M Ljin

Ac Baker wrote:

M Ljin wrote:Wintergreen berries and leaf tea! And partridgeberries!!!

Making a pot of alder twig tea.

These sound exciting.  I've heard of wintergreen as a flavour herb before, might I have come across that in commercial products?

What do these taste like? What especially do you enjoy about them?

Thank you. As many are saying, we need to recharge during this "annual ecological disaster" (as one highly experienced agroecologist I know wryly dubbed winter), and plan, and catch up on maintainance,  and also celebrate with loved ones in whatever traditions and ways are meaningful to us.

Most wintergreen flavorings were supposedly made from black birch (another plant native to here), or are synthetic, which is mostly the case nowadays. It would be difficult to harvest enough wintergreen for commercial purposes because they are a slow-growing evergreen ground cover growing in acidic soils. The berries are quite lovely, minty and sweet tasting, something between mint and a dry blueberry perhaps?

Partridgeberries are dryish and slightly sweet, and they have a similar ecology but prefer more alkaline or neutral soils and can tolerate more shade. They are more rambling than wintergreen as well. The berries of both persist well into winter beneath the snow and sometimes spring.

Alder tea is nourishing-tasting. I haven’t had any in a while but have some that I brought in and dried. I specifically pick older, more lateral twigs that are gnarly because they have the better flavor. New shoots tend to be more bitter and astringent.

I was getting open heart surgery when the surgeon went into another room and vanished. Nobody knew where they went, and everyone searched frantically but the surgeon did not appear.

Nobody expects the vanishing physician.

My guess is not enough sunlight? Purslane requires a lot of sun in my climate at least. It looks like the mites or insects that my prickly pear cactus gets when they are brought in each winter—a low air circulation, low humidity, low sunlight, moderate temperature environment.

Maypop is good medicine, so it may be just as well if they will grow without fruit in colder zones. Hopniss is the same way, but we appreciate them typically more for the root than the beans.

One in ten years they might actually fruit then!

Peaches—there were peach trees all over Vermont that were grown from pits or planted—most of them rarely fruited until 2023. 2023 and later, they’ve all of a sudden been fruiting prolifically. Maypop could perhaps be like this, too.

I do think more people learning to sing, play instruments, etc. would be beneficial. In the 19th century there was something called parlor music, where before recorded music became popular, they would get songbooks and sing and play from them if they wanted to hear a song less expensively. Not that that is the solution but it shows how people did it before

Learning to sing/play music is healthy for the brain too!

Modern society seems to push people into ever more specialization. I don’t think this is good for us, we are meant to be well rounded human beings! Maybe we don’t need to do everything but the one pointed focus is bad for making connections between things (e.g. in science and other realms) and reflects the assembly line model of society.

There is a local old-time duo I saw the other day that is good but doesn’t have anything at all that’s recorded—the only way you would hear them is by going out and hearing them! In this case they had a tip jar that was well announced (though that doesn’t feel like the best solution to me, however it was not an ordinary place).

And a musician I know, left three songs out of the online versions of his album (and in my opinion they were some of the best of the songs), because they couldn’t guarantee that the songs were in the right order, so they can only be heard on CD or vinyl—in the right order.

I play and sing and write songs, and am moderately good at it, but don’t ever want to “be a musician” of the sort who tours around, publishes things, etc. It seems stressful and I want to focus on things like picking mushrooms and acorns in the woods!

The other night while I was sorting and cracking acorns I started singing spontaneously, a little acorn song of sorts. I didn’t write it out beforehand, just sang something that seemed fitting. In previous times this was so common. Masanobu Fukuoka wrote something along the lines of “gone now is the sound of the woodcutter’s song”—maybe, we can sing it again?



Oops, rambled off topic— as can be told from the story of the person who left three of the best songs out of streaming, it seems like musicians could just refuse to put their music out that way and some have. I think an equally salient question is, despite streaming not being very helpful to musicians, how can listeners (by any means) do their best to support the musicians they listen to?

Maybe Gillian Welch has a point to offer in regards to “singing it ourselves”?

Every day I wake up
humming a song
But I don’t need to run around
I just stay at home
Sing a little love song,
my love and myself
If it’s something that you want to hear
You can sing it yourself
Cause everything is free now
that’s what I said
No one’s gotta listen to the words in my head
Someone hit the big score
I figured it out
And I’m gonna do it anyway
even if it doesn’t pay

(Sorry for the irony)

Nancy Reading wrote:I have the opposite sort of problem (....a bit too much rainfall) so can only guess at what may be best for you. Obviously you don't want to disturb the roots of the trees when you're digging, so I would suggest any ditches or berms be outside the canopy of the mature tree. Maybe sort of boomerang swales on the downhill side would work well? Mulch and companion planting to create support guilds are worth a thought too.

Which reminds me…

Lines or different shapes of rocks, mulch, logs, sticks, etc. arranged to slow water can be beneficial as well, without digging.

This came from a beaver-chewed and then abandoned branch that I stole and used for spoonmaking, then dried the bark by the fire.

The label is pictorial rather than verbal, depicting purple willow.

I forgot to mention, mayapples are delicious!

They seem to be only around old plantings here because the ones I saw were right near a cultivar American plum that had gone feral. Hopefully they spread, and I’ll keep spreading seeds around. Only found one this year, it wasn’t the best year for fruit.

Wonderful photographs and looks like a beautiful area! Arkansas, from the maps, looks as if it’s a wilder area than most, based on sattelite at least. I was surprised to see so many floodplain forests. Here they are mostly converted to farmland, though there is a protected ancient pine grove some distance away.

Is that river cane in the background?