Wild Snacks – Raw and Cooked: Euell Gibbons, Meet Richard Wrangham

If you love to cook, you will love  Richard Wrangham’s cooking hypothesis. This British primatologist proposes that we humans stepped away from the other apes (who still spend most of their time grinding bitter berries and  fibrous roots between their massive molars) when we tossed those tubers into a fire and then drew out something infinitely more savory and digestible.

In his new book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, he suggests that when we tamed fire and began to cook our food, we increased the flavor and the volume of energy we can get from food — and at the same time reduced rot.  Win-win.  Wrangham’s theory is summarized in Scientific American:   modern humans need a lot of high-quality calories (brain tissue requires 22 times the energy of skeletal muscle); tough, fibrous fruits and tubers cannot provide enough.  Heat alters the physical structure of proteins and starches, thereby making enzymatic breakdown easier.

I’m all for cooking food.  Guests gathering in my kitchen as we all prepare a meal is my favorite kind of get-together — but there is something so elemental about spotting a bramble laden with blackberries, followed almost instantly by the sensation of a mouthful of rich juice and nutritious seeds.

Eaten immediately after photographing!

Last week, while contemplating our building site, on a day when I underestimated how much food to bring, I was more than fortified by a clump of ripe chokecherries from a low branch, as I carefully spit out the seeds and meditated on this dark, almost sweet fruit so rich in antioxidants. Earlier in the year I multitasked by munching peppery, young garlic mustard spears –  simultaneously getting my daily greens and clearing out a nasty patch of invasives in my woods.  (See my post Pass the Garlic Mustard, Please .)

Walking up Lloyd’s Lane and spotting a patch of the rare wild red raspberries, putting down my tools and pausing to enjoy their exceptional sweetness makes me feel a kinship with ancient ancestors who must have relished these gifts from nature as much as I do.  (Well, probably a lot more.)   These days I appreciate my wild food finds’ unconditionally organic quality and the way I can almost feel it revving up my immune system.

Euell Gibbons (biography here ) was my hero from my first year in college.  My well-thumbed Stalking the Wild Asparagus gave a city slicker dreams of off living the land – an ideal I have never come close to achieving — yet.

Gibbons’ own survival during the dustbowl, and that of  his whole family,  depended on the wild food he foraged for them in that sparce landscape, and later, during his hobo period, he lived by what he could forage on the road.  His books are full of practical information on how to find and prepare wild foods, and as I learn how to turn some of my acres to sustainable agriculture, I also want to make more and more use of the edible plants already growing there.

Wild plums waiting to be sauce.

Last week, while pushing our way along a trail we did not clear this summer, Doug and I rediscovered a handful of wild plum trees that line the fence row along our eastern property line.  Their fruits were starting to ripen,  to an orange-tinged pink, and inside the biggest ones was sweet, musky flesh with eye-squintingly tart skins.  Yesterday we went back with a tarp and a bag to shake the branches and harvest.

Wrangham, who has spent much of his life studying the way apes eat, notes that the typical fruit they live on is not like a grape or apple from your grocer’s produce bin, but something we spit out as too  fibrous and bitter.  I must admit that my pretty little plums, after that first burst of sweet pulp, do indeed have  bitter skins.

So as a card-carrying human, I have elected to cook them.  After searching online for a way to best process this precious bounty, I have found just the thing.  Wild Plum Sauce.  Check it out here .  This site has every last detail needed to complete the project plus gorgeous photos.

With 44 acres, it’s a challenge to keep all the trails cleared, but the trail past the plum trees is now high on the list.

Let me know what you have been foraging!

Buckwheat Beginnings

When you decide to be a farmer, you have to start somewhere.

How about a row of raspberries?

Last April I drove an hour and a half to East Troy WI for the “Berrylicious Workshop” at the Michael Fields Agricultural Institute , which promised and provided hands-on training in pruning, thinning, fertilizing and propagating of strawberries, raspberries and currants.

Raspberry rows in April 2009 in Michael Fields fields

The first thing I learned is that raspberries do much better in their favorite soil, and from a raspberry’s perspective, that’s means moist, humus-rich earth that mimics the forest floor.  What I had to offer was hard, clay soil that had been farmed conventionally for many years then driven over by heavy equipment during the barn building process (see my post Building Our Timberframe Barn here) – not quite a raspberry’s preferred neighborhood.

We selected the best bit of ground we could find near our barn for a test row, and began to prep the ground with a double manure cocktail: one part horse and two parts green.

I collected the horse manure by walking my Powerwagon (check out my post on this handy tool here) across the road where my neighbor owns and boards horses.  She has heaping piles of manure and offered me as much as I can haul.  I ended up hauling 3 loads for this project.  Nothing I’ve done yet has made me feel so much like a farmer as forking that horse shit in and out of my wagon!

I mixed my brown gold liberally with the several bales of hay and turned it a few times over the months to compost and mellow it.

In the meantime, we added a  shiny red rototiller to our farm equipment (Troybuilt Pony Garden Tiller with the more efficient and quieter Honda engin to be precise).  Now we were ready to roto!

Yes, we are learning that these things can do damage to soil structure, mess with your mycorrhizal fungi and other living things in the soil while waking up weed seeds.  But we feel like it can be used judiciously at the first step of preparing this ground (compacted during the barn building.

From now on the roots of the cover crops will be softening the soil.  Plants with fibrous roots work best if you have compaction in the top six inches and for deep compaction (what you get if you drive on wet soil) needs plants with deep tap roots.  As the roots decompose, they leave wonderful tunnels which water fills, and over several years of the freeze/thaw cycle, some serious softening is underway.  Worms will use the tunnels and add their own compost.  Finally fresh roots will like to glide along the pathways left by previous roots.  It’s a beautiful system.

Doug busting sod for our first crop!

Just before July we finally had time to begin.  Doug worked up a row three feet wide and 150 feet long that follows the curve of the drive.  We incorporated our composted horse manure and planted a crop of buckwheat as green manure, which we plan to cut very soon.  Then we will plant a second green manure crop of winter rye into the buckwheat mulch, which in turn will be cut next spring when we plant the raspberries.

Back to the buckwheat because that is where we are right now.  I just completed my second class at Michael Fields last week on the pertinent topic of Managing Cover Crops, taught by Dr. Jim Stute, a University of Wisconsin-Extension Crops and Soils Educator.  Sitting on a bale of hay in Dr. Stute’s barn, I learned that cover crops are like chain saws.  They are a powerful tool that can also cause a lot of damage. (More about this in a future post.)

Buckwheat, Dr. Stute said is a good crop to plant after harvest because it germinates and grows fast.  (We weren’t actually planting after a harvest, but it was the same time of year.)  He said that when you plant buckwheat in a field, you can look behind you and see it popping out of the ground.

Buckwheat babies

Buckwheat has a primary tap root that may go down 3 or 4 feet with side roots.  He praised its above-ground spreading structure which protects soil from wind erosion. But he warned that if we are foolish enough to let it set seed, we will be seeing a lot more than we want to of buckwheat next year.

He was right about how fast it comes up.  We sewed the seed by hand and then covered it lightly with clover mulch that we had mowed in the barnyard across the lane.  Just a few days later, tender little leaves were popping up all over.  Dr. Stute says its 70 days from seed to seed with buckwheat.  We have just passed Day 60, so I’m watching closely–and I’m enjoying what I see.  Buckwheat makes a beautiful crop with delicate white blossoms crowning the stalks.

Buckwheat in flower

Stay tuned for updates.  This saga will hopefully culminate with frozen raspberries for breakfast in the winter of 2010.  These raspberries will be best savored, I think, on buckwheat-rye pancakes.

GREEN BLOG ROUNDUP: My 5 Favorite This Week

It’s energizing to see so many people blogging green!  Here are 5 sites worth checking out.  Blogs for guidance on gardening green, dressing green, eating green, housing green and the final blog, GreenStrides a compendium of green products and practices.

We don't have to wait till someday over the rainbow. We can be greener today.

I hope you will be as energized by these blogs as I am.

1   Green Garden Design Cataloging clever and beautiful finds and to inform and inspire others about sustainable landscape architecture and garden design

Gardens are naturally green – aren’t they? Well, you can get a lot greener, and here is an English garden designer focusing on sustainability from fair trade hammocks to alternate lawn covers to grass.  Though I’m sitting in the middle of the U.S., I like to see how they are doing things across the pond.

6 Ways an Architect Can Think You into a Better Home

GUEST POST BY DELLA HANSMANN

Why work with an architect when you can just hire any contractor, buy a plan off the internet or even … design it yourself?  A professional designer is trained to help you solve the problems you’ve been wrestling with as well as others you never even saw coming.  Here’s why Denise and Doug decided hiring an architect was the right thing for them:

Whole Tree office space

Denise says:  There is an old joke, “Anyone who represents themselves in court has a fool for a lawyer.” By extension, guess what kind of people live in all those houses that weren’t designed by architects? I used to fit in that category. Because my husband and I have taken hammer and sawzall to every home we have owned – knocking out or building walls, redoing floors, adding stairways and even passive solar additions, we have prided ourselves on our intuitive sense of design.  So … the first thing we did after putting an offer in on our land was to start sketching our future house. We labored on that plan for several years — a conventional, cottagey-looking structure — refining it, but never actually changing it much. Then we decided to work with the very green architect whose work I fell in love with in an article in Natural Home, and it quickly became clear how constrained we were by our lack of experience.

The plans now taking shape are something completely different, and something I love much more. So many issues I never even thought about are being addressed before they can be life long problems. The finished home is going to fit us like a bright green glove because unneeded and expensive square feet have been whittled away. Even if architectural design does raise the house cost by a few percent – this isn’t like purchasing a toaster or computer which will be replaced all too soon. This is a building – the creation and heating and cooling of which are going to be the environmental gift that goes on giving. The houses we build (if built right) are our legacies to the future.

And here are six more reasons an Architect will help you think about your home in new and better ways:

Indian Grass and Big Bluestem Join the Crowd

By now, five years into the relationship, I no longer feel it necessary to call my land Ms. Forty-four Acres.   Sometimes I feel it’s perfectly appropriate to call her Forty-four, or even Dear old Double F – but that doesn’t mean I actually know her really well yet.

Whenever I step off the path, I’m prepared to be surprised.

Prairie Grasses I’m Dreaming Of

People say sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees.  It’s even more true that you can’t see the prairie for the grasses.  But we really should see those grasses.  Ornamental grasses are gaining respect in landscaping, and truly, what is more beautiful than a sea of grass flowing under a current of breeze.

This week Susan Carpenter, Native Plant Gardener at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum, pointed out 12 of the loveliest grasses among the prairie plantings, and I’m going to share my favorite six.

Why Whole Trees?

GUEST POST BY DELLA HANSMANN

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ve seen the term “whole trees” a number of times.  Doug and Denise have decided that they want their new home to be a whole tree house.  They won’t be living in the air, however.  Here’s a little explanation of what we’re talking about when we describe their new Whole Tree Home.

Branching columns in the Bookend House at Driftless Farm

Whole Tree buildings are timber frame structures which use un-milled trunks and branches of trees to make up their structure.  Why do such a thing? 

Whole Trees are High Tech

Think about it: you know how steel is smelted and how plywood is glued together but how is a tree manufactured?  As my boss likes to say, “Whole trees are a self replicating carbon nano-fiber comprised primarily of air water and sunlight.” The building material of the future, don’t you think?  No nasty by-products, no off-gassing period, no health risks.  In fact, the process of “manufacturing” a whole tree component is to photosynthesize our collective carbon emissions into nice clean oxygen.

Whole Trees are Strong

Whole Trees are naturally pre-strengthened as they resist the force of the wind trying to blow them over.  When trees grow outward in rings, each new year’s growth acts like a tension sleeve which holds all the fibers together and makes them strong.  When you cut those rings to make standard dimensional lumber or even heavy solid beams for a conventional timber frame structure, you slice through all of those strength- giving rings. Structural testing at the USDA Forest Products Laboratory has determined that a round timber is %50 stronger than a milled piece of lumber with the same cross section.

Four Fabulous Wild Flower Sanctuaries

When we first walked our land, it was a week before Labor Day 2003.  I’m sure there were wild flowers everywhere, but I can’t remember them.  I was trying to feel the whole 44 acres at once.  What is too big?  Was it too little?  Was it too flat?  Was it too hilly?  I was more focused on the macro elements of the deciduous woods running through the middleof the land, and the acres of hopeful young pines, spruces and oaks marching over the contour of the earth in their perfect little rows.  Mostly my eyes kept returning to that glorious bowl of blue sky cupped over the hollow where two valleys intersected.

Wild geranium

But as I have crissed and crossed those acres again and again in all lights of day and times of year, I see it as a vast wild flower garden.  Every year I learn more of their names and their ways and try to encourage them. Shooting Stars.  Blazing Stars. Pale Purple Cone Flowers. Hoary Pucoon.  Wild Quinine.  Prairie Milkweed.  Wood Betony.  The list keeps growing.  See my post from July 17, Prairie Gold here

Taking care of our land has consumed our vacation time for the present.  This summer and fall we will be taking off from work a half day or two at a time to nail the batten boards on the barn, ( see my July 7 post, Building Our Timberframe Barn here ) cut in a window, lay the loft floor, build the growing boxes in the greenhouse, clear the house site, and set in the cisterns.

But if I could go on a fantasy vacation, Iwould head out for these

FOUR FABULOUS WILDFLOWER GARDENS

Pizza Wisconsinalia

I vividly remember the fireworks of flavor that erupted with my first taste of pizza.  I was about 10, and our family was dining with friends.  The pre-Martha Stewart mothers in our crowd competed to feed 10 to 20 people at a time with something tasty that didn’t break the bank – and if possible something new and different.

It was the 60s and everyone – even my parents and their friends — were eager to try something daring.

Mrs. Dreystadt met us at the door with a mischievous smile.

“We’re having pie for dinner,” she said.  “Pizza pie.”

I was intrigued and milled about the kitchen to watch this exotic mystery food prepared.  The process became very familiar to me because my mom immediately added Mrs. Dreystadt’s crowd-pleasing recipe to her own repertoire: Open box of Chef Boyardee pizza kit. Add water to dough, mix and knead.  Pinch, push and tease the skimpy lump till it  filled the cookie sheet.  Open can of sauce and spread evenly.  And then, the piece de resistance – open tiny can of dehydrated parmesan cheese-like substance and sprinkle.  After a few minutes in the oven, set on table and watch everyone (thrilled by the slight hint of spicyness) fall on it like ravening wolves.

8 Tips for Siting Your Natural Home

GUEST POST BY DELLA HANSMANN

Whole Trees Architecture and Construction

Before you even start thinking about the specific design of your building, you can have a huge impact on its comfort and cost by choosing the site wisely.  Issues of solar gain, prevailing winds, and drainage are key, as well as more personal considerations like your favorite view.  Some of these issues can be resolved with a little websurfing and a good topographic map or aerial photo of your land (check with your local county surveyors).  No matter what you find online, though, you will need to go spend some serious time on your property, wandering the site and opening your senses.  Remember, finding the perfect building site is more art than science.  Answer these questions now rather than after you move into your new green home.

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