Saturday, July 17, 2010

foraging

Jess and I went out today for a little forage. we found a few chanterelles, some wild gooseberries, and some sumac for sumac lemonade. I miss being in the woods. It was great to find chanterreles even though they were a touch buggy and there was only like 5. Hopefully we can get out a bit next weekend too.

Chanterelles are a yellow/orange funnel shaped mushroom that grows in association with the roots of white oak trees(rhizomorphic). They grow as single mushrooms but are often close together and have a very nice apricot smell to them. There is a toxic look alike called a jack-o-lantern which grow off of stumps usually and are in clumps or tufts. make sure you look at some field guides and/or google images for both types to make sure you have the right type!

July

summer time in the city. I love summer, but its going by so fast. so much is happening in life, but I like it that way.

The garden has been going mostly well. I havent had the energy to put put the time and work I would like to see happen, but its still pretty god for a first year garden. I've done a good chunk of the work myself, though I have had a few very helpful workdays with friends helping out with stuff I never would have got done on my own. I'm running out to get to work as soon as I'm done with this post. I haven't got any of my more "permaculture" stuff worked on yet, but hopefully I will be doing a lot of that this fall. I'd like to have a work weekend or something this fall and invite friends to come out to my house to learn about permaculture theory and techniques in exchange for helping us establish the no dig beds for next year. I'd like to work with the food forest and mushroom stuff as well. we'll see. I would love to have someone or a couple people come live out here for a month or two as well, so if you're interested, let me know.

There's lot of great things happening all over the place right now as well. The church that I grew up has started a huge community garden. I hope that it can have an internal transformational effect in the suburbs similar to the internal/external transformation that is taking place all over Detroit. Freash food and connectivity to the land for all!

I'm thinking about asking around to see if I anyone is interested in doing a zine with me. I miss it. I think we might put it in PDF format though, that way we wont have to shell out hundreds of dollars for printing and shipping. Each issue has cost about $300 after receiving what people donate, which is not something that I can afford right now. I'm too busy to worry about writing for a zine right now though.