Forage Friday – Page 21 – LLOYD'S LENS PHOTOGRAPHY LLC

Forage Friday #30. Hickory

Hickory Nuts 100119 — Hello friends! Tonight’s feature image was taken specifically for this article. All of the photos are my original work and are available as prints by following the instructions at the bottom of the article.

The hickory tree behind my grandfather’s house was always one of my favorite places. The tree was always a haven for the squirrels who would scamper and play in it all year but in the Fall they really came out. My first wildlife tracking experience was observing tiny claw marks on this tree and realizing that they were made by the squirrels.

The tree produces a high volume of hickory nuts. So much so that I can remember slipping on them as a child. It was like a field of wooden ball bearings directly under the tree.

Since this is a #ForageFriday post let’s start with the food aspects. Hickory is a close relative of both pecans and black walnuts. The tree I’ve chosen as an example isn’t really one of the sweeter varieties and that’s important because they can be really astringent. If you’ve ever eaten black walnuts then you’re familiar with the odd aftertaste and hickory nuts can have that too.

The squirrels have been cutting on the hickory nuts.

The rule of thumb is that the thicker a hickory nut’s outer shell is the sweeter the nut inside will be. There’s a few varieties of hickory nuts and some of them can be fairly bitter. We never foraged on this one because my grandfather told us this kind wasn’t really good to eat. The shell is kinda thin so we just assumed it was bitter. In my limited time I wasn’t really able to get out and find some of the sweeter ones for an example but you’d be looking for a husk that’s about 9mm thick. These would be the shagbark group. My online research suggests that the flavor of hickory nuts is improved by toasting them. Some people say that they prefer a sweet hickory to a pecan but in my opinion a pecan is hard to beat. However, pecan trees don’t really do well at this altitude and soil type.

Like the beech, hickory produces a high quality oil that’s used in cooking. Like any other food source that’s just outside of the mainstream the internet is full of articles claiming health benefits of hickory oil and some of them are probably true but I’m going to recommend that you do further research of your own.

Something that even the bitter varieties provide in spades is in providing the smokey flavor of meats like bacon. Nothing beats a well done hickory barbecue!

Any nuts that on the ground should be checked for worms.

Nuts that are on the ground should be checked for worms. Nut weevils are pretty quick to bore holes into the shell and feast on the nut.

One of the more obscure things that hickory provides is salt. It’s a bit of work but a few years ago I learned that in the early days of Appalachia salt was hard to obtain. There was few salt mines in operation and the steep mountains here meant that it was hard to get outside resources into the more isolated communities. Hickory must be able to concentrate salt because the instructions say to cop or crush the roots and boil them. The roots are strained out and the liquid is boiled down until it evaporates leaving the salt behind. Hickory salt is dark colored and is sold as a specialty product today.

Hickory bark — The rough bark of a hickory

The shellbark hickory has large scales of lose bark similar to the image but much more pronounced. Believe it or not shellbark hickory plays an important part in controlling mosquitoes and other insects. All trees are natural water pumps that help stabilize the water cycles and can even effect the weather as well regulate ground heat but hickory and in particular the shellbark group is the natural roost for bats. The long strips of lose bark that forms on a shellbark hickory is a natural bathouse. Local species of Little Brown Bats will even hibernate under the bark. A Little Brown Bat will eat about 1000 mosquitoes per hour over the course of it’s 40 years in the forest. We normally associate bats with caves thanks to pop culture. And they do use the caves too but when you look at the design of a bathouse it doesn’t really mimic a cave and we had the bats before there was attics and abandoned buildings to roost in. The bat house mimics lose bark. Which is a good reason to use hickory for land rehabilitation.

I have only given a brief overview to show the potential of hickory. As always my #ForageFriday posts are designed to be a conversation starter and give you a starting point for further research. And since I wasn’t really able to provide good examples of the more useful hickory nuts I’mgoing to include a link to How To Identify Hickory Nuts on Wikihow. I found the guide there to be pretty easy to follow.

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Forage Friday #29 American Beech

Color Photography, Forage Friday

American Beech Leaf Fall 2019 — Hello friends! Tonight’s feature image is untitled and was taken specifically for this article. All of the photos are my original work and are available as prints by following the instructions at the bottom of the article.

When I started doing the Forage Friday posts I was concerned about finding enough plants that qualified as something one might forage. What shouldn’t have been a surprise was just how bountiful the wilderness of Appalachia is. The mountains are absolutely loaded with the American Beech. And a mature beech tree is capable of producing a huge amount of beech nuts. A few years ago when bio- diesel was a hot topic there was a lot of concern about converting crops into fuel and what that might mean for the food supply. At the time, I remembered reading in a survival book about people in the past substituting beechnut oil for lamp oil and the idea hit me that with the vast amount of beech nuts in the forest that perhaps a program to convert it into a fuel crop would be beneficial. I never really perused the idea but I never forget it either. The amount of eeffort it would take to do this even if it were only supplying energy for one household would make it impractical. But still, a little bit of beechnut oil has some interesting potential. The nuts themselves are edible but it’s not really a good idea to eat them raw in larger quantities due to a mild toxin called fagin. Fagin is found in the skin of nut itself and it’s said that roasting them makes it easier to remove the skin. ( similar to the skin found on chestnuts. ) The nuts are also a little astringent. As a kid I remember hoping that they would be like eating a raw chestnut and bit into one. I was pretty disappointed. Enough so that I gave up on them and spit it out almost immediately. But the oil is said to be quite different. The fagin is not present in the oil and neither is the tannins that make the nut astringent and slightly bitter. ( Tannins are water soluble and are removed by leeching in water. )

Last Friday I talked to you about how there’s actually a commercial market for Tiger Nuts and after posting the article I saw that the top Google results for Tiger Nuts was around $13.00 Per pound and the average yield was about 300 pounds per acre. But beech nut oil’ s top Google results was only one supplier at a whopping $75.00 for an 8 ounce bottle of cold pressed beech nut oil. I didn’t find enough hits to give me an idea of market demand for it but I did find srveral websites proclaiming health benefits of beech nut oil which makes it worthy of more research.

The unripe bur waiting for just the right moment to drop from the tree.

The nuts are born in burs and each bur contains 3 triangle shaped nuts. The shape of nut reminds me a bodkin style arrowhead. The nuts are also tiny. About the size of a large sunflower seed. The ground beneath the tree in my parent’s yard was so full of beech nuts that it was like walking in the pebbles near the edge of river. That’s even with a horde of squirrles carrying the nuts away as fast as they can. Beech nut trees don’t really bear fruit until they are about 40 years old but by the time they’re 60 years old they really make up for lost time.

From a foraging point of view beech trees also offer a few other things. The buds are also edible in early Spring although the papery shealth makes them a little awkward to consume. I have also tried the new leaves which aren’t too bad. The guide books say that the inner bark is also edible but if it’s like some of the other inner barks it requires a lot of work to process.

The wood of beech is sold as Maple and often has a beautiful grain that shows a lot of ray fleck.

As you look out of windows and see the bright yellow yellow leaves this fall some of them are going to be beech. It just might be worth a trek out to mark the spot of this very useful tree.

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Forage Friday #28 Chufa Or Nutsedge

Color Photography, Forage Friday

Hello friends! Tonight’s feature image is titled “Chufa 82019”. The photos in this post were taken specifically for this article. All of the photos on my blog are my original work and are available for purchase by following the instructions at the bottom of the article.

Every so often I encounter a wild edible plant that has real potential to bbecome a cash crop in the right hands. As the world population grows and as urban sprawl puts pressure on wilderness the demand for high quality nutrition becomes more intense. Many people ( and I am one of them ) believe that the solution is to move away from agriculture ( The tending of fields ) to horticulture ( The tending of plants ). Rather than go into a long time consuming explanation I’ll just say that it’s better to have a decentralized system. And plants like Chufa lend themselves very easily to the broad range of conditions a decentralized system would require.

The part that is harvested is a marble sized tuber called Tiger Nuts. The tuber is collected in November and December and an individual plant is capable of producing around 2000 nuts in lifetime. Being a perennial plant, Chufa doesn’t need to be planted every year. Like a potato, it be required to save some of nuts to replenish with but unless you destroy the plant during harvest it will come back by itself for multiple years.

So, when I decided to write about Chufa my knowledge of the plant came mostly from old dusty books on my shelf. I knew it was a wild edible plant and that it produced an underground nut that you could eat. But, I never took the time to actually gather it and try use it any meaningful way. But after learning a little more and recognizing the potential I thought that I would simply step out onto my property and collect enough to do a presentation. The next image shows my entire harvest.

Today’s harvest was rather sad.

In fact the entire root system of the second plant was devoid of tubers.

None of the plants had tubers for me.

I collected a total of 1 tuber that was about 6 millimeters in diameter. I just sat there asking myself how this could have ever been a staple crop 4000 years ago in Egypt.

Even today it’s grown commercially in the Mediterranean. More research gave me the answer. The nut doesn’t form until after the top dies off. I am actually about 6 weeks too early to harvest the nuts. They have only just started to form. But in the harvest season for Tiger Nuts the ground is often frozen here. And that’s where the solution for harvest intersects with the techniques of urban farming. Chufa adapts very well to a container garden. And because it seems to like wet soil aquaponics would seem to be the best way to bring this plant out of the wild and back into the garden.

I mentioned that it was a staple crop. The ancient Egyptians kept it and so did Native Americans. The nuts were used to make flour, and they are the main ingredient for Spanish horchata which is a drink similar to almond milk. In fact while researching for this article I encountered a lot of comparisons between Chufa and Almonds.

Recently, the consumption of almonds have come under fire because they require so much water to be diverted into a plantation in an area that’s naturally prone to drought. But here in the Eastern Woodlands a Chufa substitute can easily be grown and a harvest extracted in far less time. Plus, these aquaponics systems can be set up in any number of empty industrial buildings that are scattered throughout the rust belt.

But, if you want to try this unique food on a decentralized scale by growing it yourself then I recommend a simple flower pot and decent potting soil. I have seen the plant growing in shade, open fields, rich bottom lands and old strip mines so it will adapt to almost any environment.

Since I wasn’t able to provide an example of how to use Chufa myself I’ll end this post with a link to a very well done video of how to make horchata.

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Forage Friday #27 Tule

Color Photography, Forage Friday

Hello friends!Tonight’s feature image is titled “Tule 82019”. All of the photos are my original work and are available as prints by following the instructions at the bottom of the article. Tonight’s photo was taken specifically for this article.

One of the first survival plants that I learned about was Tule. When I was a kid we always called it Bullrush and I had visions of baby Moses floating around the Nile river in a basket made from Tule. And with good reason, Tule has a history of being used to make rafts and the ropes that bind them together. Native Americans from all over the New World used Tule to make nets, duck decoys, rafts, twine and and just about anything that you can imagine. Even today it’s used to cane seats. The name Tule covers a lot species in the same genera and there’s some minor differences between them but to the best of my knowledge they all have the same properties and the same general look. Tule is often planted near water features in the south and there it is huge. I have seen that type gst to be somewhere in the neighborhood of eight feet tall with a thick base. Where as our local variety maxes out at about six feet tall and remains slender. Most often I see it less than four feet tall. All of Tule that I’ve encountered has a similar seed cluster at the top and it’s always found close to water.

It’s also a food source of course and hence it’s inclusion in a Forage Friday post. According to the Paiute tribe Tule is the food of giants! If you’re a fan of the arcane then you’re probably already aware of the Si-Te-Cah. The Paiute name for a race of red haired giants translates into “The Tule Eaters”. The legend also says they were cannibals but we can look at that topic some other day. The point is that Tule was an important enough part of Native American Culture that it made it into their mythology. From what I’ve read they used the whole plant. Seeds were used for grain. The young shoots are a cooked green. The base of the stem is a vegetable and the roots were boiled and mashed like potatoes. The mashed roots could also be processed into sugar. The process is similar to making molasses. The root starch and pollen is made into flour.

Aside from food uses it’s also mentioned that the stems were used to treat abscesses and snake bites. ( presented as historical reference only. If you’re bitten by a venomous snake please seek a medical professional!)

Plants like Tule are considered to be nothing more than a weed today. But in the days before big agribusiness they were the main food source.

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Forage Friday #26 Roses

Color Photography, Forage Friday

Hello friends! Tonight’s feature image is titled “Pink Roses 52117” and is available for purchase by following the instructions at the bottom of the article.

The grizzled old warrior looked out across the battlefield. The victory was theirs but it was hard won. At the onset of the fighting a hail of arrows fell in waves. His men’s armor was strong but there had been casualties. He felt a pinch in the side of his neck. The head of a broken arrow was caught in the chainmail. The mail had saved his life but the head of the arrow penetrated enough to cut him. A priest came to his side and removed the armor. Imeadiatly the priest produced an amber bottle of rose water to clense the wound. Without the vital liquid, the arrow would still be able to do it’s job many days from now.

One of the most common plants to be found in almost all climates is the rose. We tend to think of the rose as a symbol of love and the saver if absent minded husbands but there’s so much more. The short fiction above highlights one of the oldest uses for roses. A simple unsweetened tea made from rose pedals was once the preferred antiseptics. Rose water doesn’t just smell pretty. It’s rich in vitamin C which not only kills bacteria but also feeds the tissue as it heals. The sweet scent covers the smell of an open wound and therefore may help prevent insects from bothering it. But it gets better. There are more recipes that call for roses than I have room for in a single post.

One of the first herbal manuals that I ever purchased is Reader’s Digest “Herbs” ( ISB 0-89577-355-4) which suggests that the pedals can be used in salads, pies, syrups, flavored vinegar, sorbets and sweets. And the MacMillan Treasury Of Herbs ( ISBN 0-02-513470-1) has a recipe for rose pedal jam. It’s not surprising to me that there would be a lot of culinary uses for the flowers since in most cases the fruit is rather small and packed with seeds. However, the hips are also used in several of the teas.

Multiflora Rose Hips 91419 — The hips of Multiflora Rose are small but can be used to make a tea that’s rich in vitamin C.

Domestic Rose in all of it’s wonderful varieties is the most popular but it’s also a needy plant. One that I’ve struggled to keep alive and healthy. But Multiflora Rose is one that was brought in to be a “living fence” in the 1860s and quickly became invasive. It’s just as fragrant but the hips are small. Multiflora Rose is favored by a lot of songbirds and they seem to spread it well. Fortunately, it can be used in most of the same ways that the domestic roses can it just needs less encouragement to grow.

Multiflora Rose In Bloom 52018 — The simple white bloom of Multiflora Rose can be used in the same way domestic roses can.

While Multiflora Rose is considered to be a pest at least it’s a pest that has some virtue.

The best hips are said to come from the Dog Rose. Like Multiflora Rose, Dog Rose has a simple bloom but a much larger hip. I also understand that it’s a much lower maintenance rose than domestic roses.

If you’re curious about using roses the ISBN numbers are posted along with book titles that used as a reference to the article and I’m presuming that the internet has ton of Victorian treats to explore. In full confsession I have not gotten around to trying any more than just a nibble of Multiflora Rose Hips so it’s one of those plants that I’m waiting to try this fall. I’ll post a follow-up article to let you know how it turned out.

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