Wild spring edibles

What abundance we have growing wild around us!  We hosted our annual Wild Spring Edibles workshop today, and even though it's just the beginning of the season with wild greens only starting to peek up, our facilitator managed to find a wide assortment of delicious nutritious wild greens, roots and flowers already available.  She covered all aspects of wild edibles - including: ethical harvesting, traditional approaches, plant spirit medicine, phtyo-nutrients and medicinal values of wild foods, drying and storing, how to prepare wild foods for eating, juicing, safe quantities to consume, and of course (probably most important) proper identification.  We sampled an array of prepared foods such as burdock root tea, pine needle tea, garlic mustard pesto, purslane pesto, garlic mustard root "horseradish", fresh dandelion greens, rosehip jam, and fresh violet blossoms.  Then we had a walk around the Little City Farm property to identify these plants, plus a few others such as nettles, wood sorrel, mallow, evening primrose, wild ginger, wild grape, and ramps (wild garlic).  We are re-inspired to enjoy the bounty around us, to help build attentiveness and appreciation for these plants and bring greater health for our bodies.

Here are some photos of the spring wild edibles here at Little City Farm, with their names below.

Evening Primrose root and leaf

Large burdock root (centre)

Top evening primrose root, middle burdock root, bottom dock root

Stinging nettle greens

Garlic mustard greens

Ramps (wild garlic)

Wild ginger (just opening the leaves)

Violet blossoms and leaves

Young burdock leaves (harvest for the root)

Dandelion greens

Clover leaves

Evening primrose leaves

Wood sorrel leaves

Wild rose buds (harvest the rosehips)

Wild carrot greens (harvest for greens and young roots

This Moment

{This moment} - This moment - an end of week ritual, no words, just a special photo to remember, savour, enjoy. 

From garden to table

End of the week round-up...

what's new in the garden - the asparagus patch in full production; strawberries, currants, cherries, pear and apple trees blossoming; eggplant and pepper seedlings all planted into sheets of black plastic covering the ground, and under a temporary hot house made of raised coldframe tunnel to give them a growing boost; 60 plus tomato seedlings planted (15 varieties - in particular we are excited about our favourite Cherokee Purple, Mennonite Orange, and a new Berkeley Tie Dye which seems to be a prized tomato among "local food" chefs for it's complex flavours); carrots, spinach, bunching onions, radishs, peas all coming up...

what's on the supper table these days - rhubarb, herbs and wild edibles in full swing - fresh rhubarb & dandelion spritzers; garden sorrel soup; wild leeks; wild nettle & goat feta pie; free-range eggs with scrambled with garden chives; homemade spelt pasta with fresh parsley pesto; wood-fired pizza with last year's tomato sauce and fresh basil and oregano from the garden; many many cups of fresh mint tea (a blend of peppermint, chocolate mint and ginger mint is currently my favourite combination); fresh garden salads with dandelion, salad greens, wood sorrel, wild violets, kale flowers, red orach, arugula; red & green kale stir-fry; rhubarb crisp with last year's mulberries; ...and more to come...

Reading: Farm City by Novella Carpenter

My partner and I both just finished Farm City:The Education of an Urban Farmer, by Novella Carpenter. This book is a good read for anyone interested in the quirky adventures in inner city farming, as Novella writes passionately about farming her garden, orchard, bees, and livestock in a formerly vacant lot, living "off the land" in a rough part of downtown Oakland.

In particular, the book focusses heavily on her experiment in raising chickens, turkeys, rabbits and pigs at her urban farm. It's important to note that Novella is by no means a vegetarian - her livestock raising project is not just for gaining eggs or manure, but in fact for meat. What starts with a coop full of hens, ends up including a beehive, and many more turkeys, ducks, rabbits, and two full grown pigs. She explores what it means to humanely, respectfully kill animals that she has raised herself from day 1 (with more than enough graphic detail of the slaughtering process - these are lengthy sections of the book, which need to be skipped or skimmed over by the vegetarian or vegan reader!). The book is hilarious, inspiring, insightful, and a nice addition to 100-Mile Diet literature. At one point in the book she embarks on a month-long 100-Foot Diet where she only subsists on food from her garden or wild harvested in the city.

There are various other amazing urban farmers you meet along the way, including Novella's friend Willow whose non-profit farm called City Slicker Farm provides produce and backyard gardening skills for inner city families thereby increasing food self-sufficiency in West Oakland where store-bought healthy produce is expensive and hard to come by.

One of the final paragraphs of the book sums up the importance of seeing urban farming as a community venture that can't be done alone - a network of many small projects, together adding up to something large and significant. She writes:

"Although my holding was small - and temporary - I had come to realize that urban farming wasn't about one farm, just as a beehive isn't about an individual bee. I thought of Jennifer's beehive and garden. Of Willow's backyard farms that dot the city of Oakland. Urban farms have to be added together in order to make a farm. So when I say that I'm an urban "farmer", I'm depending on other urban farmers, too. It's only with them that our backyards and squatted gardens add up to something significant. And if one of ours goes down, another will spring up."

www.cityslickerfarms.org
www.farmcity.wordpress.com