Eino Kenttä

Jay Angler wrote:What have you done this week that makes you feel richer?

This week was the last week on my seasonal day job for this spring. Done, yay! Just now, I went out in the forest around where I'm staying at the moment and dug up a load of plants that will be planted on our land: a hazel, a tiny wild cherry tree, a gooseberry bush, ostrich fern, Solomon's seal, wood avens, and a couple more things. Guess which did more to make me feel rich: working a week at a decently paying job, or digging up a boxful of random wild plants?

As a bonus "feel rich" moment, I also saw a badger foraging for worms up close. Like, extremely close. We were probably just four meters apart when the badger finally spotted me and ran.

Interesting idea! Cool substance for sure, but also slightly frightening, using something that allergenic on stuff that's supposed to come into contact with food...

As for waterproofing unglazed pottery, I heard of a method where you apply conifer resin to the still-warm pottery pieces after firing. The resin melts, wicks into the pottery and seals the pores. I imagine if you burnish the inside of the piece and apply the resin from the outside, whatever you keep in the container might not even taste of pine resin... Haven't got around to trying this yet, but I will eventually.

The look of the leaf buds and the fact that the flowers are two by two makes me think some sort of honeysuckle? Maybe? Admittedly the flowers themselves don't look exactly like the honeysuckle flowers I'm familiar with, but there seems to be some that aren't too dissimilar. Look at Lonicera pileata, for instance.

Fairly certain that's something in the genus Scilla, only the flower isn't fully unfurled yet. Don't know which one, there are a lot of species.

Yesterday, me and a friend went and harvested a big batch of nettles and ground elder, a bit of dandelion leaves, bedstraw shoots and bittercress flower buds, and stir-fried it all with a bit of garlic. Yummy! We also got some ostrich fern fiddleheads, still waiting to be eaten.

I noticed an interesting thing with the ostrich ferns: the timing of fiddlehead growth is entirely different for older and younger plants. The old plants (with fertile fronds from last year) have barely started growing at all, while the younger plants in the same cluster are almost past the harvest window. I wonder if it's an adaptation to avoid the older, well-established plants shading out the young ones just starting? Did anyone else notice this?

Hello James, welcome to Permies!

No idea what species (or even family) that is, but it doesn't look like a beetle. I'd say it's something in the Heteroptera. More related to stink bugs than to beetles. Hopefully someone who knows more about insects than I do can give you a more specific ID.

We will expand our annual gardening area this year. That was the plan anyway, but it feels a bit more urgent because of current events. The idea is to grow mainly staples: a lot of potatoes, sunroots, some carrots, peas, etc. We're also trying for scarlet runner beans, which might not be such a safe bet in our climate, but it would be brilliant if we could grow our own dry beans.

For what it's worth, on an open air museum I know of, there's a building roofed with birch bark and turf with the top portion of the roof nearly horizontal, and it's not leaking at all. It's possible, but I'm inclined to think that a simpler solution would be to pick a roof construction that has at least some slope at every point. I've never heard of caulking between the bark sheets being done traditionally, it's probably too labour intensive to be practical for an entire house, but it was clearly used for birch bark canoes...

M Lijn wrote:
I have also heard that in Iceland, some houses do not even have birch bark in between the roof and the soil. And they’re well insulated enough that the main heating source is the human body! (Iceland being a wood scarce region.) Or at least no one said they used it in the video…

I've been wondering about that, and I think I might have a theory. In the video (if you're referring to the one I think) he mentions that the turf has to be taken from wet places. The Icelandic rocks are obviously volcanic. When volcanic rocks weather, bentonite is one possible end product, and I imagine any clay-like material formed would tend to end up in wetlands. Bentonite, once it gets humid, acts as a moisture barrier. Probably not a perfect one, but he does mention in the video that they used a thick cover of turf, which would mean that the majority of the water is shed before it goes through.

I agree, not all bitters are created equal. Coffee is not the same as willow bark, and neither is anything like the saponin bitter of good king Henry. I think saying that we can just differentiate five basic flavours is probably a huge oversimplification. And how we perceive taste does vary hugely between people. For example, I find wintercress, Barbarea vulgaris, to be horribly bitter when raw (but tasty cooked) while a friend of mine insists that it just tastes sweet to him.

Rebecca Norman wrote:And then some people in this thread say their Good King Henry is not bitter. I wonder if maybe in the high desert environment I was growing it in, it was more bitter than usual.

I think you might be on to something there. A lot of secondary plant metabolites are more abundant under different forms of stress. On the other hand, Stephen Barstow doesn't exactly live in a very dry climate (I know, since our place is just a little bit north of his) and even though he's very much used to bitter plants, he doesn't like his good king Henry raw... I think our bodies are probably just telling us that those saponins are not something we should be eating in larger quantities. I've never even tried GKH raw for this reason, don't like any of its relatives raw either, including spinach...