Rebecca Lerner's Blog, page 5

The Perks of a First Ways Upgrade

Just two days ago, I used Facebook to launch an IndieGoGo campaign — I’m raising funds to pay for upgrading First Ways — and we’re already more than 50% to our funding goal, with 17 days left to go! Wow! Is it because you really love First Ways, or because everybody’s excited about the perks, which make great holiday gifts? I’m offering signed copies of my book; custom-made magic medicine bags stuffed with pretty crystals and dried herbs, and then infused with the intention of your choice and mailed to your doorstep; my services as a human field guide — and even my secret nettle spot is up for grabs! Click here to check out the awesome goodies.

The vision for the site upgrade is to:

Keep the blog content as free as it’s always been
Get rid of the annoying Google pop-up ads
Increase the functionality of the existing content so that it’s an even better resource – for example in terms of the Search Plants page, where currently, you can’t click the photos to get info, only the captions. I want to fix this!
Make the site financially sustainable for me to continue investing time in by laying the groundwork to offer high quality plant identification videos, downloadable PDFs, medicine making tutorials, and other creative, useful items. I would like to be blogging more frequently, and this would make it possible.

In order to make this vision a reality, I need your help to offset the cost of:

Upgrading the site, and transferring it safely off WordPress.com*
Paying for ongoing hosting, with bells & whistles, spam filters and security gizmos
Compensating a web designer for assisting me with consulting and getting rid of the bugsIf you’ve benefitted from the information I’ve been sharing on this website over the past five years or so, please consider contributing to the cause, sharing the campaign with a friend, or just checking out the awesome perks! They do make excellent presents for the holiday season.
*Because of the funding that’s already occurred, I’ve been able to initiate phase one of the transfer!!! Yay! Let’s keep it going and make this site amazing.

Herbal Remedies for Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)

The cold, dark, 5 p.m. sunsets of mid-November have a way of making you feel like contracting in on yourself, like  curling into a ball of lethargic melancholy and staying there, restless and angsty. When you add in the gloomy, rainy, overcast gray skies that dominate the late autumn daylight hours here in Portland, Oregon, it becomes unbearable for those of us prone to Seasonal Affective Disorder. The melancholy can easily become despair, and we begin feeling absolutely miserable, especially when we think of how very rare the sunny days will be between now and mid-spring. It’s the most major downside to living in one of the best cities in the country, and it was getting to me big time last week.

And then I thought: “Hey, I’m an herbalist. I can approach this like any other imbalance.”

I surveyed my medicine shelf to look for mood-boosting herbs, and saw that I have a whole lot of lemon balm, Melissa officinalis, left over from my summer urban wildcrafting excursions. Lemon balm is considered a nervine, an herb that acts on the nervous system, and in my experience has a noticeable uplifting effect when I drink it in tea or smoke it in a pipe. Another effective herb I’ve enjoyed as a noticeable mood booster is damiana, Turnera diffusa, which makes me feel lighthearted and sometimes even giggly. That one grows in the southwestern United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean, so I can’t wildcraft it here, but it’s easy to find at the local herb shops in town such as Clary Sage Herbarium and The Herb Shoppe, or through Mountain Rose online.

From a holistic health point of view, of course, finding herbs to lift your mood when you’re feeling down is only a band-aid — to really help yourself, you need to do two things:

1) Discover what external influences you have around you that are knocking you off-balance, and counter them using herbs, lifestyle, or diet.

And

2) Examine the internal influences, the mind-body connection, see what’s originating in the mind, and explore what spiritual tools you may have at your disposal.

For me, #1 is the cold, dark, wet weather. The wonderful distance herb course I’ve been enrolled in for the past few months, Michael Tierra’s East West School, is heavily informed by concepts in Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda (Indian herbalism), and these systems of herbal medicine emphasize the importance of balance. How do you balance cold, dark, wet weather? By taking warming herbs such as ginger and eating hot, cooked foods in the colder months. In addition to ginger, other warming herbs that are great in teas include cinnamon, licorice, and orange peel.

Herbs that help the body cope with stress, called “adaptogens,” can also be helpful. Some adaptogenic herbs are astragalus, devil’s club, American ginseng. And if you are prone to anxiety, you may also consider including some nervines, such as the anti-anxieties skullcap and kava kava, or gently soothing, supportive oat straw.

From that TCM perspective, it’s also important to adjust your diet to avoid cold, dampening foods such as dairy, raw vegetables, or cold ice cream, which can worsen the effects of the climate on the body. Other lifestyle changes that help are regular exercise and earlier bedtimes/wake times.

As for #2, the spiritual/mind-body element, whether you’re into yoga, meditation, affirmations, Qi Gong, or whatever else, if it works for you, do that! Personally, meditation and Reiki are my favorite tools. My meditation practice, like my herbalism, is DIY free-form. What I find useful is putting my awareness in my heart space and being a compassionate presence for it and then going from there. Here is one technique I came up with recently that I’m sharing here for the curious: You put your awareness in your heart, ask yourself what you want and need emotionally at this moment, and then think of a time when you had it, and then feel in your heart what that sensation was like physically. Once you connect with the sensation, meditate on it in your heart space and expand it, giving yourself the exact sensation of happiness, relaxation, or anything else you want to experience, regardless of external circumstances.

That, plus some extra exercise and warming/mood-boosting teas, seems to be doing the trick!

How do you combat S.A.D.? What works for you?

Share this post with your friends and family.

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News:

* My HD, professionally filmed plant-identification video will be available next month for download.

* Stay tuned for an Urban Foraging 101 webinar coming in January!

* I’m currently offering a Gloomy November special of $10 off when you book a Plant Spirit Reiki appointment with me before the end of the month! Please visit http://PlantSpiritReiki.com for location, rates, testimonials, and other info.

Paw Paw Ice Cream Adventure!

The Paw Paw tree, Asimina triloba, is native to the southeastern United States and parts of the midwest, and while it can be cultivated out here, it is very rarely seen in the Pacific Northwest, and its fruit is rarer still. It is not commercially available, despite its popularity among wild food enthusiasts. So when local forager Dave Barmon invited me to gather some Paw Paw fruit with him this weekend, I happily agreed — and I had an idea: Why not turn them into Paw Paw ice cream? I’d been reading that little binder of recipe ideas that came with my  blender and I discovered I could make ice cream simply by combining fruit + ice + sugar + milk (dairy or otherwise), and that sounded pretty easy, pretty Becky-proof. If you’ve been reading my blog or my book then you know I’m not into cooking. But I can blend!

Dave thought it was a great idea. Paw Paws are also known as “custard apple,” “false banana,” and “Michigan banana” because of their flavor, and their fleshy texture is mango-like.

Photo by Dave Barmon

In Portland a lot of us have multiple occupations, and Dave is no exception. He owns a sustainable landscaping company called Fiddlehead Landscapes in addition to his work as a wild food activist, consultant, urban lumber advocate and all-around entrepreneur/visionary. It was this first capacity that led us to the Paw Paw trees — they happened to be living in the front yard of one of his landscaping clients, who had given the green-light on picking them. Actually, we didn’t so much pick the fruit as gather them; the Paw Paws were scattered across the grass. They were roughly the size and shape of a potato, and ranged in color and texture from hard and pale green (not yet ripe) to mushy and purple (over-ripe).

We stopped by an Asian grocery store in southeast Portland called Hong Phat on the way back and picked up some cans of coconut cream to use. It was there in the grocery aisle that Dave suggested an even more brilliant idea, from the efficiency (aka laziness) perspective: Why not just buy vanilla ice cream and blend the fruit with that? So we got some rice-milk vanilla ice cream and decided to try both recipes!

At Dave’s house, we sliced the Paw Paw fruit open and removed the seeds and the outer skin, collecting the mango-like flesh in a bowl. “Dave, we need some music!” I said.

Photo by Dave Barmon

“OK, I’m going to put on some Latin music, because Paw Paw is related to Cherimoya, a popular fruit that grows in the tropics and Latin America,” Dave said.

While we worked, Dave told me Paw Paws are good trees for people in rural or even suburban areas because birds and deer don’t like the fruit. But for us human animals they’re great — they’re the largest edible wild fruit indigenous to North America, and are one of the few wild fruits that are high in calories, minerals and amino acids.

According to Kentucky State University, PawPaws have as much potassium as bananas and one and a half more times calcium than oranges, plus “two to seven times as much phosphorus, four to twenty times as much magnesium, twenty to seventy times as much iron, five to twenty times as much zinc, five to twelve times as much copper, and sixteen to one hundred times as much manganese, as do banana, apple, or orange.”

Paw Paws are small trees found wild from east Texas and Florida to New Jersey and the Great Lakes, and west to Iowa. They have deep tap roots and grow in deep, rich, moist soil, such as river valleys, flood plains, and stream banks, according to forager-author and expert Steve Brill. (Caution: Steve writes that the seeds are poisonous, so make sure you don’t swallow them if you start eating ripe Paw Paw fruit off a tree).

And you’re considering installing a Paw Paw tree in your yard, you’ll want to know that they’re fly pollinated and that  getting fruit requires opposite-sex trees in the vicinity of one another.

Photo by Dave Barmon

Now — back to the important part, the ice cream. We poured 1 can coconut cream with equal parts ice and Paw Paw flesh, plus 1/8 cup organic sugar, and it came out delicious! Here in the photo is Dave’s 5-year-old daughter, Ruby, a forager in her own right, demonstrating for you her reaction to the flavor: Ruby approved!

The lazier ice cream experiment, involving simply hitting the on button to mix vanilla rice ice cream and Paw Paws, was not so good, because the rice-milk version of vanilla ice cream was pretty icky. The coconut cream was much, much better. It did a great job of complementing the tropical flavor of the Paw Paw.

Other fun foodie things one could do with Paw Paws include banana bread and custard.

If you’re a person with a sensitive stomach, tread carefully. The unripe fruit is considered an emetic, and Steve wrote in his book “Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places">Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants” that he once tossed his cookies after eating some.

I’m happy to report that I have not!

What have you done with Paw Paws? And what are you foraging right now? Tell me in the comments!

***

News:

- That TV show I’m on, “Brew Dogs,” airs tomorrow (Tuesday) night at 10 pm on Esquire Network. If you don’t have cable, or don’t have a friendly neighbor with TV who will let you take up residence on her couch, then you can  download it from iTunes after it airs. Just make sure to look for the “Portland” episode!

- Are you wondering what weedy or native wild foods are growing in your yard? Hire me to come over and tell you with a private yard assessment. I also do plant identification tours for private groups at the location of your choosing, and indoor presentations and keynote talks, too. E-mail me at RebeccaELerner[at]gmail.com to inquire.

 

Book Review: Langdon Cook’s “The Mushroom Hunters”

Seattle forager-blogger Langdon Cook is the author of the new book “The Mushroom Hunters: On the Trail of an Underground America,” his second nonfiction narrative book on foraging in the Pacific Northwest. Readers may remember his first, “Fat of the Land,” a fun read about his adventures as a newbie foraging coastal foods, such as squid. Langdon’s new book is broader in scope, nuanced, and more journalistic than “Fat of the Land“; in an approach that recalls Michael Pollan’s “Omnivore’s Dilemma,” he endeavors with elegant prose to give us a behind-the-scenes view of the mushroom trade.

We meet immigrant pickers, refugees from war-torn countries who grew up foraging in Southeast Asia and find it a familiar career, former loggers who once felled old-growth red cedars and now harvest morels and porcini for a living, and even a truffle-sniffing mutt. And we also trail the path of the main character, Jeremy Faber, a 30-something New York Jew who works as mushroom middle-man, traveling North America year-round, competing with other middle-men to acquire the best fungi from the pickers and then selling it to upscale restaurants on the East Coast.  Langdon then eats the mushrooms Faber sells at these high-end restaurants and writes in detail about the flavors he experiences, inspiring our mouths to water with tales of his favorite decadent fungi dishes. I enjoyed the insider secrets, such as that many (most?) chefs who describe truffle-infused sauces are actually lying, employing a synthetic chemical concoction made to taste like truffles instead of the real deal!

Langdon, at left, Portland forager Dave Barmon, and myself got together at the Wordstock Festival, a literary convention in Portland that happened a few weeks ago, and enjoyed some pawpaw fruits Dave harvested for us from one of his landscaping clients. Pawpaws are very rare in the northwest and this was a treat!

Through the perspectives of the people Langdon meets, we also get a robust exploration of the moral and legal dilemmas pickers face when deciding whether to harvest on private land, the tension between them and the forest rangers, the methods they use to assuage them (such as sending over free morels), and the occasional prison time that can result when they get busted.

There can be no doubt that Langdon is deeply enamored of mushrooms. “French novelist George Sand (1804-1876) wrote that truffles are the ‘black magic apple of love.’ Black magic seems about right. There isn’t much middle ground. Either truffles make little impression or they cast a spell,” he writes.

And we learn lots of interesting naturalistic facts too, from the geological history of the Pacific Northwest to tree-and-mushroom species correlations, such as that porcini thrive in a second-growth spruce timber plantation. “Novice Question: ‘Where can I find morels?’ Old-timer answer: ‘Morels are where you find them,” he writes.

It’s a great read, but I do have one criticism: I would have liked to see some female characters in the book. The only women we meet are those briefly mentioned as the wives, girlfriends, or desired lays of the men he follows. But having met Langdon and knowing him to be a good-natured guy, I believe this must be an unintentional oversight.

Bottom line: “The Mushroom Hunters” is an interesting, well-researched tale that is intriguing and worthwhile reading for any forager. As the holidays approach, it will make an especially great gift for that foodie or mushroom enthusiast in your life.

Full disclosure: I benefit from a percentage of sales via Amazon when you click the link to Langdon’s book from this post. However, I only review and promote books that I like. As a number of disheartened authors and publicists already know, I do reject quite a few.

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News: Catch me talking about yarrow and cedar for beer brewing on the show “Brew Dogs” next Tuesday, Oct. 29, at 10 p.m. on the Esquire Network. You can also download the episode from iTunes after it airs!

Classes: I am available for private yard consultations, indoor talks and presentations, and plant walks for private groups, and yes, I do travel. E-mail me to inquire (RebeccaELerner[at]gmail.com).

Healing Sessions: In addition to my work as a writer and a naturalist, I have a healing studio on NW 23rd and Johnson in Portland where I do Reiki and related no-touch energy work which I call Plant Spirit Reiki part-time, and I am currently accepting new clients. Learn more here.

False Solomon’s Seal: Worth Eating!

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Unripe berries of False Solomon’s Seal are beige speckled with red and brown. Photo via Wikimedia

The first time I identified False Solomon’s Seal, Smilacina racemosa, in person was this past July in the woods, while leading a private guided tour near Wilsonville, Oregon (hi, Bruce!). What caught my eye was its distinctive berries, which I recognized from reading field guides. When unripe, as they are for most of the summer,  False Solomon’s Seal berries are an interesting mottled beige speckled with red and brown spots. I knew, also, that they were in the lily family because the smooth leaves had parallel veins. And another reason I knew what I was looking at is that the berries are all at the end of the plant’s stalk, as opposed to staggered throughout. Botanists refer to this arrangement as a “terminal cluster.”

According to Nancy Turner’s excellent book, “Food Plants of Coastal First Peoples,” these berries were eaten by indigenous people here back in the days of full-time foraging. As I read more about the plant in other sources, I learned that the berries would turn bright red in the fall. So I waited patiently for September to roll around and hoped to get a chance to taste them in their full glory.

(And — I was thrilled that I had gotten some excellent photos of the mottled unripe berries to show you here. Sadly, I then spilled tea on my camera phone last month and the photos are now gone, so please excuse my use of Wiki photos in their stead).

Ripe red berries of False Solomon’s Seal. Photo by me.

I got my chance to try the ripe red berries Sunday. I was out in eastern Oregon, in a town called La Grande, doing a private plant identification walk for a really lovely client, and though the ecology is quite a bit drier out there — more desert-like, with Ponderosa Pine and such — we did come across some ripe False Solomon’s Seal berries. My expectations were pretty low, as I had read in the Pojar and MacKinnon field guide, “Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast,” that the berries are “edible, but not especially palatable.” To my surprise, the berries tasted fantastic! They were very sweet and syrupy. The only downside to them at all is they have rather large pits you end up spitting out, but no worse than seeded grapes.

Now, generally, that Pojar book is considered the gold standard, but in this one case, I have to say, that description was not true at all. I wonder if maybe the authors tasted the unripe berries and didn’t realize it? When I tasted the unripe berries in July, I did think they were bland.

OK, so if you want to taste some ripe False Solmon’s Seal berries for yourself, go look for it in the forests in partial to full shade, in somewhat moist soil. It’s a native plant, not a weed. Make sure you find a plant that has those lily leaves with parallel veins, that the leaves are alternate, that the berries are all on the very end of the plant’s stalk, and that the height of the plant is not more than a meter tall. It is distributed all across North America, from British Columbia to Georgia, so even if you’re reading this blog far outside the Pacific Northwest, you can likely find it. Actually, hey — pssst — if you do live in Portland, Oregon, then I know where you can try these: visit the Hoyt Arboretum.

False Solomon’s Seal variety Maianthemum stellatum has berries that appear striped when unripe. (Image by Wikimedia)

False Solomon’s Seal’s Latin name is Smilacina racemosa, as I mentioned earlier, but for some reason the botanists decided to confuse us by also calling it Maianthemum racemosum. There’s also another kind of False Solomon’s Seal, called Star-Flowered False Solomon’s Seal, Smilacina stellata, or Maianthemum stellatum, which has a more sparse spray of flowers, and unripe fruits which are white and striped purple, and ripe berries that are described as “dark blue or reddish black” at maturity. Both kinds are edible. And just to confuse you further: Some people also call this plant “False Spikenard” instead of “False Solomon’s Seal.”

The rhizomes also have been used as food by native people, though it takes a lot of effort: they traditionally soak them in lye first to get rid of a reportedly “acrid” taste (and then boil them to remove the lye, before eating). Sam Thayer writes in “Nature’s Garden” that you can also eat the shoots in early spring, but that they are bitter. He says the same thing about the berries, though, and notes that we in the Pacific Northwest seem to have a sweeter species than those of you out East.

I should also mention that forager-author Steve Brill writes that the raw berries might cause diarrhea and suggests boiling them first, and if you are a cautious type you might like to do that, but I can tell you that a) the indigenous people at them raw, spitting out the seeds, and b) I ate them raw and had no adverse reaction and c) I haven’t read anything about them being a laxative. Maybe it’s in the seeds? If you’ve ever eaten them and had a bad reaction, do tell me in the comments. And if instead you’ve eaten them many times and enjoyed jelly and so forth with no trouble, tell me that, too!

I would be remiss if I did not tell you about the long list of medicinal uses this plant is known for. A decoction of the root has long been used for rheumatism and blood cleansing. Interestingly, a tea of the leaves have a history of use by native people as a cough medicine as well as a contraceptive. I would love to find more information on how exactly they used it as a contraceptive — what dose, when, how often. (If anyone reading this knows, please tell me). The root is also burned and inhaled for catarrh, and as a medicine to calm children having crying fits. The aforementioned info all comes from Native American Ethnobotany by Daniel Moerman.

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News & Events:

~ I’ll be reading from my book “Dandelion Hunter: Foraging the Urban Wilderness” at Portland’s Wordstock Festival at 11 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 5, and am delighted that I’ll be sharing the stage with fellow Pacific Northwest forager blogger and author Langdon Cook, whose brand new book “The Mushroom Hunters: On the Trail of an Underground America” only came out a couple weeks ago and already has a ton of great buzz. I’m looking forward to reviewing Langdon’s book myself in an upcoming blog post next month.

~ Catch me on TV teaching some folks how to forage wild herbs for beer brewing on the Esquire Network’s new show “Brew Dogs” on Tuesday, Oct. 29, at 10 p.m. I haven’t seen the edited footage, but I am pretty sure they’ll show my discussion of yarrow and cedar.

~ Those of you who have come to my classes know that plant-spirit work is part of my life and that I’ve been working as a healer for the past year part-time. I’m excited to share with you that I’m expanding my Plant Spirit Reiki shamanic healing practice, moving it next month out of my home and into a beautiful healing studio on NW 23rd and Johnson in Portland! What I offer is like massage without the contact: powerful, deeply relaxing Reiki energy healing combined with shamanic work for stress relief, trauma healing, and much more. See photos of my gorgeous new space, and learn much more about what I do and how it works, here.

~ I have created a plant identification walk in high-definition video in response to the request of many of you dear readers who live outside Portland. I am in the process of getting the footage edited and hope to have it available for sale in October or November.

National TV debut!

I’ll be making my national TV debut on the new show “BREW DOGS” on Tuesday, October 29 at 10 p.m. on the new Esquire Network. (The network launches next week). It’s their “Portland episode,” and this should be a really entertaining show, especially if you’re interested in foraging for brewing herbs! For a look at the show: http://esq.tv/140iMWH

Upcoming Appearances, Projects & Events

Upcoming Events



* 7 p.m. Weds, Sept. 18 in Portland, OR

Enjoy *free* beer from Full Sail and *free* pizza from Rovente at Destination DIY‘s “Makin’ It” crafty/project night and listening event from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Wednesday, September 18, at ADX in Portland, Oregon. The address is 417 Southeast 11th Ave., (cross street is SE Oak). I’ll be the featured live interview, will do a short presentation on local edible and medicinal plants, and will also have copies of my books available for sale and signing. Before and after, there will be a DJ (“DJ Daddy Issues” – haha). Participants are encouraged to bring DIY craft projects in progress to work on. More info on this free event here. 

* 5 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 21 in Pendleton, OR

Catch me reading from my book, “Dandelion Hunter: Foraging the Urban Wilderness,” in Pendleton, Oregon, at Prodigal Son Brewery & Pub at 5 p.m. on Saturday, September 21. I’ll have copies available for sale and signing, and will also do a short presentation on some local wild plants. Event is free.

* 11 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 5 in Portland, OR

See me as a featured author on stage at the annual Wordstock Festival in Portland, Oregon, at 11 a.m. on Saturday, October 5, reading from Dandelion Hunter and sharing the spotlight with fellow forager-author and blogger Langdon Cook, who will be reading from his new book from Random House about mushroom foragers, “The Mushroom Hunters: On the Trail of an Underground America.” I look forward to reviewing his new book on this blog soon!

News

In response to popular demand, I have filmed a plant identification walk with high quality equipment and by a professional videographer and am in the process of getting it edited. I am hoping to have it available for download or streaming online sometime in October. Stay tuned!

You can watch me on national TV in late October on episode 6 of the upcoming show “Brew Dogs” on the new Esquire Network. When I know the air date, I will be sure to let you know!

Classes

While I do not have any in-person foraging classes scheduled this fall, I am available for hire for private presentations, workshops and plant walks on demand for individuals, groups, businesses, and more. I offer guided plant-spirit meditation and smoking ceremonies as well. To inquire about hiring me for speaking or teaching, e-mail me at RebeccaELerner@gmail.com

Healing Work

“I have experienced energy work before with varying degrees of success, [but] nothing came close to the experience I had with Becky. The word profound doesn’t do it justice. I now feel better than I have in years!!” – S.K

 Plant Spirit Reiki  is my shamanic healing practice incorporating Reiki energy medicine with guided meditation, botanical blends and other tools. My clients find Plant Spirit Reiki extremely helpful and transformative for addressing PTSD, anxiety, depression, addiction, and the general stresses of life. Avid readers may know I have been offering energy medicine for a year now and count among my teachers multi-dimensional healer Jeanette Hieter, shamanic priestess Selene Aswell, and shaman Laural Virtues Wauters. For more testimonials, rates, and info on my approach and background doing this work, please visit PlantSpiritReiki.com.

Wild Beer on Tap: Scotch Broom & Cedar Leaves

Last month, I harvested the so-called “invasive species” Scotch broom, Cytisus scoparius, and some western red cedar leaves, Thuja plicata, and brought them over to Deschutes Brewery in Portland for their brewers to make a special hops-free, wild herbal beer that is now on tap at their downtown pub. They’re calling it “Willamette Weisse.”

We used Stephen Buhner’s excellent book Sacred & Herbal Healing Beers as a guide while choosing the ingredients and concocting the recipe, which includes only the herbs (the majority of which is scotch broom), malt, water, bacteria, and yeast. The finished product is a very light-colored brew, similar to a pilsner. The flavor is very mild.

The occasion for this collaboration was a national TV show that will air in October, called “Brew Dogs,” on the soon-to-be-launched Esquire Network. It’s a docu-series about two Scottish guys who make adventurous beers in different American cities. I am in the Portland episode, taking their hosts on an urban plant identification tour of my ‘hood, and they drink the finished product at Deschutes.

I am not, at this point in my life, a drinker — in fact my friends will tell you I generally won’t even taste the drinks they order while I sip my tonic water with bitters and a splash of grenadine (try it, you’ll like it) — but I made an exception for this special brew, because it’s made with wild plants, and how unique is that?! They have it for sale right now for $5 for a 20 oz pint glass. They tell me they plan to keep it available for the next three to four weeks, so if you’re in Portland, you can taste it too.

When the producers told me they wanted a wild foraged beer, Scotch broom came to mind because I knew that before people began brewing with hops, Humulus lupulus, which is a sedative in the Cannabis family, they were using it as a bittering agent, along with mugwort and yarrow.

According to the USDA plants database, scotch broom lives on the east coast and the west coast of the U.S., but not in the middle. You’ll see Scotch broom commonly on hilly highway roadsides and in wilderness areas in disturbed areas that get partial sun. The parts that are used for brewing traditionally are the flowering branches. It’s now unlikely that you’d see the plant in flower, but in May and June, the bright yellow, pea-family flowers abound. Pea-family flowers have a big banner petal, two side wings, and little canoe shaped piece hidden inside them. Black, fuzzy seed pods hang from the branches and the leaves are very short and small, grouped in threes lower on the plant and then becoming simple above. It grows as a bush, commonly three to six feet tall, but can be up to thirteen feet.

Interestingly, the plant lives up to 25 years, and doesn’t flower until it is 3 years old. Scotch broom was reportedly brought to North America as an ornamental, but then it went feral and reproduced like bunnies. Or like mice. Or like fruit flies.

Scotch broom supposedly gets its name because the branches are said to have been used to make brooms. I can only see that working if they were used as the end you sweep with. I have read some off-color things about why witches have been classically depicted as riding on broomsticks, and I have to say, Scotch broom is implausible for that end of the device.

It has long been safely used as a brewing herb, its flowers can be eaten in salads “like capers” (according to Buhner), and its seed pods have been roasted and used in place of coffee. The interwebs spread this rumor that it is psychedelic if you smoke it, but as Erowid’s adventurous psychonauts discovered, that does not appear to be true. At least not unless you mix it with hallucinogens.

In very large doses, scotch broom could make you vomit, cause uterine contractions, or potentially depress your cardiovascular system. Also, do not eat the raw seeds, particularly if you are a horse or a dog.

Buhner writes that Scotch broom once had a reputation for creating “amorousness.” For me it created happiness. Because you know what an invasive species usually is? A plant with a lot of neat stuff to offer, and plenty to write about.

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Have an idea for a workshop? I am available for hire by private groups and individuals, and I do speaking gigs, too. Inquire at RebeccaELerner(at)gmail.com

Upcoming Classes:

Join me for a sunset urban foraging walk with smoking herbs, in which we’ll cover dozens of useful plants, from mimosa tree to sumac, mugwort to Russian sage. 7 to 8:30 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 8, meeting outside Caffe Vita, at NE 29th Ave & Alberta St., Portland. $20 in advance, or $25 in person.

Note: This blog gets a small percentage from Amazon purchases that result from the links in my posts. I never, however, recommend any book unless I personally own it and like it.

Cloudberry vs Emerald Carpet

A reader e-mailed to say that the plant I featured in my last post as Cloudberry may actually be a very similar looking relative used commonly in landscaping that has the common name “Emerald Carpet,” Rubus hayata-koidzumii, which seems also to be commonly called Rubus pentalobus (though confusingly, this latter Latin name is apparently no longer considered a “legitmate” name — which leads me to wonder, who decides?), which are native to Asia, and not Rubus chamaemoris, which is native to the Pacific Northwest. This makes sense, as I had wondered why, if it was native here, I had never seen it in the wilderness. Turns out true Cloudberries don’t grow south of Canada. So, that explains it. Both kinds of berries are edible and tasty. The distinction is one of classification. This reader added, “Cloudberries need a male and female plant to pollinate, where Emerald Carpet is self pollinating.”

I googled “Cloudberry vs. Emerald Carpet,” trying to distinguish them visually, and it is extremely subtle. It seems like maybe Cloudberries have berries that stick out more, elevated above the leaves, whereas Emerald Carpet seems to have berries closer to the ground. The leaves of Cloudberry also look slightly darker. While Googling, I also found a post Emily Porter had written about this after spotting them on the Lewis & Clark campus back in 2010. It seems the most meaningful distinction is geographical distribution.

My sincerest apologies to you, dear reader, for confusion caused by this error. I always strive for accuracy. Please do weigh in if you have experience with either plant.

Cloudberry: A Heavenly Wild Food

This is a new wild food on my radar, brought to my attention by a reader who sent me a photo, asking, “What’s this?” I thought the leaf shape resembles currants and the bright orange berries looked similar to salmonberry, but it clearly wasn’t either. Then one day I was looking through Plants Of The Pacific Northwest Coast, the comprehensive field guide by Pojar and MacKinnon, and there it was, listed in the shrub section: Cloudberry, Rubus chamaemorus.

I was eager to taste one, but where would I find it? I had never before seen it in a local forest or wilderness area, and I spend a lot of time exploring them. This reader (hello, Bruce!) told me he had seen it near a library in a town outside of Portland, a place I wasn’t likely to venture unless I made a special trip of it. Then, just the other day, I was visiting Portland’s Hoyt Arboretum to prepare for a plant walk I’ll be doing as part of a fundraising event next weekend — which, by the way, involves foraging and acrobats hanging from the trees!!!! It sold out fast, or else I’d be telling you to scoop up a ticket right away. I hope they do another!

So, where was I? Ah yes, I was at the arboretum, and I parked my car and I was walking around a little traffic island on the way to the entrance of the gift shop, and there it was: Cloudberry, growing like a carpet, a sprawling and dense ground cover — and ripe! I picked them eagerly, and thought as I ate them that in flavor they were like gentle raspberries, but less tart. And in texture, since they are soft and juicy, they remind me of salmonberries.

Cloudberries have historically been a common and favored wild food among indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest, who ate it both raw and cooked, though it also grows in Europe and Northern Asia, and has long been eaten there, too — at least since the sixteenth century, where it was called “Knottberry,” according to the Pojar guide.

Plants for a Future, a crowd-sourced database for botanicals, sort of like Wikipedia, described the flavor of the berries as “like baked apples.” I don’t know about that, but it sure would make one helluva pie!

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Upcoming Classes:

Join me for a sunset urban foraging walk with smoking herbs, in which we’ll cover dozens of useful plants, from mimosa tree to sumac, mugwort to Russian sage. 7 to 8:30 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 8, meeting outside Caffe Vita, at NE 29th Ave & Alberta St., Portland. $20 in advance, or $25 in person.

Note: This blog benefits a small percentage from Amazon purchases that result from the links in my posts. I never, however, recommend any book unless I personally own it and like it.