How to Cook Broadleaf Plantain

...most inventive wild food recipes I’ve seen anywhere. On a recent visit to Urban Outdoor Skills, I was very excited to find he’d developed a cooking technique for broadleaf plantain (Plantago major, the common weed, not the banana relative). Though I know plantain is very nutritious, it is also bitter and heavily veined, so I prefer to collect it as a medicinal herb. I infuse it into oil that I put into salves and creams and I use it as a fresh po...

Read…

Homesteading Disasters: The Skunk Menace

...ed. I know that I’ve got a skunk problem. Yet each year when I sow lettuce seeds I get lazy about putting up the required bird net barrier over the beds. Or I haphazardly put it up, thinking that the skunks aren’t smart enough to squeeze through any gaps. And each year I wake up the morning after planting to a kind of vegetable garden apocalypse–dozens of V shaped holes, overturned seedlings and scattered seeds. And each year I swear off vegetable...

Read…

Josey Baker’s Awesome Adventure Bread (gluten free!)

...uten, he’d make something entirely different. It works. It’s made of nuts, seeds and oats, moistened with oil and water and held together with chia and psyillium husks… [Psyllium what? We’d never used psyllium seed husks before, but they are apparently used in gluten free baking to help bind ingredients–like chia, they are mucilaginous. We found them in the dietary supplement section of Whole Foods, for what it’s worth. Be sure to get the husks, n...

Read…

Self-watering terracotta seed-starters!

...iners for seedlings. Most anyone who has ever tried to start a garden from seeds has had the experience of having seedlings die or go shocky due to a heat wave or a day or two of neglect. Starting seeds in a self-watering container makes a whole lot of sense. These containers can go up to a week between waterings. Even better, Anne’s seed starters are made out of terracotta instead of plastic. We’ve tried out her 6-pack model. It’s really cute, an...

Read…

Alektyomancy: Divination by Rooster

...traced squares containing the letters of the alphabet, and in each square seeds were placed. After proper incantations, a white rooster was released, and the letters were read in the order in which the rooster pecked the seeds. The interpretation of the oracle is unknown.(1) Thankfully you don’t need to own a chicken to practice alektyomancy. There’s an online version. 1) From I.P. Couliano’s book Out of this World: Otherworldly Journeys from Gil...

Read…