“kids these days”! or so i’ve heard. we can’t connect. but are we, ourselves, connected? to anything? why do we wonder that we can’t connect to our children when we can’t connect to ourselves. they are imitating our own dumbass behaviors, and we are not showing them our best side.
can foraging bridge that emptiness, the hole in our hearts? the hole in our families? does a family-either a blood family or a chosen family-build bonds by watching television? by playing farmville, by catalog shopping or by microwaving burritos? or does a family build a strong foundation by roaming the woods and neighborhoods together, searching for plants or fungi, identifying insects and birdsongs?
i want to be open-minded and say-oh, hell a family can build bonds around reality tv. but my heart says no. because, my friends, out there in the woods it is a holy sacrament. eucharist means thanksgiving, and tasting the forest is a sacrament we can all share. flesh of my flesh? fungi IS the actual fruit of the actual soil, no leaps of faith needed. making or own medicine is a connection you will never find at the store. growing our own food feeds both body AND mind.
have we humans somehow evolved, in only 2 or 3 generations, out of our foundational need, our desire, our instinct, to forage for or own food? have we somehow evolved into a technological mindset which does not value touching, smelling, feeling the source? NO, we have not. the need is still inside of us. even with our brains held captive by modernity the communion is still valid.
becasue why would god, however you view them, not be in the fungi, in the insects, in the soil and muck and plants and stone? why would spirit not be found in a forgotten piece of woods where old TVs, underpants, loising lottery tickets and beer bottles snuggle with wild goldenseal, beautiful trilliums and rotting logs? why would the earth’s energy suddenly become unavailable to all people?
answer: it has not. the earth and its gifts are all around us and we CAN return at any time. we CAN choose to see what is all around us. we can choose to celebrate what is under this pavement. we can, right now, get off our asses and look behind the strip malls and dumpsters and see the spirit of renewal in action, pollination, turning of the wheel, rejuvenation, plants protecting soil, earth breaking down someone’s discarded undies, dogs eating dropped doritos, bees on “invasive” knotweed and pigeons bathing in puddles. it’s a clusterfuck celebration and it’s the foundation we can build our lives upon.
we can go to the taco bell drive-thru-again!–or we can finally choose to participate in the animal-vegetable-mineral magic that spends all day trying desperately to get our attention, taking moments away from safety and away from antibacterial panic hell to let reality in.
and, friends, reality tastes good.
the family that forages together, stays together. May 19, 2013
black haw kicks ass March 12, 2013
One of my absolute favorite herbal medicines is Black Haw-Viburnum Prunifolium. It spent years in the Caprifoliaceae family amongst the lovely Honeysuckles and Elders but someone moved it to Adoxaceae, I’m going to need to mull about that one for a bit. The Viburnums are a pretty big bunch and also includes the more well-known Crampbark plus Nannyberry, Arrowwood Viburnum and Possumhaw. What’s a haw? It means fruit, as in “Hawthorne”. Oh, and it also means “a command to a horse, telling it to turn left”. Just in case you’re reading this on horseback.
So Blackhaw-it’s a shrub. On the large side for a shrub, with opposite branches and it flowers in late spring with tiny flowers not unlike the Elder’s flowers. I’d call it cream color, and the bark is grey and sturdy. It is a common shrub in my area of upstate NY but is native to the whole northeast and midwest area and has been, in my experience, pretty easy to grow in a moist to medium area with part to full sun. I have yet to see it decimated by critters and the haws are not super desirable because they are mostly seed-one big flat seed in each dark purple haw, sometimes called a drupe amongst botanical types.
To make medicine I harvest bark and twigs, taking just a bit from each shrub so as to not be a jerk, and tincture it fresh. I use it both internally and externally. I will make a liniment with rubbing alcohol for external use only and a tincture with grain alcohol for both internal and external use.
My most important use of Black haw tincture is to address spasms and muscular tension. Our muscles spasm for various reasons-tension, dysmenorrhea, “charlie horse”, injury, overwork, asthma. I take a high dose-1/2 to 1 dropper-internally for menstrual cramps and I’ll do so every 2-4 hours if needed. But all types of so-called uterine colic responds to Black haw including the pain of endometriosis, fibroids, threatened miscarriage, afterbirth pains, ovulation pains, and -I haven’t tried this-but Winston says testicular pains.
“As a uterine tonic it is unquestionably of great utility”-King’s American Dispensatory. Yup.
The urinary tract also responds to Black haw and I’ve started to add it to my standard UTI formula of Alder/Monarda tincture if there is pain of a spasmodic nature.
I also use it in tension headaches. I will use it straight up or mixed with Crampbark and Lobelia-a little bit internally, and a lot externally. In my first aid kit this blend is in a spray bottle-it is a great way to get tincture on places you can’t reach that well or-when you are in the throes of a debilitating tension headache or spasm- to just push the sprayer and avoid messing around with a dropper. I strongly recommend addressing tension and other headaches BEFORE they get bad, thus the joy of carrying such a blend about. Of course, no tincture will deal with all tension, and I recommend combining herbal treatment with deep breaths, tree time and whatever therapeutic practice works for you. My favorite meditation to use with Black haw is “let go”.
For neck pain I blend it with Goldenrod tincture-fresh flowering tops. Aviva Romm recommends adding Jamaican Dogwood bark for headache, which I love for menstrual headaches but is a bit more relaxing than some folks may want. Experimentation is always called for when formulating!
The Eclectics call it a specific for leg cramps and I have used it externally on very intense calf cramps to near-miraculous effect. It is indicated for restless legs, pregnancy induced leg spasm, pain from overwork or over exercise in all parts of legs, feet, and it has a place in back pain formulas.
Matthew Wood calls it a nutritive tonic which improves the powers of digestion and nutrition and Margi Flint indicated it for high blood pressure, these are 2 areas I have yet to explore but seem to make sense to me.
Black haw is an ally which has been used for a long time and has no reported negative qualities that I’ve found. It is a special plant which I love in every way and which deserves a place in our forest gardens, in our first aid kits and medicine chests.
a different view of urban foraging: winter edition January 22, 2013
“are you gonna eat that?”
hibiscus flowers
galangal root
lemongrass
devotion
smoked bluefish
cinnamon
RECAO
As much as I love being outside in nature I enjoy a different type of foraging too. I like to go from one little market to another in my hometown (Providence!), usually on foot, pushing my rickety-ass little market cart and collecting treasures. That is what food is, treasure, worth its weight in gold really. Cause you can’t eat gold, baby, and food is devotion. Food is my expression of love, my reason for gathering friends and family, my voice.
I like the so-called “ethnic” markets the best, the little places. I like the people, the stuff, the skills needed to find what I’m looking for–or didn’t know I was looking for. I like the dust-covered monkey salves and knobby roots, the tiny dried fish and the salamis hanging from the ceiling. I like butchers that say “hey, mama” and buildings painted hot pink. I like mysterious pastes, stuffed peppers, tamales, boxes of dried peppers and stacks of tortillas.
I like chubby tomatillos, eryngium foetidum and the guy who effortlessly hacks up the whole roast pig with a butcher knife. i like chicken feet, i like live crabs and live ducklings in a box. chicory coffee, korean ginseng and slurpy noodles. i like old teapots and banana flowers and tubs of bean curd.
this satisfies my need to forage, my need to stock up and try new things. I just made a vat of recaito and a jar of curry paste. Bones are simmering with cinnamon, star anise, shallots and ginger for pho. nothing cures my cabin fever like good food, spicy, sweet, fun, healthy, delicious food made with love and a little adventure.
chaga, oh chaga! December 13, 2012
chaga with dog’s leg
chaga
Oh, Chaga. Inonotus obliquus. What the hell is this stuff? It is a fungus which grows primarily on birch trees and allied trees in the birch family-some of my very favorite trees, of course. To call it a “mushroom” sounds absurd. It is a fungus, a fruiting body, and a firestarter.Chaga and birch seem to have a symbiotic relationship, swapping the mutual aid of healing with each other and whipping up a little batch of betulin!People decoct chaga for the usual amazing medicinal mushroom benefits like addressing cancer, supporting immunity and deep nourishment. It may, along with its home the birch tree, help address inflammation.
i hike through the birch and pine forests looking for standing dead or partially downed white birches to harvest chaga from. It is an odd and mysterious, dense, heavy chunk of space junk and can be quite difficult to pry off.i enjoy it as a decoction, perhaps with some roots and warming spices, infuse it into oils and make tinctures with it. i am working on a chaga-birch body butter right now and a warming chaga nutmeg massage oil.Chaga has an entry in the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center’s “cancer care” website. For more information on chaga check out Paul Stamets, Dr. Andrew Weil, Christopher Hobbes and Russia.
http://www.mskcc.org/cancer-care/herb/chaga-mushroom
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-stamets/chaga-mushroom_b_1974571.html
birch crown!
roots, medicine makers, and my calling December 10, 2012
Ah, the making of medicines. I am a creator. I began my herbal journey growing weed with my dear friend Aymar, sneaking around with jars of water in or packs and visiting our sort of pathetic little plants–somehow that led to us sitting quietly, outside, listening to birds sing and watching rain fall. That was the medicine we needed, and our scrappy little harvest was a bonus.
After that I was a home herbalist, a family herbalist, and I was searching for the way forward. I decided to be an herb farmer. Moved to the country, planted a lot of Calendula. I learned to ID. I learned to forage. Amazing. But it was the making of medicines that spoke to me, more than anything else. After years of creating mediocre art, writing poetry, and wandering about it was the CRAFT of medicine making that struck me, that grounded me, that fulfilled me like nothing else ever had.
And though I do consult, I do teach classes, I do write about herbalism absolutely nothing recharges me like medicine making. Nothing reminds me that I am exactly where I need to be like making medicines by hand, like digging roots in the cold and muddy swamp, like wielding my precious digging knife and mucking up my boots. Bug bites, sunsets, chapped lips, hours on my hands and knees harvesting precious violet flowers or digging massive burdock roots. Mmmmmmmmmmm.Coming home, bags of bark, my thighs sore from squatting and hiking, my dog tired from “helping”, my nails dirty and hair full of thorny crap. Herbgasm.
Then the washing, the chopping, the glug-glug-glug of my liquor and the creative spirit flowing right into my medicines is just pure joy. Pure, unadulterated, present-moment, interspecies wonder. Elixirs? Blending? Oh, yes. And I’m shaking my jars to booty bass and I’m pressing every drop of juice outta last summer’s precious flowers…..there is no greater heaven. The tastes, the smells, the hands-on, the healing intention, wrapping them up and sending them off to wonderful people. I can’t see myself doing anything else. I am an artisan. The craft of herbalism is a beautiful and meaningful craft which feeds me deeply, and I am thankful to be right where I belong.
solomon’s seal root
“we’re all gonna diiiiiiiiie!!!!!” November 16, 2012
fruit!
“Mycophobia is a cultural overreaction”-Garl Lincoff
Sooooo-fungi. Mycelium. Mushrooms. What’s up with them? Are they psycho killers? Should we be shaking in our booties at the likelihood that we will die from poisonous fungi? Um…. no.
A recent article circulating on facebook tells of a family who ate destroying angels and “almost died.” (They were saved by milk thistle seeds, which is somehow controversial.)
And the last sentence reads: “His family will only eat mushrooms from the grocery store from now on.”
Ya know, F that. Food at the grocery store is sprayed with all kinds of poison. Pumped up with diabetes-inducing sugars, fraught with blue lake number bajillion and obscene amounts of sodium and “flavor enhancers”. Food at the grocery store is hyper-preserved, factory farmed and packaged to the high heavens. And have we not heard of “recalls”? Peanut butter full of rat shit, ground meat full of “pink slime” and everything teeming with “allowable filth”. Yeah, safe.
I feel frustrated when people tell me to “be careful” when foraging for plants andf fungi. Yeah. No kidding. And should I be careful when driving, boating, drinking, eating peanuts, and ingesting (doctor prescribed!) pharmaceuticals?!?! All of which slay a zillion more humans than fungi?
I believe we can learn about fungi. I believe we can learn about wild plants. I believe humans are not as stupd as we act. Can we identify a banana? Can we tell the difference between an almond and a walnut? Or a poodle and a pitbull? Yes, most of us can. Can we learn to use an iphone, operate heavy machinery, program the damn VCR? Yes we can. So why do we think we can’t identify a destroying angel?
You don’t need to learn ALL mushrooms. Just learn those that kill. A small minority, I might add. Learn the clear sign of a poionous puffball. Learn the skirt of a destroying angel. Avoid LBMs. Never eat raw fungi. Always use at least 2 ID sources. (and this blog is sure as hell not one of them!!) If you aren’t sure, just don’t eat it. It’s not rocket science.
Often in our society we fear the forest, we fear the dark places, the unknown, we fear our own knowledge, our own hands. We overvalue the invariable. We overvalue the list of ingredients, the nutrition facts, the stamp of approval. And we project all this internalized crap onto fungi. And don’t tell me advertising has no hand in our panic. Don’t tell me big business isn’t eating our panic right up like fungi on a stump.
We CAN learn to recognize patterns. WE can learn basic botany. We are not helpless babies being manipulated by great evil lurking in the forest. And we can ingest stuff that doesn;t come from the supermarket. I have a few choice fungi that I have memorized, that I recognize and feel affection for. And, really, most fruiting bodies are just “eh” in the pan. (But that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy their presence outside!)
Foraging for wild fungi and wild plants and is a passion, an obsession. It is not inherently dangerous with some common sense and a basic grasp of major pitfalls, patience, safety guidelines and idenitfication skills. People have died from way lamer passions.
fruit!
Digging roots: fall photos November 11, 2012
angelica
teasel
angelica
washin’
handlin’
making epic messes
joe pye
close-up
plant medicines
making friends with fungi September 24, 2012
“i have learned that there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusion between moments of valid inspiration”-steve martin
flava
my name is traci, and i am a forage-a-holic. i think i was born foraging, but i still remember my 2 biggest pushers. the first was roseanne, a tiny elderly lady with the biggest fluffiest ragmop of black hair you can imagine. she probably weighed 90 pounds and dwelled amongst piles of gowns and woolens in the basement of her lavender-shuttered suburban ranch house. basically, you could go into the basement and rifle through the bags, boxes and hangers to find vintage treasure and she would bag it up, name a ridiculously low price, and throw in free nude nylons and polka-dotty scarves to make sure you could bring it all together. i still cherish a ridiculous rhinestone-studded mother-in-law number i found there 20 years ago. she has passed the mantle on to her daughters who run it as a thrift store combined with a head shop and wigs….it’s not the same. she taught me to look under, over, around and through.
i was born to forage. the knowledge that one will, eventually, uncover buried treasure-it is very tempting. i love bottle dumps. i love library book sales. beachcombing. free boxes.
horsetail
one day this proclivity of mine met an edible mushroom. i still remember the day. 6 years ago this fall. i was at a communal farm and 2 foragers presented me with a pan of fungi. rafter and andy, they had boxes of extraterrestrial grifola frondosa. i was coaxed into trying a bite of the buttery bits…and something clicked in my brain. oh, yeah. angels trumpeted, suns rose, moons spun stars into silver drops of dust.
i became a mushroom forager.
a love of foraging can be encouraged, but not taught. it is innate. all 3 of my kids forage, but one is really really good. we all have a basic foraging ability. we are animals. but we are wasting our ability on freaking bejeweled blitz and wheel of fortune. the desire must be activated! i find foraging satisfying to my primal side, which i didn’t realize existed until i ate that bite of fungi.
sweetfern
and activation is really what i am talking about here. i am an herbalist, and what that means to me is i match people and plants. i introduce people to plant medicines and get the hell out of the way. because it is not about me, it is about YOU forming a relationship of your own with plants. a lot of what i do is help you awaken with my flava. whether it is awakening your spirit with rose or awakening your gall bladder with turmeric or awakening your saliva with bitters the taste of my plant medicines, made with love, say more than this blog ever will. (thank goodness, really.) this is why i offer apothecary tastings, maintain a large bag of testers and always offer to taste tinctures and plant materials at my classes.
smell and taste access places in our brain and history that no written or spoken word have the ability to go, and may not be understood until later. tasting medicinal herbs/foods/fungi is like putting money in the bank of emotional knowledge to withdraw later when you need it.
it is exciting to have another voice with which to communicate with. and flavor is that voice.
girdles
live nude girls! September 6, 2012
just kidding, welcome to my nerdy photo gallery of late summer fungi! i am going to avoid naming the fungi because i do not think using some random person’s blog to identify mushrooms is reasonable and i do not want to be responsible if you snort a destroying angel and your liver implodes. get a book, or a stack of books, or go ask a slug.
trippy santa fungi
brightly colored fungi
my personal favorite fungi
spooky fungi
modest fungi
unidentified fungal object
her worshipfulness
lil’ fruity friend
birch buddy
pollination, foraging, exuberance, joy. June 14, 2012
just one day in mid-june…
harvesting milky oats
wild urban mulberries!
little harvester.
post-harvest exuberance
linden
gathering nectar
the money shot
mullein
honeysuckle
a little ginkgo tree
aaaaand, the berries. OH, the berries!!
