This update will be brief. The eastern yampah seed I collected last summer of 2017, having been sown outside to cold-moist stratify all winter, has germinated abundantly and healthfully.
Yampah generally takes three or four years to mature to flowering age, so by 2020 or 2021 at the latest I hope for the first wave of flowers. More later…
After climbing over the Sierra Nevada mountains from the west to the east, the landscape drops into the Great Basin. Here it is the country of sagebrush steppe, desert grasslands, cottonwood and aspen canyons, river willows, and piñon-juniper forests. This year, on the border of Nevada and California I gathered pinenuts from the single-needle piñon trees (Pinus monophylla). It wasn’t my first time gathering pinenuts — I gathered from the two-needle pinyon Pinus edulis in Taos, New Mexico in 2015 — but this was a really enjoyable trip and I got to dig deeper into the ecology of these trees as well as the ins and outs of the pinenutting process.
Continue reading The Piñon Pines — Pinus monophylla, Pinus edulis, and more…
One of the most useful aspects to learning plant families is the way one begins to find and see the connections between seemingly separate species. Take the flowers of Ipomoea pandurata above… five-petaled big white morning glories with fuchsia centers, on a sprawling vine of heart-shaped leaves.
Now check out the next picture of Ipomoea batatas. See the similarities? Continue reading Mecha-meck, the wild sweet potato vine — Ipomoea pandurata
Sometime in August my friend Eric Lewis sends me a message. Eric is a teacher of plant knowledge and permaculture practices in the Maryland area. He’s found a large stand of wild rice in a local river. I’d never harvested wild rice before so the idea of gathering some was exciting, especially rice that was local to the Chesapeake Bay bioregion, only a couple hours drive away from me. I knew that wild rice or Zizania aquatica was a fairly common tidal grass up and down the east coast but I had no experience with it. Wild rice normally conjures up ideas of the north country regions surrounding the Great Lakes, but as I was soon to find out, it is more common and abundant than I had imagined. Eric kept daily watch over the ripening rice, and when it was ready for harvest, I borrowed a canoe and we took to the river…
Continue reading Southern Wild Rice or River Rice — Zizania aquatica
Wild plants have made up most of the focus of this blog. But what about “domesticated” plants, such as the annuals we grow in our gardens?
How can we treat them that they behave more like wild plants – vigorous, resilient, low-maintenance, and more fecund and feral – yet which continue to supply our needs for flavor, nutrition, and ease of access?
The answers, I believe, are found inside the genome of the seed where genetic diversity is found. I will explore the concept behind landrace gardening, which provides for many real-world examples of genetic diversity in action.