Ellen Lewis

When you say "in the city", how much land are you talking about?
I live in a fairly dense city, but my neighborhood is still largely either single-family homes or former single-family homes that have been divided up into small apartments. In other words, there are still yards. I have a moderately large yard for the area, at about 6200 square feet, or a seventh of an acre, minus the area of the house.
My son's family are a little overwhelmed with a yard about twice as big in the suburbs, with chickens and trees and veg and play structures, and pets and too much work to do.
As an elderly woman without much traditional gardening experience, I find this is plenty of land for me to steward. There is light pollution and noise pollution and occasional vandalism and fruit theft, but there's also a lot of satisfaction. I prefer working on things that are in poor condition so I can improve them and not worry about my mistakes messing them up.
This house when we bought it was falling apart: roof, floors, windows, doors, electrical system, plumbing, walls, foundation all needed work. Repairing rather than remodeling or tearing it down conserved hundred-year-old materials and much human investment of effort and thought.
The yard was invasive toxic bulbs and ivy and poke and blackberry and trash and broken glass. Now it's a forager's plot with dozens of fruit trees, mushrooms, vegetables, fiber and medicine plants, as well as places to nap and host dinners. I have conserved and brought in woody debris, so the soil gets better and water sinks in. There is always work to do. It's kind of a bonsai food garden. Good thing I like pruning. The weeding is impossible to keep up with. My "zone 5" is a 5 foot diameter thicket in the back corner.
I have been working on a book about my experience here. If anyone wants to read it and comment I'd be thrilled. It's mostly about particular species in my particular climate. Maybe I should broaden its scope.
I'm happy others are thinking about city permaculture also. I am convinced that unless city people have a lived connection to the earth and the sun and the water, all our efforts to "save" our home planet are nothing but an abstraction, with no real conviction, just ineffectual, out-of-context sentimentality.

Some people think the reason the American chestnut succumbed to the blight is that when the passenger pigeon was wiped out, they missed their fertilizer.

Hi folks,
I was trying to make a copper mordant. I soaked a handful of scrap copper in vinegar water. At least, I thought it was scrap copper. Maybe one of the pennies was newer than I thought and so I got some zinc? I sure don't think there was iron. I dunno what else might be in it.
I thought the water would turn blue. It turned rusty brown. So I'm calling it the Messed-up Mystery Mordant, and using it to darken colors.
It stained or you might say dyed my yarn a nice rust orange.
My question is, can I just use it as a dye? Don't bother with a subsequent dye bath, just use it as is, since I like the color? I haven't tried washing it out with soap, but it's been rinsed & seems stable.
Thanks.

OK, now a year later. I'm still eating both batches of lactarius. I prefer the brine pickled ones. The miso pickled ones got slightly alcoholic, and need scraping and/or rinsing.
The mushrooms are popping up again, but not in such large quantity.
So I'm trying again.
This time I boiled then without soaking first, and without salt, and for only five minutes. I removed the stem bases first, and washed the rest of the dirt off after the boil.
They didn't taste fiery or bitter after the boil. Kinda nice, in fact, but so far I'm only fermenting them, not trying them fresh yet.
I am packing this year's harvest on top of a bed of three-cornered leek leaves. They're a weed in my yard and flavor the ferment nicely.

My son was retrieving some char from a yard fireplace-thing fire they had so the kids could roast marshmellos. He had quenched it so it wouldn't all burn to ash, but that's all the intervention he did. It wasn't "for" biochar, but he wants to use the char, since he has it.
Emptying the fireplace after dousing it, he got a slurry of ash and char. I was recommending separating the two. He asked me what harm there would be in putting the ash in the soil or the compost along with the char. I had no answer.
Please advise us.

I freeze them whole.
Then I cut them up into chunks and put them in the blender with milk and vanilla.
They make a great milk shake/smoothie kinda thing.
It's sweet enough that it needs no sugar.
If you pour it into little bowls and let it sit a few hours, the tannins and gels in the persimmon curdle the milk so it becomes kinda like a pudding. You can eat it with a spoon.
Usually mine have no seeds, but you would be able to get the seeds out when you cut them up if necessary.

I use a pencil.
I twist it all into some kind of lump and stick the pencil or knitting needle or chopstick through it and that holds it.
So much depends on how curly/straight and thick/thin it is. That would never work for some people.
Clips are great too if you want a dedicated implement.

Another failure, in case it's of use:
I had a lot of fallen green apricots this year.
I put them in a small sauerkraut crock with salt.
They made just enough umesu to cover them.
By this time the shiso was harvestable. I added shiso to the ferment.
After a week or so they smelled good and the sun was out.
I sun dried both the plums and the shiso for several days.
That was too long in the sun for the shiso, it lost much of its aroma, though I crumbled it anyway to use as a condiment. Not ideal, but still nice. Salty, sour, and somewhat aromatic.
I put the shriveled apricots back in the umesu to age. I covered them with mesh and rocks so the liquid covered the apricots.
I guess the apricots absorbed the umesu and brought the level of the liquid down, because it got moldy anyway.
So that ruined both the umesu and the umeboshi. I'm quite frustrated.

The plants that pioneered when the glaciers withdrew were accompanied by the rest of an ecosystem - other plants, bugs, little animals, bigger animals and so on. They were not individual plants occurring without a context.
An invasive is different in that it arrives without its ecosystem, without its companions and its predators.
Often invasives were brought in as pest-resistant ornamentals, which means the local critters don't eat them. So they get a competitive advantage compared to the local plants which are eaten by the local bugs which are eaten by the local birds. Then the diversity goes down, the songbirds don't have the bugs they need for feeding their young and for migrating, it turns into a downward spiral.
I agree that working towards balance and diversity is much more important than particular plant choices. Observe and interact! Use what's there.
Going back to an imaginary pristine state is both impossible and impoverished. I utilize plants from all over the world and would miss them. At the same time, I very much enjoy experiencing areas dominated by the plants that were here before I was. I believe they have a great deal to teach us and should be protected.

Thanks Christopher,
I've been meaning to go to their weekend lunch for years. Apparently I'm too much a creature of habit to ever get there.
I love their pickles. Been getting them at the farmers' market for decades - though it always seemed a bit of an extravagance to buy someone else's pickles. Now that I'm old and lazy I do it more often. And always use the matrix to make more pickles, though they do tend to get lost at the back of the fridge.
D'oh! I shoulda got a jar and used it to start my nukamiso.
Had a big birthday party last year and finally went to the shop and bought a bunch of things to serve at the party.
Today the tester cucumber tasted good for the first time, rather than just bitterly salty.