I got called out for writing a cop out of a post yesterday. My reader raised an excellent point. If we were truly dependent on foraging for our survival, we wouldn’t let a little snow stand in our way. So here is the post you have gotten to read. Enjoy!
Here we see a photo of my favorite patch of chickweed (Stellaria media) (which you may be sick of hearing about before the winter is over).
Chickweed (Stellaria media) in the snow
As you can see in the photo, the chickweed is thriving despite the cold temperatures. It will continue providing us raw salad greens for some time.
In the below photo, notice the beautiful dandelion greens (Taraxacum officinale).
Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) in the snow
They are in such good shape, I could harvest half of them for greens, and the other half to roast the roots for a caffeine-free coffee substitute.
And here we see a colony of garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata).
Garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) in the snow
I have very mixed feelings about having such a healthy “crop” of garlic mustard, since it is an invasive species that crowds out other native plants. I intended to cull this particular patch by dining on the greens, or making some intensely flavored pesto.
Last but not least, here is a tenacious burdock plant (Arctium minus).
First-year burdock plant (Arctium minus) in the snow
I am hoping this little guy makes it through the winter. Burdock is a biennial, and in its second year of life forms an edible flower stalk which I have yet to sample. (I was able to dig up a nearby first-year back in the fall to sample the burdock root.)
There you go! Four edible plants that can be found even in the winter. Now that you know what to look for, you can successfully survive by foraging in the snow too!**
I had a few topics to choose from for this week’s post, but they all needed fresh photos. However, we finally got snow, so I am not going anywhere today!
Yay, snow! First snow of 2019.
Luckily, I had a backup post!
I’m technically cheating with today’s post – I previously discussed spotting persimmons (Diospyros virginiana) in the winter, once the leaves no longer hide the fruit. However, I recently took a new photo that showed extremely well how a female persimmon tree stands out against a clear winter sky.
American persimmons in the winter
At this point, in mid-January, these fruits are inedible. We’ve had several hard freezes, and the persimmons have turned mushy and sad.
But once you find the female trees, you know where to return next fall for a persimmon harvest!
(…assuming the trees are on your own property, or the property of someone whose permission you have to harvest from them, so you can clear the ground around the trees for the fruit that falls.)
This is the second post in a series (of undetermined length) on techniques I have tried to improve my brain power. The first post focused on one of the easiest and cost effective approaches – physical activity and exercise. Today I’m going to talk about one of the more complicated options. Nutritional supplements. (Queue dramatic music.)
For the record, if I participated in an affiliate marketing program, this would be a profitable post for me because I’m talking about a LOT of products. But my goal is to share what I’ve personally tried, and what made a big enough difference to me to keep using. For this reason, I am NOT including hyperlinks to every single product listed in this message. If you are interested in learning more, you are very capable of looking them up on Amazon.com yourself!
(Also, if I ever permit on this site it will only be for causes or organizations I personally support as well.)
The supplement issue is especially challenging for me now, since in 2019 I am actively pursuing a lower-energy, less-industrialized, less-consumerist lifestyle.
And nutritional supplements are the poster children for industrial processed products.
But I, like so many other Americans, am seduced by the carefully crafted promises, the half truths, and my own desperate wish that fixing all my problems was as easy as popping a pill.
Especially mental problems!
Early in 2017 – before I started my ‘book diet’ – I acquired a copy of Dave Asprey’s Head Strong. I’d heard of lifehacking of course (who hasn’t) and even biohacking, but this was the first systematic treatise I’d read on the subject of deliberately hacking your brain chemistry.
Among all the other suggestions, there was (surprise, surprise) a section for nutritional supplements. After reading the whole book, I decided to give some of them a try… and if a few supplements were good, then MANY supplements must be even better. I carefully crafted a detailed schedule for which supplement, in what quantity, to take exactly when, to maximize my brain benefits.
Unfortunately, all those brain benefits failed to inspire me to put that schedule somewhere for posterity, so I could share the exact details with you almost two years later.
Here are the fragments I could reconstruct from memory and re-reading the relevant chapter of Head Strong.
Morning, with my Bullet Proof Coffee: COQ10 (p. 259), Magnesium citrate (p. 260 – 261), Krill Oil (p. 264 – 265), one packet of Jeunesse Reserve Antioxident Fruit Blend.
BTW, I was already drinking my own personal variation of Bullet Proof Coffee years before this book came out.
During the day: I am pretty sure I took vitamin B12 and Folinic Acid in the afternoon (p.260), and I think I took them both twice a day although I cannot now recall why. Perhaps because the dosage I could find was only half of what the book called for. I also took Creatine throughout the day (p. 263) in pretty high doses for the “loading phase” described in the book. I didn’t stick with it long enough to actually get out of the loading phase! I know at some point during the day I also took “Sprout Extract” (p. 266 – 267) but I can’t remember when I took it because it is supposed to be taken on an empty stomach. At that stage of my life, I pretty much ate around the clock! …yes, I realize that wasn’t even two years ago. A lot can change in two years!
Evening: Calcium with Vitamin D3 (I don’t recall taking a separate, dedicated Vitamin D3 supplement, but Calcium with Vitamin D3 was already part of my routine) (p. 2261-262)
Bedtime: I experimented a few times with taking Magnesium at bed time to help with sleep
As needed: Activated Charcoal after eating any especially inflammatory foods (p. 262 – 263)
I also took BCAAs (p. 259) though I don’t recall what time of day. I do however remember distinctly feeling like a poser when I did it, because the supplement is intended for body builders!
I tried one bottle of the Brain Octane MCT in my morning Bullet Proof coffee, and it seemed to make a difference the first few cups. (I only drank one a day, I swear!) But I switched back to regular MCT oil because by the end of the bottle, the effects didn’t seem sufficiently dramatic to justify the expense. That was the only one of Asprey’s own brand of supplements I tried. The Ketoprime, Glutathione, and ActivePQQ looked interesting, but I just couldn’t bring myself to even more money, on top of everything else! At least most of the other supplements I could procure locally.
This whole experiment lasted only a few weeks. It was ridiculously expensive and the epitome of unsustainable in my world. My entire day revolved around ensuring I took various supplements on schedule! More tellingly, I personally did not notice much improvement in my mental performance … probably because I was so flustered and scatterbrained trying to stay on track with taking so many different supplements on a schedule! I still take a few, though – more on that below.
After reading The 4 Hour Body in early 2018, I added a few additional supplements to my daily brain health line up, mostly focused around sleep. I don’t have a copy of the book handy (this was *after* my book diet started), but going from my Amazon.com order history, I added N-Acetyl Cysteine (NAC) and Phosphatidylserine (aka PS) right before bed to help me fall and stay asleep. If I recall correctly, Tim Ferriss also mentioned magnesium in The 4 Hour Body, possibly also in context of sleep. My memory is faint because I was already taking magnesium at that point, so it was more of a reinforcement for an existing behavior, rather than a new one.
I have also experimented with the lion’s mane tea from Four Sigmatic. Unfortunately, the cost of the tea is high enough that I save the tea for “special occasions” (when my brain needs a hug, like the box says!) and I have read in online forums that lion’s mane is more effective when you take it regularly to keep levels consistent in your body. And drinking the tea daily is not in my budget right now!
Now in early 2019, these are the only brain specific supplements I still take:
COQ10: in the morning with my Bullet Proof coffee because allegedly the fat helps absorb the COQ10.
Magnesium: one in the morning and one at night. I can actually tell when I take them at night because my dreams are especially vivid and intense when I do.
PS: because I actually feel (or think i feel, anyway) a difference in my mental function when I am taking PS. The PS I take also has gingko, gotu kola, rosemary and dimethylethanolamine (DMAE) in it. I take this in the evening, again to help with sleep. I cycle off the PS for a week or so in between bottles.
I have also noticed I fall asleep faster and harder when I take NAC as well in the evenings. However there are plenty of other contributing factors for sleep quality (that’s another post of its own!), so I stopped taking NAC a few months ago. Although after researching NAC benefits while writing this post (namely reading articles like this one), I may reintroduce it!
Of course, the real question is how much do supplements really make a difference, versus just causing a placebo effect? After all, if you’re spending money on all these supplements, and all the smart lifehackers out there say they work, then they have to… right? But there have been numerous studies both about whether supplements are effective at all, and extensive debates over whether they even contain the ingredients labeled on the bottle. Additionally, I lost a lot of faith after listening to the audiobook version of Suggestible You by Erik Vance September of last year. (If you take maintenance prescriptions or even over the counter medication on a frequent basis, you might want to skip this one. You’ll be happier not knowing.)
On the other hand, if the medicine or supplement works through the power of suggestion … it still works! So maybe that isn’t such a bad thing!
Off to the local vitamin store I go. Oh wait. Never mind. Off to research more natural ways to enhance brain function. Stay tuned!
Winter foraging is mainly about locating plants to harvest from in a different season. The lack of foliage and undergrowth allows for better visibility of some characteristics.
A few plants are still edible in the coldest weather. But I promise I won’t sing the praises of chickweed *every* single week until spring arrives. (OK, maybe I will for a several weeks though.)
We start the new year with staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina), a short tree or tall shrub I mentioned back in July. The female members of this species produce edible red drupes with a sour coating. The coating is water soluble so the drupes can be soaked in water to produce the base for “sumac-ade”. I tried making this myself, but it didn’t seem very flavorful, perhaps because the excessively rainy summer had washed the flavor away.
Remember, if the plant has white berries, it may be poison sumac rather than staghorn sumac, and is (surprise, surprise) poisonous!
Once the leaves have fallen, the female sumac shrubs are particularly easy to spot because the drupes cling to their bare branches throughout the entire winter.
Staghorn sumac drupes stand out against a winter sky
Obviously these instructions won’t do you much good until later this summer … but by then you will know exactly where all the female staghorn sumacs are.
Except the ones alongside busy, fume-filled, dangerous highways. Leave those for wild birds!
As 2018 draws to a close, I reflected on the past year of foraging in central Maryland. I mean, a “year in review” is a thing people do, right?
The most notable theme for 2018 was “learning” – both learning what plants grew in this area, where they were (or weren’t) to be found, when and how to harvest them, and how much I still have to learn about, well, everything!
2018 provided some unexpected surprises, finding plants I’d never even known existed (like the flying dragon citrus), and amazing successes (like the local proliferation of pawpaws). But even these successes were hampered by learning curves: how do best make use of this abundance, now that I’ve found it? For example, I still have the Mason jar of pawpaw liqueur from early October steeping on my counter top, because I’m not sure what else to do with it! Other wild edibles I found but didn’t know how to actually take advantage of included:
acorns (which got its own separate post)
amaranth (mentioned last week – and I STILL haven’t managed to get enough of the chaff out to count as edible in my opinion)
pokeweed shoots
black walnuts and hickory nuts, both of which are so difficult to shell that I have only made a token attempt to use what I harvested
Another recurring theme from this year was my inability to find and harvest enough of a given wild plant to actually use. Wild grapes, chinkapins, ground cherries, and spring beauties come to mind. This particular challenge closely relates to another theme of the year: accessibility issues. For instance, my two local American persimmon trees had plenty of fruit, but I couldn’t get to them easily enough for a bountiful harvest due to the overgrowth that prevented me from gathering fruit that had already fallen to the ground.
Accessibility was also a challenge for cattails, sumac berries, and evening primrose, all of which seemed to grow best along roadsides. Particularly busy highways!
Additionally, my timing still needs a lot of work! Since this was my first year foraging year round, this comes as no surprise. Everything in nature has a rhythm, and matures in its own season. For example, I think my recent failure to harvest nutsedge tubers was mostly an issue of timing. I also missed the mayapples due to my inexperience. To complicate matters, the excessively wet year and late frost probably impacted the timing of harvests in ways I can’t yet understand, given how new I am to this field.
Last but not least, 2018 saw me reaching out to the local foraging community (and the overlapping tribes of permaculture and sustainability). Through visiting the Mother Earth News Fair, taking a class at the Fox Haven Learning Center, and attending the Third Annual Pawpaw Festival at Long Creek Homestead (which I apparently forgot to blog about!).
I debated whether to continue my weekly foraging post into the new year. Particularly as it is winter, and cold, and what is there left to say? Then I realized as I was writing this post, that I still have SO much to learn about nature and its bounty, and how humans can live more healthily and sustainably through foraging, and the best way for me to learn is to share my learning process with you, my readers. (All three of you… yes, I am up to three! *waves*) I hope you will continue reading and learning with me in 2019!
Also, if you are interested in more “real time” updates from my world of permaculture, gardening, foraging, and lower-energy-living, you can follow me on Instagram as @lean6life.
I wanted to post about my experience with processing amaranth for seeds, but I still haven’t successfully processed them. Ooops? Hopefully after the holidays have passed…
In the meantime, however you choose to spend these last weeks of the year, please do so with love, cheer and peace!
