(Transcript from video)

Alinahh:

Okay, well I have a few things… more than a few….. but there are a few things I’m passionate about one of them is foraging. I like to call it original earth food or original earth garden food or original garden food rather than wild because it’s what we were given at the beginning of time.

One of the original garden foods was this one: chickweed, which is delicious. I eat it a lot; I make a lot of spring green salads with it.

One of my other passions is singing. In this last year I’ve been writing song I want to share. A song about this beautiful plant that I adore called chickweed and it’s other name is Stellaria.

I’ve been teaching this to the kids here in the Ecovillage and some of the young ones have really taken it up. It’s really fun to be walking with them and we’ll start singing it together. We’ll be skipping down the road singing the song. Here it goes..

Skipping down a path on a blue sky day
the sun shimmers down on my head. A…

See my friend chickweed on the edge of the field
I ask if I can harvest for a meal.

Stellaria your taste and charm reminds me I’m a creature so wild.
I place your tiny white flowers in the mouth of a fairy child

Yum!

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(Transcript from video)

Courtney Brooke: What are you doing, Uncle Zev?

Zev: I’m admiring this cover crop that Eli put down with veggie ladies. And Daikon’s flowering with all of their, so many insects, bumblebees and honeybees and little parasitic wasps and stuff, into their flowers.

Courtney Brooke: These are the daikon’s!

Zev: And these Austrian winter peas that are yummy. In fact I think I’ll have one right now. Mmmm.

Courtney Brooke: What’s it taste?

Zev: It tastes like nutty sweet freshness. And um and then rye in there. It’s a nice mix.

Courtney Brooke: This is the rye.

Zev: Daikons dig deep down and create channels of organic matter and air and water getting down into the soil and make a food source the daikon radishes.

Courtney Brooke: It’s probably hard to see but I can see just hundreds of pollinators on here right now.

Zev: Yeah it’s amazing. And the grass makes a bunch of biomass, that rye does. And the peas fix nitrogen and improve the soil that way. Yeah really nice.

Courtney Brooke: Hallelujah for cover crop!

Zev: Hallelujah for cover crop!

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Transcript from video:

Courtney Brooke: Good morning, it’s Courtney Brooke here. I wanted to show you another exciting plant in our landscape which is called an Alder. It’s a tree; it’s these trees here. This is a baby one. It was planted about …maybe two years ago. Here’s one that was planted three years ago; it’s the taller bigger tree there.

What’s going on here is that we have an existing muscadine arbor.  Just here… behind me is an existing muscadine arbor, which is made out of logs to hold it up and then it grows muscadines which are a wild grape. They make a lot of food; they’re just really delicious. They’re native to this region.

The scheme here is that we are growing these alders. At the base of each one of these, each one of these trunks, each one of these, what would you call it,…whatever the thing that’s holding up the arbor is. An alder that we planted to replace the pole, the post when the alder gets bigger.

Alnoculture

Nitrogen Fixing Living Trellis

The alder is a really cool plant. It’s actually fixing nitrogen. It’s a nitrogen fixing tree that’s non-leguminous. So, it’s not a legume. It doesn’t make a bean pod. Alder fixes nitrogen with its roots so it improves the soil. It helps to put nitrogen, which is part of what the plants need to grow and be well, into the soil.  Then you can see here this alder here and there’s a grape here. So this grape will be trellised up the alder when the alder is a little bit bigger.

This is not something that we came up with on our own. There’s a whole beautiful way of growing grapes that’s called Alnoculture because the latin name of this of this older tree is called Alnus. There’s this whole thing from up in Europe where people grow a lot of grapes for a really long time called alnoculture. They use these plants to trellis, as living trellises. So we’re not gonna cut the tree down. We’re just gonna let it be living and it’s gonna be a living post.

Pollarding and Propagating

Then you coppice it, you know when you pollard it. We don’t want the alder to get really big. We want to cut it and let it stay as a trellis. When you cut it releases nitrogen into the soil so this is an old thing. Tried and true. Especially out in Italy there’s all these old vineyards where they are practicing alnoculture.

Then another thing about the alder is that you can do something that’s called stooling. So when… let’s see if I can find an example… if you pack dirt around the bottom of the tree then it will make another baby tree. So you can see here that that is what has been done we just mounted the soil around the original tree here. It has made a whole bunch of other little babies. Then we can cut those off and have vegetatively propagated older trees to be feeding our grapes… yay!

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(Transcript from video)

Courtney Brooke: Hi there. Well, I’m gonna share a really exciting thing that’s happening right now in our yard. So, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of wild ramps, but they’re an Allium, in the onion clan. They grow in the wild mountains around here. You can go wild harvest them; they are a food.

Planting Ramps at Home

Some people plant them in their garden also.  We’ve planted some here, and they’re an ephemeral.
So that means that they come out in the early spring before the trees have leaves on them, and they soak up the sunlight, and then they to put that energy into their roots to come back again next year.

We have planted some here in this little patch of forest that we have in our land which is small. There’s probably, like, 15 trees in here. It’s a tiny little forest and it still spring.  The trees, as you can see, don’t have any leaves on them yet, barely at all. And I was just walking by and I noticed that the ramps are popping up.

That’s them there. That’s them, that’s them. We planted these here.

Delicious Little Indicators

We have a few; enough to have a little celebratory snack on them. But we know that when they come up here that they’re starting to come up in the wild mountains around, and we can go wild forage and harvest some and usually just go once a year. And then we freeze them into ice cubes and just take a few and leave the most of them and just have them as a wild food in our lives.

We’ve planted these here as little indicators to let us know when it’s time, because, you know, if we drove all the way to the wild mountain places like an hour drive and then two hour walk and all that…

So, we have these here to let us know. So, we don’t go too early and we don’t go too late.

Exciting!  Ramps!

You can get them. You can buy bulbs from different plant vendors; they sell trays of ramps, and you can plant them out in your yard.

Enjoy Now and Throughout the Year

They are really delicious. You eat the leaves and you can also eat the bulb. The bulb is really small. We mostly just eat the leaves and we blend it up with olive oil and then put it into ice Cube trays so that we can just pop the ice cubes. We put them in a bag, and we can just use one ice Cube whenever we need to put it in some special pesto or put it in some pasta or whatever like that.

So celebrate the ramps.

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