Daniel Sillito

glycerites are another common application, or tinctures. Glycerin / alcohol solutions.

I'm an absolute okra fan, my favourite preparation is to top and tail them, toss them with salt and olive oil, some seasoning that matches whatever meal is cooking, and then dust them with some coarse ground flour, whatever is available. (I've used lupini flour, sorghum flour, okra seed flour, almond flour, coix seed flour, they all work great) Roast em at about 400 for 18-20 minutes, give it a quick flip and pop them in for 5 to 10 minutes more. The okra shrinks a ton so that dusting of flour keeps them from getting soggy and crisps up beautifully with the mucilage underneath binding it together. If you use lupini flour or nut flours it can be keto friendly if that's important to you.

Second okra recipe I always come back to is okra scrambled eggs. literally just as simple as it gets. soften up some thin thin slices of okra (only need a couple pods per person) with some garlic and mushrooms. when everything is pretty broken down just pour some good eggs over it, salt pepper and cumin. Just need some good fresh tomatoes and homemade bread or steamed potatoes to go with it.

Laurie Burton wrote:Loofah Seeds Edible?

I can't find information online about loofah (luffa) seeds. I have the smooth, not spiney kind. Can someone tell if there seeds are edible? If course they are inside the fruit cooked like a zucchini, but I'm thinking dried and roasted like pumpkin seeds? They produce way more seeds than I need for replanting every year, and it seems a shame to waste them. Thanks for any tips.

https://tropical.theferns.info/viewtropical.php?id=Luffa+aegyptiaca

assuming this is the correct species, UTP lists it as having edible seeds when roasted. I wouldn't consume them raw. The seeds can also be pressed for oil, I have no certainty what the fatty acid profile would be - - likely similar to pumpkin and watermelon seeds.

unripe pumpkins can be quite similar to spaghetti squash, depending on the cultivar. I don't know this variety well enough to be sure, but if you split it and roast it, it might be close in texture. If it works to where you can pull the strands with a fork and make them noodle-like that would be a great use for them

they want you to be confused, because the ones pushing the fad diets are always, always selling something.

Eat real food, Mostly plants. Don't overdo any one thing

Ask yourself - could I make this at home? If not, its probably best to not eat it, or only have on special occasions. (White rice is a favourite example here)

Look how traditional cultures ate. Legumes and grains were eaten together, bones were stewed for a long time, many foods were fermented. Sugar was special. Oil was expensive and cold pressed.

Find what works best for you. Don't think some person on tiktok selling some supplement has your best interests in mind.

This is one of my favourite things to bring up when I talk about multiple yields and why I only grow limited numbers of nightshade vegetables.

Hands down my favourite summer green is Squash greens, especially from pattypan squashes. I also like the thicker, older stems where the leaves aren't nearly so appealing. Split them in half and slice them thinly exactly like how you might treat celery. They have a mild flavour and by slicing the fibres lengthwise you get a really tender vegetable for soups, stir fry, anywhere you'd use cooked celery.

Okra greens are amazing when young. Okra has 1000 uses.

Radishes have some of the most delicious of all greens but they tend to catch a lot of dirt. I like to soak them in cold water with a pinch of vinegar for a few minutes to really pull all the dirt out of the leaves. They shrink so much when cooked! Seed pods are equally desirable and hands down the most reliable yield when it gets stupid hot outside. My watermelon radishes rebelled last year with a late heat wave but I got easily a few hundred pods from a dozen radish plants

Carrot leaves make a great pesto. They are a good green but are fairly tough. If you want to use them you're gonna want to pound the daylights out of them or stew for a long time. Flavour is amaaaaazing.

Peppers - this is one hardly anyone talks about. Peppers, like bell peppers, have edible but very strongly flavoured greens. They are *Not* a solanine heavy green and are only distantly related to the other nightshades. I'd personally always cook these ones. I love the flavour, the wife can't stand them. Worth a try.

Sweet potato greens. Never grown them, I'm too north, but I buy them at the local asian market occasionally. Fantastic green. Flavour profile, texture, its all just really good. Not much to cooking them, just a quick wilt in a steamer, stir fry, or thrown into a soup last minute. Pasta sauce also.

I've heard that cowpeas and runner beans have edible greens. I need to try both this summer.

Fava bean greens. I adore fava beans, they are the gift that keeps giving. The greens make good pesto, cook into anything, the beans are edible in lots of ways. Garden peas have edible greens as well with identical uses to favas but much more PEA flavoured.

There's a million more but this is what I"m thinking of right now

Bethany Brown wrote:Thought of a new one today- making dock more palatable/edible. Chickens seem to like the leaves and seeds. I haven’t tried eating it, and have heard it can be toxic if you eat much. Of course. How much is too much? How could we decrease the amount of toxic compounds? It seems like potential for a great multiuse crop- leaves, roots, and seeds.

As far as I know the only toxic compound worth noting in Dock is oxalates. A low oxalate variety would be worth breeding for. The seeds are pleasant enough, though a bit fiddly. The book "Wild Wisdom of Weeds" has a whole chapter on the plant and its uses, though even the author notes that dock is only good for greens while very young and small.

A veggie would be any part of a plant that isn't a fruit or seed and is a very generic term. If you want to talk about it as a culinary term, then if its used in savoury cooking and is a part of a plant, people will usually call it a vegetable.

Jan White wrote:The okra flour flour sounds really interesting. I'll have to keep an eye out for it.

It sounds like my cabbage moths aren't as bad as yours, but they can be pretty destructive. I think this is only my third year growing deitrich's wild broccoli raab (from experimental farm network), but so far it seems to attract waaaay fewer cabbage moths than any other brassicas I grow. It's also a feral turnip, so quite a few of the plants have bulbous roots. It might be an easy thing to select for. If you want to try some out and see how it does with your monster moths, PM me. I'll have no end of seed in a month or two. I'll send you some from the bulbous-rooted plants.

I've had my eye on Ba Yi Qi sorghum for a while. Annapolis Seeds is where I've seen it. This year, I noticed a new variety on their site called Gaolian Voskovidnyj. They say it's a couple weeks earlier than Ba Yi Qi, so you might want to check that one out, too, for next year.

I'll definitely be looking at that particular sorghum variety. A brief overview seems to indicate it has lower yields than other sorghum varieties, smaller seeded and has the "waxy" characteristics. I think the best thing to do is try to cross it with my Ba Yi Qi I hope to save from this year and aim for a better yield and maybe aim for an 85 day maturity period.

as for the okra flour:

https://oliverfarm.com/store/okra-flour-gluten-free

cannot recommend this stuff enough, its like halfway between coconut flour and almond flour as far as baking goes, but with a flavour all its own. I need to order more, my son keeps asking for okra pancakes... Hopefully I'll have some locally grown stuff by the end of the season.

I'm taking a deep look into oilseeds for next year as well, I'm trying some yellowhorn this year, no idea how viable it is or even what it tastes like but I'm always looking for perennials. My current contenders are Camelina, Benne (heirloom sesame), Okra.

I'd even be interested in a short season grape for a grapeseed oil. I recently saw a wine company in California selling varietal cold-pressed grapeseed oils and it got me thinking about it. I'll have to see if anyone is actually selling grape plants here that aren't seedless.

Also, probably weirdly, I'd be really interested in trying to breed watermelons for their seed production. Watermelon seeds are probably one of the most underutilized foods around. It just happens to conflict with just growing watermelon for the sake of having fresh watermelon. Definitely on my to try list.

Any northern permies have any oilseed successes?

Years ago I came across the flat earth model and was fascinated by it, mostly as a though experiment. The big thing that gives it away without question is that the model only describes the sun's movement in the northern hemisphere. The generally used model of the flat earth has the sun rotating around the equator, moving north and south a bit between seasons... but the sun never moves south of the tropics. A person in the southern hemisphere south of the tropic would always see the sun to the north, regardless of season. Literally anyone that lives there will tell you the sun sets to the south and rises in the south during the summer, and its even part of the PDC course to track the sun movements in the southern hemisphere.

There's a million arguments about flat earth being fake, most of which I've seen quickly dismissed by conspiracy theorists or whatever, but this is one failure of the model that can't be explained away.

An image to give a reference point, and why someone in Buenos Aires or Sydney will always see the sun to the north in this model.