June 2010 Archives

Heads up, blog readers, especially those of you interested in wild edible plants--I have an exciting announcement to make!

New Wild Food Girl site:

Etmarciniec.com is now the proud parent of a new baby bloglet dedicated solely to the topic of wild edible and medicinal plants as well as other wild food. Please oh please visit wildfoodgirl.com. (And if you want, you can join the RSS feed in the upper right corner.) I've posted two new articles already, one related to goosefoot and the other to cow parsnip. I do not intent to post any new wild food articles here at etmarciniec.com, so please make the move with me if wild edible plants is your reason for visiting this site.

What happens to the old content?

After much thought, I decided to leave most of the old articles up here at etmarciniec.com for ease of browsing, although I may set up a 303 redirect on a few of the most highly-searched pages if I can figure out how on earth to do that without screwing things up, heh.

In the meantime, thanks so much for reading and I hope to hear from you over at wildfoodgirl.com.

-Erica 

Gregg and I have found yet another tasty wild green to supplement our store-bought diet: fireweed!

Not to be confused with other plants referred to by the same common name (I found reference to one in an older wild edible plants guide), the plant of which I write is Epilobium angustifolium.

I first read about it in Gregory L. Tilford's Edible and Medicinal Plants of the West. In fact, the book's cover is adorned with a montage of fireweed flowers atop a blown-up image of a fireweed leaf, so Tilford must think highly of the plant.

So many people have told me that the "bluebell" is edible, and yet, despite my growing collection of wild edible plants literature, I have found only one reference to it as a food source. Thus, much of my evidence for the plant's edibility is circumstantial.

"The leaves are awesome," said my friend Rachel Sowers, a gardener by trade, as we rode up the chairlift late season at Arapahoe Basin. "If you're camping in the backcountry you can add the leaves to a salad. They're super tasty," she said.

And Gregg's sister Wendy has a friend who supposedly "goes gaga for bluebells," but who has, on occasion, eaten enough of the small blue bell-shaped flowers to become sick.

Type "hair boom" into your browser and, with the exception of opinion pieces, you can read the same Associated Press article in newspapers across the country which announces the decision by BP and the U.S. Coast Guard not to use the hair booms made of donated human hair and animal fur to help clean up the oil spill in the Gulf. "We foresee a risk that widespread deployment of the hair boom could exacerbate the debris problem," Coast Guard spokesman Petty Officer Shawn Eggert is quoted as saying.

How, exactly, would the hair booms exacerbate the debris problem?

According to an attractive fact sheet [PDF] by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), "Using Booms in Response to Oil Spills," a February 2010 field test revealed that "commercial sorbent boom absorbed more oil and much less water than hair boom, which became waterlogged and sank within an hour."

Enter Matter of Trust, the 6-person San Francisco based nonprofit that has mobilized volunteers, collected 20 warehouses full of hair, animal fur, nylons, crab traps, and other materials needed to construct the booms, and yes--conducted their own tests.