Philip McGarvey

I have a large 32sqft solar dehydrator, so a few times I've made a giant batch of beans with seasoning like chili powder and some salt, simmer a long time like overnight in a huge pot, and then pour them on the dehydrator trays.  After drying I store them in big airtight glass jars particularly because the salt would bring moisture in otherwise.

 I keep a jar of them in the car for a crunchy on the go snack.  I can also throw them in soup at any time - they're already cooked after all.  Or just add them to a jar of tomato sauce for an instant chili that can be eaten cold with no cooking.

I do a similar thing with mushrooms sometimes - cook one big batch of dried mushrooms and then dry them after cooking so they're ready to eat immediately without needing to cook again.  

M.K. Dorje Sr. wrote:But I'm curious, how do you make manzanita sugar? And would Hairy Manzanita (the main species in my food forest) be a good species to make it from?

Manzanita deserves it's own thread so I just made one:  https://permies.com/t/357565/berry/Making-manzanita-berries

A quick google shows hairy manzanita having similar looking berries to the ones around here so I'd assume it's similarly good.

Manzanita berries are another often ignored food in parts of the west USA.

They will be dry on the plant when they're fully ripe, which is convenient since you can just store them as is for a long time after picking.  The berries are sweet, tart, slightly tannic.  I pick them into a belt-bucket (a bucket hanging in front of me from a belt) so I have both hands free.  The berries come of the plant extremely easily when ripe.  Some twigs and leaves will get in the bucket.

They have very tough seeds.  It's probably safe to swallow seeds whole, I do it and the bear does it.  But for eating lots of them, it would be a lot of big seeds.  

I make manzanita "sugar" by grinding the whole berries in a cheap blender with dull blades (so as not to break the seeds, and not to damage a sharp quality blender).  Then sift the powder from the seeds and pieces of berry that remain.  I don't worry about the twigs and leaves and bits of dried flower, there will be that debris mixed in and it doesn't ruin it.  It would be a lot of work to separate everything from just the pure berries by hand.

You'll get maybe 3-4x as much of the seeds and chunks of berry as the powder - this stuff is good too, I just make tea or "cider" with it.  Say 1/4 or 1/2 cup ground manzanita berries with ~2 cups hot water, and then pour the liquid through a strainer into mug.  (Any ratio is fine just depends how strong flavor you want.)  

The powder is good for so many things.  I'll put it in anything that I bake, in oatmeal, pancakes, etc.  You can make nice little cakes out of it with just 1/2 cup manzanita sugar and 1 egg and a pinch of salt, mix it up and fry in a pan.  

This year I've made good use of the himalayan blackberries.  I feel like they're a very abundant underutilized resource in some regions.  

I've picked 65lb this season not counting the ones that don't get in the bucket, from probably ~9 cumulative hours picking.  I keep my belt-bucket in the car so on my way home from wherever if I see a good patch I can stop and get some.  There are also patches around here I can walk to.  I might not pick right by a highway but along the back roads I feel like they're still less polluted than conventional food - and also a lot of food we eat is grown near roads already.  There's also the back side of the roadside patches.  I mostly pick at night by headlamp when it's cool and the mosquitoes are mostly asleep.

Flavor can vary dramatically - I find the best are those with moderate water and a lot of sun.  Too much water and they are less flavorful, too little water and they're too small to be worth picking.  That said, even the shaded berries by the river here are still worth picking even if they have less flavor.  

The easiest way for me to preserve them is drying.  I dry whole berries and also mash them into a "leather" though I let it get dry enough to be crunchy.  Freezing would be nice too.  I would recommend mashing the berries and then freezing as one homogenous blob rather than freezing individual berries.  Canning jam is a bit more involved.  And since I'm picking some every few days, and they go bad really fast, I'm not going to can every few days, so it's easy to just throw each batch into the dehydrator.

Tips for picking:

- make a belt-bucket setup so you have two hands free and the bucket hanging in front of you at your waist
- you can press into the blackberry thicket with the bucket in front of you without getting too tangled, to reach deeper in
- bring a hooked stick or tool, for moving canes around and pulling toward you the ones that are just a bit too far.
- if there's a big patch and the best berries are in the middle, try trampling in there to get them, move carefully and you can do it without getting too tangled.  It's important to lift the foot up and then put it down on top of the canes to flatten them, rather than just walking straight in.
- send your tallest person to pick
- wear old clothes that are ok to get a bit more tattered
- ditto for shoes - old shoes that don't matter, or sandals
- skin heals itself while clothes don't
- it's easier to avoid getting tangled in bare skin because I feel the thorns before they get too stuck in - so I actually like to go in shorts and t-shirt or even no shirt if there's no mosquitoes
- the hands will get a bit torn up, embrace it, they heal quickly
- promptly extract any bits of thorn that get embedded - I only got one this season
- wear full plate armor if you have it (or maybe a smooth hard hat for the really tall patches)
- have water handy to rinse the hands when it's time to go

Just a thought - those peels and cores look good to eat.  I've made vinegar before when I had apple and pear bits that were wormy or otherwise not good to eat.  But if I had bits like yours in good looking condition, I'd rather dry and eat them than make vinegar.

That said of course make what you want!  

Charolett Knapic wrote:I'm wondering if it would help to add native tree chip mulch to the soil to help get a mycelium network throughout the soil layer to help keep that soil from sliding/washing down over time. You might need to add some form of nitrogen at first since the mulch breaking down uses nitrogen, but that's easy to accomplish. I've never done it though.

My hunch is this would not help long term. In my experience, fungus that eat wood chips are not permanent - they eat the wood chips and the chips break down and the fungus eventually is gone (eaten by something else).

Mycelium used to make structure is usually grown on the substrate and then dried so it stays in that one form.

Wood chip eating mycelium is different from soil mycelium that are connected with living plants and could add living structure for a very long time. I think these are typically different species of fungus.

I am intrigued by the idea of using a lot of charcoal/biochar in the soil layer as that could give you the most lightweight and drought-tolerant form of living roof as opposed to a soil that is mostly sand/clay (i.e. rock).

Gray Henon wrote:I often remind myself that”you diet at the grocery store”.  If you don’t buy it you won’t eat it.  I’ve probably felt snacky thousands of times, looked through the fridge/pantry, saw nothing snackable, and walked away without eating anything.

That's a good point.  If someone leaves junk food at my place there've been times I've ended up eating and regretting.  It's hard but good practice to throw it out - I'm getting better at that.  I'd feel bad offering it to others- like "hey, I think this is poison and don't want to eat it, but you could eat it" .  

When I'm doing well, I do the same as Kevin Olson - 16/8 intermittent fasting so I just have two meals about 6 hours apart.  Not having any sugar really helps everything else taste better too.

Matt McSpadden's post has important points too about nutrient density - I try to get a lot of homegrown or wild plants/mushrooms in.

The one thing I haven't seen mentioned yet is the modern ultra-processed oils (aka seed oils or vegetable oils).  I've seen research suggesting that because these oils oxidize very easily unlike natural fats, they damage metabolism making it harder for the body to convert fat (including those oils or any sugar that's stored as fat) to energy.  These oils are  a significant component of 99% of processed food or junk food or normal restaurant food, and I read stats that in the US average diet ~30% of the calories come from these oils - something like 60 pounds of them a year.  If they do indeed damage metabolism in this way, they could be a big cause of getting the munchies if the body can't get enough energy throughout the day from our normal fat reserves or the fat that we eat.  

This is I think the biggest controversial topic in modern nutrition - the health authorities say the new vegetable oils that are in all processed food are the healthy fat, and that natural fats, which are mostly saturated fats that are hard to oxidize, such as dairy and animal fat and coconut oil, are bad for you.  I have looked at a lot of their science and I don't believe the authorities - in particular I see zero basis for saying saturated fat is bad.  These modern oils (soybean, canola, sunflower, etc) can't be produced without modern industrial processes and have only recently been eaten by humans.  I use butter and animal fat instead, or virgin coconut oil.  I think most olive oil in stores nowadays is actually also ultra processed or cut with canola oil; you can get real olive oil that will be green and taste like olives it's just usually a lot more expensive.

So the gist of my advice would be: minimize or avoid sugar/sweeteners or any processed food, don't be afraid of saturated fat (i.e. natural fat) or salt, and eat very flavorful nutritious things, and give yourself big windows of time with no eating at all.

 These changes aren't easy initially but they can elminate the cravings, at least they did for me, which is much easier in the long run.  I've mostly been doing this for 10 years now, though there have been times of weakness where I've got back into sugar and processed food I've always quickly felt the bad effects and eventually quit again.

And yes, addiction is part of it too, mental health and having community and all so we don't have to go to food to feel OK.  I still do find myself snacking for not the best reasons at times, but at least it's nuts and cheese which fill me up and don't seem to cause problems.  

Another year mostly well spent.  

My focus has been on music, family and community, and improving my health and habits.  I'm loving playing the fiddle more than ever - the early stages of learning fiddle aren't so pleasant to listen to but at this point I and others enjoy hearing my playing.  I've spent a few months each in Arizona at oak flat, in upstate NY with family, at home in california, and in Ireland where I am now.  I'll be back in CA in August.

I'd be ready to find a partner and settle down somewhere.  Meanwhile being single with few obligations it's been a good time to learn music and migrate about and give energy to the different things I care about.

Health wise I've had several big things.  First, I seem to have healed my lifelong sleep apnea.  I put a separate post about it here:    https://permies.com/t/281830.  Second, I seem to have healed a knee injury - I think I had tore a ligament in my knee, it had gotten a lot better but still bothered me two years after.  Three months of diligently doing the "knees over toes" exercises (basically stretching and strengthening the ankles and legs) and I have had no more pain - and am back to being able to hike a long way with a heavy pack and also run more.  I also made some changes to my phone to make it impossible to see those stupid short videos that are everywhere on the phones now, and in general built habits to reduce time on the phone/internet.

Through everything I've seen this past year it's strengthened my resolve to give myself to what I care about - community, family, the land, creating beauty (music etc) and being present, and to having good humor ;).  As the world we see on the internet will probably keep getting crazier and it's better to live our days in the real world.

As my photos here are a couple years old here's a current one - we just made a big pile of charcoal for a garden.

Here are images of what I used.  Again there may be other brands / types that are better for different people I'm not attached to these.