Morels
May 14, 2012 § 2 Comments
My kind employers brought me a plateful of morels that they discovered early last week.
I dredged them in flour and fried them in butter, with a little salt and pepper.Yum.
And then, do you know what? When I was out looking for ramps, I stumbled upon a patch of morels myself.
My first experience with mushroom foraging, and it was accidental. I know many others who go to the point of making a ritual out of it. I prepped and served a gorgeous pile of chanterelles that our chef at Meadow Lark found in the Colorado mountains. But I never managed to go mushrooming myself. Now suddenly I understood what all the fuss was about.
That discovery moment is one of those where you feel like jumping around. “Look what I found!” I maybe bounced a little with glee. Maybe. I definitely smiled to myself, and did that funny thing where you look around you even though you know that no one is there. It feels like somehow, the universe is sharing this moment with you, observing your discovery, and receiving your appreciation.
Explore
May 12, 2012 § Leave a comment
If I were small again, I would crawl inside this cylinder of cement. I would imagine it led to other places. I would hide in here and make up those other places and believe in all their possibility.
Remember those days? The days of wading in streams beneath bridges, of walking through culverts, of making groves your woodland home? Imagining what would happen if you were orphaned or lost? It must be some childish attempt at understanding survival, even preparing for possible upheaval – this considering of other lives you might be living, in other realities, and how you might survive them. It was always fun. Purposeful. Imaginative. And yet with flecks of thrilling fear.
Perception
May 11, 2012 § Leave a comment
“Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.” -Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
Bees, birds, and butterflies
May 10, 2012 § Leave a comment
A little video I made for our Hungry Turtle facebook page. Here’s a look into our back yard.
Puppy!
May 9, 2012 § 1 Comment
No, she’s not mine, but she does live here – which means I get to pet and play with her as often as I like, without having to deal with training and chewing. She belongs to Cella and Emmet, our animal husbandry farmers, and her name is Rue. This half husky/half golden retriever is exactly the same color as Tassie, and she absolutely LOVES to follow her “big sister” around. Isn’t she a doll?
Trillium, ramps, and other wild wonders
May 9, 2012 § Leave a comment
Trillium seems to me such a gently joyful flower. It was one of the first flowers I learned to identify as a child out wandering the acres of our farm in Minnesota. There we had a happy mix of woodland, field, and pasture, just as we do here at Hungry Turtle, where we are working carefully towards resilient health and better farm-habitat integration on this somewhat well-worn landscape.
Fortunately, the woods bordering the pasture nearest the learning center (where I live and work) seem to be fairly well left alone, since bloodroot and ramps and strawberries and raspberries and trillium are wild and abundant here. I feel as if I’ve stumbled into a trove of nature’s offerings, which she has quite finely brought about herself, thank you very much, and which are not necessarily meant for me.
I will likely harvest some berries, a handful of ramps, and a good helping of stinging nettles (they are invasively everywhere). The bloodroot and trillium can stay and bloom and I will scarcely touch them. The creeping charlie at the edge of the wood tempts me to try to make it into tea, and I think I will.
But I want to barely make a dent. These woods are just a little of what remains seemingly wild in this world, and if I can forage here it will – it must – be gently, in a way that allows them to remain so.
Low voices
May 6, 2012 § Leave a comment
“In that same lovely Maytime we took to the river in a canoe. Here she was the skilled one and I the crew. At night we would paddle far upriver, and then, sitting together, leaning against the rack, we would drift down, talking in low voices so as not to offend the peace of the night.”
– Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy
Robin’s eggs
May 4, 2012 § Leave a comment
I came across them in a nest tucked just inside the doorway of an unused shed, when I was bicycling around this afternoon taking photos of our farms. The mother robin flapped outside the moment I set a foot in the door – well, I did thump in heavily, as I was avoiding bristly weeds. And then I saw her nest, and peered in hopefully. There they were.
Four little eggs. So well-shaped. The loveliest of blues.
Kinds of Honey 