Posts Tagged ‘forage’
New Discoveries
Quite a while ago, we discovered that a person we knew from our school days in Eden Prairie was a volunteer for elections in our township. She and her husband own a log home nearby on the Rush River. We plotted getting together for lunch, but somehow failed to accomplish it for years.
Yesterday, we finally made it happen. Ann and David showed up at our house, and the minutes flew by as we shared snippets of our life stories over a fantastic meal and a tour of portions of our property. We found Dave to be a wealth of knowledge about our plants and trees.
I queried him on the demise of the maple in the labyrinth, but he was stumped (no pun intended) as to why it died so mysteriously.
Right away in our woods, Dave spotted golden oyster mushrooms on a downed tree and alerted us that they are good eats. We gathered a bunch to try cooking up.
That is definitely a discovery for us, as we’ve never considered eating mushrooms growing in our woods. When we first moved in, we spotted some that looked like the coveted morel mushrooms with the irregular honeycombed surface, but we weren’t confident enough to try them.
We learned later that it was very likely that they were morels, and we could have consumed them. Sadly, we’ve never seen them growing here after that time.
Dave went on to share his experience cooking down wild plums, making juice from wild grapes, creating a lotion for skin out of jewelweed, and he pointed out one other edible berry I didn’t know about on our property of which I’ve already forgotten the name.
The most important discovery is that we need to get together with them again soon, as we share many commonalities and a similar respect for the natural world in which we live. We are looking forward to seeing their property and strengthening the surprising number of connections we discovered during this initial all-too-brief visit.
.
.
Sticky Sweet
Our three chestnuts had their heads out when I visited the barn on Thursday. Legacy was turned around with his butt to the door. We are so grateful to have this barn with stalls. It is obvious to us that they are, too. We have never once had any of them make a fuss over being confined inside.
Yesterday, everyone was back outside in the sunshine, after the fog burned off. Cyndie surprised me with a last-minute suggestion that we go out for breakfast before she went to work. It was the first day of a local syrup farm’s open house event, and they were serving pancakes with fresh blueberries!
They also provide free maple-syrup sundaes, so I had ice cream for dessert first thing in the morning, too. It was pure sticky, sweet goodness.
We learned last year that you can bring your own containers and purchase syrup at a discount. We bought a gallon in two Ball jars, brought from home. It’s that good, and it’s easy to keep. Since it wasn’t sealed in these containers, we’ll refrigerate it.
We are still “new” folks here, meaning we weren’t born and raised in the area, and that shows when you attend an event like this where everyone else knows each other well. Since it was a weekday, the primary crowd we encountered were retirees and their parents. I’m sure we appeared out of place, but we were doted on just the same.
After pancakes, Cyndie dashed off to work, leaving me to chat about the syrup season (it was average), and the art and science of knowing when to start tapping trees. If you try too early, while time passes until the sap runs, the tree will have been busy healing the spot where the tap was inserted. If you start too late, you miss some of the sweetest, best sap for syrup.
I killed a little time in the morning, working indoors while waiting for things to dry out as much as possible, then headed out to see if I could mow more of the fields. It was borderline, as some spots still have standing water.
I forged ahead regardless and ended up cutting what I could, working around the wettest spots. Based on the forecast, it could be my last chance to mow for quite a while…
Just as predicted, the rain has brought out the greenest of greens in the lawn and portion of the back grazing field where I did the first cutting last week. It makes it look like the areas cut yesterday don’t match, but I’m confident they will come around soon enough. I was concerned that these remaining areas all had thicker grass already, and that is causing more piles of cuttings that get left behind. This should become less obvious before long, though.
I’m all about the aesthetic impression aligning with my goal of better grass. I believe this will improve the forage in our fields, but at the very least, I would like it to look like improved forage. If nothing more, I would enjoy having that justification for spending all this time out there trying to mow farm acres with a lawn tractor.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Relative Something 