advantage of Holiday themes more readily, and to find productive options for continuing healthy sales through the winter.
Farmer’s Markets are a little like Christmas. One of the reasons they have a sense of excitement in some areas is because the season is limited. But they also have a hard time succeeding with many people because they are not a predictable entity.
Shoppers are largely driven by habit. If it is their habit to go to the Farmer’s Market once a week, they’ll get what they can there, and then go to the other stores. When the Farmer’s Market dries up for the year, they may or may not return to the weekly habit the next year. Keeping them alive through the winter, and keeping them fresh and vital through that time would add to the stability of it as a local shopping source, and help people to incorporate it into their habits more effectively.
People who CAN market through these venues all year exist in virtually every community that is large enough to support a Farmer’s Market. Making it work all year would mean reaching out not just to growers, but to other producers, and encouraging seasonal production of whatever is possible in that area. It also means bringing back Winter Food Production, which has largely been lost in America.
If Americans are to make the move to more locally produced foods, in a way that lasts, Farmer’s Markets are an essential part of that. They need to provide enough variety and enough stable production to assure every shopper who WANTS to buy local, that it is worth their time to make the effort to check the Farmer’s Market every week. Those markets that are held only monthly need to be established and built up to a weekly event in order to really gain a lasting foothold.
Year-round operation is not only a tantalizing possibility, it is a practical necessity, and possesses the very real potential to benefit a range of producers within a community.
I have found ONE exception to the Year-round potential. That is in a tourist driven economy where seasonal customers WILL buy, and locals will NOT buy.
UPDATE: Mushrooms are a great year-round product. Our book Profitable Mushroom Products is now available on Amazon for Kindle, and in PDF format through our Firelight Heritage Farm Books website.
What Is Traditional Food?
“Traditional Food” is a term that is bandied about in Foodie circles, and used to give a feeling of authenticity to whatever method a particular author is defending as being the most superior way of making a thing. Traditions are funny things though… They tend to evolve over time, and become something different than what they started as.
To many people in the US, Boxed Macaroni and Cheese is now a Traditional Food. It is the food their grandmothers served to their mothers and fathers.
To some people, the meaning of traditional food means they have looked back a hundred years or so, and have decided that this is how humanity always did a thing.
To others, it means going back far enough that all traces of industrialism are removed from the processes – and most of these people have NO idea how far back they really have to go to achieve that goal.
A further wrinkle in defining “traditional” is that historic methods of preparing and preserving foods varied from family to family, culture to culture, and climate to climate. Chinese traditional cooking and preserving is different than European traditional cooking and preserving. While they have many aspects in common, details vary widely.
Because of the confusion, I’ve preferred to use the term “Historic” rather than “Traditional”. Historic Foods encompass those foods used to sustain human life and population growth for nearly seven millenia. It had to be successful to do that!
In general, if you want to remove industrialization from the food arena, you must go back at LEAST 200 years. This removes the industrialization processes only from food preparation and preservation. It does not remove industrialization from farming. Mono-cropping on a large scale was practiced for some time prior to that, first on a very limited, then increasingly large scale.
To achieve truly Historic food – that is, food that is clean, produced by nature (with or without the cooperation of people), and purely healthy, you must go back in time both in how the food is prepared, AND in how it is grown. This is true of plants, and animals. You must remove industrialization as far as possible from the production of the food, from birth or sprouting, to consumption.
Industrialization in food has caused more harm to the quality of food than anything else. Our government has entrenched industrialization into virtually all commercial food production processes – requiring the use of artificial means and methods, prohibiting the use of natural and healthy means and methods. If you buy it in a grocery store, the hand of government controlled industrialized contamination is already upon the food in one way or another. The only exception to that is a very few small local stores that carry food direct from small farms that are exempt from the heavy hand of government regulation. If the product is marketed nationally, the hand of government has already dirtied it.
Mass produced foods have lower nutrition, higher chemical contamination, higher foodborne illness contamination rates, and far lower digestibility. There is nothing about them that is superior to the customer in any way. They are NOT lower in cost. They only appear so, because they are subsidized by tax money, which you pay in ways that you do not associate with the food you are purchasing.
Industrialization has affected foods increasingly in negative ways for many centuries now. To remove it, we must go back further – to a time when crops were grown together, companion plants were used, chickens and pigeons and pigs were used to benefit the gardens, and the manure from farm animals, along with composted food and garden waste were the only enhancements available. Back to a time when food was harvested wild in dense forests with deep litter. Back to when any farm animal that was not disease hardy and an easy bearer was allowed to discontinue from the gene pool.
All of those natural conditions can be either utilized, or recreated on a polyculture, permaculture style farm. Farming becomes an endeavor of managed ecosystems involving the full range of organisms, rather than a science of crop management designed to produce hundreds of acres of a single crop on semi-sterile ground. Production rises, profit rises, and food quality is enhanced exponentially when the entire complement of crops and beneficials are balanced.
Food is then handled and processed cleanly – without chlorine or other chemicals, without artificial additives, and in small batches to control potential pathogen outbreak. Food gets from the producer to the customer fast – so it is not required to be genetically modified or chemically preserved to retain the appearance of freshness, and so that pathogens have no time to become dangerous contaminations. People are treated to fresh ingredients, which they then prepare from scratch. Preserved foods are dried, pickled, cold stored (root cellared type crops), or cured – some may be frozen. They are not heat sterilized, nor are they chemically embalmed (both processes destroy the majority of nutrients, and may introduce other problems as well).
REAL food – good Historic food – is produced in a partnership with nature (rather than a replacement of nature), and is prepared using only real food ingredients. It is NOT based upon traditions which contain hidden assumptions of safety, but upon time honored methods stretching back for thousands of years. There is a REASON why those methods survived for so long!
So the next time someone tells you that a process, or method, or concept is “Traditional”, ask them just what they mean by that. Because their definition of traditional may be completely different from yours.
Dry Leaves
There is something magical about the feel of dry leaves under one’s feet. The crackle and crunch still delights me. I first discovered the magic of crackling leaves in the Yakima Valley, while I was dating Kevin. The magic of the leaves somehow mingling with the magic of being totally, completely head over heels in love.
Having grown up near the Washington Coast, where rain is an assumption rather than an event, I had never experienced the sound of leaves crunching under my shoes as a child. Leaves did not crunch there. They wilted, and sogged. I had read about fall leaves crunching underfoot, but had never been able to produce the sound, in spite of trying many times.
So now I walk down the streets, with brown leaves littering the edges and the gutters, and try to surreptitiously step on promising looking clusters or larger leaves. Trying to step on them, to hear that cheerful sound, but of course, wanting very much to not LOOK like I am trying to step on them. Best of all, holding hands with Kevin while the leaves crackle underfoot. And I am still totally, and completely, head over heels in love.
Homesteader’s Twelve Days of Christmas
On the first day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
A no till garden bed.
On the second day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
Two Muscovy ducks,
And a no till garden bed.
On the third day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
Three poultry tractors,
Two Muscovy ducks,
And a no till garden bed.
On the fourth day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
Four milking goats,
Three poultry tractors,
Two Muscovy ducks,
And a no till garden bed.
On the fifth day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
Five Dexter calves,
Four milking goats,
Three poultry tractors,
Two Muscovy ducks,
And a no till garden bed.
On the sixth day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
Six heritage turkeys,
Five Dexter calves,
Four milking goats,
Three poultry tractors,
Two Muscovy ducks,
And a no till garden bed.
On the seventh day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
Seven hogs a-rooting,
Six heritage turkeys,
Five Dexter calves,
Four milking goats,
Three poultry tractors,
Two Muscovy ducks,
And a no till garden bed.
On the eighth day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
Eight hens a-laying,
Seven hogs a-rooting,
Six heritage turkeys,
Five Dexter calves,
Four milking goats,
Three poultry tractors,
Two Muscovy ducks,
And a no till garden bed.
On the ninth day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
Nine solar panels,
Eight hens a-laying,
Seven hogs a-rooting,
Six heritage turkeys,
Five Dexter calves,
Four milking goats,
Three poultry tractors,
Two Muscovy ducks,
And a no till garden bed.
On the tenth day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
Ten utility pigeons,
Nine solar panels,
Eight hens a-laying,
Seven hogs a-rooting,
Six heritage turkeys,
Five Dexter calves,
Four milking goats,
Three poultry tractors,
Two Muscovy ducks,
And a no till garden bed.
On the eleventh day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
Eleven orchard fruit trees,
Ten utility pigeons,
Nine solar panels,
Eight hens a-laying,
Seven hogs a-rooting,
Six heritage turkeys,
Five Dexter calves,
Four milking goats,
Three poultry tractors,
Two Muscovy ducks,
And a no till garden bed.
On the twelfth day of Christmas,
my true love sent to me
Twelve silver coins,
Eleven orchard fruit trees,
Ten utility pigeons,
Nine solar panels,
Eight hens a-laying,
Seven hogs a-rooting,
Six heritage turkeys,
Five Dexter calves,
Four milking goats,
Three poultry tractors,
Two Muscovy ducks,
And a no till garden bed.
This is a Firelight Heritage Farm original, feel free to share and re-post.
Growing Food from Scraps
There are an amazing number of things you can grow from the grocery store, and a surprising number which can be grown from scraps that you’d normally throw away. A lot of these, you probably know about already. A few were surprises to me.
There are three kinds of foods that can be grown, and only one is technically “scraps”, but the others qualify under certain circumstances. This list is not comprehensive – you’ll likely think of a few of your own as you read.
If you have a compost pile, and have ever had volunteer plants come up, you’ll already know that some things thrown out will still grow and produce.
Seeds – Almost any food that you buy that is fresh, or sometimes dried, which has not been chemically treated, or canned using heat, may contain seeds that are viable.
Tomato, fig, strawberry, and other small seeds with stuff clinging on them can be fermented for 24 to 36 hours, and then the seeds can be separated out. Some require chilling or a rest period before you sprout them, some do not.
Not all will bear fruit, but generally, even with those reputed not to, a certain percentage WILL. Many seeds from plants that are propagated by cuttings or by grafting (figs, apples, pears, peaches, etc) will not breed true – that is, the seeds will have a high percentage of marginal plants (some of which may not bear fruit at all), some which will bear poor fruit, some which will bear acceptable fruit, and a few that will bear good or very good fruit. Hybrid tomatoes, cucumbers, etc, will also have this issue, but are likely to produce some edible food. This is how plant breeding and pollination work, just like your kids, there is a lot of genetic variation in the offspring. They are included because the potential is there, and the experimentation can be fun.
I recommend that you Google about growing any of these from seed, and find out what it takes to actually bear fruit. In almost all cases, determination gets the job done.
- Avocado
- Papaya
- Mango
- Pomegranate
- Persimmon
- Apple
- Pear
- Peach
- Figs
- Pepper Seeds
- Tomato seeds
- Strawberry seeds
- Pineapple seeds – yes, some pineapples do have seeds! Some do not, but many do. They are in the flesh, close to the rind. Small black seeds, close to the size of sesame seeds, black or dark brown in color. Surprisingly, there is a lot of info online for growing pineapples from seed.
- Raw Peanuts
- Raw Almonds
- Many herb and spice seeds – coriander, dill, celery, caraway, etc. Any whole seed is worth a try. Some may be heat treated. Lower cost ones are more likely to be viable. They can even grow when many years old – we had a wonderful winter crop of dill grown from dill seed that had to have been 7 or more years old, scavenged from a kitchen cupboard where it had been neglected for years.
- Many grains and legumes – lentils, garbanzos, black beans, black eyed peas, wheat berries, etc.
- Seeds from squash, pumpkin, cucumber, watermelon, cantaloupe etc.
Bulbs and Tubers – Any one of these bulbs or tubers, and most others, can be re-planted. Now… some of them will bear more of themselves, others will need to go to seed to do that. A few, like onions, depend upon the variety.
- Potatoes – cut old potatoes so that there are two eyes per chunk. Let dry overnight. Plant.
- Sweet Potato – Google “grow sweet potato slips”. You can propagate from most sweet potatoes, even if they look too withered to eat.
- Ginger – A nice chunk of ginger root can be planted, and will grow. It is a tropical plant, and it usually takes quite some time to show growth.
- Jicama – Can be replanted, and will grow and produce seed. Google for info on pollination.
- Onion roots – Onions can be done many ways. Multiplier onions will divide and propagate. Top multiplier onions will produce more bulbs at the top, for you to plant. Standard large onions may sometimes divide, but may need to go to seed for you to expand them. Green onions may either divide into more, or go to seed, depending on the variety.
- Carrot Tops – Actually, any carrot can be planted and left to go to seed. Many fresh food fanatics like eating the green carrot tops as a salad green. The top of a carrot can be replanted, it will root and grow green tops, which can then go to seed. Carrots from the store need only have some visible remains of the carrot top – if they have just a circle, and no green foliage (even very little is enough), then they won’t work.
- Horseradish – pieces of horseradish root can be grown into new plants.
- Jerusalem Artichoke – These bulbs, which resemble more compact ginger roots, are prolific, and once planted, will come back year after year. They may be hard to find in stores. They are excellent animal feed, both roots and tops.
- Turnips – Turnips will produce edible tops if replanted, and if let go to seed, will produce more turnips.
- Garlic – Virtually any kind of garlic will grow if planted. Break apart into cloves, plant each clove, and they’ll divide.
- Shallots – Shallots are multipliers, the bulbs will divide fairly prolifically. If you purchase shallots in the store, the bulbs may have the beginnings of the division process. You can divide any bulbs that are starting to divide, and plant the pieces separately.
Really Truly Scraps – These foods are typically things you would throw away. Replanting gives you another crop from them, sometimes many more crops.
- Celery bottoms – Save the bottom of the celery from the store – I leave the smallest ribs in the center. Set them in a bowl of water (shallow water) for 1-2 days, then plant. Just make sure the bottom of the plant is covered sufficiently to retain moisture at the base. Keep well watered for the first few weeks.
- Potato peels – Depression era potato growing. Thick potato peels with the eyes were used instead of potato starts.
- Lettuce bottoms (best with roots) – Two ways to do this. One is the same as celery. The other is to buy hydroponic lettuce that has the roots on it, and replant that. It will send out many small side heads. You can also let it go to seed.
- Pineapple tops – they are actually specially designed to grow! Pull off the rest of the fruit. Then slice the stem, in thin slices, until you see a circle of brown dots around the edge of the stem – don’t worry, when you see it, you’ll know! If you pull away the leaves, you’ll see some brown roots curling around the stem. Pull off some more, about an inch up. Let it dry for a few days, and then plant it. Keep the soil moist for several weeks, and then settle in to a once a week watering schedule. Yes, you can get them to bear fruit. There is an abundance of information available online for doing so.
- Mushroom stems and scraps – bury mushroom scraps (chop into small pieces) in damp half finished compost (for Portobellos), or in damp hardwood sawdust (for shiitake). Keep damp, but not wet. Google to learn how to induce them to fruit.
- Cabbage bottoms – Cabbages work the same as lettuce.
- Onion bottoms – the bottom root portion of an onion, if cut off just above the solid part, can be planted. Just set it in a bowl of water for a day or two, then settle it into damp soil – no need to cover it. It will send up greens from the middle, and form more bulb.
You can do these items in potting soil, or in dirt. Or in home grown compost, or a mix of all of those things. Whatever you have.
Now, you don’t have a choice of varieties. There is an element of gambling here. Also, due to modern food handling methods, sometimes it just won’t work – maybe the potatoes have been sprayed with sprout inhibitor (some are, some are not), maybe the seeds have been heat treated, or maybe the food has been irradiated or chemically treated in other ways. You don’t know. But if you NEED to grow food, this is worth a try. For sheer survival, it is a great experiment, and if you ARE in a survival situation, chances are at least half of what you try is going to work enough to justify the effort.
If you are on food stamps and want to grow a garden, this is one way you can get a garden going with foods you normally buy. Quality may vary, but there are still many things you can grow this way which will work nicely to produce more food with less money.
Update: Our book on this topic is now available for download! Get The Scavenger’s Garden: Growing Food from Groceries and Scraps for even more kinds of foods you can grow from groceries or scraps, and factors that influence whether they will grow and produce food.
The Wealth of Self Sufficiency in a Global Financial Crisis #shtf
“Buy gold!” they say. But the more I think about it, the less logical it seems. Oh, it makes good sense for the gold dealers now, making record sales percentages based on record high gold prices. But if you DO invest in gold, what are you going to DO with it in a crisis?
There are two major issues with gold. The first is vulnerability, the second is usability.
If you buy gold, there is a record of it. If things get dicey, there is a good chance the government will confiscate what it knows about, and make it illegal for you to possess it or sell it if they do not know you have it. Gold is still tied to our financial system, even if not strongly. There is a precedent for confiscation of gold, by the government. It has happened twice in history before. And this time they have a big motive. Central banks have “leased” their gold reserves. They have them on paper, but they no longer have the actual gold. The leasees have SOLD that gold. At today’s (or tomorrow’s) prices, they can NEVER buy it back. The government is all too likely to confiscate the gold of private citizens to stabilize the havoc that particular bit of slight of hand is going to cause. This one item means that if you are going to invest in metals, go with silver or platinum, not gold. They are highly unlikely to confiscate those – especially silver, as it is so bulky in comparison, and not tied to the monetary system anymore.
If the government does not confiscate it (which I kind of doubt), SOMEONE knows you have that, you are on a list somewhere, that list WILL get out, and SOMEONE will come after it. Gold makes you a target. A bright, shiny one, for people who see it as the ultimate route to power in a meltdown. It isn’t… but they will still think so. Gold makes you very vulnerable to people who are a whole lot more determined to GET that than you will ever be to KEEP it – they are willing to not only kill, but to torture and harm your loved ones to get it.
If you manage to keep it, it may not actually be usable! In a national or global economic crash, if currency is not longer worth anything, people will NOT automatically turn to gold. For one thing, most people simply do not have it. Those who do may find it impossible to actually USE. Your average farmer who might sell you eggs or milk is simply not set up to do business on a gold standard – if there were such a thing. In an economic collapse, there won’t be such a thing. He wouldn’t have any idea how much to charge you… or how to USE what you have.
Say you have one-ounce gold coins. How do you spend two dozen egg’s worth of that? Carve off a piece?
Money is nothing more than an agreed upon unit of trade. My labor for a valuation which can then be exchanged for things I need.
When money goes away, people do not replace it with gold, which they can no more set a value on than any other useless thing. The currency of trade, becomes BARTER. Goods or services for goods or services. When money goes away, it just goes away, and is not immediately replaced.
Those eggs have more value than your gold.
You can’t eat gold. You can’t use it to stay warm.
You only really have one security. Don’t invest in gold. Invest in land. Paid for, free and clear.
Then USE the land. Get it producing. Get it to produce something that people will always need. Food, clothing, shelter. Things people will be willing to barter for in times of desperation.
Learn how to barter. Not just how to barter this thing you have for that thing you want. But how to barter this thing of value for that thing of value to barter again for another thing of value and finally barter for the thing you want.
Invest in tools of self-sufficiency. Keep a few spares.
Invest in a food storage, but don’t rely on that to save your bacon. Food storage runs out. Gardens don’t. Food storage does not reproduce. Animals do! Get your continuous supply system set up and operating. It will always have value.
The more you can do for yourself, and the more surplus you can produce, the better off you’ll be if things do get really hard. They haven’t yet – they only hint at really hard.
Don’t expect gold to save you. The land can do that much more effectively. If you feel you must invest in some kind of metal, silver is likely to be more liquid in a crisis, and while it is bulkier, it is easier to fly under the radar with it. Even then, silver is not a highly spendable item in a crisis – it is more a means of keeping your money THROUGH a crisis, until it is over. Just something to use to store funds that you don’t want to trust to the banks, which you don’t want to sink into land and other usable items.
UPDATE: Our book Growing Microgreens for Home and Farm is now available on Amazon for Kindle, or in PDF format from our Firelight Heritage Farm Books website. Learn how growing microgreens can help you save money on vegetables, and feed your animals.
Peanut Butter, Poverty, and Salmonella
Ever notice how we get told about salmonella outbreaks in peanut butter whenever the economy tanks? There’s a reason for that. And a simple solution!
Apparently, the oil and low water environment of peanut butter can make salmonella stubborn to kill in the processing factory environment. Heat sealing won’t quite kill them all. Usually only a few stubborn beasties are left though, and only on special occasions.
So why is it that these little buggers show up every time the economy gets bad?
When things are hard, people buy more peanut butter. Peanut butter sales are sort of the mercury reading of economic health. Good times, people buy meat and cheese. Hard times, they eat more peanut butter. Especially families with lots of children. No criticism there, my kids ate a lot of peanut butter, it is good food.
But when things are hard, and peanut butter sales increase, peanut butter spends less time in storage, between the factory and the table. Turns out, that creates a problem.
Salmonella can’t survive well in peanut butter. It can’t multiply there, and has a hard time even living. Somewhere between two and six weeks after bottling, any salmonella in peanut butter is gone from natural peanut butter and unsweetened peanut butter by the time it hits the store in almost every situation.
Some ingredients help the salmonella survive longer. Sugar is one of them. Some other sweeteners act the same as sugar, giving the salmonella a carbohydrate fix that helps it last a bit longer. More sugar, longer living salmonella.
Even so, within about 12 to 20 weeks, the salmonella is completely gone (even in cooler temperatures which prolong the life of the bacteria). And here we have the reasoning for salmonella outbreaks when the economy is in the toilet…
It means that our peanut butter reserves in warehouses have run short. The peanut butter is spending less time in storage between packaging and the store. It isn’t having enough time for the salmonella to completely die off.
This is a bit alarming when you think about it. If the economy is so bad that we are down to a few weeks supply of peanut butter in our nation, then things are worse than they may appear on the surface. Peanut butter doesn’t lie.
So, what does this mean to you, and how can you be sure you are eating safe food? It has nothing to do with the government – there are a few simple things you can do to make sure your peanut butter isn’t going to make you sick.
- Buy natural peanut butter. Peanut butter without sugar is best.
- Keep natural peanut butter sealed, at room temperature, for 2-3 weeks before using.
- Keep sugared peanut butter sealed, at room temperature, for 6-10 weeks if you can, before using. This means having a supply on hand to use from.
- If you make fresh peanut butter, do not add sugar, and store it at room temperature for three weeks before using – the salmonella comes from the fresh peanuts, not from the packaging systems. Give it time to die.
- DO NOT REFRIGERATE UNOPENED PEANUT BUTTER! Store at room temp, NOT in a root cellar or cold storage. Salmonella survives LONGER when refrigerated.
No need to recall “contaminated” peanut butter, just set aside unopened jars for use later. Truth is, probably a lot of what comes to your table was contaminated at one time – but the salmonella has had time to die in storage, and is no longer a risk.
The problem here is not that peanuts can be contaminated. We will never be able to stop them from being contaminated, and we won’t really be able to stop some of those little beasties from surviving the hot bath of processing and preserving.
The real problem is that our economy is so badly damaged that people are using far more than is being produced, resulting in a depletion of stored supplies. Under normal conditions, the commercial storage and distribution system has a built-in mechanism to ensure that the peanut butter is safe by the time it reaches your home. It is only in this kind of hard times when that falls apart because of abnormally high demand.
The long term national solution is to elect a man who actually cares about fixing the economy instead of re-electing someone bent on destroying it further. A reduction in government regulations, which allows businesses to flourish and hire again, will solve the problem of the peanut butter – no new regulation is needed (quite the opposite).
The personal solution is much simpler. Just make sure your peanut butter is old enough to be safe.