Mushroom blocks are offered by many online retailers. We bought ours from FungiPerfecti, the brainchild of mycologist Paul Stamets. Some other fungi retailers that carry different varieties and different tools for DIY mycology are fieldforest.net, and gourmetmushrooms.com. I bought my wife four varieties for her birthday in February. Two have started to grow mushrooms already,…
Author: Jeremy
Quack Grass Horror! Invasion of the Soil Snatchers!
Spread that Eurasian Love Around One of the wild plants that we can’t say enough swear-words about is the undesirable weed from Europe and Asia called in the Latin, Elymus repens, or in the vulgar tongue, “The @#$!@ plant that ate my garden!” Or just plain Quack Grass, for you non-gardeners who would rather not…
Defending the Garbage Plate
Bring on the plants! The wildcrafting season is in full tilt and what better way to christen the ship than preaching the good word of Garbage Plates. Now traditionally, Garbage Plates, if you’re not familiar, are a dish native to Rochester, NY. They’re a regional food much like a Philly cheese steak or a Chicago…
An Article to Digest: Evolutionary / Landrace Plant Breeding and Stressing Plants Out For More Nutrients
An Article to Digest Here’s an article that was just recently published by Independent Science News detailing studies on the importance of having diverse gut bacteria when it comes to battling inflammatory diseases and how that all relates to diet diversity. One of the many reasons why Laura and I decided to stretch our diets and…
Rutabaga
If you’ve ever read the children’s book Rootabaga Stories by Carl Sandburg, you might say the whole book might have been better off if the above mentioned bibbed pigs would have just ate it cover and all, and the stories could have finished right there. We had a copy when my daughter was growing up,…
How To Eat Beets: History, Planting Instructions, Nutrition and Recipes
Mangles, Sugar Beets, Garden Beets, Chard, and Perpetual Spinach … What’s the diff? The beet is a master of variety. While plants like lettuce or the tomato might vary in characteristics of its edible part, each beet type emphasizes a different use of the plant. Chard for example emphasizes the edible leaves and so the…
Turning Food Deserts into Food Desserts by Design
Food Deserts: Choice and Design Scarcity of food still exists amidst the fresh fruit and vegetable abundance most of us experience in the US. And even in the US, people are starving themselves of nutrients through an improper diet of fast food and over-processed food. To loosely quote guerrila-gardener extraordinaire Ron Finley, for some people…
Jicama Salsa Recipe
Jicama–humongous Let’s eat some jicama salsa. Jicama (pronounced Hick-a-ma) is an ancient food-tuber, purportedly eaten by the Mayans. It’s a vining plant that grows in Central America and as far north as Mexico. It has also naturalized in Asia, but it’s not native to that region. While people have tried to grow jicama in the…
The Weekend Variety: Traversing the Bitter Melon (Momordica charantia)
Bitter melon is so much of a world traveler that we do not know exactly where the plant originated. Some scholars suggest that Asian farmers first cultivated the vegetable, but the plant pops up in India and Africa as well. We’re pretty sure that it made its way over to the Americas during the…
Seven Reasons Why You’ll Want to Eat Wild: Wild Food Matters (Part 2)
In our previous post on wild foods, we mentioned some of the reasons that people don’t go out foraging. In this post, we review some of foraging’s benefits. Benefits of wild food What characteristics does wild food have over agricultural food? Well, first, it’s impractical to think we could live entirely off wild food…
The Weekend Variety: Alcohol Fuel, Blood Sugar, Digestion and the Sunchoke (Helianthus tuberosus)
Almost every week I drive uptown to the big-box stores to get something we need at home. And frequently during the summer months, I pass a ditch where wild sunchokes grow right along the main road. Often during these drives I think that I should get a shovel, harvest a few and plant them at…
Bark Is Food Too: Feeding Your Inner Porcupine
Mountains, Falcons, and Bark For Breakfast Once when I was a young, I read a book about a boy around my age who survived in the New York wilderness through an entire winter. The book, My side of the mountain, inspired me. At the time, I thought I might go out and live my own…