Bill Taylor

Joshua, seeing your posts about eggshell and comfrey, wondering 8 years later if you got any results to report.  My wife sees a natural dentist in Farmington, VT., Dr. Yuriy May.  Excellent, not cheap.  She got zirconia implants as she is allergic to metal in the mouth.  MI paste and something called Wonder are supposed to help regrow enamel. I am using the latter and not sure if it works but Dr. May says it will.

The secret to a delicious flower salad is to use more greens than flowers.  20% or 30% flowers by weight is a good balance, if you have that many flowers.  Balancing sweet, hot, tart, bitter, and other flavors helps too (both of the greens and flower portion of the salad).  If you are selling the flower salad as we do, avoid ones that turn gray quickly like dandelion, any of these 3:  chicory, raddicchio and endive flowers (they look beautiful on the plant but get gray once picked), the purpleish red fuzzy vetch flowers (so called "hairy vetch" grown in cold climates has smoother purple and white blooms that do keep for longer).  Using fennel leaves, flowers or buds, pea tops, pansies, anise hyssop can balance dandelion greens, calendula blooms (then you can use the entire flower), chicory leaves, endive, etc.  I find Batchelor Button flowers to be tough and unsatisfying but some seem to like them.

If you are near the southern Berkshires of Massachusetts we have an in-person class "Eating and Growing on the Wild Side: Salad University" a few times a year.  Please email me at edibleland@earthlink.net if you want to get on our announcement list (you will need to get through the spam blocker by responding when your email gets snagged).

I remembered hostas after seeing another post mentioning them.  I find cooking the tender leaves; in our eastern zone 5 location they are harvestable for over a month; makes them like spinach.  Raw, they burn my throat same as raw chard or evening primrose root; not sure everyone has that reaction.  I love bitter but that burning throat sensation of a few plants is horrible for me.  Last spring the hostas were our only go-to green for 6 weeks or so until the overwintered kale recovered and anything we planted was harvestable.  It emerges very early!  They seem to get tough before one can overharvest and destroy the stand (similar to asparagus but there the stalks begin to get smaller telling me it's time to stop).

We planted Black Scorzonera and another similar one with white roots, bought from Burnt Ridge Nursery in 2013.  The black roots are supposed to be similar to Salsify but I have not tried either as only the white rooted plant made it and spread like crazy; it self-seeds and also was perennial in northern CA and seems to be here in western MA (zone 5b but only tested in a very snowy winter that may have kept it above 0F)).  The leaves are good in salad when young, which includes the tender tops even in summer.  The roots are probably good too, but not very thick (pencil thick maybe more for an older plant).  It is a bit spicy, not nearly as much as mustard or horseradish which it resembles vaguely in appearance.  

The purple flowered thistles can be ground in a blender with apple and lemon to make an energizing and cleansing drink.  Just wash the thistles handling them by the roots, or use the leaves only but handle with scissors or gloves or both.  Cut them to fit in the blender and add pure water, lemon and apple.  Strain through a nut milk bag and compost the mash.  DO NOT use yellow flowered thistles like star thistle; they are poisonous!  We use bull thistle, canada thistle, and in CA used Italian or Milk thistle.

Stinging nettle is delicious, buttery in flavor, and good any way as long as you either crush the stinging parts (blend into a raw smoothie or pesto for example) or heat it (as tea, cooked greens, last thing added to a stew right before it comes off the heat).  Gloves and scissors once again are useful to handle it.  If shade or part shade grown, it can be eaten almost any time of year it is up; just select the tender top part before it blooms.  In most places it will leaf/shoot out again after fall equinox or so after the seeds mature (you can cut the flowers/seed stalks, soak in water a week or 2 for a nutritive if stinky medicinal spray or drench for your veggies or fruit trees).  

Yellowhorn tree leaves are passable, not my favorite.  Linden leaves are edible.  Of course dandelion, cat's ear (a fuzzy dandelion), ribwort or broadleaf plantain (slightly mushroomy flavor) are all good in salads (select only the most tender leaves) or smoothies.  If bitter bothers you (some people are more sensitive than others who actually enjoy bitters which are cleansing foods) then be sure to avoid dandelion and cat's ear especially in the hot months.  The tender small leaves are always best.

Unfortunately the potential of Stevia leaf powder to kill Lyme bacteria only worked in the lab.  The stevia tickles our sweetness sensors but does not get into the body so does not kill Lyme in people.  Too bad.  That bad news is according to a doctor easily found with a web search; it was the only post I saw on Lyme written in 2019 or later, 2017 was when the research was done in the lab.  Many posts are repeating the hopeful study in 2017 and 2018.

After getting a Lyme tick bite, doing the amoxicillin (Doxy was not logical as it was May and too much to do outdoors) a month and then Stephen Buhner herbal protocol, I still managed to get very sick in August after demo-ing a building to salvage some lumber and overdoing it in general.  Forgot I was 63.  After a long slow recovery using many modalities, my wife Jaye signed us up for a yoga teacher training in Miramar, FL (Yogi Hari's ashram).  It was the best thing I did all year.  I have gained strength and peace of mind.  I prefer it to working out, or just stretching, as it both strengthens and relaxes, energizes and recharges.  Whether your joint and muscle issues are Lyme disease or something else, yoga helps.  Part of it also is eating mostly vegetarian.  I am not a purist and occasionally have meat, as my ancestors did after a successful hunt, eating plants the rest of the time.  But when I have a lot of meat, the joint pain increases.  So in addition to the great suggestions, this shift can improve the workings of the body and mind at any age.  

Just moved east to western MA after years in CA.  Tried the Michael Phillips spray program which uses hydrolized fish (not emulsion but unpasteurized fish), 0.5% to 1% neem oil emulsified with biodegradable dish soap, liquid kelp, and effective microbes.  4 spring sprays starting at half inch green and then every 10 days (before and after but not during bloom), then summer sprays with no fish after July (can add fermented homemade comfrey, nettle, horsetail liquid, filtered) to summer sprays.  See The Holistic Orchard book or numerous youtubes he is in.  Did not get complete control, but some.  Also keep a ramial chip (branches not big trunks or limbs) mulch under the tree, scythe or mow only as grasses prepare to blu=oom (goal is to do during spring root flush when the leaves and shoots pause in growing, maybe 10 days after petal fall), mow in fall and add compost and mulches to help down leaves after leaf fall to reduce scab next spring.  The sprays strengthen the leaves and fruit to resist pests and disease, EM's colonize leaf and bark surfaces to outcrowd disease organisms, and the neem blocks molting of insect larvae.  I can say our apples tasted the best in the neighborhood.  One no-no is close mowing all summer - it reduces the soil biology that would feed the tree.  We let it be messy (aside from keeping up with "drops", except the spring mowing and an after-leaf-fall mowing.

We use the tender leaves and flowers in a salad mix.  Taking only 10-20% leaves enough energy for bean production later which was important in CA.  Here in zone 5 in wet summer Massachusetts bean production is very low so it seems leaf and flower production is the main deal.

Apple-ginger and apple-fennel fruit leathers.  Grind sliced unpeeled apples (or a mix with pears or plums, whatever is in abundance) in a blender along with the spicing.  We use about 5-10% ginger or a few Tbl of powdered fennel seed to a 3-4 pint blender jar.  A slight amount of water gets things going (unless using plums which are wet enough).  Adjust spcing to taste.  Then we spread on Teflex sheets and dry in our dehydrator til either leathery or totally dry.  Totally dry last longer without refrigeration.  We sell these as it ends up being a lot of work and a lot of product.

I now live in the humid east (Since Nov. 2020), but did farm in northern CA for 17 years, the last 8.5 years in an inland Mendocino County climate.  A dry farmed apple tree next to a seasonal watercourse (only ran a few days following rain) had Brix 24 fruit!  Can't do that in the east!  Jujubes were a great crop we barely watered (a few times in Aug-Sept as fruit ripened).  Leaving more plants present was essential; made years of mistakes pulling weeds.  Citrus got our kitchen sink water (carried around as doing grey water system was too involved with a hanging insulation underneath we did not want to cut into) until I added more drip irrigation.  Walnut trees got little water but they were in a sloping flat area just below a slow spring.  We sure miss that abundant food forest and gardens we had, BUT with so little rain last 2 winters (26.5 and 20" rather than the "drought" years with between 36-46" over 5 years 2013-18 and "normal" of 50-55 inches between Oct and April),  I can imagine the new owners are struggling.  One advantage we had was that the land was a bowl which concentrated the rainfall.  We had a spring and as season went on switched more and more zones to pond water (2 acre feet or so), all gravity fed.  Quite a magical spot, but too many fires in 2017 on the land (burned orchard and some of garden) and family would not move and build family compound there, so we moved east once we got the orchard replanted and starting to bear.