Happy New Year, folks! In Vermont we are in Deep Winter, which often means snow up to my bellybutton when I emerge from the woodstove cocoon of our old farmhouse.
The good folks at the Herbal Academy asked me to contribute a piece on circulatory herbs for winter and how best to get them in your belly: Warming Winter Rituals: Herbal Truffles for Good Circulation. Check out the teaser below and click on the link for details, materia medica, and recipes!
This year we packed our bags again for an epic foraging and seafaring trip to visit our friend Micah, who runs the Atlantic Holdfast Company off of Deer Isle, Maine. Our visits are filled with exciting extremes, kept on our toes while clinging to rocks in crashing tides or laying back against soft grass under giant old maples as the wind runs soft fingers through the St. John’s wort. . .
As some of you have read before on this blog, I am a freelance writer and Associate Academy Educator at the Herbal Academy, an online herbal education project that holds SO MUCH awesome information and hosts amazing resources. In addition to plant monographs and articles for the Herbarium, I also contribute to the blog. Check out my newest exploration of herbs, the human palate, and coming out of winter — Sour Flavor: How Taste Can Rinse Out Winter.
Today the equinox came, sandwiched between two watery eclipses spanning Pisces and Aries, bracing us inside this liminal space, a transition to spring and return of growing, a day awash in both strong bright light and cold brisk winds. Watching through the windows at breakfast, standing in the greenhouse sprinkling soft rains on my flats of tiny green starts, I could feel a dragon stirring in the ground beneath my boots.
Follow the link to read the full article!
This Mercury retrograde of revisiting + rethinking has been a heart-wringer for all us resilient creatures.
Rose medicine brings warm comfort as we choose to return to our bodies each morning, as we stumble through navigating our own boundaries and one another’s. I’m learning to choose snow magic over fear of slipping on ice, an ongoing process for this lil Southerner, and I’m appreciating the tender rose thorns reminding me to stay open rather than succumbing to resentment from the heartache.
Bust & Mend Grief & Heartbreak Formula is going back up on the website asap, y’all, holler at us or visit the online apothecary for yours.
#rosarugosa #plantmedicine #queermagic #stayopen #goodboundaries #allies #witchery #takecare
Check it out, friends.
I’ve been published on the blog of the Herbal Academy of New England, waxing poetic about the grizzly parts of the animal. Read on to see why you might want to be saving those chicken bones. . .
If I was better at handling winter, I’d be moving to Maine.
In mid-July, despairing of finding any sizable quantity of St. John’s wort for my apothecary and feeling restless in what Vermonters call “heat,” I headed to the Maine coast with a companion to find out what my friend Micah has been doing these past four years.
Turns out, he’s been living on a magical island that you can only get to by boat. Micah is the founder of the Atlantic Holdfast Company, a small labor of hand-harvested love, bringing you the loveliest cuts of seaweeds that Neptune is willing to part with. He spends his time harvesting vegetables from ledges awash in salt water with a serrated knife, under the curious gazes of dog-like seals who venture in only occasionally for a nibble.
Micah picked us up from a dock on the southern tip of Deer Isle in a friend’s lobstering boat, which we traded halfway through the Penobscot Bay for a much smaller vessel with an outboard motor. Micah positioned my pal and me just so in the boat, in order to balance the weight in the laden vessel. I learned quickly to tuck my feet under a weighty cooler to prevent myself from being cast overboard in the substantial wind.
After a good half hour of motoring out, we arrived thoroughly goosebumped at a small isle covered in St. John’s wort, and so I was immediately satisfied, notwithstanding the epic kelp harvesting, rock-hopping, beach-combing, and roasted goat and lobster dinner in our immediate futures.
The daily activities of seaweed harvest are of the gutsy gritty romance that characterizes many of Maine’s industries. Several hours before the lowest tide of the month, my friend and I headed down to the barn where the seaweed and wetsuits were hung to dry. My pal and I struggled into our wetsuits as if the suits were actually exercise accoutrements designed to help us achieve and sustain effortful contorted positions. Half an hour later, after accomplishing ten chores in as many minutes, Micah came along and slipped into his suit like an easy second skin over rearrangable limbs.
We piled more equipment into the boat, waded in, and pushed off, the spray upon my glasses offering an impressionist’s view of the sea and sky. After another half hour, we arrived at several exposed ledges that Micah identified as prime seaweed territory. With a serrated knife in my right hand and in my left the rope to an inner tube with a harvesting basket stuffed in it and floating upon the curl, I threw myself overboard into four feet of sucking tides and slippery seaweed-covered rock.
We were after Digitata, the many-fingered kelp, and all the while the spidery Alaria fronds curled raggedly around our waists and thighs as the tides tried their damnedest to swallow me or at least laugh insanely as my tiny human attempt to balance upon two legs. To harvest the Digitata required that I reach into water up to my shoulder and grasp the stipe with an inarticulate gloved hand. The stipe was often as thick around as I could grasp, and without allowing the chaos to interfere with my sawing, I’d cut through the meat of it in order to retrieve 2-4 inches of stipe and all of the frond. Micah had an eye for the amount he wanted to harvest in order to manage the patch sustainably. Just when I was starting to wonder whether I was in control of the bucket full of seaweed or the bucket was in control of me, Micah shouted for us to hoist ourselves back in the boat, a feat which I was able to execute inelegantly thanks only to the quantity of pull-ups required in the study of acrobatics.
This all occurred between 4:30 am and 7:30 am.
Let me be clear, I was inordinately thrilled by every single moment of the harvest and would encourage anyone looking for a foraging adventure to test her sea legs. Pay no mind to the sizable seal nosing at your toe.
Being the smallest of our threesome — I have since learned from a Vermont natural science museum that the smallest animals often don’t survive the winter simply because of mass — I went directly under the covers upon our return to the cabin on the flower-covered isle and shivered for the better part of two hours. When I woke, I ate an enormous quantity of bacon and eggs, feta and cucumbers, walnuts and dates, and squares of dark chocolate.
Around noon, we returned to the boat, which had been pushed in to us by the tide, and we spent the happy part of an hour hauling buckets of wet seaweed up to the barn. My friend and I used a little yellow cart, which I pushed and he pulled, and we’d delivery the slippery vegetables to barn, where Micah had designed several ingenious sets of pullies and racks and ropes to haul the seaweed from the bottom of the barn to the second story.
Seaweeds begin to exude alginates after an hour of so out of the water, and so I had the sensation of having my hands covered in mermaid sneezes as I hung the muppet-like plants on thin wooden sticks in their specially-constructed racks.
Processing plants — shucking corn, pruning garlic, stripping leaves from dried tulsi, pinching golden ground cherries from their papery lantern husks — is one of the most intimate times for human-plant and human-human bonding. The plants slither or crumble or shed all over you according to their natures, and we homo sapiens catch up on all the gossip since we last we met: what its like to find a date in rural New England, the after-hours shenanigans of the neighboring lobstermen, the best way to butcher a goat, farming versus foraging. The usual.
After hanging the Digitata to dry, I had another nap, and then in the late afternoon my comrade and I wandered the perimeter of the island, past a giant elderberry tree covered in soft flowers, over rocky inlets ridden with buoys and lobster crates washed ashore, past Rosa rugosa thickets heavy with green hips, through patches and patches of wild raspberries, and up into the arms of a giant old rowan tree covered in the droppings of a raccoon tucking in to the early raspberries.
Along the shore we gathered the bladderwrack, which lay like the pocketed hair of mermaids, sucked at by the rocks at the water’s edge. We bent amid the tumble of boulders to snip the seaweed and pile it into our buckets. Bladderwrack has an odd mineral butter aroma, strongly of the sea and also sort of animal-ish. Micah recommended that we start to dry the seaweed in the car on the way home, and then grind it, as it was best as an additive or condiment to dishes or smoothies.
So that’s what I did. First on the porch in the sun, then finished it off in my dehydrator. A coffee grinder did the job just fine. What a particular plant this is! Here are some things I’ve learned about it since.
ENERGETICS & USES
Fucus vesiculosis (the species name meaning “little vesicles,” for the sealed air pockets that float the stuff) is the Latin binomial for the brown seaweed bladderwrack, a form of kelp famous for its ability to stimulate sluggish thyroid function. High in a form of iodine which is the immediate precursor to the thyroid hormones T3 and T4, bladderwrack is also highly nutritive, demulcent, and stimulating to cellular metabolism. The specific indications for use of this sea vegetable medicinally include both energetic and constitutional pictures as well as discreet diagnoses.
+ Depeletion: Bladderwrack in dense in micronutrients besides iodine, including calcium, magnesium potassium, sodium, silicon, iron, vitamin D, many B-complex vitamins, as well as essential fatty acids. The powdered sea vegetable is useful in debility, poor digestion, post-surgery, convalescence, postpartum, and other situations where remineralization is necessary. Particularly indicated for lethargy, dry skin and membranes, constipation resulting from dryness, and slow cognitive and physical development in children.
+ Chronic and Systemic Inflammation: Hot baths, compresses, and oral supplementation with bladderwrack is often recommended in rheumatic conditions. Treatments have been documented to relieved sore and achy joints and muscles as well as stimulate cartilage growth.
+ Adrenal and Immune Function: Studies have shown bladderwrack to improve duration and quality of sleep, promote tissue healing, and support anti-viral activity. Fucoidan is a compound found in brown seaweeds which has been shown to interfere with all stages of viral attack as well as will proliferation of human cancer cells. Dr. Drum even points out that all human cells studied have receptors for Fucose, the end-group sugar on the Fucoidan compound.
+ Metabolic and Cardiovascular Function: Bladderwrack added into the diet delays hardening of the arteries, lowers chronically high blood pressure, and stimulates cellular metabolism — all conditions correlated with low thyroid function.
SAVORY MORNING OATS!
This is my chance to share my favorite breakfast recipe, an not-sweet oatmeal recipe that I prefer for its ability to sustain the body through cold and hard-working mornings.
INGREDIENTS
Steel-cut or rolled oats, soaked 2-24 hours, drained 1 tablespoon ground bladderwrack or other seaweed 1 shredded carrot 2 tablespoons sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, and/or walnuts 1-2 pats of butter or coconut oil 1-2 teaspoons fresh-ground black pepper Nutritional yeast or miso as desired
DIRECTIONS
+ Bring water for oats to a boil, adding an extra half-cup to account for seaweed addition. + Upon boil, add oats, ground bladderwrack, and nuts and seeds. + Reduce to a simmer until oats are tender, as desired + Remove from heat and add remaining ingredients. + Easy peasy!
SOURCES
Maude Grieve. Bladderwrack. A Modern Herbal. https://www.botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/b/bladde54.html
Ryan Drum. Sea Vegetables for Food and Medicine. http://www.ryandrum.com/seaxpan1.html
Herbal Riot. The Magickal Uses of Bladderwrack. http://herbalriot.tumblr.com/post/56686839194/the-magickal-uses-of-bladderwrack
Most researchers agree that alliums and humans have been circling around each other for at least 5,000 years, and its seems pretty likely that our paleolithic ancestors were intimate with a variety of onions and leeks long before then. The allium has been so essential to human evolution that it has left its fingerprints not only in on human nourishment and medicine but also on art and mummification.
Allium Ethnobotany
A sacred object in ancient Egyptian cosmology, the layered round structure of the onion is thought by archaeologist to have symbolized eternal life. Mummies have been found with onions in a variety of locations in the body, including inside the pelvis, in front of and inside the eye sockets, and attached to the soles of the feet. In medieval Europe, onions were offered as rent payment as well as to newlyweds as gifts, while the Pilgrims schlepped the bulbs across the ocean only to find that the indigenous folks they encountered gathered plenty of alliums from the wild.
Garlic, similarly, was cultivated in central Asia around 3000 BC from its feral form Allium longicuspis into the modern domesticated Allium sativa. Unani-tibb (Arab-Greek medicine) had a hand in helping spread the use of Garlic medicinally to Europe, refining the practice and research of medicine while Europe languished in the dark and unwashed Middle Ages. Medical texts from the middle 17th century recommended garlic for treating symptoms of plague and smallpox, and in 1858, chemists and microbiologists proved garlic to be a useful antiseptic for wound infections and dysentery, allowing the bulb to become an ally to medics during WWI and II. The ethnobotanist Daniel Moerman describes indigenous North American practices that prized ramps for their blood-cleansing properties, noting the Cherokee used the juice to treat colds and earaches.
There are times, in the dead of winter, I comfort myself by reading the names of the seed varieties in the catalogs: Nodding Onion, Babington’s Leek, Elephant Garlic, Texas Star Multiplier, Gray Griselle Shallots, Grandma Pfeifer Walking Onion. It’s not only the poetry of the varieties or the imagery of green things poking through the soil. There is something comforting in domesticity of the onion, the spicy sweet of the round-bellied bulbs and all the allium-resplendent meals that lay in the cellular memories of my taste buds.
But the Ramps. . .
The current sexy celebrity of the allium family is, of course, ramps (Allium tricoccum). Also known as “wild leeks,” ramps have, in the last ten years of localorganicslowfoodartisinal mania, made headlines because, well, they are so wildly delicious. There are ramps festivals, ramps cook-offs, ramps recipe books, and seasonal ramps dishes at fancy (and not-so-fancy) establishments.
The thing is, ramps are particular creatures, each bulb growing a pair of leaves on inclined patches in damp and rich woodlands. This lily once ranged as far west as the Dakotas and Alabama, but the bulk of the current healthy patches now remain along the eastern edge of the continent, from north Georgia to northern New England. Like many food traditions that have long been the unadorned but well-loved practices of everyday working people, the ramps craze has come without much thought from marketers and consumers as to the stewardship of the ramps populations and the ecosystems from which they come. I know lots of folks who, as with their ginseng and morel hunting locations, guard the whereabouts of their woodland ramps patches, not out of selfishness only but out of concern for the well-being and future generation of these sweet and tender alliums.
This year, while heading up a long dirt road to the biggest patch I’d ever laid eyes on, I said hi to two folks plopped down in a smaller patch by the side of the road, who each harvested while sitting on their bums.
“Does that qualify as foraging?” my friend said to me, and I reflected that my teachers defined sustainable harvesting as leaving the bulb and roots, moving around the patch, and only taking one leaf out of every ten in a given area. Less likely if you are plunked down in one spot.
Cook + Nutrition
Wild foods nearly always have as dense or denser nutritional content than their domesticated kin. Like onions and garlic, ramps are high in anti-oxidants like polyphenols and cardio-protective sulphur compounds like kaempferol, which protect the epithelial lining of your vascular tissues from the scarring of oxidative stress as well as help the liver to process cholesterol. One ramp contains 10% of the recommended daily allowance (RDA) for iron. Ramps are also high in choline, a neurotransmitter needed for cognitive function, and the essential B vitamin folate.
A popular way to preserve ramps is to make pesto and freeze it. I, however, am rarely able to delay gratification when ramps are in season, feeling that the greatest way to appreciate this ephemeral treat is to sautee them fresh with butter and eat them thus with every meal while my small harvest lasts. The trick to cooking ramps is to sautee (or grill them!) them quickly and lightly or add them in at the end (like in eggs). If you needs some more ideas for ramps recipes, check out these at Serious Eats or the Huffington Post.
That’s how famous these allium are.
RAMPS FESTIVALS
Helvetia, WV. www.helvetiawv.com/events/helvetia_ramps/helvetia_ramps.htm
Hudson, NY. http://www.rampfesthudson.com/
Flagpond, TN. http://www.flagpond.com/festival/ramp/fest.htm
Ramps Dinners, The King of Stink. http://www.kingofstink.com/
Feast of the Ramson. http://www.richwooders.com/ramp/ramps.htm
RESOURCES
Jess Schreibstein, “In The Land Of Wild Ramps, It’s Festival Time.” NPR. http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/05/08/182354602/in-the-land-of-wild-ramps-its-festival-time
The History of Onions. National Onion Association. http://www.onions-usa.org/all-about-onions/history-of-onions
“The Sustainability of Harvesting Ramps.” http://botanicalposters.com/blog/129/the-sustainability-of-harvesting-ramps/
“History of Garlic.” Vegetable Facts. http://www.vegetablefacts.net/vegetable-history/history-of-garlic/
Philipp W. Simon. “The Origin and Distribution of Garlic: How Many Garlics Are There?” Vegetable Crops Research Unit, Department of Horticulture, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706. http://www.ars.usda.gov/Research/docs.htm?docid=5232
Scott Sheu. Foods Indigenous to the Western Hemisphere: Ramps (Allium tricoccum), Wild leek, Wild Garlic. http://www.aihd.ku.edu/foods/Ramps.html
Julie Daniluk, R.H.N. “Ramp up your heart health with wild leeks.” Chatelaine. http://www.chatelaine.com/health/diet/ramp-up-your-heart-health-with-wild-leeks/
Julie R. THomson. “Ramps Are Here! Stop Freaking Out And Go Make These Recipes.” The Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/10/ramp-recipes_n_1428780.html
Laurel Randolph. “15 Recipes to Celebrate Ramps.” Serious Eats. http://www.seriouseats.com/2015/04/ramp-scallion-spring-recipes.html
“Here’s 10 Ways to Cook with Ramps from you CSA.” New York Times Cooking. http://cooking.nytimes.com/68861692-nyt-cooking/1188870-heres-10-ways-to-cook-with-the-ramps-from-your-csa
Friends, I’m excited to share a guest post I’ve contributed to an awesome blog chronicling surviving and thriving through chronic illness. The article even features my fifth-grade science teacher Mrs. Harrison! You can read the post at the link below, and I encourage you to check out other articles there too.
