Ellen Lewis

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.

Hi Christopher (and anyone else with a nukadodo),
I finally got my nukadoko started, and now I have a bunch of questions.
It's been a week or two, and in my cold kitchen (we're having a very cool summer, seldom over 70, so I guess it's in the mid 60s in the house) I think it's starting to ferment.
All the recipes call for kombu and chile peppers, and some for yuzu peel and shiitake.
They say to remove the vegetables every few days but they don't talk about the "aromatics".
I pulled out the kumquats that I was using instead of yuzu peel just because they were hard to bury.
Do I leave the kombu in? It is starting to fall apart, and maybe it just becomes part of the nuka?
What about the pepper? It was dry. It's gotten soft but still in one piece. I'm worried that it will drop seeds in the nuka, but maybe after time that's OK.
The shiitake were fresh and are sort of disappearing. Maybe I should pull them out. Should I add more? As a seasoning or as a pickle?
Do I want to continue adding seasoning components, or are they just for the initial creation of the culture?
And does anyone use shiso in a nukadoko? Mr. Google doesn't seem to think so.
Thank you.

I don't know about cherries but it's not just the fruit. If it were my apricot, I'd say brown rot. Probably some kind of bacterial disease. Do you get sap lumps on the bark?

I had some that were about a dozen years in the jar. Brown and jelled like yours. I used them occasionally but mostly I had been ignoring them.
I did some internet searching, but it wasn't very encouraging. Most recipes you can find talk about six months or less.
I finally found some Asian recipes that say don't even think about using them until they're ten years old. So that was reassuring.
Then they were noticed by a Thai-American friend. She recognized them and loved them, so I gave her a jar and made a bunch of new ones to use next decade.
I did one batch with paprika and bay leaves and one with cinnamon. By time I used them you could barely tell the difference. I think spices are more important if you're using them fresher.
One half-used jar did get odd. Looked funny and didn't smell right. I concluded it had rotted and got rid of it.

A lot of my gardening is working with succession to shift the weeds from horrible stickery annuals to other plants that are easier to live with and preferably also useful.
I'm starting to think about the place of the vetch in succession.
It climbs over the bermuda grass and shades it out in patches. After the vetch dies, that leaves patches of semi-exposed dirt where I could plant without digging up mats of grass.
Perhaps I can establish something in those patches before the winter rains come and the whole place turns to sourgrass and three-cornered leek that shade out all seedlings.
It would take watering, which I try to minimize, so the bermuda grass might come roaring back to cover the open space. But it's an idea that's kind of appealing, and if I could keep up with patches of weeding I might increase diversity at ground/low shrub layer.
But what to use? I could start with low woody native shrubs. I dunno. Sometimes I plant native grasses but I tend to lose them. I think in the long run I'd probably want to replace many of the first round as I figure out better options. But I guess I could just start with whatever natives might shade out the grass and see what happens. If they grow wide it might not take too many of them.
I'd have to think about all the open space in the middle of the yard, and instead of it all being random and semi-pathless, I'd have to have places to walk and places to walk around. I guess that wouldn't be so bad.
Hmmm...

Thanks William.
I don't want to do the whole yard in cardboard for a number of reasons. Probably the most salient one is that the grass just grows right over it and through the wood chips.
I used to have a compost bin. Then a client of mine looked out the window and asked "Is that a rat?" Now I just put everything in the municipal compost.
Yes, I do need to be more methodical about dropping my chop around my trees instead of where I removed it. Good reminder. And I can keep an eye open for coffee sacks. Though most of my trees are surrounded by other smaller plants, so it becomes a bit of a jigsaw puzzle.