High Food Prices? Look Around Outside...

The cost of food just keeps going up and up. Just the other day we heard about peanut butter going up by 40%! (A national catastrophe! as my brother says.)

I was heading out on my normal afternoon's walk and took a look around. From where I stood outside the door, I could see plantain, dandelion, lady's thumb (pictured), a few remaining lambsquarters, now gone to seed, a bunch of some kind of mint, a really nice healthy looking mullein plant, lots of mugwort, some curly dock plants, a few red clovers, and a bit of wood sorrel.

Walking down the road, I saw walnuts galore from the black walnut tree, and some Queen Anne's Lace. And persimmons from the persimmon tree. And pine trees across the road.

While the cost of grocery store foods have surged ever upward, all of the food plants mentioned above are still free and available for the harvest with a wee bit of work on my part.

While I find plantain a bit too fibrous to eat, if I needed or wanted its nutritional value, I'd add it to a pot of water for a vegetable broth. Ditto with all the plants I just mentioned. If you're feeling run down and sickly, pick a bunch of these wild vegetables and green and make yourself some healing broth with them.

Some of these plants are greens for eating, some have medicinal uses, but all have a lot of nutritional value, full of vitamins and minerals.

It can take a while when you're new to identifying plants in the wild. But I will tell you this--I first starting learning this stuff about 5 years ago. While there's still zillions of plants I don't know, there's now a lot of them that I recognize easily. Once you're had that EUREKA moment and identify a plant--you'll then see it everywhere for a while. And you'll know it from then on, like a good buddy.

With grocery costs spiraling higher, consider learning to forage some of these green plants, nuts, berries. Learn which have edible roots (like Queen Anne's Lace--but be careful, there's some toxic lookalikes of Queen Anne's lace, so leave this one to experts). Learn which greens are better at what times of year. When you learn some of this, you can start harvesting and cut your grocery bills.

We all love lambsquarters here. It's a spinach like green and quite tasty. Highly nutritious--better for you than spinach, actually. So when it is flourishing, growing wildly everywhere, I harvest it, blanch it, freeze it, and we eat this lucious green instead of the $1.70 package of frozen spinach or $1.99 to $2.99 bags of fresh spinach from the store. See what I mean? That's money I don't have to spend, I can keep it (or more likely, spend it on something else...)

I gotta go, but I'll be back. I think for a while, I will focus on various plants ...

HM

The Cost of American Lawns

This is an excerpt from an article in the May/June 2009 issue of Countryside & Small Stock Journal. The article is "Edible Estate: Trade your grass lawn for an edible garden," by Susan M. Osborn. It's a wonderful article on how a older lady, Margie, tore up her dumb lawn and created a urban garden that supplies 35-40% of her food. How cool can it get?

The article has a section on the environmental benefits of discarding your grass for a garden. This is the part I thought you might want to read:

Approximately 70% of American residential water is used for landscaping. The average lawn needs 10,000 gallons of water each summer. To irrigate 45 million lawns in the U.S. requires 200 gallons of water per person, per day. Margie waters only three times a week for five or ten minutes.

Lawnmowers use 800 million gallons of gas each year. Gas-powered lawn equipment produces as much as one-tenth of the smog-forming pollutants from all mobile sources. In one year, a gas mower produces as much air pollution as driving 43 new cars 12,000 miles each. The pollution emitted from a power mower in one hour is equal to the amount from a car being driven 350 miles. Margie uses no gas-powered equipment.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, over 70 million pounds of pesticides are applied to lawns each year. This is ten times more per acre than the pesticides that are applied to agricultural crops. Some 40-60% of the nitrogen fertilizer applied to lawns ends up in surface and groundwater, contaminating these waters. Manufacturing pesticides and synthetic fertilizers requires fossil fuels and contributes to global warming. Margie uses no pesticides or synthetic fertilizers.

Yard waste makes up over 50 percent of the nation's landfills. Margie recycles kitchen and yard waste through a compost pile.

NASA photographs indicate 32 million acres of US land are covered by lawns. This makes grass the nation's largest irrigated crop. If we're going to devote precious natural resources to cultivating a crop, shouldn't it be edible?

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As for me, I've always thought lawns were a dumb idea. I've never owned a home, so never had to figure out what I'd do, but if I had, I have torn up a lawn and at least planted some ground cover that I wouldn't have to mow. This article goes on to explain some background and history of lawns. Lawns might have made some sense in England where there is abundant rain, but here in the States, it's an idea whose time has long gone.

In this issue, there are also articles on making a simple feta cheese from goat milk, and a very interesting article on how Middle Eastern countries use sumac as a spice. Apparently, the sour-lemony taste of sumac makes it a highly regarded condiment, used in a lot of dishes. Recipes are included. If you've got to spend money on magazines, this is a fine one to get!
HM

HM