Snow on the nettles' spot

Well, I threw several cubic feet of snow on the location where my nettles grow. This is pretty much what it looks like. You have to imagine the nettle part.

I hope that helps them, as I will no longer be able to warm the earth with my stare while I search for the slightest hint of  a nubbin that lets me know they are coming back. Well, at least until Friday, when it will likely melt. For now the highs are in the 30s, so there is no real melt going on now.

Thanks to the wonder of whatever caused our village guy to not shovel my intersection versus all the other intersections in town, I got an extra workout making sure I could get into the street with my non-huge, non-4WD pickup. But the extra snow went onto the flower beds and the nettles. Well, I admit, some went on the dog. She's nimble, and it's not easy to get snow on her. Of course, a shovel is not the best tool if you want to throw snow at a moving target, either.

It was officially four inches of snow, but Sunday was a wonder of howling winds. Some of the snow drifted up to 8 inches deep. I can admire that, for four inches of snow, and 30 mph. We think 11 inches at 50 mph is manageable most years.

I mostly stayed in on Sunday. I spackled, and got some crafts and sewing projects underway and finished. I did dishes and cooked and let the cat in. Then I let the cat out. Then I let the cat in, etc. etc. there was a lot of cat action going on, for sure.

Herb books can be unexpected books.

I was recently at a really nice two-hour workshop where the woman, Rachel Liester of Red Road Herbs, hit on a lot of herbal topics in a short amount of time.

One of the topics was books about herbs.

I remember one of the first books I ever looked at was "The Herb Book" by John Lust. I borrowed it from the library and later bought a copy because of the encyclopedic nature of what you can do with herbs. It was amazing.

I also tried earnestly to learn words like "galactagogue," "emetic," "purgative," and "vermifuge." Some of the other cumbersome terms for the actions herbs can have on a human are still in that book but certainly not in my brain.

Just the size of a mass media paperback, yet chock-full of herbal knowledge. Not a ton of pictures, though. I have other books for that!

And I remember enjoying the herbalist portions of Clan of the Cave Bear, the first of an interminably long series of books set in prehistory.

It was an interesting and thought-provoking book. I thought it made it obvious that all of us at one time in our histories knew a lot more about the natural world, and in particular we knew a lot about plants. And not so much, the more time goes by.

But why not again?

And I want to put out there one more book, that only had a small part that was herbal, Cold Mountain. If you saw the movie, you met my favorite character because visiting her was part of his odyssey; the Goat Lady.

I liked how she was busy keeping up with the natural world in her journals and she mentions that she doesn't want to "get behind." We might think a hermit living in the mountains with a few goats doesn't have a lot going on, but she was a busy woman!

If you liked the movie and you like to read at all, that's a good book. It's a re-reader for sure.

Where are those darned nettles?

I've found myself looking pointedly at the ground where the nettles were last fall. I'm looking for leaves. Every time I go to the mailbox, I detour to where they were and stare around a bit.

Did hunter-gatherers do this? I wonder. Did they go to the places they gathered herbs or greens before, but now it's in the too-early spring or the very-late winter. Did they also go and look and wonder when those leaves would come up?

A young, luscious-looking nettle

I have a turkey roast in the oven, but I want some nettles. Fresh ones. I think they'd be great in stir fry tonight.

There are a lot of recipes on the Internet on how to cook nettles, or use them in soups and other recipes, but of course the first, very very most important thing is to know that it's a nettle, and not something else. -- The evil way (crude but effective) is to grab it and see if you are stung by their sharp little hairs, but that's really a last resort!

There's no way to get good at identifying plants other than the big P, practice! Get ID books for your area, talk to folks older than yourself, your local botany teacher, etc.

Never underestimate the unknown knowledge hidden in the heads around you. Ask questions. Don't be shy.

And if you have a camera, take pictures of the plants you see and compare them to your research, whether it be books or the internet. You'll find that plants often look different in various seasons, at different angles, and at different parts of the plant. So be persistent, be curious, be snoopy! Identify!

Does the robins' arrival predict snow?

My mom told me that the first robins always get snowed on. Which isn't exactly that they predict snow, just a note about their arrival time seeming to always be a bit premature.

And I woke up the other morning to the strangest sound outside the door. Birdsong! How weird. And as I drove to work, two robins jousting in my neighbor's yard caught my eye.

And this morning? Howling winds and snow. The jays are up and about, farting around in the apple tree, but I don't see anyone else out there. ... Tough little goomers!

But why?

Yes, in my obsession for identification and winter botany and gathering, I never told you why I want cottonwood leaf buds. Why I drive down cold roads in crappy weather, the wind wrenching the hat from my head, pruners in frozen hands, and a dashboard of twigs in my truck. Hee!

Well. I want to make a healing salve, and if you do a wise search of the internet, you'll find any number of recipes on how to make cottonwood leaf bud salve. The trouble is, after the first step of gathering the buds, the second step lasts about six months where the buds are infused (soaked) in oil. After that, you remove the plant material, add beeswax and pot up, and it's ready to use.

Cottonwood oil is known to ease arthritic joints and sore muscles.  It has been added to lip balms, body oils and healing salves and makes an excellent massage oil for sore muscles and useful for healing the skin, including sunburn.

Frankly I might not have gotten all het' up about it if I didn't have a potential victim ...I mean volunteer. -- Shh!

Cottonwood trees and winter botany

I have spent several weeks looking for cottonwood trees. Since mid-January I've been watching for them. When you're used to checking for foliage as the give-away, January and February can be tricky months.

The trees have to be juuuust right for me to harvest them. They have to not be along a busy highway or road. They have to have boughs I can reach. They have to be in a place where I don't need to cross a fence or get into or too near a creek. Also, they cannot be within sight of someone's house. ... Let's face it, when I see someone loitering too long near my place, I look twice and three times. So I gather in solitude as much as possible.

These tall, shapely cottonwoods are my backroads Ents!

Many (so many) cottonwoods have lovely fat buds that I can see but not reach. *Shrug* such is the nature of cottonwoods. They have a distinctive shape if allowed to grow naturally and they tend to be TALL. Some have branches that happen to have a couple sprouts down low on the trunk, and that's where I got many of my buds.

Two of the trees I harvested, though, were non-typical.

One looked as if it had its top ripped off by a storm. It had a few years of new growth coming off the stub that were at least 20 ft tall themselves. But it had one generous older limb from the original trunk reaching over the ditch to the road. Its feet were in a tiny creek or seep, which is why it survived the ravages of the storm, I presume.

The other tree did NOT look like a conventional cottonwood. It was broad, not tall, had low limbs that reached out to the sides in all directions, and just looked *wrong*! As I approached this tree, I said mentally "The shape is all wrong!" But the bark was right, and as I slowed on that county road and peered up to see silhouettes of the tips of its branches against the sky, I could see that I had hit the jackpot. These were certainly the right buds. There was no fence to this former acreage, the old corncrib was falling down and the remains of the house were no longer to be seen.

As you know, if you've read previous posts on this blog, I don't harvest as much as is there, and I walked about 30% around that tree and had enough, this without even harvesting half of everything in sight. It really is a generous tree. I hope no one clears that land any time soon, as I'll be checking on it as the seasons progress.

Searching for sage aka Artemisia ludoviciana & my rule of procreation

I was searching the roadside today for some sage I know lives on a roadside I sometimes travel. Today I went a few miles out of my way to look for it, and realized that the haying farmers are doing in the broader ditches probably took it already.

I saw some around a t-post in a tall beautiful cluster, but it's obviously needed out there for the next generation. Cutting sage down wholesale like that is not good for the following year. It needs to seed first. But of course, because of its status as a roadside weed, not too many people care about it.

If you are a forager or wildcrafter, get to know your weeds. Next time I'll try another location and see if there's enough left to harvest.

What is enough?

To me, "enough to harvest" means that after I leave with some herbs, that even I won't be able to tell I've been there, barring the tracks I make in the long grass. My harvest should not impact the colony of plants. They have a right to be in that ditch and to procreate successfully. My harvest should not mess with that.