The Unknown Turn

Posted on August 29, 2011 by Randy Tindall
Clifty Creek Conservation Area and Natural Area

Clifty Creek Natural Area

I looked down the at the tattered sheet of paper laying beside the path.  Despite having been shredded by shotgun pellets, it was still legible.  “Trail Begins Again Here”, it said.  A few feet farther along, Nadia and I emerged from the trees to see the natural bridge of the Clifty Creek Natural Area just across the creek bed.  A beautiful formation in a beautiful and high-quality natural preserve, the bridge arched over a tributary of the creek heading off at right angles to the one we crossed to reach it.  We stopped to admire and take some pictures, then prepared to move on.  But where?  There was a small trail going to the left right next to the base of the bridge, but there was no sign or markings, and it didn’t look much used.  Was it farther down the tributary?  I went off to scout, walking a ways and scanning the banks for any sign of the path.  No good.  We realized that the vandal who had shot up the first sign had probably gotten the one on this side, too.  Thanks, friend.

We knew from the signs at the trailhead that we had come just less than a mile—the short part of the loop to the bridge, leaving us about a mile and a half to go to get back to the parking area.  Not much of a hike, really, especially with plenty of daylight left.  Unless, that is, you’re going the wrong direction.  So, what to do?  We could take a chance on the path to the left and hope for the best.  That would be a somewhat adventurous and fun thing to do.  We could keep going down the side-creek and look harder for any trail that might be there, doing a little true exploration.  Or we could back-track—–the safest and most boring solution to getting home.

It was only a mile and a half, so what was the big deal?  Mainly the deal was that we were thinking of another hike, just a few weeks earlier.

*********

We were making our final, sweaty ascent up the last hill before the road to the parking lot and some welcome rest after several hours of hiking in Three Creeks Conservation Area.  The bags of trash we had picked up weren’t making the walking any easier, and I was starting to regret emptying out the several full cans of beer we had found discarded along the trail.  Even a warm beer, even a warm light beer, would have tasted good about now.  So the gravel road at the top of the hill was a welcome sight as we emerged off the path, turned left and headed for the car.

Problem was, someone had built a house while we were in the woods.  At least it hadn’t been there when we started.  The road looked kind of funny, too.  We walked a ways, far enough to be certain that we weren’t going the right way, then marched back in the other direction until the road stopped at a locked pasture gate.  A few cattle stared blankly at us.  We stared blankly at each other, in that strange bafflement that results when the world suddenly shifts and suddenly you’re not seeing what your brain says should be there.

I scanned the rudimentary map in the area brochure, but could not find any place that could possibly be our present location.  What could have happened?  All the way, I had been following tracks left in the damp trail surface by two off-road bicyclists we had met on their way back to same parking area we had started from.  We had passed landmarks we knew well, even though we hadn’t hiked this particular area in several years.

It was getting near five o’clock, and we weren’t about to retrace our steps and risk getting stuck in the woods after dark with no flashlight.  At any rate, we had no clue where we had gone wrong.  We had no idea where the car was, and there were no people in sight.  Unless….

Bowing to the inevitable we slogged back to the house and knocked on the door.  The woman that came out eyed us in a friendly enough way, and, after apologizing for bothering her, I asked where we were and showed her our little map.  “You’re right here”, she said, pointing to a place I would never have thought we could be.  “Where did you start from?”  I pointed to our trailhead.  “My word!”, she exclaimed.  “You’re at least five miles from your car!”  My blank look must have made her want to make me feel better.  “Must be the day for this sort of thing,” she said.  “A few hours ago, a couple of bikers knocked on our door.  They were completely turned around, too.”

“Oh”, I mumbled.  “Is that right?”  I think Nadia’s eyebrow arched up just a little bit as she looked at me.

Our benefactress must have decided we were sincere and harmless enough, because after a well-deserved and gentle lecture about being more prepared next time, like maybe carrying a cell phone so we could call for help, for example?, she bundled us in her van, and, at no little inconvenience to herself, hauled us back to our car.  She would accept nothing in return except our relieved thanks, not even gas money.

*********

We started off down the trail to the left, a little apprehensive about not knowing if we were getting closer to our destination or heading farther into the woods.  If we guessed wrong, I figured, the worst part would be a longer back-track to get to the car, but the farther we went, the more distinct the path became.  At one point, some rocks had been used to make steps to aid hikers up a small bank.  Soon we passed a tree with a plastic label announcing that it was a Blackjack Oak, with a remarkably unflappable lizard clinging to its bark, and saw where branches had been trimmed back from the trail and some invading trees had been cut out.

Eastern Fence Lizard (Sceloporus undulatus)

Eastern Fence Lizard (Sceloporus undulatus)---I think.

Eastern Fence Lizard (Sceloporus undulatus)

Closer view of Eastern Fence Lizard

We started to relax, and finally, after about the right amount of time considering pace and distance, we came to the turn-off to the parking area and our car.  We were relieved, even though there was certainly no real “danger” at any time.  Only the uncertainty had been a little unnerving.

Time was when the prospect of taking an unknown turn wouldn’t have caused apprehension.  The idea of an unplanned night in the forest would have even been exciting, but with age seems to come caution and a sense of possible unpleasant consequences, and at some point they begin to compete for our attention with the thrill of adventure.  That back-track seems kind of attractive.  The unknown trail, maybe not so much.

We have both taken many unknown paths in our lives: me heading out from Illinois to a summer job in California in ’79 with some camping gear and just a few dollars in my pocket; Nadia leaving her family to travel alone to a new country to study where she knew no one and nobody knew her; me quitting my job and selling most of my things to hop a bus south across the border, to come back when and if I wanted.  Both of us taking the cosmic leap of faith of trusting each other with the rest of our lives.  Into the unknown….

Exploring nature in our backyard doesn’t have the thrill and risk that taking a strange fork in the road does, but it has its own quiet advantages.  It offers a certain depth to replace the sense of adventure, allowing us to watch details evolve as our little patch and its citizens make their way around the years, acting and interacting with each other and us.  We learn to welcome the return of old friends at more or less expected times, and we say so long to others until the wheel turns again.  This is as safe, I suppose, as life ever gets, and that can be pretty comforting, if you learn to let it.

I suspect, though, that there are still unexpected and murky turns ahead, areas that we can’t find on our inadequate maps, and that’s okay.  We can still welcome that, the tingle of heightened senses scoping out unknown terrain, the adrenaline rush of “Uh-oh. What now?”  There are more moments like that coming, I hope.

In fact, I’d bet money on it.

Natural Rock Bridge, Clifty Creek Natural Area

Natural Rock Bridge, Clifty Creek Natural Area. The trail is at the left base of the bridge. Really.

 

 

Posted in Hiking, Musings, Natural Areas | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Hoarder on the Deck: Our Trashline Orb-weaver

Posted on August 23, 2011 by Randy Tindall

I don’t think we’ve reached the point where intervention is called for, but we have a hoarder in our backyard.  Not the kind that buys twenty tubes of toothpaste when it goes on sale, but more like the type that can’t throw away a pair of worn-out tennis shoes, because…..well, there’s the question.

It’s the trash that catches your attention, a vertical line of silk-wrapped corpses, egg sacs, and discarded skins.  The hoarder itself, who goes by the inelegant name of Trashline or Garbage Line Orb-Weaver, is pretty hard to see, being small and all nestled in with the garbage.  Let’s call her by the prettier name of Cyclosa turbinata, which has a nicer ring to it.

Trashline Orb-weaver (Cyclosa turbinata)

Trashline Orb-weaver (Cyclosa turbinata)

Now, I hesitate to try to guess why she does this, especially since a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to figure out the same thing, with results that still sound a lot like guesses to me.  The catch-all term for this type of web-decoration is “stabilimentum”, best known to most of us from the webs of the big orange and black Garden Spiders (Argiopes), who weave those little ladders and designs in the middle of their homes. Some folks say it’s to attract prey to the web.  Some say no way, it must be to keep birds and photographers from running headlong into it by making it more visible, especially since it seems to decrease prey capture.  Others suggest that, especially in the case of our little hoarder, these things function as camouflage or diversions to distract predators. That last one makes sense to me.  See the spider?

Cyclosa turbinata web decoration

Cyclosa turbinata "trashline" web decoration

Some have even suggested that they are forms of communication, maybe even inter-species! Still others suggest that spiders might be practicing spider art and have a sense of beauty.  I like that last one, although I personally wouldn’t hang the remains of my own meals around the house.  But that’s just me—–and Nadia, too, I bet.  But I have known people who hang heads of dead animals on their walls.

One of the earliest theories, and hence the name of the structure, was that they served to physically stabilize the web—–stabilimenta—–which hardly anyone believes anymore.  But let’s not be too hasty.  There are different kinds of stability, and we are talking about hoarding here, right?  Human hoarders seem to find a kind of stability in being surrounded by lots of familiar stuff, from piles of old newspapers, to those precious old worn-out sneakers.  I once knew two elderly German sisters in Illinois who kept neatly arranged rows of Prince Philip tobacco tins in one of their farm buildings, not far from piles of corn-cobs precisely sorted by size.  I think this, along with all of their other “collections” gave them a sense of place and comfort and…..stability?

Maybe that third bug from the top in the Cyclosa‘s trashline was a really good vintage, a meal to be remembered, or the one next to it put up an especially memorable fight.  Mementos.  Could it be?

Nah.  I’m going with camouflage.

Posted in Spiders, Wildlife | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

New Native Plant Pages

Posted on August 18, 2011 by Randy Tindall

I have posted the first two of a collection of pages dedicated to the native plants Nadia has identified in our yard.  You can find them in the Our Native Plants pull-down menu.  I hope to add about one per week until all 141 species she has found so far has its own page with information about the plant, its characteristics as a team player (or not) in a natives landscape, its uses, and other, hopefully, interesting information about it.  That last part might include odd bits of folklore and legend about the plant, recipes for it (assuming it’s edible), plenty of links for further resources, and sources for seed and sets.  And photographs.  There will always be photographs.

If anyone has a plant or plants that they would like to see featured from our list (go to the Our Native Plants page link), I can tackle them early on.  Otherwise it’s as the muse moves me.  Next up is probably wild leeks.  Maybe.

And I promise to pretty that list up one of these days.

Backyard colors

Backyard Colors

Posted in Cooking, Edible Native Plants, Foraging, Gardening, Native Plants, Recipes | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Through the Keyhole

Posted on August 15, 2011 by Randy Tindall

It takes patience to walk a beagle.  It is not an exercise for the terminally rushed, nor is it for those who want to cover a lot of ground and work up a sweat.  Beagles have other agendas.

It doesn’t take long being out with a beagle before you recognize that they perceive a very different world than we do.  They walk constantly back-and-forth, one side of the path to the other, backtracking, wandering off to explore hidden paths beyond our perception.  If the beagle is on a leash, its human will be stopping every few feet to let it smell some message on a running bulletin board we would otherwise have no clue about.  Twigs, blades of grass, mailboxes, curbs, shrubs—-all have their notes from others who have passed before.  All must be read. Then, of course, the beagle will add a few drops of its own gossip and scrape a little dirt and grass over it before the walk can continue.  A few feet later, the scenario repeats.

Bonita

Bonita and Her Nose in our Backyard

Our beagle, Bonita, likes to be outside with us, but her backyard is not our backyard.  I don’t know what she sees, hears, and smells out here, but she must have an entirely different picture of the world than we do, her own tiny snapshot that differs greatly from our own.

We—all of us—beagles, people, all living things, experience so little of the vast whole.  For example, we humans see only a very limited range of the “light” that is there, a piddling band of frequencies between infrared and ultra-violet, missing out completely on most of the vast range of energies, like radio waves or microwaves (although we do a little better than dogs in this regard).  Our hearing isn’t so great, either—it’s common knowledge that dogs can hear much higher pitched sounds than we can, up to three times higher, not to mention sounds that are just too faint for human ears to pick up.  And let’s not even get into to smells, the beagle’s forte.  In that regard, we are beneath canine contempt, hopelessly handicapped, and must be lead around by, well, the nose, for our own safety.

Here’s the thing. When I sit in our backyard it feels like a sensory deluge—-the wind in the trees, the sounds of the insects and birds, a nearby lawnmower, colors, motion everywhere, a few smells I can actually detect (rain coming!), the textures I feel.  It’s too much to take in completely.  Yet, for all of that, reason tells me that I really perceive almost nothing of what is really there.  I can’t follow the invisible pheromone trails that pull insects along through the air.  The network of mycorrhizae, carrying chemical pulses through the soil between plants like a inter-species World Wide Web, is out of range to me.  The butterfly world of polarized light and ultraviolet flowers must be eerily beautiful, but I just have to try to imagine it.  I can’t see the radio or gamma waves the universe is sending through me constantly or hear the drumming of insects to get word to each other about important matters.  I can’t trace the paths of migrating species by tracing the unseen lines of the earth’s magnetic field.  The equipment just isn’t there.

Tiger Swallowtail

Tiger Swallowtail on Sunflower

Leafhoppers on PawPaw

Leafhoppers on PawPaw. Chatting?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m looking at an infinite world through the tiniest of keyholes, trying to reconstruct an ocean in all its complexity from a drop of spray.

But that’s probably the only way it could be, since I can’t even pay attention to more than a fraction of what I actually detect, anyway.  When we humans get really curious about what is out there beyond our ken, we can always use instruments to help, like beagles, compasses, or special microphones and cameras, but we would probably lose our minds if we were long exposed to the raw torrents of information and events that are beyond our senses.  Maybe our filters are here so we can attest to the world as we alone see it, our part of the puzzle—the world according to butterfly, beagle and me, all different, all correct.

As it is, I can sit and look at our backyard and, if I don’t think too much about it, pretend that it really is as peaceful as it seems.  Bonita is snoozing in a patch of sun.  A swallowtail is feeding on a flower.  Nice and quiet.

 

Posted in Insects, Musings, Pets | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

A Fair Trade

Posted on August 9, 2011 by Randy Tindall

We may not have any more parsley in our yard, but we should soon have a
bumper crop of Black Swallowtails.

Black Swallowtail Caterpillars, Parsley

Black Swallowtail Caterpillars on Parsley Plants

Posted in Gardening, Insects, Photography | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments

A Lotta Damn Gall(s)

Posted on August 8, 2011 by Randy Tindall

 

(NOTE: Full confession—I goofed!  The following article is partially incorrect. The apple-like galls are NOT caused by one of the generations of a cynipid wasp, but rather by Polystepha pilulae, a midge, a mere dipteran, not a noble hymenopteran.  The wasp does indeed cause the the horned oak galls found on twigs, but the juicy version found on leaves is an elongated gall running along the leaf veins.  This is discussed in a later post.)

Also, by the way, the title is a vague reference to Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant”.  Those of you who grew up in the 60’s and 70’s will recognize it.  Others may not.  That’s okay.

————————————————————————————–

Nothing’s ever perfect.  Not in our backyard.  Not in yours, I bet.

At least that’s one way of looking at it.  Another way might be just to accept that “perfection” in nature is pretty much just something we try to impose on our world.  Some of us believe that a perfect yard is a uniform green carpet, lush and friendly to bare feet.  Some of us prefer a little more chaos and complexity in our surroundings.

Take our backyard Pin Oak, for instance.  It’s a pretty enough tree in its own right, named for the needle-sharp tips on its leaf lobes.  It grows high and shady and keeps a lot of early sun off our house during the dog days—a much appreciated quality in recent years.  It’s a great climbing tree, something I have explored on many occasions, much to Nadia’s consternation, using the excuse of getting up there and trimming off dead branches.  You can take those conveniently spaced limbs all the way to the top, although I haven’t made it that far.  Yet.  Twenty feet or so up, I generally hear something like “Aiiieeee!!  You’re going to fall and break yourself!”, and I reverse course.  Someday, though.  It’s on my bucket list.

But I digress.

Recently we’ve been seeing a lot of this:

Oak leaf gall

Succulent Leaf Gall on Pin Oak Leaf

These are oak leaf galls, which my limited research is telling me are caused by a tiny cynipid wasp, which won’t sting you or me, but can certainly mess up the complexion of a pin oak.  Not just our oak. All up and down the street we can see leafy twigs full of little apple-like structures, which in turn, I hear are full of little wasp larvae.  These larvae will emerge to search for love and destiny, and if they succeed in at least one of these goals the females will lay their eggs on the woody stems of a tree.  By next spring, these will result in another type of gall, adding insult to injury.

Horned twig gall, pin oak

Horned Twig Gall on a Pin Oak

After a suitable period of time, two years or more, wasps emerge from these spiny warts to lay more eggs on the veins of the leaves, and we’re off to the races again.  In my opinion, the oak tree gets the worst end of this deal, but it doesn’t seem to mind much.  The wasps, on the other hand, get food and shelter and a chance to annoy people who find twig and leaf blemishes to be “imperfections” and eyesores.

Heavy infestations can drain the resources of the host tree, but there doesn’t seem to be much anyone can do about it anyway, since there apparently is no recommended chemical solution.  If you are really serious about wanting your trees looking picture-perfect, you can cut off infected twigs and destroy the galls, but I suspect this is mainly useful as a good excuse to climb an oak tree (Aiiiieee!!!).  You’ll never get ’em all, but it would be good fun trying.

However, I have never come close to achieving perfection and so have become highly tolerant of its lack in other things.  We will live and let live, as far as our gall crop is concerned.  Why be hypocritical, after all?  There are thousands of “galls” in our fair city, blemishes upon a once pristine prairie.  We refinanced ours a couple of years ago and are rather fond of it.  We may never emerge.

Posted in Insect pests, Insects, Landscaping, Native Plants | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Quiet Medicine

Posted on July 31, 2011 by Randy Tindall

Being in our backyard calms—-me—-down.  It is a palpable sensation, beginning within minutes of going out there and just sitting—just watching and listening.  Even though Nadia and I live along a busy street, the traffic noise fades to insignificance in our backyard.  In the front of the house, it can be hard to hold a conversation, but in the backyard you can hear a hummingbird’s wings or the “pips” of the cardinals.

There is always something to see out there, always something happening.  Always.  Today I saw the smallest skink I have ever seen skinking around on the weathered, old deck.  I see tiny wrens slithering through the vegetation looking for insects.  I watch a tiger swallowtail obsessed by one of the few non-native plants we have, Mexican sunflower, which is blooming right through the heat and dryness of this extreme summer.

In front of a computer, I’m in distraction-land.  Right now I have ten tabs open in my browser, from news sources to other blogs to search engines.  This must be a sign of the lack of self-discipline I already know myself to be guilty of.  When I should be writing or researching, I’m often reading about the latest wranglings in our nation’s benighted capitol or compulsively seeing if any new email has come in or checking prices on that new lens I want, but can’t afford.  I’m convinced our electronic “civilization” is designed to prevent reflection.  I think too much thought is truly threatening to certain vested interests.

The other day I watched a young girl driving a large SUV down our street, ear-buds in her ears, eyes down, texting on her phone with both hands.  She may be part of the next iteration of the human animal that is psychologically, and maybe increasingly genetically, adapted to the constant flow of huge amounts of information, little of which is actually useful, and even less of which is actually absorbed and digested.  Multitasking?

Noise.

Trees and vegetation are known to provide gentle, but effective physical barriers to actual noise–traffic, in particular.  More and more, I believe that they can work to ameliorate the mental noise that chatters ceaselessly in our oh-so-busy minds, or at least slow it to the point that we can pay attention and derive some benefit from it.  In our backyard, I can sit and drift until, almost magically, connections began to be made with what I see and hear and other things that I have experienced or read about.  A little sense can be discerned, lessons can be drawn, patterns begin to emerge.  It becomes possible, a little, to understand the mind of an Emily Dickinson, a keen observer of nature, who could leap from the mundane to the cosmic in a few, precisely chosen words:

Pin oak

Pin Oak

“Nature is what we know
But have no art to say,
So impotent our wisdom is
To Her simplicity.”

Heart rates drop.  Blood pressure settles.  Worries lift a bit.

 

(Note: Check out this entry at “Nature is My Therapy”, a wonderful blog run by a friend I have never met.   It gave me the impetus to write this entry, which I have thought about for a while. She links to one of many studies showing that nature can help with what ails us. Malls, not so much.)

Posted in Musings, Society | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Beans and Butterflies

Posted on July 24, 2011 by Randy Tindall

My Dad stopped and stared at some plants in our yard, then turned to stare at me.  “Did you just forget to pull these things?” he asked.  “Because if you did, I can do it for you now.”

“No”, I said.  “They’re supposed to be there.”

He shook his head in disgust.   “You mean, I spend half my life pulling these out of the beans, and you’re planting them?”

Some things are hard to explain.  He was glaring at a small patch of common milkweeds growing in our yard and thinking back to the almost forgotten ritual of bean-walking, one of the ways farm kids earned spending money in the hot Iowa summers of days gone by.

Common Milkweed

Common Milkweed

It wasn’t hard to see why the sight of an arch-enemy like milkweeds could raise the hackles of a retired farmer.  Bean-walking involved miles and miles of shuffling up and down long rows of soybeans, hand-weeding the fields of anything that didn’t belong there.  That meant everything except soybeans, and it especially meant milkweeds.  Bean-walkers carried a hoe or machete (corn knife) and used them to chop out thistles, volunteer corn and other weeds from the crop.  Some weeds, like cockle-burs, could be pulled up easily, dirt knocked off the roots, then left to wither in the sun on the black soil.  Others, like milkweeds, pulled hard, and a really big one could defeat the efforts of a smaller bean-walker, although it was a point of honor to give it your all.  A big patch of milkweeds took time to work through and left your hands (gloved, if you were smart) coated with sticky sap and your back aching.  The bigger the patch, the longer it took to reach the end of the row where the cold water or kool-aid waited in big thermos jugs.  Some of those rows took awful long.

This was more than just weed control to improve crop yields.  This was agricultural aesthetics, and milkweeds had no place in them.  Farmers could be very opinionated about the state of another farmer’s fields, since a messy looking field, in the mind of the onlooker, often pointed to a messy farming operation in general.  It was just unprofessional, and my Dad farmed professionally.  He could, and often did, spot a lone cockle-bur or milkweed in the middle of one of our fields as he was driving down the road.  If he was lucky enough to have one of us kids in the car with him, well, it saved him some walking.  Most of the time he had to direct us to the offender, shouting directions from the car, sometimes until we were standing right next to it.  It was almost supernatural how he could spot weeds at a gallop.  The result was fields that looked like newly cleaned carpets.  They were beautiful in their own way, and even I took some satisfaction in knowing I helped to make them that way.

Walking beans was as much a part of summer as watermelons and sweet corn, but not as nice, if you want my opinion.  Whole families, young and old, walked their own fields, starting early in the cool mornings and aiming to quit when the sun got to be too much, and I guess today that would be called “quality family time”, but I had other names for it.  Boys and girls able to work hard enough to actually get paid would hire out to other farmers, sometimes teaming up with a friend or two or a bean-walking crew.  Since this was before they told us that the sun was our enemy, we wore as little as possible, turning brown as nuts as the weeks passed, and this could have more immediate hazards than skin cancer.  I still have the scar on my shin from the day when I was working a corn-knife and watching the older girl a couple rows over from me, instead of the plant I was chopping.  She was walking beans in a bikini she had made herself.  It was bright yellow.

I figured it probably wouldn’t do much good to tell my Dad that these milkweeds were natives and belonged here, or that a weed is just a good plant growing in a bad place.  I may have told him about all the Monarchs we raised on them and sent south, but I doubt if he cared awful much about that.  In his mind, these old enemies would soon pop open their pods and send thousands of seeds wafting though the air on little parachutes, heading out on the wind to infect some hard-working farmer’s beans.  And that’s just not right.  So I dodged and told him that these milkweeds were Nadia’s idea.  After all, she grew up in a city and never had to pull them by the hundreds.

Bean-walking has mostly gone the way of corn detassling, square-baling hay, and shelling corn as rites of passage for farm kids.  I’ll leave it to others to decide if this is good or bad.  My take is that I’m awfully glad I did it then, and I’m awfully glad I’m not doing it now.  Most of my callouses are gone now, and I mainly interact with milkweeds by admiring them and photographing the huge number of insects that come to pollinate them, feed on them, or raise their young on them.  These are plants with place and purpose.

But I don’t think my Dad will ever see it that way.

Monarch Chrysalis

Monarch Butterfly Chrysalis on Common Milkweed

Posted in Edible Native Plants, Farming, Musings, Native Plants | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Backyard Haute (or at least, Hot) Cuisine

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Randy Tindall
Aficionados of native edibles can get into ruts.  It’s easy to cook down all wild greens like they were spinach, or to make omelets and fritatas with them, or throw them in with a bunch of potatoes to roast or fry.  Not that there’s anything wrong with these things—God knows I’ve fritata’d my way around the block a few times, but sometimes it’s fun to get more adventurous.

One of my culinary addictions happens to be kimchi, the spicy fermented vegetable mixture that is said to be a staple at nearly every meal in Korea. I have been buying it at local oriental markets, but one day, with a refrigerator packed full of Nadia’s foraged native greens, a little light went on in my brain.  How hard could it be to make our own?  On to the internet I went and it turns out, it’s not hard at all.  So, Nadia fixed me up with a mess of lamb’s-quarter and woodland nettle leaves (not stingy) and I went to work, based on this recipe.  A few minor modifications and a couple days of fermenting later and this is what I had to show for it:
Backyard Kimchi

Backyard Kimchi

If I say so myself, it’s delicious!  It’s got a nice crunchy/chewy texture, great flavor and relatively gentle heat.  Next time I might add a little water to add more juice to the final product—this version is drier that the ones I’ve bought.  The nice thing about making your own kimchi is the control you have over things like spiciness and chunkiness.  I like spicy foods, but not if they take the top of my head off, so I was a little leery of adding a 1/2 cup of chili powder at first.  I discovered, however, that the real Korean chili powder (purchased at Chong’s Market in Columbia) adds nice flavor and color, but just a pleasant, glowing heat that lingers a while, but never really bites.  Nadia’s not as much a fan of picante foods as I am, but she loves this stuff.  If you’re really sensitive to spice in foods, use less, but in that case I doubt you would ever eat kimchi anyway.

I would imagine that lots of native edibles would be tasty in kimchi, such as goldenglow, cup plant greens, young mildweed pods, or stinging nettles (might want to blanch these first a little to neutralize the sting).  Experiment!  Forage!  If you come up with something great and would be willing to share, send it to me and we’ll post your recipe.  In the meantime, here’s how to make ours:

What You Need

Several cups of washed wild greens.  If you like more protein, skip the washing step..
1 head of garlic, peeled and finely minced (we got ours from local farmer, musician and all-around iconoclast, Paul Weber).
1 2-inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled and minced
1/4 cup fish sauce (available at oriental groceries)
1/3 cup chili paste or 1/2 cup Korean chili powder
1 bunch green onions, cut into 1-inch lengths (use the dark green part, too, except for the tough ends)
1 medium Asian radish (daikon), peeled and grated
1 teaspoon sugar or honey

How You Do It

1. If you want a finer kimchi, lightly chop greens into smaller pieces, or leave whole if you want a chunkier mix.

2. Mix the other ingredients in a very large metal or glass bowl.

3. Now combine everything and mix thoroughly.  You might want to wear rubber gloves if mixing with your hands, to avoid chili burn and being dyed red.

4. Pack the kimchi in a clean glass jar large enough to hold it all and cover it tightly. Let stand for one to two days in a cool place, around room temperature.

5. Check the kimchi after 1-2 days. If it’s bubbling a bit, it’s ready and should be refrigerated. If not, let it stand another day.  You should be able to eat it by itself for three weeks or so, and if it gets too fermented after that, it can be used in cooking things like Korean vegetable pancakes, stir-fried rice, or soups.

Lamb's Quarter

Lamb's Quarter (Kimchi wannabe...)

Posted in Cooking, Edible Native Plants, Foraging, Native Plants, Recipes | 1 Comment

Beneath the Surface

Posted on July 15, 2011 by Randy Tindall

Daydreaming in our backyard one afternoon, I heard something hit the side of our house, just a few feet away. Startled, I looked up to see a struggling sparrow, looking newly-fledged and adolescent-clumsy, fluttering off our deck and again hitting the siding. It seemed panicked, desperate, and only then did I see the cause. A blue jay dove at it and knocked it down onto the deck again, and again the little bird flew up, struggling across our backyard and over the chain-link fence into our neighbor’s lawn. It never had a chance after that—there was only mowed grass there, no shrubs, no tall forbs, no cover. The jay was like a heat-seeking missile, slamming into the small body of the sparrow and knocking it into the grass. The predator landed next to the prey and its head reared back and speared down, twice, three times. It was over.

Only a few seconds had passed. I was still in the grip of surprise and, truth be told, a little shock.  I was witnessing something unexpected, lightening quick, something primal.

————-

We are determined optimists, we humans.  Especially those of us born into, if not wealth, at least a measure of security and loving care, taking for granted that there will be food on the table tonight, that doctors are there for us when we are sick, that we have a level of protection from the predators of the world, human and not.  We see the placid surface of existence and dream about the future, aware at some level, but not dwelling on the fact, that sometimes things can change very quickly.  Death is understandable—-just not ours.

Not everyone is as complacent as I grew up.  I did my Peace Corps time, many moons ago, in the little East African country of Malawi.  I got to know many of my neighbors as friends, and I observed things that left deep impressions on me.

In Malawi, it was normal and polite to ask new acquaintances about their families—Is everyone well?  How are your parents?  How many children are in your family? That last question was one that changed my view of existence.  Very often the reply was something like, “We had nine children in our house, and there are five living now.”  When I was fresh out of training and new on my site and heard this, I was caught unprepared.  My first reaction was to express my sympathy, but I soon noticed that my new friends didn’t say this with obvious sorrow.  Their faces didn’t take on a look of grief.  They were simply stating a fact of their life.  There were nine and now there are five.  Five beautiful children live in our house and four have gone to God.  God is good to us.

They saw the placid surface of life and lived there with great joy, but knew the murkier depths on an intimate level.  They had no illusions, no self-deceptions, about how fragile it all is.  They were too close to it, much closer than my kind was.  Or so my kind pretends.

In the natural world, life and death are right there together every second.  No creature comes into it with the expectation of living forever, or any expectations at all, but only the instinctive determination to live until life is done.  I don’t know what goes on in the mind of a young sparrow struggling for its life, but I doubt if it’s telling itself that this just isn’t fair, that it can’t go now, because it has so much left to do!  I expect that it’s struggling because that’s what life does, to fight on until the end.  We are the ones, we two-legged, arrogant, products of millenia of this struggle, insulated by layers of “civilization”, who get so bloody offended by it all.  Who dares do this to us?  Don’t they know who we are?

We think we are different.

——–

The bluejay began pulling feathers from the warm body of the young bird, getting ready to feed.  Suddenly, the jay froze and looked to its left, and I glanced over to see a teenaged boy walking through the grass of my neighbor’s lawn, staring intently down at the screen of a cellphone.  The bluejay held its ground until the boy was within about ten feet, then it flew up and away to a far tree.  The boy walked on, never lifting his eyes.  He never even saw the little body that he nearly stepped on.

We swim on the placid, calm surface, but sometimes a fin breaks through to let us know that something powerful and inevitable cruises beneath.  Sometimes we see it.  And sometimes we look elsewhere with great determination.

NOTE: I have found very few accounts of this predatory behavior by bluejays, but there are a few.  Here is one.  Here is another.

Posted in Musings, Wildlife | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Comments