I gathered greens for dinner while hiking

Today on a hike with the Sierra Club, as we walked under a live oak tree, I pointed out to my friend who is from France and is familiar with edible plants, that there were lots of edible greens under the tree. The two of us got out our plastic bags and filled them up with stinging nettles and chickweed.

Later, after I got home from the hike, I decided to walk to the grocery store to get some ingredients to make a soup from my greens. Along the way I noticed a hillside was full of miner's lettuce. I picked some of them and brought them home with my groceries.

I made a soup with commercial mushrooms and onions and my wild greens. I have never eaten chickweed and nettles before. They were delicious. I intend to pick lots more nettles and chickweed and make different dishes from them. They tasted much like spinach without the astringent aftertaste. Sweeter and better than spinach. I think a quiche would be good with these wild greens, or just a simple side dish.

The nice thing about chickweed is it grows everywhere. It's a weed and is all over the backyard. Stinging nettle is harder to find, but not impossible. When I worked at the garden at the mission it would pop up after rain. There may be some in the backyard.

Nettles are a little hard to deal with. I used my plastic bag to pick it so I wouldn't touch it. I was careful not to pull it out of the ground so I didn't bring home any dirty roots. I rinsed it in a colander without touching it. Then I chopped it up without touching it. Then scraped it off the cutting board into the soup without touching it. I've touched it before when pulling weeds and it really hurts.

I have an herb garden

I pulled out all the dead and dying plants from my little roof-top garden and planted herbs. I planted cilantro, basil, oregeno, thyme, chives and rosemary. I also planted some rainbow peppers which look ornamental in purple and red, and some Anaheim chiles. I'm looking forward to a winter full of delicious Mediterranean and Mexican food.

Whole food

My diet isn't all that great. It's probably better than some people's since I do not eat much fast food, but it's not that good. I have a weakness for pastries, cheese, wine and chocolate. What I really should do is eat more whole foods.

Now that summer is almost here, better food is arriving at the farmers market. Oddly, I seem able to grow better food in my own garden in the winter months than spring or summer. My roof-top container garden is very shallow and gets too hot and dried out in the warmer months. I do have a zucchini that is thriving (but not yet fruiting) and we've gotten a few volunteer tomatoes that fruited, but I can't grow anything with a deep root or that might bolt easily. The volunteer tomatoes came out of the compost. Sadly they still taste like the commercial ones they came from.

For breakfast I had poached eggs, spinach and tomatoes. Tonight I made fish, carrots, fava beans and sliced tomatoes for dinner. I usually feel really good after eating a meal of whole foods. Something about fish with vegetables, especially fish on salad, works well for me.

Whole foods, I believe, are the key to better health. I want to make a better effort to prepare healthy, whole food meals. Fortunately whole food meals are pretty easy to prepare. A little butter and fresh rosemary (grows on the parking strip in front of the neighbor's house) on the carrots makes it taste fancy. Mangos added to anything seems exotic. Chop up a bunch of cilantro on top of some boring Mexican food and suddenly it's gourmet. Plain sliced avocados makes a great side.

I believe that rather than try to fuss with supplements and manufactured super-foods that we'd all be better off if everything we ate still looked like what it originally was. Since I'm not on the trail and forced to eat food that stores well in a backpack, I really want to make a better effort to eat recognizable things as much as possible.

Rapini

I finally figured out what was growing in one of the sections of my garden. It is rapini. I forgot what I planted where. I'm glad I didn't pull it up when it first started sprouting. At first I thought it might be weeds, but I wasn't sure.

I found a farm that has a web page about rapini. Apparently rapini is used in Italian and Asian cooking. This is perfect for me since we mostly cook Italian, Thai and Indian-style food around my house.

I picked a bunch of it that was showing flower buds and I plan to have it for dinner tonight with some pasta. Here's hoping it is an edible meal.

Seed Exchange jam session

I played my fiddle with the Glendessary jammers today at the Seed Exchange. We were lucky there were sunny skies. It has been raining every day like cats and dogs all this week and the rain is supposed to return tomorrow. There's even a layer of snow on the tops of our mountains. This is not a usual occurrence. You can bet there are people up there building snow mans and little kids seeing the snow for the first time in their lives.

The Seed Exchange is one of those events that gives me hope for humanity. People were there just giving away seeds and gardening advice. Nothing real elaborate.

The reason the Seed Exchange gives me hope for humanity is because it's the exact opposite of what I learned about watching the movie Future of Food (or see their web site here.) There is true evil in the world and it's well described by this movie. Sometimes I go back and forth between whether I want any hope for humanity or whether it would be best to allow the evil described in that film to win. Maybe humanity isn't worth saving. Anyway, hope does feel good and things like making your own home-grown music and home-grown food provide big doses of it.

At the seed exchange I picked up some scarlet runner beans and pole beans seeds and some kind of herb I already forgot the name of. My little garden is too small to get greedy about free seeds. Lots of lettuce is growing. I made a nice salad the other night. Not sure where the beans are going to fit. Maybe in some pots.

After the playing the music, I walked down to the music shop to get new rosin for my bow and a new chin rest for my fiddle.

On the way home, I decided I would walk home in my bare feet, a distance of about a mile and a half. Some kind of street tree has dropped all kinds of sticky berries all over the sidewalks. It was difficult to walk with them stuck to my feet, forming a crust of sticky seeds all around the edges of my feet. It was kind of awful, but once I got that stuff on my feet, I didn't want to put my shoes back on.

Speaking of music, I decided to order a plastic PVC flute from Doug Tipple in the key of E. I placed my order this afternoon. With an E flute I will be able to play A tunes using G fingering. They sometimes play A tunes at the Irish session and I can almost pick them up on the fly, but that darn G# always messes me up. An E flute will make that easier. Or if not, at least it'll make for a nice camping flute.

They had a reed E flute made in India at the music shop where I got the rosin for only $16. It sounded really nice. It seems each key has it's own feeling, and E sounds rich and lovely. I suppose I could have gotten the reed flute instead. But it might not have been in tune. Doug's flutes may be made of simple materials, but they are of excellent quality and are in tune. They sound great too.

Update on my garden and my job

My garden is doing well. The romaine lettuce is huge. The other lettuce is growing nicely. The chard looks lovely. I wonder why people don't landscape with chard, it's shiny, showy leaves are so pretty. The cliantro is prolific. There are also lots of things sprouting that I can't seem to remember what they are. I hope they aren't weeds.

Last night I made a dish with my cilantro and broccoli and kale from the La Huerta garden. I stir-fried thin-sliced beef, onions, garlic and the vegetables with some bottled Thai peanut sauce. Cilantro and chopped peanuts on top for garnish. Served over rice. The Man loved it.

I've been working 3 hours a day or so at my web development job. I'm not sure what I'm doing there, but whatever it is, it often doesn't feel like enough hours. I like web development and sometimes three hours isn't enough.

I do wish I had a more concrete skill set than that, however. I wish I could work with my hands and that I knew a trade.

California Christmas

The weather is really nice this time of year.

The day after Christmas The Man and my mom and her husband went on a hike along the beach with the Sierra Club. The weather was very pleasant and clouds in the sky made the scenery interesting. We hiked from Refugio Beach to El Capitan Beach and back.


The tide was not low enough to stay on the beach for our two mile hike, so we hiked up the cliffs on to the bike path. We saw an egret along the way and I managed to catch a picture of it in flight.


It was a little chilly at first, but on the way back the wind was no longer in our faces and we got quite warm. It was probably in the mid-60s during the day. I found a wooden spool on the beach. I wanted to take it home to make a little coffee table, but The Man didn't want to take it home. It would have been quite an effort to roll it the whole two miles back to the car.

Today we went on another hike. This time we hiked 9 miles round trip to the top of the Santa Ynez mountains and back down again. It was a good workout, which I blew on chocolate and peppermint cookies and candy once I got home. My body is a dumping ground for toxic chocolate waste, and my waist certainly shows it. I can barely fit into the hiking pants I wore all summer.

Our great December weather also makes us fortunate enough to do things differently if necessary. We put our Christmas tree out on the deck instead of in the house this year. Well, actually, we have never had a full-sized Christmas tree before. Our house is too small and cluttered for a tree, plus it might scare our birds. Our big white bird (sitting on The Man's shoulder in case you don't see her) doesn't look too scared by the tree outside, so maybe we worried for nothing.


It looks like a jungle for our Christmas picture. Behind The Man is our rain barrel that we got from the City. The leaves hanging near his head are from one of our many avocado trees. The avocados are bonking me in the head in the yard now.

Finally, one last picture from my new camera. I got a new camera to replace the one I accidentally broke while hiking the PCT. I broke it while sleeping with it. I rolled over and pressed with all my weight with my hand and broke something inside. I heard it snap. Never sleep with your camera. I finally got a replacement camera and can take pictures again.

This picture is of my garden which was made from a crappy wooden bookshelf we found discarded on the sidewalk. The stuff you see growing in the front is romaine lettuce. In the back is more lettuce and chard. I thought my seeds weren't sprouting, so I tossed seeds in until stuff started to grow, so there is also cilantro and god only knows what growing, too, all mixed up. I haven't a clue what I'm doing, but maybe someday I'll do it right.


I grow my garden on the garage roof, which is flat. It is also the only sunny place in the yard, thanks to the avocado trees. We are so lucky to have a year-round growing and hiking season.

Raccoons ruined my garden

Well, my garden was gopher-proof but not raccoon-proof. The raccoons destroyed most of it. At least the lettuce and spinach survived.

We will have to build a little fence for it. Then start again.

Nettles in my soup

I decided to try eating nettles. They grow as weeds in the garden. They hurt, too. I can see why they take more calories to prepare than they provide.

I wore leather gloves to pick them. I picked only young plants a couple inches high. I tried to pick only the top part of the plant, but sometimes the root came out. I put what I collected into a plastic bag and took it home.

At home, I had to rinse them because of the dirt clinging to the roots. So I put on rubber gloves and pulled off the root part. Then I rinsed what remained and chopped it up.

I have a bunch of squash soup that I made. It's very bland. I usually steam up some vegetables or heat up some other leftovers and add it to the soup. Today I added zucchini, yellow pepper and the nettles, and topped it with feta cheese.

It tasted fine. I couldn't tell you what the nettles taste like. They just taste like greens. They don't sting once they are cooked. Maybe next time I will try them as a side dish.

It's a lot of work, but they're weeds anyway, so why not? It was fun.

New garden made of junk

The Man and I found a bookshelf while walking today. He went back to get it once we got home. It was made of boards, two boards deep. He cut the bookshelf in half so now it was only half as deep. Then he stapled wire mesh and fabric to the bottom and put wooden feet on the bottom to raise it off the ground. He put these new planter boxes on the roof of the garage where it is sunny all day.

We filled them with soil and now I have my own little square foot garden. He is very proud of finding garbage on the street at 10AM and turning it into a garden by 4PM.

So far I have planted rapini, cabbage, chard, shallots, lettuce, spinach and basil. I transplanted some of the plants that had sprouted in my buckets. I'm not sure what they are. I'm soaking some chinese pea seeds and will plant them tomorrow. I still have the other planter to fill. I feel so lucky to live here. When other people are watching snow cover the ground, we are planting cool-season crops. Soon it'll be spring (although the native plants think it already is spring) and we can start planting the warm-season plants.

I finally have a real victory garden. Victory over the tyranny of a fully corporatized needs hierarchy.

A new label is needed

I need a new label to apply to all these posts I've been doing lately. I'm not sure what I'm doing, but I'm striving to find my new place in the world since the big hike. It's like a continuation of the journey, but without a clear destination.

I keep putting my posts under boring news or consumerism, authentic life or maybe adventure, but I need a new label that better describes this process. It's not really news, and it's sort of related to anti-consumerism, but too vague for that. It is a process of finding authenticity in a world that forces us to behave so much like the plastic that chokes the environment, but without any real definition, it's hard to define as my authentic life. It's not that adventurous, but it is my next big adventure. I don't know what I'm doing or what to call it.

Scavenging, foraging, canning, gardening, not going back to the cubicle, being frugal, learning about portable living, examining life and my world after two summers living in the forest. Is there a word for that?

City foraging

This morning, The Man and I decided to walk to our favorite coffee place.

Along the way, we noticed pecans falling furiously from a tree in the neighborhood. Birds were busy pulling off the pecans and dropping them to the street. I looked closely to see the birds and saw a green head with a red patch of feathers appear. The tree was full of Lilac-crowned Amazon parrots! It is a well-known wild flock of parrots that lives here.

Since this is the best time of year for foraging food for our own parrots from the neighborhood, I had remembered to bring a plastic bag with me. We grabbed the pecans as the parrots were throwing them out of the trees and put them in the bag. The pecans are green and unripe, but I remember eating unripe walnuts as a kid. There used to be walnut orchards where our housing development was built, and some walnut trees remained. We would eat them green as kids. They were quite tasty. The flavor reminded me of lettuce. Since the birds were also eating them green, they must be good to eat this way.

As we walked away from the pecan tree, we noticed macadamia nuts on the ground. We grabbed a few of those, but our parrot has a hard time opening them. So do we. The only way we have found to open macadamia nuts has been with a C-clamp. And that is only marginally successful. Crows like to drop some kinds of nuts in the street and wait for cars to run them over. I'm not sure that cars are able to open macadamia nuts. Usually, the macadamia nuts lie uneaten and unbroken under the trees.

We walked to the coffee place to have breakfast and then walked home. We are both sore from a 15 mile endurance hike yesterday. On the way home, we walked along a street with a lot of magnolia trees. A few years ago I had seen crows eating the magnolia pods so I started collecting them for our parrot. She likes to eat the red seeds inside. We collected fallen magnolia pods until our bag was full.

We also noticed a wooden bookcase left discarded on the side of the street. The wood is rough and unfinished, but it looked like good wood. The Man plans to remove the rose bushes that are not doing well and put in a long, thin area for gardening. We can use the wood from the bookcase.

City foraging can be fun.

Qunice butter

I am making quince butter in my crockpot. I've already cooked it 12 hours. There are about 4 to 10 more hours to go. I hope it will be good. I got the recipe for quince butter here.

I decided to make quince butter because last year at the La Huerta garden we sampled the quinces. They were not good to eat off the tree. They are sort of woody.

The following week, several of the ladies who work at the garden brought in better ways to taste the quince. One brought in a store-bought quince paste, which was kind of like an aspic in a can. It was quite tasty. Another brought in homemade quince butter. It was rich and spicy. We ate it with crackers and fancy cheese. Wow, amazing!

Update: I completed my quince butter. The recipe said to save 2 cups of the sauce and then cook down the sauce with the lid of the crockpot slightly askew. That seemed to work, but when I put the 2 cups of sauce back in, the sauce would not continue to cook down. I tried to cook it for several more hours but it never cooked down. So I figured that would be as good as it gets.

Then I decided to try canning it because there was so much. I have never canned anything before. I bought some small mason jars and put the sauce/butter (it's a little more like sauce than butter) into ten of the jars and boiled them for 20 minutes. Seemed to work.

The quince butter tastes yummy by the way. It's like applesauce but with a richer, spicier flavor.

The "how long can I go without grocery shopping" challenge

So I was reading on the Urban Homestead blog that they had a 100 foot diet challenge. The challenge is to eat one meal per week of food grown 100 feet from your door. In other words, to eat food you grow yourself. It's kind of like the 100 mile challenge where you try to eat locally grown food. The idea of challenging you to eat your own home-grown food for one day a week is to show you that food security and freedom from being dependent on corporate food is within your reach.

At first I thought I could not participate in such a challenge because I don't grow much food. But I do grow some food, and I also help grow food at the garden at the Mission.

So then I got to thinking maybe I could see how long I could go without buying any food. We have fruit and chard in our yard. There are still veggies to harvest at La Huerta, and maybe in a couple weeks some bananas, too. And then there are all the various events I attend. People are always bringing extra backyard fruit to share, and they bring in baked goods, too. I could see how long I could go without grocery shopping. That would be funny.

And so today I took home a trombone squash. I cut it up and put it in my crock pot with the rest of the chicken stock I made a few weeks ago. When I got home tonight, it was all cooked so I blended it up smooth with my hand-held blender to make a thick and creamy squash soup. Trombone squash is just like butternut squash. The soup is real good plain but it also makes a good starter that you can add other things to. I saved the seeds. Hopefully one of them will grow in the back yard.

I also brought home some black kale, red peppers and fresh basil and rosemary. I picked some lima beans, too, and shelled them when I got home. They are white with bright red splotches. I have never seen lima beans that looked like that. I plan to plant some and eat the rest. According to Jane, the lima bean bush didn't die last year and was two years old now. That's how it goes living where I do. Annuals sometimes become perennials or nearly so.

With all the veggies I took home today, I could make lunches and dinners, but not breakfasts. So, I think my challenge will be to see how many lunches I can go on food I grow myself. Not dinners because The Man thinks living the good life means unwrapping a package and popping it into the microwave.

Gardening: my economic activity for the day

My job at the whale farm hasn't quite begun yet, so I have finally gotten around to planting my fall garden. I had planted some stuff last year and I was surprised to see that after our 4.5 inches of rain the other week, chard had voluntarily sprouted itself. So I planted more chard, beets and cilantro.

My garden is very small. The Man says that gophers will destroy any attempts to plant food. Last year I gathered a bunch of big plastic pots, maybe 3 gallon sized, and so instead of a normal garden, I planted my garden in the pots. I used dirt from the ground and compost mixed together. Some of the pots have planting mix, too, but I ran out of that. It doesn't seem to matter much. The plants will grow.

While I fiddled with my pots, I heard a strange noise. I thought maybe I was about to be attacked by insects. I looked, but it was only the neighbor's chickens staring at me and making little buzzing noises. I've wondered if I put nests in our back yard if the chickens might defect over to our side. They certainly like our compost bin. I have a chicken nest somewhere I bought for our big white bird. She wasn't interested in it, despite how many times we've called her a big white chicken.

Last year I grew lettuce in my garden. I decided to go for beets this time instead. With beets you can eat the roots and the leaves. I made a beet green soup once and served it with feta cheese and crusty bread. The Man thought it was delicious. I think he would have turned up his nose if I had told him I was making beet green soup before he tasted it.

After I planted my garden, using a big spoon from the kitchen and a watering can—that's how high tech I am—I noticed that our tiny little tangerine tree is covered with fruit. There is so much fruit, the shrub (I can hardly call it a tree) is almost more fruit than leaves. So I picked a big bag. I wonder if pulling off the fruit and leaving a big hunk of peel still attached is bad. That is what seems to happen every time.

Nothing tastes better than tangerines. My little green bird likes them, too. I'm not a fan of oranges. I like tangerines and grapefruit best of the citrus fruits.

I also picked up some large, ripe passion fruit that fell off the monster vine that is taking over the yard. Our big white birds likes those. She'll eat a passion fruit bigger than her big head.

Since I've become mostly locked out of the corporate world (and I'm kind of wondering if that is really so bad) I've come to the conclusion that I need to grow more of what I eat and eat a lot less. The 20 minutes I spent today in my little garden was my economic activity for the day. Let's hope it earned me enough to buy a beer down at the Irish session tonight. At the very least, I've got a thousand calories or so of tangerines in the fridge to show for my efforts. And about 50 calories of chard sprouts to show for no efforts at all.

My container garden

I started planting my garden today. I am going to attempt to grow some food in plastic pots. Tony saves every plastic pot that any plant ever comes in. So I used those.

We'll see how it goes. It may be a total failure. But after working at the garden at the Mission, where we only tend the garden 3 hours a week, I figure something ought to grow.

I planted chard, onions, cilantro and lettuce so far. I ran out of daylight. I'll plant more things in more pots in the days to come.

Mulch is a beautiful thing

Today the weather was cool and moist. I felt great when I arrived at the garden. First I watered all the plants I usually water. Then I pulled a few weeds. Then I decided that I was tired of pulling the same weeds every week so I decided to mulch the heck out of the area I work in.

First I mulched with the "gorilla hair" mulch, covering the bare ground around the various plants in the perennial beds. Then I went for the hard-core wood chips and mulched all the grapes growing along the walkway. When I was done, the garden looked like a professional park. Everyone seemed very grateful for my hard work.

It was a wonderful way to spend the morning. For my efforts I was paid in an entire bunch of Misi Luki bananas, a dozen figs, a taste of quince and many passion fruits. In dollar value, the fruit put me over the minimum wage. In pride and enjoyment value, it put me higher.

The garden is wonderful. Still no word from the Parks and Rec department about my application to work in some other gardens. And now I'm trying to decide if I should sell 20 hours of my time each week to pay the rent.

Hey, I'm a farmer!

I decided to pick some avocados. We have lots of avocado trees. I picked them with a very long apple-picker. It is made of a long, telescoping pole with a wire basket on top. The wire basket has prongs that bend over on one side. You position the basket with the prongs around the fruit and pull down. The fruit falls into the basket.

I picked a large box of avocados. Then I made a collection box out of a shoe box. I cut a little slot in the shoe box so that people could put their money inside. I taped the shoebox to the big box of avocados. Then I made a homemade sign announcing BIG Bacon AVOCADOS 50¢. Because Bacon avocados are different from the Haas avocados most people are used to, I also put another sign near to the slot indicating that bacon avocados are ripe when green and soft. Bacon avocados really are huge so they tend to be popular. That's a lot of avocado for the buck!

I put the box down on the sidewalk. People driving or walking by can easily see the box. Anyone who wants to buy avocados can plop a little money in the box and take a few avocados. It's on the honor system. It's a win-win because even if someone stole all the avocados at least they would be eaten. Unless someone eats them they fall off the tree loudly enough to wake me up in the middle of the night. Then skunks and raccoons eat them instead. It would be sad if someone stole the money, but I check every few hours. Even if someone stole the money, it's not a lot of money and still the avocados would be eaten by someone.

So far I've made over $15 in just one day.

We also have Haas avocado trees. I will fill a box of those next. We also have a Valencia orange tree. I might try that. I suppose you could do something similar with squash or tomatoes or whatever garden bounty. And if you didn't have a garden of your own, any fruit tree that has branches over the fence into an alley or other public place is fair game for harvest. I know where there is an apple tree, plums, loquats and walnuts. I'm sure with a little stealthy bike riding I could find a lot more.

Passive income. I made the money while going for a hike, while relaxing in my home and eating dinner. It's not a lot of money but it's enough to enjoy a little treat.

Using a hula hoe

I remember when I was a kid they used to have those Ronco TV commercials during the day. One I remember was for the hula hoe. I guess the hula hoe went legit because now you can buy them at garden shops. There was one in the tool shed at the La Huerta garden.

I hula hoed the garden today. It's hard work, but much less than bending over and pulling every tiny little weed. You just scrape below the surface and turn the weeds into mulch.

I just wish they'd invent something to remove Kikuyu grass.

After watering and weeding I felt pretty tired. I ate some figs from the garden to get me home. I also brought home some passion fruit for Ariel, our cockatoo, and a long, thin, light green melon that is supposed to taste like a cucumber. I traded my avocados for the cucumber. I have so many more. I ought to sell them for 50 cents a piece. Would it be strange for a full-grown lady to put up an avocado stand on the sidewalk like a little kid?

Working in the garden is very pleasant. I would be interested in a part time job in landscaping. Not full time because I don't think I have enough strength and energy to do it that much. I'll just put that out there and see what becomes of it, if anything.

Today I read an interesting quote.

In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally.

That seems to explain a lot about me.

Bananas

At the garden I learned a little about bananas.

After the tree fruits, you remove the stem that held the stalk because after it fruits the stem dies. You cut it off to about knee-high with a saw. Cut it in cord wood sized chunks and let them fall to the ground around the base of the tree as you go down. You should be careful of the sap the comes out when you cut the stems. The sap is the basis for indigo die and can stain your clothing black. I got some sap on my shirt but didn't see any stain. I did see some stain on my arm, however.

If you want to tidy up the banana tree, you can cut off old leaves and also leave them around the base of the tree. Cut them off at the petiole. The banana will start new shoots to replace the old and the chunks of old stem and leaves will nourish the new shoots.

I also learned that a couple of Costa Ricans had said that a banana tree should have a mother, father, son, daughter, aunt and uncle. They meant that's how many stems the tree should have.

I learned from my own observation that the fruit lasts a long time on the stalk but once you cut some off, you better hurry home or eat them quick because they go bad quickly.

I pruned all the banana trees in the garden today and found out the garden needs a web site. I offered to help with that. I also got a lead on a part time job listening to tapes of whales in the arctic. Soon the adult education schedule will be out. I know I will find more things to do through that avenue.

Sometimes it is good to just let life unfold as it happens. It's just like the trail. I didn't know where I would sleep each night and I didn't know what the trail would be like each day. But every day I followed the trail and never failed to find a place to sleep.