Weed Seedling ID

I've spent the past hour reacquainting myself with the likely weeds I'll find in my plot, which ones are useful and what they look like.

While pulling up some chenopods among other weed seedlings, it occurred to me that some of these "volunteers" would be worth sparing. I went through my "Wild Plants to Eat" book along with a mess of extremely helpful extension weed seedling ID websites and came to the conclusion that I'll spare the two little dicotyledonous pseudograin weeds: amaranth and quinoa. 

We(eat)ding

The dominance of weeds in our community garden plots is truly unbelievable. You'd be forgiven for mistaking the whole thing for a crop of oilseed rape. Although several of the plots are well-tended and fenced (can you see the fences?), the majority of the field is completely yellow with Brassica flowers.

WOW!

Now, this is what I call huitlacoche!

I've seen lots of cool stuff in our maize research fields, but this is definitely this year's highlight so far! Some of the diversity panel landraces are particularly susceptible to corn smut, but none can hold a candle to our sweet corn varieties. This specimen was wrapped in a husk twice as big as any actual ears.

Community Supported Fishing?

Like a CSA, except each week you pick up a box of sustainably-harvested seafood.

Awesome!

Girls make better Gatherers

Though men may be better at reading maps and finding randomly hidden objects, a new study suggests that women are better at remembering routes to known objects - i.e. men are better at hunting and women are better at gathering.

The study has a neat design: they saddled pairs of indigenous Mexican men and women with GPS and activity monitors and then sent them out to collect mushrooms. Women were much more efficient foragers - they collected the same amount of mushrooms as the men but used a whole lot less energy (because they presumably knew where they were going). Women also found a greater variety of mushrooms from more sites (collecting from small patches of mushrooms). Meanwhile, the men ran all up and down the mountain, wasting a ton of energy looking for motherlodes.*

I'm always a little skeptical of these evo-psych Just So Stories, but it's interesting all the same (and it matches my personal experience!).


h/t: MycoRant


*Hopefully they controlled for confounders - e.g. how much time men and women usually spend mushroom hunting in this society. I don't have access to the article...

Urban Foraging Links

Urban foraging for charity to map fruit locations or to have a snack.

An app to find trees in NYC

Stupid Kids

Fishing was supposed to be my reward for getting a lot of work done today.

Conditions were better than I've ever seen in this town. The hole just upstream of the first bridge down from Fall Creek falls had tons of really active trout.

I tied on a blue-winged olive and had just started to shake the rust off my cast (despite gusting winds) when a bunch of boys showed up and started trying to try to hit the fish with rocks.

There wasn't any point in saying anything. It wouldn't have un-spooked the fish...


Maybe I'll try again early tomorrow.

"Eat Your Lawn"

Hank over at Hunter Angler Gardener Cook (one of my new favorite blogs) recently rattled off a long list of edibles growing in his lawn.



Many of these species are ubiquitous Old World weeds that followed the Europeans here. Hank lists some of the highlights and describes the weather that produces the best tasting harvest (with environment affecting plant metabolism and all...)

Since reacquainting myself with Eastern wildflowers this past spring, I've kept a running mental tab of native and/or edible herbs that I'll be overseeding my glyphosated lawn someday. I'm glad to see that I can now put an "edible" checklists next to violets and vetch. Why anyone would want a solid green lawn over a seasonal gradient of yellows, whites and purples, I'll never understand...

Just make sure you know what you're eating.*

*Incidentally, does anyone know if there's any risk of picking up parasites eating from the same salad bowl that your local critters roll around in?

The Fruit Hunters [Review]

I found myself in an Annapolis pub, discussing dental anthropology over oysters on a cool, wet Maryland evening. Raw oysters are not my favorite bivalve, but I enjoyed hearing Jim describe his Madagascarian classroom, where he was studying the diet of lemurs for his Ph.D.

I asked him what type of foods human teeth are adapted for. "Well..," he hesitated, explaining the controversy over whether teeth are adapted to chew an animal's main food, or its food of last resort.

"Okay, but what are human teeth adapted for?"

"Fruit."

It was always a nice reward after a 110 degree bike commute to stop for figs in the shade of an abandoned field. My grad school roommates and I would often meet in the kitchen after work to discuss the tree's progress and plot to strip armloads of the soft, aromatic fruits before the birds caught on. I remember Mel spilling grocery bags full of homegrown pomegranates across our seminar lunch table and myself crushing walnuts against tree trunks on the department farm. Pausing in dusty redwood clearings to sample blackberries among the hoppers, wasps and rattlesnakes. Or pulling down rain-sopping mulberries on a dark summer night, waiting to help Amelia move.

There's something peaceful and familiar about foraging for fruit. I always felt that my research time spent pawing through low evergreen canopies on Sonoma ridges, searching for bright orange patches was apt for an animal adapted to find colorful fruit in a sea of leaves.

These memories came back to me as I sank into Adam Leith Gollner's The Fruit Hunters. I was immediately hooked by his playful use of language and allusions, and by his somewhat stream of consciousness rhythm (which struck me as oddly reminiscent of my own attempted style). He quickly convinced me that the world is full of many thousands more species and varieties of fruit than I could ever imagine, or that a dedicated fruit hunter could ever track down. He wound stories of explorers and ancient mythology, illuminating a world where mundane, everyday fruit were hiding centuries of stories.

I enjoyed as he rattled off random facts about random fruit:
Grenades were inspired by exploding dehiscent pomegranates. (Grenade is French for pomegranate). Explosive dehiscence also occurs in wisteria and sesame fruits (hence, "Open sesame!")
Some fruits mimic centipedes, worms, spiders and horned beetles so bird and insect predators will disperse them.
Giant fruits that have lost their ancient animal disperser (e.g. avocados, prickly pears, osage oranges and papayas) are known as "anachronisms."
Fig wasps (which symbiotically pollinate fig flowers and raise their young in the fruit) are dissolved by the chemical ficin after they die within the fruit.
The miracle fruit contains sugar-mimicking chemicals that stick to the tongue, making all sour foods taste sweet, and was outlawed by the FDA (i.e. sugar industry) in the 1960s.
Maraschino cherries are just the worst quality cherries, bleached, dyed and flavored artificially, but were adapted from a sour cherry liqueur, popularly used in Eastern Europe to preserve sour Marasca cherries.

Unfortunately, he began to lose me after the second chapter. The rest of the book increasingly follows the adventures of wealthy eccentrics whose tales don't live up to the hype of their mystical fanaticism for fruits.

He lost me altogether as he began to spout random "facts" on agricultural science that were flat wrong:

It is NOT a secret which foods have been genetically engineered.
No commercial tomato ever had flounder antifreeze genes in it.*
He refers to black sigatoka disease as being caused by a virus.
GMOs ARE tested for safety - by the USDA, FDA and EPA.
He also reported numerous absurd health claims about different fruits (possibly tongue in cheek)

He also makes sweeping generalizations about the dangers of pesticides. Every single molecule that exists in the world is toxic at some concentration (yes, even water). It's beyond irresponsible to conflate the ability of pesticides to injure experimental animals with the danger that trace residues pose.

His funniest screw up was his shock at seeing the fine print on a California IHOP that warns of the presence of "chemicals known to cause cancer or birth defects or other reproductive harm." He blamed it on industrial, processed food, but a better journalist would have learned that California passed some law requiring these signs everywhere (e.g. every apartment I'd lived in).

All in all, it's worth reading if you have nothing better to do. I was fascinated by the beginning, but any given fact (including the ones I listed) are dubious.


* Here's the history behind that dumb tomato with flounder genes rumor:
For years now, it's been a routine academic approach in plant biology to express foreign genes in experimental plants to see what happens. In this study, they expressed animal antifreeze proteins in a plant. They make the (far-fetched) suggestion that expressing native plant antifreeze proteins in crops could protect them from freezing damage. These plants are not grown commercially and were probably destroyed as soon as the experiment ended.
Hightower R, Baden C, Penzes E, Lund P, Dunsmuir P. 1991. Expression
of antifreeze proteins in transgenic plants. Plant Molecular Biology
17: 1013±1021.

Urban Hunting

Yet another interesting foodie article from the NY Times: The Urban Deerslayer. They describe the recent appearance of urban hunting clubs that cater to novices who may never have so much as held a gun or carved a turkey.

I'm all for anything that gets people more involved in nature. People who interact intensively with nature understand it much better and make more meaningful efforts to conserve it. Some people like to watch birds, some like to climb mountains and some like to hunt - these are all valuable nature educations, plus the hunters (like gardeners!) learn something about where their food comes from.

Besides, the Midatlantic-Northeast deer herd is absolutely out of control. It's very satisfying how quickly our abandoned ag land has exploded with secondary forests in the past few generations but, lacking predators, the deer population has also exploded. I'd love to spend time in local woodlands that haven't had every sign of greenery within 6 feet of the ground scoured clean.

h/t: The World's Fair

Killer Carrots Invade Local Town!

One of our local newspapers had an article today warning of encroaching populations of Giant Hogweed. The sap of this plant contains a chemical that, when illuminated by the sun or other sources of UV light, causes very serious inflammation, blistering and scarring of the skin. Any contact with this (up to 20 foot-tall!) plant is dangerous and even very slight eye exposure can result in blindness.

Hogweeds are a member of the carrot family, the Apiaceae. This family was formerly known as the "Umbelliferae," referring to their clusters of flowers, which arise from a common point, like an upside-down umbrella. This is one of those plant families that has taken spectacular advantage of its potential arsenal of chemical weapons. The Apiaceae contains both choice, highly-aromatic and flavorful crops, and dangerous poisonous weeds. Common Apiaceous crops include carrots, parsley, parsnips, celery, dill, caraway, fennel, coriander/cilantro and cumin. One of the most famous poisonous species is hemlock, an ingredient in Socrates' last cocktail (this is different than the tree). Often, very small morphological differences distinguish edible domesticated, edible wild, and poisonous wild species in this family.

My rural jogging route has been offering me some good opportunities to brush up on my knowledge of East Coast flora. So far, the main Apiaceous flowers in my local fields seem to be the edible wild carrot (aka Queen Anne's Lace) and wild parsnip. I'll post some pictures soon.

Deep Fried Daylilies

The meadows and pastures along my running route are full of edible plants. Today I start working my way through them.

Here's a view of the drainage ditch that runs along this part of the road, filled with daylilies, cattails and elderberries.









There are a number of ways that people prepare daylilies, but simply frying them was the most appealing of the easy recipes. Here's the one I used.









Raw, the flowers tasted very weakly of lettuce or snap pea greens. Fried, they tasted like salt and fried batter. The petals left a thin, not unpleasantly chewy center. In the future, I'd consider including them as an edible garnish (the way most of the recipes seem to), but if I want the novelty of a fried flower, I'll stick with squash.

Central NY Mushrooms

Well, one good thing about all the rain we've been having is that I keep seeing mushrooms pop up under the conifers outside my window.

A big family of fly agarics lives there. I quickly keyed this one out to, probably, Amanita muscaria var. formosa. This genus of mushrooms is responsible for 90% of mushroom ingestion fatalities, though some species are perfectly edible. Some say that the only cure for eating the most poisonous members is a prompt liver transplant. A. muscaria, depending on the genetics of the specific mushroom clone, and the physiology of the consumer, may be poisonous and/or hallucinogenic.

There also were a large number of little brown jobs that appeared to belong to the Cantharellaceae, a family that includes many outstanding edibles, including chanterelles. I haven't studied mushroom taxonomy enough to consider eating wild ones so I didn't bother going further in trying to identify them.

Both these mushrooms are mycorrhizal, meaning that their extensive, underground mycelia are fused with the roots of certain species of trees and other plants. In this mutualistic relationship, the fungus generally gives its plant host greater access to water and mineral nutrients in exchange for carbohydrates.