Alt OP. #46 Weeds for lunch

Well, I finely found someplace this weekend where the folks at least half way understand me when I get off on my Permaculture stuff. I actually used the word Permaculture and Hugelkulture while I was talking to them and . . . They knew what I was talking about!!!

This place is even in Hunt County, though it is north of Greenville and even a little N. E. of Celeste on 272. The place is called Good Earth Organic Farms (they are online, look it up). You can go there and pick up some organic produce just about any old day I think. They are also planning on having more classes similar to the one I was there for when I started talking about my favorite subject.

The class was on wild food and it was very informative. Fortunately the young lady teaching the class warned us that it was highly unlikely that we would remember all of the plants we would be shown growing in the wild that day. It is fortunate because, sadly I remember only a few.

Most of them were greens, I do remember that. She mentioned Poke Salet but that is a spring green and not available right now. However, the various types of Dock are. They had some Yellow Dock growing near their hay barn and it was rather tasty. At least the younger leaves were. One of the others in the class noted that one of the Dock plants had put up stems with clusters of dark brown seeds. He asked if those were edible and the instructor said they were. Just pop them in a grinder or blinder as you would whole wheat and grind them to a flour consistency. She told us we wouldn't have to thresh the Dock seeds like we would the wheat to remove the chaff as the Docks hulls were also edible. We moved on through the sheep pastures and to the garden areas where there were various tasty goodies growing between the rows of normal garden plants. Now remember this is an organic farm so there have been no pesticides or dangerous petroleum based fertilizers applied to the fields. Thus we could simply pluck the weeds and eat. There were lambs quarters which were quite tasty as I remember. Sadly I don’t remember what they looked like well enough to trust I’d be picking the right thing in my own yard. There was also clover. Yes. People, as well as live stock, can eat clover. Another plant, related to mint she said, is one with lovely little purple flowers. Bee’s love it too for the flowers of course, but the leaves do have a hint of mint to them. Can’t remember the name. I even found out that an odd looking plant I've been seeing around my barns is actually edible. I’ve been calling it the paper lantern plant because the obvious seed pod looks sort of like a little Chinese paper lantern. It is actually called a Ground Cherry and each little ‘lantern’ carries a small cherry that is ripe when it turns a dark purple. It tastes slightly like a tomato and is related to that plant as well as the tomatillo.

One of the most surprising edibles I encountered that day was the Choke Berry Tree. Those little red to reddish brown berries that appear in the fall and then seem to hang on forever are edible!! The instructor had about a cup of the berries that she had harvested earlier and rinsed off. She put them in a blinder with about two cups of water and blended them for a fairly long time. (At least it seemed so to me) Then she strained the mixture through a “paint strainer” cloth bag she’d bought for this use and viola! Choke Berry milk.

 Ah, no. I was not overly impressed with it, but then I don’t like cow milk either. I would have added some sugar and cinnamon to the mix as I do with real milk, but others there liked it as it was. So all in all I had an interesting Sunday this past weekend.

It’s always bound to be interesting when you can say you had weeds for lunch.