Winter Foraging: Oyster Mushrooms
During my holiday visit to Maypop I met up with a buddy of mine and fellow forager for a hike down by the Chattahoochee River. We were not just going for one of our usual rambling winter hikes. We had a mission. We were looking for toppled deciduous trees, especially poplars or beech, with the hopes of finding a few clusters of oyster mushrooms attached.
Many folks are wary of foraging mushrooms. And they absolutely should be. There are many varieties out there that can mess you up. However, like garlic mustard and chicory, oyster mushrooms are a pretty safe wild edible to go after. While the Pleurotus ostreatus (oyster mushroom) has a number of look-alikes, none of them are dangerous and at the very worst you’ll end up with a woody or unpleasant-tasting surprise if you’ve got the wrong one.
Still, no matter what you forage for, make sure you triple check your findings with three or more reliable sources. If you can, go foraging with someone who is familiar with the edible. I’d never gathered edible fungi before, but my buddy has experience as a mushroom cultivator and has foraged mushrooms for many years now, so we were set to go!
We spent about an hour in the woods and found enough oysters to top pizzas at a “make your own pizza” party the next night. I went foraging again a few days later with Banjo Boy and we came home with even more! We turned out bounty over to Mamabear who used them in an Asian stir-fry. That batch, which were larger than the first, were a little tougher than the younger ones I’d gathered earlier… but they were definitely yummy.
Here’s a good site to explore if you’d like to learn more about some of the more common North American edible mushrooms!
Honeybeeing.
I’m not sure when the idea transformed from an improbable scheme to a conceivable dare, but after years of it lurking in the realm of the hypothetical, the wish to keep honeybees leapt from the shadows and into our plans for this Spring.
Huck checking a friend's hives down in Georgia.
Although I’ve never kept bees before, I’m not a total newbee. For more than 20 years we had wild honeybees living at Maypop (more on that later). We also had a neighbor who kept bees and he’d sometimes invite me to help him with his hives. Still, while I know some very basics about honeybees, there is much to learn! So we started out Beeventure at the county library where we found a surprising number of books on apiculture and the history of honey. (If you’re curious, I highly recommend Robbing the Bees by Holley Bishop and Fruitless Fall by Rowan Jacobsen)
Cave painting of honey collector!
At first we had just wanted to keep bees for the heck of it– it’d be good for the garden and, of course, a potentially yummy project! But as we read more and more about the role the honeybee in agriculture and the crisis of CCD, our Honeybee Project become more like a Honeybee Mission. If we get honey from our hives, terrific, but our real goal is to simply to have fun, learn, and, most importantly, keep the bees alive.
Probably a good goal any way.
Just like with spring gardening, honeybee planning begins in the middle of winter. Although it’s the middle of January we’ve recently moved past the “research” phase and into the “action” phase of accumulating gear and placing orders. Lucky for us, a bee keeping friend of ours has offered to loan us all of her equipment for the next few years (she’s amidst a big move), so we now have on hand a variety of hive tools, a honey extractor, a thingamajiggy for bottling honey, and a hive (empty) with spare frames! We have been advised to not use the second-hand hive even if it is most appealing to our budget because of the possibility of transmitting bad-bee-bugs to our new bees… so we might just use it as a model for building our own. Still, having the rest of the gear certainly helps a lot!
As for acquiring the bees themselves… we were connected through friends to DC HONEY BEES, an up and coming group dedicated to the growth of beekeeping and bee colonies in our urban environment. DC Honeybees has two programs - one for helping you purchase and start your own rooftop or backyard hive, and one in which you sponsor a hive on your property that they manage and maintain. For our residential project, we have opted to order for 4 lbs of Russian honeybees which DC Honeybees will install for us in April. We will also receive some “support” until we feel comfortable with our hive. As for the other program, I’m currently in negotiations with my Place Of Work to allow DC Honebees to park a hive on our downtown rooftop! The negotiations are off to a good start, so wish us luck!
To learn more about DC Honeybees, their programs, and their services, check out their official website. To learn more about their day-to-day adventures with urban beekeeping, check out their blog!
My first give-away.
This is my first give-away post. It might totally flop, but then again…. it might not! The give-away is related to my previous post on hunger and my general interest in food issues and is meant to encourage action as well as share something really wonderful…. music.
This is how it works. I have these terrific CDs by folk musician Paul Loether. He doesn’t quite have the celebrity of Pete Seeger, at least not yet, but he sounds like him! And rumor has it that he spent some time with the great Harry Chapin.
Paul is a wonderful singer/song writer/musician. His music is playful but meaningful and is a great listen for folks of all ages. I think you’ll like it.
Soooo….. sign up for a volunteer shift at your local food bank or donate $15 or the equivalent in canned goods to a hunger cause. The first few people who leave a comment with their donation intentions will receive a free CD. I’m trusting that you will make good on your promises! Make sure to leave an email address in your comment so I can track you down for shipping details.
Happy New Year,
Huck
**give away closed**
Hunger.
We have a fantastic farmers market in our neighborhood that runs year round. Meat, dairy, vegetables, fruits, honey, eggs… it’s all there every Sunday, available from local and mostly organic vendors. Often there’s music being played by our friends, too, and it’s a joy to see everyone come out with their families. This past summer the produce from our yarden (yard/garden) and our CSA share kept us from visiting the market much, and I missed it. But now my garden has been put to sleep for the season, so I get to make the occasional run for an item or two. This past Sunday I went to the market for honey and to ask the honey-dealer questions about his bees and beekeeping methods. It was raining and cold and I was making a beeline (pun!) for my chosen vendor when I was approached by an older woman who I would describe as “homeless.” In truth, I have no idea what her status was, but she did tell me she was hungry. “Got any food?” she asked miserably, “Haven’t eaten in days.”
I paused for a moment to reflect. How lucky was I to be shopping at our beautiful farmers market, to be able to buy healthy, wholesome foods for my household! My own budget was very strict, but I had enough to share with this woman. I told her I needed to buy some things for my family first, but I would come back to her. So I did my shopping and then circled back to pause at a baker’s stall with her in mind. At first I pointed to a large sweet pastry… but then I decided to purchase a more expensive bread instead– something more like a focaccia with cheese and vegetables lending a healthfulness and heartiness that the pastry lacked. The bread was wrapped and put in a brown paper bag and I carried it to the woman. At that moment I felt that I was doing tremendous good through a simple act, but suddenly the whole situation was flipped on its head and made way more complicated than I could have imagined.
“What’s this?” My Hungry Woman said, her tone filled with unmistakable disappointment, even disgust. “I wish you hadn’t… I wish you would have asked me first,” she continued. “I just want to go to the all-you-can-eat buffet up the street. Is there meat in this? No? So you’re one of those people who doesn’t eat meat, and you don’t think I should have meat either?”
I didn’t know how to respond, to the comment about the bread lacking meat, or any of it. Had I done the wrong thing in buying her the food? Would money have been a better donation? Caught off guard I almost even apologized! But then I said, “I was trying to support both you and the baker.”
I won’t elaborate upon the rest of our exchange. Long story short, I disengaged and left the market, and as I did I saw My Hungry Woman headed towards the trashcans. I chose to walk away quickly and left her actions in the realm of the unknown, but I should have watched to see if she dumped the bread. It was an artisan loaf, and I’m not too dignified to go dumpster diving. In fact, I wonder what that woman would think if she knew I spent this Saturday night “gleaning” behind certain grocery stores.
Gleanings: Several bags of organic apples became several quarts of applesauce. A handful of shrink wrapped six-packs of organic Persian cucumbers became several jars of spicey pickles. Three hands of bananas became countless loaves of banana bread (currently in the oven). The flowers brighten my day.
Inspired by experience with My Hungry Woman, I spent 4 hours yesterday working a warehouse shift at the Capital Area Food Bank. I figured that even if I couldn’t convince her to eat the focaccia, I could still do something for the general cause. I also got a tour of the food bank and gained a better understanding of hunger in the Nation’s Capital, and throughout the country, and the systems in place (or not) for responding to that need. It also felt good to do something physical– it gave me the sense that I was actually helping with my own two hands, even if all I did was assemble boxes and stack them on pallets.
Hunger is a terrible problem. Worldwide, 6 million people die each year as a direct or indirect result of poor nutrition, which is more than 1 death each second. In America in 2009, 33 million adults and 17.2 million children lived in homes with food insecurity– meaning that they did not have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food (FEEDING AMERICA). In my own city (District of Columbia/Greater Area), more than 50% of the children are in food insecure families, and more than 2,500 of those kids rely on food assistance for meals over the weekends when school programs can’t provide them with breakfast and lunch. Tragic? Not as tragic as the fact that we (the eating, consuming part of the world) produce twice as many calories as are needed to solve this worldwide problem. We have the food. It’s just not getting to the people who need it.
A lot of our food goes to fattening livestock that really never should have been fed this food (corn) in the first place. A lot of our food (soy, corn) goes into empty gas tanks instead of into empty bellies. And a lot of our food simply gets thrown away. In fact, a 2004 study showed that forty to fifty per cent of all food ready for harvest in the United States never gets eaten. Edible food (like my gleanings shown above) is discarded, and sometimes because of labor issues the food never even gets picked from the vine in the first place. And then, of course, there’s also the problem that my Hungry Woman had. She didn’t even know what real food was.
Hunger, as My Hungry Woman taught me, is a complex thing. It is just one facet of our failing food system, and it is of particular interest to me right now because we (all of us) are not all that far from going hungry ourselves. Before you give up on me and call me bonkers, here are three quick points to consider :
#1) Our general food system produces cheap (although that’s changing) but low quality food so that we are clinically overfed but undernourished. Even with “abundance,” our bodies, our land, our animals, and our plants suffer.
#2) This whole system, one that relies heavily on petrochemicals for everything from fertilizer and pesticides to packaging and globalized transportation, is hanging tenuously by a thread. If something were to shake the frame (an event like Katrina, Snowmageddon, Flu pandemic, bee colony collapse, or a terrorist attack, or even spikes in gas prices, inflation, or job loss), many of us would have to drastically change the way we eat, and quite likely go without. This second point is closely linked to the third….
#3) Our food stores, collection, and distribution methods are woefully inadequate for current hunger needs, let alone times of true disaster. There aren’t enough supplies in food banks, grocery stores, or likely even in your own pantry to support you/people for two weeks, the amount of time recommended by FEMA that one be prepared to face in an emergency. Many of us have lost the ability to even prepare our own food, let alone keep a pantry that can supply us for two weeks or more should an emergency arise.
Do you see now why we all should be concerned about hunger? About why, even if you ate a giant brunch this morning and have plans for dinner, hunger is a more immediate issue than you may have thought? It’s not just a concern for those who are hungry right now, but for all of us. Every single one of us. We can all do a little something to help, though– to help ourselves and each other. Here are three simple steps:
- Know food. (know where it comes from, the methods involved in growing and transport. If you can, support local products and farmers, and/or grow your own.)
- Save food. (keep emergency stores, DON’T WASTE, rescue and re-purpose food from “seconds” bins or shelves)
- Share –both food and knowledge. (Donate time, donate food. Learn to cook, garden, store, forage, make, etc., and share skills with friends and children.)
We are now entering the last few weeks before New Years, a period for many Americans that is full of reflection and resolutions as well as turkey, eggnog, and fruitcake. With nearly 10% unemployment, however, and more than 1 and 9 families requiring federal food assistance, not everyone will start the New Year in the most auspicious way. For several New Years now I’ve promised myself to learn more about food, to grow a bigger and better garden, to shift my dollars more towards local, organic, and ethical products, and to share my skills with friends and family (and you), and to gain even more skills. I know I’ve succeeded– I’ve grown and gained a lot. This year, however, will be my year to focus more on sharing directly– by volunteering, donating, and teaching.
Whatever you choose, I challenge you to keep food issues and hunger in mind this year.
__________________
Ironic that my experience with My Hungry Woman came just as I’m reading Sharon Astyk’s Independence Days: A guide to sustainable food storage and preservation, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in food concerns, issues of hunger, or yummy food storage options!
