Newsletter 21 November 2011

Chinese Elm Samaras

From The Village Green

Sometimes looking down gets you to look up. Recently the sidewalks have been covered with debris under Chinese Elms. The squirrels are stuffing their tummies, and so can we. Chinese Elms fruit in the fall and their genus sibling, the Siberian Elm, fruits in the spring. Convenient, and a lot of food.

Both elms have several edible parts. When they start to fruit they make what is called a “samara” (SAM-ah-rah) which is a round paper-like envelop, slightly smaller than a dime. That is edible raw or cooked and the trees are loaded with them. Over time a seed develops in that samara which is about the size of a lentil and can be used the same way. When the samaras are brown the seeds can be winnowed out.  They can be used just like a lentil. Young leaves are also edible year round as is the cambium.

Locally Chinese Elms are numerous, used in landscaping with some naturalization. The Siberian Elm was planted by the millions as part of the Work Project Administration during the depression and are common in the mid-west. To read more about them click here.

Goat Grazing in Suburbia

♣  I am constantly meeting people who want to reduce the entire realm of foraging down to one sentence: “If the animals can eat it you can eat it.” That advice can kill you and or make you very ill. Birds can eat arsenic, squirrels strychnine, poison ivy is high-protein deer food. Conversely day lilies kill cats and avocados crash canaries. There’a quite a list, actually. Then you hear “all black berries are edible.” Wrong. “Most red berries are edible,” Wrong. The best you can do with berries is that almost all white berries are toxic. Not all but almost all, or enough of them to leave white berries alone. In the satirical novella Animal Farm, by George Orwell, the final rule is “all animals are equal but some are more equal than others.” That might be said about eating plants. Goats can eat almost anything. They are the garbage scows of the world, putting pigs to shame. However avocados will kill goats, but not us. As things go we humans are fairly limited compared to animals, tolerance-wise, another reason to know your plants and use the I.T.E.M. system. I had a fellow email me from a Mediterranean country. He said his foraging method was if it tasted good he ate it, if it tasted bad he did not eat it. He asked me what I thought of that. I replied I hoped he had good life insurance.

Drymaria cordata

♣ In the Mail Bag:  This weed has totally invaded my lawn and I am desperate to get rid of it. Do you have any suggestions? Yes, it was a serious question about an edible,  Drymaria cordata. It’s not as edible as regular chickweed and has some medicinal uses, but it is an edible. I receive a lot of emails like that. Maybe I should change the website’s name to “Kill The Weeds.” I’ve also noticed an odd trend, the most visited pages this past month were not about weeds but critter cuisine, you know, eating slugs and lizards and the like. Maybe it’s seasonal or some biology class logged on. I had over 400 inquiries about the Osage Orange, a very obscure edible that was lucky to see four visit a year. Analytics can be strange.

Speaking of mail. The new newsletter has been sent out twice on Monday evenings, and twice Tuesday afternoons. When do you think is the best time to mail them, not only day of the week but hour of the day?

Dandelion Pappas

♣  Botany Builder: Pappus (PAP-us)  a ring of fine feathery hairs surrounding the fruit in composite plants, such as the dandelion. It takes advantage of the wind for dispersal of the seed. Not all pappus are as light as the dandelion one. They can be short and bristly as well. Pappus is dead latin bastardized from the living Greek pappous, literally, grandfather, read gray beard or ring of white hair. Pappus spelled Pappas is also translated from the Greek meaning priest or father. A Greek with “papa” in their last names usually means there was a priest in the family tree.

♣ Did you know that one of the most common toxic principles of plants is alkaloids, some 5,000 of them, and they are almost universally bitter to the taste. There are many bitter foods that don’t have alkaloids but bitterness in a plant should always raise a concern that should be addressed. Is it a bitter edible or have you just tasted an alkaloid? Bitterness does not exclude a plant from edibility but it is a huge warning sign to make sure you have exactly the right plant and that it is definitely an edible.

Passiflora lutea

♣ During a class the John Chestnut Park this week we saw a fruiting Passiflora lutea, not that common in my experience. It is an edible though the flavor is neither here nor there. Some of the student’s sharp eyes also noticed Pepper Grass just starting its winter run, as are the native Plantagos and Pellitory. Our winter species will be showing up between now and Christmas and are usually around for a few months, varying with the species. Chickweed shows up around Christmas and is gone by Valentines Day, the mustards are around longer as is the False Hawksbeard. To learn more about the Passifloras click here.

♣ Upcoming classes this week which includes a Friday class and Sunday class, none on Saturday:

Friday, November 25th, Jervey Gantt Recreation Complex, 2390 SE 36th Ave., Ocala, FL, 34471, 9 a.m.

Sunday, November 27th, Colby-Alderman Park, 1099 Massachusetts Street, Cassadaga. Fla. 32706, 9 a.m.

For more information click here:

_______________________

Green Deane’s in the striped shirt, bottom row.

On a personal note: Some people will always remember where they were when the World Trade Center was attacked. Others will remember when the shuttle blew up. Less of us each year remember what they were doing when President Kennedy was assassinated, 48 years ago Tuesday. It was perhaps the first national memory after the attack on Pearl Harbor. I was in the 7th grade, above, going to school in a one-room school house in Pownal, Maine, with no running water, no phone, no radio and no TV. It did, however, have electricity and one teacher, Mrs. Arlene Tryon, for three grades and a total of 32 kids.

In those days high school students rode a school bus. They got out of school at 2:30 p.m. and the rest of  us at 4 p.m. The bus driver was en route to pick up the older kids when he stopped at the school to deliver the news that Kennedy had been shot but was alive. All was well. As history would record he was by then dead two hours but communications were much slower and different in 1963. People were more personally independent then but from a communication point of view far more dependent. TV had only recently surpassed radio as the largest medium and up until Kennedy assassination more people got their news from newspapers than any other source. We would not get a phone for another seven years. Affordable personal computers and the Internet were nearly 40 years away.

When I got home at five the news was that Kennedy was dead. The country shut down, literally, and the countdown to the funeral began. It was to be the first national tragedy shown on, and united by, television, carried non-stop on both our channels. We had an occasional third channel from Mt. Washington if the weather was right and you held the antenna just so. Oddly, the 22nd of November that year was a Friday and Thanksgiving was not until the following Thursday, the 28th. Between the assassination and the end of Thanksgiving weekend was 10 days in which people basically stayed at home. Most businesses were not open. People did not go to work. We did not go to school. It was if the country simply paused for ten days.

Now the assassination is a historical conundrum followed by so many aftershocks with that family. The assassination of Robert, the marriage of Jackie to Aristotle, Ted and Mary Jo at Chappaquiddick, and the ironic watery end to John John. I don’t remember what I was doing when the rest of those things happened but for some of us the assassination of the president is a moment embedded in ones memory, even after 48 years.

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