Yeardly Arthur

If the medicinal properties of berberine are what you're after, why not try Oregon Grape (Mahonia aquifolium)?

Berberine appears to be the active ingredient in Goldenseal, and Mahonia is chock full of it. Oregon grape is easily cultivated all over the country as an ornamental shrub, and commonly breaks away into surrounding environs, so there's no risk of over foraging. I was fighting an invasive patch of it here on my property until I found out what I was wrestling with. With Oregon Grape you get the benefits of the golden bitters, and juicy fruit for jelly too.

https://flatcapforager.com/oregon-grape

Chance Lunceford wrote:Well, my project is a bit less...social, at least for now.
So, around 4 years ago, I started a guerilla food forest project.
Food Forest of Dreams: If you grow it, they will come.

Welcome, Chance!

Fellow guerrilla gardener here, veteran of borrowing and improving ignored and underutilized public spaces for decades -  sometimes discovered by authorities, more often by adventurous kids. My philosophy was, if it's not a sin for a squirrel to plant food ins the ground, it shouldn't be illegal for me to do it, either. Besides, everything you do is evil to somebody.

The only time anyone objected was when it became obvious, e.g. after planting a dozen tomatoes in rows. The city spent ten grand bulldozing that one. They never found the others - or any of the 'volunteer' peach trees that likely sprouted from hundreds of pits tossed into the creek that ran from suburban Birmingham, Alabama to the Gulf of Mexico.

I did try working through channels to convince local leaders to consider building a food forest for all, including the growing homeless population they promised me did not exist. They were not amenable to the idea; the citizens they wanted to attract had real jobs and could buy food at the upscale restaurant down the street. So you win some/you grow some more. All in all, I found it easier to be a silent, stealthy Robin Hood who robbed from nobody, and gave to everyone.

These days I am living in a different community, one that will not prosecute you for growing vegetables in your front yard. Sometimes, though, I miss the fun of explaining where I got those tall, fancy yellow hibiscus (okra) that grew amongst my sunflowers, the pretty purple puffball borders (chives), the funny little round-leafed bushes (peanuts), and those lovely, viney ground covers (cantaloupe and sweet potatoes). Now when my neighbors ask what I'm growing I find out what they like, and make sure a basketful of tomatoes, beans peppers, etc. appears on their doorstep. A few of them even ask for seeds and seedlings, if I have any extras to share. (I always have extras to share.)

Every year we make a big pot of spicy ketchup - pureed peppers, tomatoes, garlic and onion cooked down to a slurry.
Sugar, vinegar, salt (sage, oregano, basil, whatever is on hand) to taste.
Basically liquified Cowboy Candy. It doesn't last long.

Chocolate cupcakes!

I mean, if Nutella on toast is a legit breakfast, why not serve homemade chocolate cake? I made our multi-grain breakfast cake with a pureed zucchini and egg base, and cut the oil in half by tossing a few prunes or peaches in the blender with it. The oil is a mix of butter, peanut butter, and ground sunflower seeds. Cocoa powder hides an abundance of healthy ingredients (carrots, greens, you name it.)

If it looks like cake and tastes like cake, who's to say they're not getting away with dessert for breakfast?

Syd Smith wrote:[They have a lot of sites in their atomic structures where ions can attach, including spots that you might effectively consider "defects" because they aren't the routine locations for elements to sit in there. heck, you can jam water into their structure with hydrogen bonds and cause the mineral volume to expand dramatically, and then drive off that water if the mineral dries out.
Their extreme expansion and contraction qualities can also cause some interesting outcomes in soils... though if you are working in super clay rich material, it can also cause serious structural problems (like slope creep and imploding basements).

Thank you! My understanding was much simpler (we biologists tend to think in cartoons). I used to tell folks that that the polarity of water filled the ionic deficit, allowing clay molecules to slip past each other when there was enough moisture, but forced them to lock arms and pull inward when things got dry. Hence the expansive, slippery, nutritive mess (and happy plants) found in wet clay - and the packed, cracked shrinkage (and choked plants) when clay soils dry out.  Continuing the simplistic analogy, gypsum provided static gloves for the clay, allowing it to high five itself without getting grabby.

Jesse Lane wrote:Here’s a submission for forging and drying mint.

To complete this BB, the minimum requirements are:
Harvest, dry and store one of the following:
One pound (fresh weight) of:

   o mint

To document your completion of the BB, provide the following:
- A picture of one of the plants/fungi in the wild
- A picture of the bounty on a scale showing the weight
- A picture of the dried goodies in or with their storage container

Thanks for the reminder, but I really don't need the badge that badly. After forty years of munching on things I find in the woods, foraging has become a regular part of my time outdoors, and lately is providing a substantial addition to our diet. That's what really matters, isn't it?

Timothy Norton wrote:While this thread has primarily been about the fruit, I am now curious about the wood itself.

My wife's father experimented with peaches for decades, and we inherited some of his seeds. When we moved to our current location three years ago, we planted year-old slips that are now already fifteen to twenty feet high with long, straight branches. My initial strategy (as with most things) has been to leave our trees alone and let them demonstrate what they can do in this space. For example, many of the branches are forming into wonderful tool handles. Time will tell if they are strong enough for lengthy service, but I am eager to find out.

Another approach might be to train the horizontal limbs into a living, fruit-producing hedge. They're already planted along the property line between us and an enthusiastic neighbor. Perhaps grafting them to each other at chest height could create a functional curiosity with practical benefits - a nice-looking fence producing fruit that is easy to harvest.

I've always wondered how one might turn the tables on grasshoppers and use them as fertilizer.  During the 17-year cicada emergence in 2024, we had thousands of big, fat insects pop out of the ground all over our neighborhood. Every few days I would gather the husks in buckets for high-nitrogen mulch, and after a couple of weeks I could rake the spent bugs into piles and bury them in our garden plots. Best year for tomatoes EVER.

Back when Japanese beetles were first becoming a problem, a neighbor would let me empty his traps twice a day. I'd dump them by the pound in soapy water, wait a while and pour the soup around the veggies.

I hope we never have an infestation of grasshoppers, but if it happens I'll have to cycle back around to this thread and see what they like best to eat. Maybe they could be lured into big box traps and added to the compost pile...

Sarah Joubert wrote: I have long been debating whether this would make a suitable ammendment to lighten my clay soil by adding sand and if it would add minerals left in the dehydrated grasses.

Seaweed, yes! Sand, not so much. We have notoriously heavy clay soil here in central Alabama, and I have been fooled more than once by the idea that expanding the soil with sand will fix the hard, sticky clay. It will not. In fact, sand will turn clay into concrete. I can be a very slow learner, and after multiple attempts can attest to the futility of trying to sand my way out of clay issues.

Three things will improve clay soil. 1. Organic material. 2. Gypsum. 3. More organic material. If you use seaweed in steps 1 and/or 3, you will certainly get the a minerals you're hoping for (many times more than land plants), and the added benefits of water-retaining mucilage and amino acids. The more you can add to your clay soil, the better.

I'll leave it to the geologists in the thread to comment on specifics, but my understanding is that clay has an abundance of clingy electrons, and the calcium in gypsum provides more positive charges to keep the electrons company. In practice, a good dose of powdered gypsum turns my sticky red clay into crumbly brown soil in a single season - especially when I add plenty of leaf mold, grass clippings, rotted wood and composted sawdust.

The comments noted above seem well-reasoned and sincere, a combination I find characteristic of the Permies community. We are all trying to find the best materials and methods for growing the healthiest food possible. That said, I feel compelled to point out that the opening essay contains a concerning measure of medical misinformation. I invite everyone here to thoroughly investigate any information that concerns them directly, in order to avoid rationales that might lead to mistaken conclusions.

Rather than get lost in the weeds over details, it seems prudent to suggest that if anyone is truly concerned about levels of micronutrients in the food that you grow on your land, a good first step would be to send soil samples to university extension labs or commercial soil testing facilities for exhaustive analysis. That would tell you if there are major deficiencies, and give you direction regarding rational remedial steps.

In the meantime, if your land is already supporting a wide variety of healthy plants, animals, and fungi, and the populations of birds, bats and bugs are increasing as you improve the soil and provide greater habitats for broader interaction among species, that's pretty good evidence that your environment is currently providing all the necessary bricks and mortar for building healthy bodies and biological systems overall.