Wild Blueberries fresh from the Commons

Blueberries, and a few blackberries picked yesterday on Black Balsam.

Yesterday, we took an afternoon trip up to Black Balsam on the Blue Ridge Parkway to look for wild blueberries.

You never know when the wild blueberries will be ripe -- it's usually sometime in August, but you have to hit the right place at just the right time to strike a rich ripe blueberry vein. We had tried Craggy Pinnacle a week ago, but the berries were still green. This week on the Ivestor Gap Trail, we were in luck!

Kelly in the blueberry thickets.

I love foraging on public lands - it feels like a way to reclaim the idea of the commons, places open to all for shared use, and collectively stewarded for future generations.

Stewardship means that while it's fine to fill a bucket or bag with blueberries, it's not OK to dig up a blueberry bush, removing the plant from the ecosystem and depriving others of future blueberries. It's important to make the distinction between foraging for things like berries and wild mushrooms on public lands, which is great, and removing plants or animals from wild lands, which is unethical and often illegal.

A bit more scenic than a trip to the super-market.

Wild blueberries are a native plant, valued in many native traditions as an important edible and medicinal.

Recent studies have confirmed the nutritional value and health-promoting qualities of blueberries, and in recent years blueberries have become a trendy health food. Blueberries are often referred to as a superfood, packed with antioxidants, good for your heart, your brain, your eyes, and your gastrointestinal system, and cancer-fighters extraordinaire.

Luckily, they are also incredibly tasty!

I find wild blueberries especially delicious, and I believe that nothing can beat the nutrition of food growing in the wild, picked fresh, and eaten as soon as

possible.

As we picked yesterday, I kept thinking of Blueberries for Sal, a beloved children's book which my mom must have read to me and my brother and sister hundreds of times throughout my childhood.

We loved the story of little Sal picking wild blueberries with her mother, and her surprise encounter with a mother bear and cub who are also foraging for berries.

I remember picking blackberries with my brother and sister in our neighbor's overgrown pasture (an informal commons) and bringing buckets of berries home to my mom, who would make a cobbler from them. Mouthwatering memories of those cobblers kept me picking yesterday, and bolstered my willpower to put at least some of the berries in my bag, rather than straight into my mouth (this was a difficult task for Sal, too).

Sal and her mother processing berries.

Me processing berries.

Sal and her mother canned their blueberries, to eat all winter long. We will use 3 quarts of yesterday's haul to make a batch of blueberry mead--another, more ancient way of preserving fruit. We'll pick more over the next few weeks to freeze, and the cobbler extravaganza has begun using the remaining quart of fruit we gathered yesterday.

In the spirit of childhood nostalgia, here's my mom's cobbler recipe, with a few tips in her inimitable style (my mom's tips in quotes):

My Mom's Summer Cobbler

(can be made with blueberries, blackberries, peaches, or any fresh fruit)

Dry Ingredients:

• 1 cup sugar
• 2 Tbs. baking powder "make them FULL tablespoons"
• 1 tsp. salt
• 3/4 cup flour

Stir or sift dry ingredients together.

Once they are mixed, melt a whole stick of butter in a baking dish in the oven as it preheats. "Make sure it gets good and hot and bubbly."

As the butter is melting, add 3/4 cup milk ("or rice milk or half and half or whatever") to the dry ingredients.

Pour the batter over the melted butter. Then pour on 3 cups fruit "or whatever you damn well please" (the exact amount of fruit is not important).

Bake at 325-350 for 40-50 minutes until golden brown and slightly crunchy on top.

More on The Commons:

• Here's a good starting point website on issues related to The Commons: onthecommons.org.

• Here's another interesting piece on tenets of The Commons, as established by legal precedent.

• Here's an interview with Vandana Shiva which includes a discussion of the commons. "The commons and the recovery of commons is vital to earth democracy. It's at the heart of sustainability of the earth and democratic functioning of society." -Vandana Shiva

• And here are a couple of excerpts from an article I wrote a few years ago for a local paper about the loss of the commons:

Originally, the term "commons" referred to lands and waters where anyone could forage, grow food or hunt. In ancient Rome and Britain, and in indigenous societies around the world, these shared inheritances were held in common rather than privately owned.

Among the generally accepted modern commons are public lands, the oceans and the atmosphere. But today, the concept of the commons has expanded to include commonly held systems, places and even ideas: community gardens, parks, public libraries, radio waves and herbal lore. Participants at the 1992 Earth Summit defined commons as "the social and political space where things get done and where people derive a sense of belonging and have an element of control over their lives."

. . .

Historically, conquering empires seized the commonly owned property of indigenous peoples for private profit. Here in Western North Carolina, the Cherokee Nation held most land in common until the U.S. government forced it to establish a system of private land ownership just 150 years ago.

Today, battles are being waged around the world over ownership of and access to water, land, energy, services and even genetic material. Ecologist Vandana Shiva points to a "series of enclosures" of commons in the Third World under colonialism, beginning with land and forests, then water and finally biodiversity and indigenous knowledge. Seeds saved for generations and medicinal plants growing in the wild can now be patented by private corporations and sold on the global market. As privatization is imposed, the values that sustain commons as the center of community life are eroded.

This loss has had devastating ecological and social consequences. With multinational corporations and financial institutions like the World Bank leading the charge, what was once stewarded as common property is now plundered for private gain -- a major factor in the deepening global environmental crisis. And the enclosure of commons often happens at the local level.

You can read the full text of my article, which centers on the loss of a particular commons in Asheville, NC here.

Autumn Olive Mead

Dozens of small, shrubby autumn olive trees are speckled across our five acres of river bottom land. Autumn olive (Elaeagnus umbellata) is an invasive exotic. . .and an abundant, nutritious, wild fruit. Of all of the invasive species I've encountered, autumn olive is the hardest to hate.

Autumn olives are one of the first trees to leaf out here on our land, and one of the earliest plants to flower. Their silvery green leaves are beautiful, and their tiny yellow flowers are heavy with a sweet scent that makes me feel drunk with Spring. Honeybees and other pollinators love the flowers, which provide an early spring meal for many beneficial insects. Then, around the time that blackberries start to ripen, the trees bear fruit. Autumn olive trees in fruit are covered with tiny red berries, packed with fruit, bursting with fruit. The berries are pearly, almost opalescent in some light, and flecked in such a way that they almost seem to be dusted with glitter. Autumn olives are magical. A hard plant to hate.

Need more evidence? Autumn olive trees are nitrogen fixers. At Sugar Creek Farm, where we took a class last spring, farmer Joe Allawos has experimented with the benefits of the nitrogen fixing capacity of autumn olive trees by planting fruit and nut trees next to autumn olive trees, and at the same time planting the same variety of tree in a spot away from any autumn olive trees. The trees planted next to the autumn olives grew much faster and when we saw them were about 50% larger than the ones planted away from the autumn olives. Autumn olive trees planted or allowed to grow in a garden or orchard will accumulate nitrogen around their roots, which is then available as on-the-spot fertilizer for other nearby plants.

Finally, there is the nutritional value of the fruit: autumn olive berries contain vitamins A, C, E, essential fatty acids, flavanoids, and carotenoids. They are especially chock full of the antioxidant carotenoid lycopen, which is considered a powerful fighter of cancer and heart disease. Tomatoes, which are the most common source of lycopene, contain a fraction of the lycopene found in autumn olives. One study by the USDA's Agricultural Research Service showed that autumn olives can contain 17 times as much lycopene as a fresh tomato.

So there it is. Beautiful. Nitrogen fixing. Nutritious. And invasive.

We have cut dozens of autumn olive trees in clearing space for gardens, but we've left a smattering growing for the time being, and we harvest as much of the fruit as we can. The taste of the fruit is a tart burst of summer--I can stand at an autumn olive tree for a good long time picking and eating on a summer afternoon.

I can never eat an autumn olive without thinking of my friend Holly, who introduced me to autumn olives on a hike in the woods almost ten years ago now, when she was six years old. She knew far more about wild foods than I did, having spent a lot of time in the woods with her knowledgeable parents, and I am always thankful to her for helping me begin to appreciate the food that is available all around us for free!

All of this said, I feel compelled to offer at least a couple of links to information about the noxious, invasive nature of Elaeagnus umbellata, so here they are:

• Morris Arboretum invasive species fact sheet on Autumn Olive

• Nature Conservancy article on Autumn Olive (this article is written with a specific focus on autumn olive in one state, Indiana, but is more widely applicable, and is a good summary).

• Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center Threat Summary on Autumn Olives

What To Do With Autumn Olive Fruit

As long as these beautiful and edible invasives pepper our landscape, we might as well enjoy their delicious fruit.

We knew we wanted to try a batch of autumn olive mead, which we did (more on that below), but I took to the internet in search of other interesting things to do with autumn olives, since we have so many and they are so yummy.

Here's a blog with all kinds of autumn olive recipes, including a delicious-looking jam that I intend to try later this month: Dreams and Bones.

I also discovered on one of my perennial favorite blogs, Fast Grow the Weeds, a post with a recipe for an autumn olive chutney that looks divine. There will definitely be some chutney happening in my kitchen later this week -- thanks El!

In the meantime, here is the recipe for the mead we made last evening, which smells outlandishly delicious already and is a gorgeous deep, purple red color as it begins its fermentation.

Autumn Olive Mead

Ingredients:

• 1.5 gallons autumn olives
• 1 gallon of honey
• Water as needed

Equipment:

• 6 gallon carboy (glass jug for fermenting)
• Airlock (see photo)

Instructions:

1. Wash and mash the autumn olives. Use your hands and create a nice, mushy, juicy slurry!
2. Heat a large pot of water and dissolve the honey in it.
3. Add water to the fruit slurry to make it easier to pour. Combine the honey water and fruit slurry in the carboy and add water to fill the carboy up to its shoulders.
4. Cap with an airlock and wait!
5. The mixture should start to bubble and continue for several weeks. If the mead is not bubbling, or develops mold, you can add storebought yeast for winemaking (champagne yeast is good). If you're lucky, the wild yeast that is present on the skin of the fruit will suffice.
6. After the bubbling stops, siphon off the liquid into another carboy and compost the fruit dregs. Allow to ferment again until there is no more bubbling; transfer to bottles and enjoy right away as "young" mead or age for a mellower flavor.

Below: mashing the fruit to create a slurry. . .

. . . and the mead ready for fermentation!

Guerilla in a Bright Red Dress: Sumac

Over the summer, Christopher took this photo (left) of sumac in bloom on our land -- if you click to enlarge, you'll see how beloved the sumac flower is by bees. Providing sustenence for pollenators is just one of the wonders of sumac, a woefully under-appreciated plant.  

Sumacs are a family of native plants that grow througout most of North America, and are widely thought of as a common weed.  Here in WNC, sumac grows along the highways and in trashed-out urban lots, among other places.  It's a tough plant.

I've heard sumac's growth habit described as rangy or scrappy, but if you look at stands that have been allowed to mature, the plants cluster together and take on a graceful, curvy, elegant form that I think is quite beautiful.  

In the summer, sumac looks like a bushy green shrub or small tree, eventually bearing huge yellow flowers.  In the fall, the leaves turn deep crimson and the flowers dry on the plant, becoming a gorgeous shade of red. After the leaves are gone, bright red fruit clusters remain on the tips of the long thin branches.  

Below: two photos of Sumac that I took across the river at Warren Wilson College today - neither of these shots captures the color but you can get a sense of the shapes of sumac trees.

Coming across a stand of sumac in the winter feels to me like witnessing a ritual of some kind. A mature patch of sumac with its branches bare looks like a gathering of lanky, sinewy women, arms and legs intertwined, reaching up to the sky.  In the winter the sumac sisters, those tough leafy warriors, shed their red dresses and stand still together,  their arms snaking throuh the air, holding up offerings of bright red fruit.  Magical.

Each red sumac pod is made up of a cluster of tiny bright red berries. Birds and animals feast on the fruits as long as they last--the fruit is a rare treat for wildlife in a winter landscape.  

Food and medicine traditions of many native peoples include sumac, and for good reason.  The dried fruit makes a deliciously tart beverage, and the tiny hairs on each of the small red fruits are jam-packed with vitamin C.  In addition to the high C content, sumac fruits contain potent natural antibiotics (Foster/Duke).  According to Peterson's field guide to medicinal herbs,  sumac was used to treat and prevent a wide variety of maladies in native traditions throughout North America.  For more on sumac's medicinal qualities, see this overview.)  

So back to our sumac.  In the fall, Christopher remembered that an old friend of his, Lalynn, used to make a tea from dried sumac heads to drink during the winter, and decided he wanted to harvest some for us.   So he picked some dried heads of sumac and we broke them apart and let them air dry inside (see photo above) before jarring them up.  We left plenty behind for the birds and other wildlife, and ended up with about a half gallon of dry sumac berries.  I snacked on the tiny berries as we processed the heads, and the zingy, tart flavor was so strong it sometimes made my eyes water.  This winter we'll use the berries to make hot sumac tea or steep and then cool and strain to produce refreshing sumac-ade.  

I appreciate sumac as food and medicine, but most of all because I see it as a plant that goes where others can't, takes root, and grows like wild.  Sumac is often found growing in neglected areas, along roadsides, in old railroad beds, and in places where woods have been recently cleared or there has been a fire.  

Above: Sumac and rivercane growing on a roadside in Swannanoa, December.

I see Sumac as a guerilla gardener of the plant world, with dandelion and mullien and other tough front-line plants, dropping seeds in wastelands and bringing bare earth back to life.  

Sumac is one of the first plants to come in as living systems begin to recover and regenerate.  It is drought-tolerant and can survive conditions that would kill many other kinds of plants, and it helps make way for a succession of plant and animal life gradually to renew and heal damaged places.  (See the US Forest Service's page on Sumac for more information on sumac's role in rehabilitation of damaged and disturbed land, as well as other interesting facts about sumac).  

I'm thankful to sumac for being one of the tough ones on the front lines of the healing of damaged ecosystems.  And for its beauty and healing power, and its tenacious presence as an ancient native medicinal plant.  

Long live sumac--graceful, strong, and powerful plant warrior adorned in flaming red!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

References:

Foster, Steven and James A. Duke.  A Field Guide to Medicinal Plants and Herbs of Eastern and Central North America, Second Edition.  Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Meadow Mushrooms**

Earlier this week Christopher noticed that jillions of mushrooms had sprouted up in the horse pasture next door. Fortunately, our favorite wild mushroom expert was coming over for dinner on Friday night, and quickly identified them as Meadow Mushrooms.

Alan, who knows more about wild mushrooms than almost anyone around (click here to visit his wild mushroom website), explained that Meadow Mushrooms are the closest wild equivalents to storebought white button 'shrooms. Since they are white, and there's a deadly mushroom that grows around here that's also white, we learned that this edible variety is distinguished by pink or brown "gills" on the underside.

C & A harvested some of the mushrooms last eve and we had them for dinner, marinated in balsamic vinegar and olive oil with fresh minced garlic and then broiled briefly in the toaster oven. I thought they were WAY better than button mushrooms. In fact, they were delectable.

Harvested meadow mushrooms up close


We ate the broiled mushrooms with fresh sliced tomatoes and sauteed veggies (squash, chard, potatoes, onions, garlic) with homemade tomato sauce over pasta, topped with some of that ridiculous beet/basil pesto. Needless to say, it was quite satisfying.

All of the vegetables were from the garden except for the potatoes, which I bought on Wednesday at the Farmers Market - I used one of each of these gorgeous pink- and purple-fleshed varieties (see the photo below...)

The potatoes were so lovely to behold, especially with the multicolored chard stems (see photo of saute in progress, below) and that magenta pesto on top.

Thanks to Alan for the mushroom lesson, and thanks to the meadow for the free gourmet ingredients!


**NOTE: Don't attempt to identify mushrooms for eating without help from someone with expertise and experience. Book learning is not enough!

Nettles Patch!

Christopher found a big patch of stinging nettles on our land down by the river ... hurrah!

We had just been craving nettles and talking about how we needed to go to some of our favorite old patches around town and harvest some, since this is just the right time of year for tender young nettles.

Picking nettles (usually at the Pearson St. Community Garden) has been a spring ritual for me for years, and it's been a magical shared experience with several close friends. There's something that feels ancient and vital about nettles to me. They're an early bright blast of green from the wild that just tastes like spring. Tart, wild, and full of chlorophyll, they even look like a little green explosion. Every April or so, C and I both start feeling the urge to get out and get us some nettles, and make teas, soups, quiches, or just eat them plain after a good quick boil. So how exciting to find some right here on our land!

We walked down to The Patch this eve for me to get a look at it, and to pick some. There are blackberry brambles mixed in and a good 12 x 12 or so patch of young juicy hearty NETTLES!

Besides being delicious and making you feel tuff/punk rock when you pick them (because they're not called stinging nettles for nothing), they are medicinal and super-nutritious. They are full of iron, calcium, and bright green spring juju.

C. is making nettle fritters for dinner, using some of last year's Sicilian Silver garlic and some yummy local eggs. After today's visit to Sugar Creek Farm, we were already feeling pretty high on plants, and nettle fritters, I predict, will take us over the edge into full-on, bright green, spring plantworld bliss.