I subscribe to a couple newsletters about foraging, and one, from a local person who teaches classes that I aspire to attending one day, had a blog post in her newsletter about spring greens to forage. Most of them I already knew about, but then she mentions sochan. What the heck it that? And I clicked through on the link she provided to Alan Bergo’s Forager Chef blog post on Sochan. And it turn out that I have a lot, I mean a lot, of this stuff growing in my garden.

I know sochan as the native green-headed coneflower. They are actually yellow, get up to 6 feet or more tall, and are loved by butterflies and bees when in flower and goldfinches when they go to seed. They also have spread over the years from one plant at my house’s foundation to a quarter of my front garden and a currently small patch in the back garden by the compost bin.

To my surprise and delight, it turns out these early spring plants are edible! According to Bergo, they are a staple of traditional Cherokee cuisine, but few people, even most avid foragers, even know about them.

Of course, now that I do know about them I had to try them. We had a couple meals that included the early leaves and stems and they are delicious! Bergo describes the flavor as celery-like, and I guess? I know people who have never had certain food want to know what they taste like so those who have eaten the food compare it to something common. But sochan doesn’t really taste like celery, it tastes like sochan and if you want to know what that tastes like, you just have to find some and try it.

As the plants grow, the leaves become more strongly flavored, and the autumn leaves are apparently wonderful. I look forward to trying them out.

In the meantime, I borrowed Bergo’s book The Forager Chef’s Book of Flora from the library. It is rich with plants and recipes—not at all vegan but veganizable—so I bought myself a copy of the book. Because one of the things about eating plants that aren’t “normal” is figuring out what to do with them. So even though his book is not vegan, it has lots of cooking and flavor combinations so we can figure out our own versions. If you want to dip in your toe, his website has lots of recipes for mushrooms, greens, flowers, and fruits.

Another book I borrowed from the library is Do-it-yourself Projects to Get off the Grid. The book has complex to simple projects in it like building your own solar panel grid or portable 100 watt wind turbine, to making a rain barrel from a trash can. What I borrowed it for is the information about making a greenhouse from salvaged windows.

Recall, I had lots of new windows installed in my house last summer and saved the old ones with the intention of fulfilling my dream of having a greenhouse. The instructions in the book are useful, and it would only take basic building skills, which James and I have, to put together the greenhouse. However, the more we’ve talked about it and thought about the only location we have for it, the more we found ourselves wondering if a greenhouse would actually be useful.

The place we have for it is in the chicken garden between the shed and the elderberry tree. Not a large space. Not a large enough space to make growing beds for beginning the season early and extending it later. Only enough room for some containers and some shelves for seed starting. But when thinking about all the attention that goes into seed starting, having to walk out a couple times a day to the very end of the garden to care for the seeds in still cold and snowy February and March (and April), turned it into a giant inefficient chore.

We have decided instead to use a couple windows to make portable cold frames that we can place over garden beds to warm the soil sooner in spring and keep it warmer longer in fall. This seems much more practicable. And, if we eventually decide a greenhouse would actually be useful, we can still manage that since we will be keeping all the windows we don’t use. We are also thinking about building our own solar dehydrator and a window will come in handy for that as well.

We passed our average last frost date on May 15th, and the long-term weather forecast says we are free and clear of frost. Our night time temperatures have even been above 50F/10 C, and soil temperatures from the various area agriculture sites, are over 60F/15.5C at the depth of seeds, so vegetable gardening can begin in earnest.

Today we sowed Hidasta red pole beans, succotash pole beans, Iroquois skunk pole beans, stringless bush green beans, Jackson wonder lima bean, Kentucky wonder pole bean, purple pod pole bean, and fortex pole bean, as well as summer savory. We transplanted a whole mess of onions, fennel (for seed not the bulbing kind), Eduardo’s jalapeños, which are getting tiny buds on them, black prince tomato, Hungarian heart tomato, and a cherry tomato with an Italian name I don’t remember at the moment and I’m too lazy to go look it up. Heh. We also transplanted butternut squash (which will grow on the ladder, we hope), turtle moon kuri squash, pie pumpkin, sweet meat squash, and Arachne muskmelon.

There is still more to sow and transplant, but we are done for today. We are expecting a couple days of rain, so everything will get good and watered in.

Everyone already growing in the garden is looking pretty good. The peas are vining, we have tiny lettuces, radish sprouts, cilantro sprouts, dill sprouts, tiny cabbage sprouts, tiny komatsuna greens, a few tiny kale sprouts, a few tiny beet sprouts. No carrots yet, but I’m not too worried. Some of the potatoes have grown up tall enough to start hilling already. The protected strawberries have little fruit. Professor Plum, Marlon the Peach, and Ma Cherry Amor (cherry tree named after the Stevie Wonder song) all have tiny fruit. Bossy and Bingo, the front garden apple trees as covered in tiny apples. The low bush serviceberries are covered in tiny berries. The raspberries are blooming. The clove currant was covered in yellow flowers last week. The chokeberry (aronia) is flowering, and so is the grape. Wow!

When we aren’t out in the garden it is filled with birds flitting around—sparrows, cardinals, chickadees, robins—nothing is ever still and not moving out there. For the past few years we’d hear a bird call that we could not identify. It sounded kind of low and trilling, almost like a loon. But loons are water birds and would not be hanging out in the neighborhood trees. We thought perhaps it was a woodpecker or flicker or nuthatch, but looking through the bird book nothing matched. And we never could see the bird.

This year I finally decided to download the Cornell Merlin Bird ID app to my phone and to catch its call on the app. Of course, I have not heard the call since I got the app! However, after I installed it, I took it out into the garden to get it set up. There was the general sound of birdsong, but nothing nearby or specific for the app to identify.

And then Sia, the white-crested Polish chicken, squawked.

The app picked it up and, searching…searching…searching…, came back with Northern Cardinal. I laughed hard. Sia squawked again. The app returned the same result.

Clearly Merlin does not include backyard chicken in the birdcall database. Also, Sia absolutely does not sound like a cardinal, not even close. My faith in the app being able to assist in identifying the mystery bird, should I be able to catch the call, is greatly diminished. Nonetheless, I will keep the app at the ready, just in case.

Some sad chicken news. Lucy, a black australorp and one of the Nuggets, just shy of three-years-old, died Thursday night. She began declining a month ago. At first we thought Sia was picking on her again. Then we thought she was egg bound. And then we thought maybe she had parasites. None of these things were the case. Nor did she have a virus. Sometimes she would rally and appear to be getting better. She continued to eat and drink. She even laid a couple of eggs.

Last week it because clear that she was never going to recover from whatever was ailing her. We kept her as comfortable as we could. Thursday evening she hovered near death. James snuggled her into the coop for the night so she would be safe and warm. And in the morning we found her dead. She is buried in the chicken graveyard beneath the elderberry tree.

Now we are down to three chickens; the Elder Mrs. Dashwood, Sia, and Ethel. It appears Sia is now top chicken in the pecking order. But since she can’t see worth squat because of her stylish bouffant, Mrs. Dashwood continues to be the one who calls out alarms. There have been cats stalking around the garden a few times. Dear friends, if you share your life with a cat, please keep them indoors or leashed so they do not leave your property. I am tired of chasing away the cats of my neighbors who allow them to roam; they threaten the chickens and they use the garden as a litter box. Be considerate!

With that, I have run out fo steam for today.

Reading

• Book: The Long Form by Kate Briggs. It’s a novel that inquires into what a novel is while playing with the novel form at the same time. All of it is told over the course of one day while Helen takes care of her newborn baby, Rose.
• Blog/Essay at The Forests of Arduinna by Rhyd Wildermuth: Gardens Come With You. Some lovely musings about gardens Rhyd has grown and how, even as he has moved to other places, they all come with him in one way or another.
• Article: It’s OK to mow in May. No Mow May became a thing with good intentions, but as the article points out, not mowing you lawn in May, particularly in the United States, is not the most effective way to help pollinators. What does help, is planting and growing native plants.
• News: House Democrats launch investigation into Trump’s alleged offers to oil executives. The Washington Post broke the story (but it’s behind a paywall) of Trump meeting with oil company executives at Mar-a-Lago, where he reportedly told them that if they raised a billion dollars to help get him elected that he would, in turn, remove all of President Biden’s environmental rules and drilling bans, effectively selling American energy policy and regulation to commercial interests for campaign donations. This is supposed to be illegal, but that’s never stopped Trump before, and in spite of all his current felony charges and trials, he is still a free man. So much slime.

Quote

“Gardens come with you, and also wait for you on your return. But they are different when you arrive, and so are you. They teach you that growth will always mean change, and that death will always mean life in other forms. They teach you not to hold too tightly to what was, and not to fear what comes next.”
~Rhyd Wildermuth, “Gardens Come With You”

Listening

• Podcast: Animism: Listening to the Land: Episode One: Introductions to Animism. This is a new to me podcast I just discovered and finally had the chance to listen to their first episode that aired in 2019. It’s a nice introduction to what animism is. And the two hosts, who recorded the show outdoors, have wonderfully frequent “nature distractions” while they talk. I am looking forward to listening to more episodes.

Watching

• The new season of Doctor Who started with Ncuti Gatwa as The Doctor. The first episode was appropriately goofy with some good messages about being yourself because there is no one else like you in the entire universe. I like Gatwa and I look forward to his Doctor tenure.

James’s Kitchen Wizardy

It was a kind of hodge-podge of leftovers sort of week. James likes the challenge of turning leftovers into something completely different. The biggest success was spaghetti noodles with a sauce made from canned tomatoes, a little pureed delicata squash he found in the freezer, and the rest of the lentil loaf from the week before crumbled up.