Wild Food Lab: Foraging Taken to the Next Level

...is also the simplest: how to prepare the ubiquitous broadleaf plantain (Plantago major). Pascal gave me a couple of ideas for ways to enhance my bread experiments with seeds and wild herbs which I’m looking forward to trying. Do you have a favorite wild food? Tell us where you live and what you like to gather and work with....

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Bee Idle

...rmingham, where we spent the day filming the first two instalments of our new online gardening course for eco-idlers. The principle is low effort, high productivity. Alys is a brilliant instructor and I wish I’d consulted her before I started growing vegetables and herbs. It would have saved me a lot of pain . . . We’re also organising an event with Alys for the Chelsea Fringe Festival. Her idea is that we create a Plant Cemetery at the Idler Acad...

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Failed Experiment: Bermuda Buttercup or Sour Grass (Oxalis pes-caprae) as Dye

...t dodgy. Water quantity, as you will recall, is just enough to “cover” the herbs. For the record, I believe I used 3 tsp of both alum and cream of tartar in the first round, for t-shirt #1, then added 3 tsp of iron for round 2. But how much water I used, I have no idea. T-shirt #2 went in and I let it stew forever. The water took on a nice green color, but the shirt couldn’t even pick up the pale tint that shirt #1 had acquired. It was like the dy...

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Anagallis monellii : A New Favorite

...planted Anagallis monellii “Blue Pimpernel” in a bed of mixed flowers and herbs. This plant is neither edible or medicinal, but we hoped the bees would like its many blue flowers. Anagallis monellii is a Mediterranean native, so it is well suited to the California climate, and it follows that it does not need much water. It is perennial in zones 9 to 11 (that’s us), but can be grown as an annual elsewhere. If you see Anagallis monellii without bl...

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Saturday Tweets: From Zines to Hedgehogs

...t back: https://t.co/Qolk4BE0zh — Root Simple (@rootsimple) May 7, 2018 10 herbs you probably haven’t heard of but should grow | Alys Fowler https://t.co/5ZDthQa7H2 pic.twitter.com/yOTRrsvH6V — Guardian gardening (@guardiangardens) May 6, 2018 ‘I had to guard an empty room’: the rise of the pointless job https://t.co/q8RhMn391u — Root Simple (@rootsimple) May 6, 2018 Humility in science communication https://t.co/NAPo2gyqXP via @2020science — Root...

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