Wild Food Profile: Yellow Dock (Rumex crispus) Seed Flour & Yellow Dock Pancake Recipe

Harvested dock seed with a ready-to-harvest yellow dock plant

This past month, I had a chance to visit Silver Acres, my friend’s 5 acre farm in the thumb of Michigan, where she is practicing rewilding, restoration agriculture, and permaculture. We were walking through her field and found a good deal of yellow dock that was in seed form–which for the Midwest US, usually happens around Lughnasadh (August 1st) and continues to the Fall Equinox. While I’ve eaten the young leaves and used the roots as medicine, I haven’t had a chance to try making any seed flour yet–so we set about our task joyfully. I’m quite impressed by how easy this flour is to make (compared to say, acorn flour) and it cuts nicely with other flours.

Foraging for wild foods is not only a fantastic way to connect deeply with the land but also allow us to reconnect…

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Rites of the Goddess

secretsoftheserpent

The Sacred Feminine is the mysteries. She is the Great Mother. The mother of the mysteries. Her secrets have been guarded generation after generation. There have been initiations and tests to prove one is worthy to hear her secrets. Humans are born from their mother and leave for a short period of time. In this short period of time, which is this life, one of the things we can hope for is that by some wonderful reality while we are still alive we can die and be born again. When you are born again you are born from the womb of the mysteries of the Sacred Feminine. The Sacred Feminine is forever bearing her children yet forever a virgin.

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Beware Of Fraudulent Mushroom Products (Many Of Them Are Mislabeled)

A common sentiment among non-foragers is that harvesting wild mushrooms for consumption is dangerous.

“I’ll stick to the mushrooms sold in grocery stores,” the non-foragers say. “They’re much safer.”

Turns out, that’s not always the case. Commercially sold mushroom products are often mislabeled. In some instances, the mislabeled products sicken consumers.

A brand new study exposed the widespread inaccuracies associated with commercially sold mushroom products. Here are 3 major findings from the study:

Many commercially sold “wild” mushrooms are actually cultivated mushrooms.
Of the mushrooms that are actually wild, many of them are not the same species that are listed on the labels.
Some products contain species whose edibility is at best dubious, and at worst potentially toxic.

To shed additional light on the topic of fraudulent mushroom products, I filmed a brief video in which I dig a bit deeper into the study’s discoveries.

You can watch the brand new video here.

You’ll never see this fungus sold in products intended for consumption (unless the product is mislabeled, of course), but you will find it growing in coniferous forests this time of year. Have you seen anything like it? To learn more about this club-shaped species, check out the latest Instagram post!Click to view post

Thanks for reading and watching, and thanks for your continued support!

-Adam Haritan

HSA Webinar: Herbal Hues

The Herb Society of America Blog

by Sasha Duerr

Sasha Duerr is an artist, designer and educator who works with plant-based color and natural palettes. Join her this Thursday, August 26 at 3pm Eastern as she explores creating natural dyes.
Our webinars are free toThe Herb Society of America members and $5.00 for guests. Become a member today, and enjoy all of our webinars for free along with access to the webinar library with over fifty program titles. To register, visit www.HerbSociety.org/hsa-learn/hsa-webinars/

For those who love color AND plants, natural dyes connect you instantly to a vast range of artisanal hues that are truly vital, vibrant, and inherently meaningful through the ingredients themselves.

Plant-based palettes tell stories that are inherent to places, people, and the plants, and plant-based colors can be conjured seasonally from weeds, yard waste, florals, and food. There is an intertwined overlap with natural colors that are awe-inspiring and a…

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Cultivating Resilience as a Physical and Spiritual Practice

The Druid's Garden

Staghorn Sumac: A tree that teaches us about resilience

Resilience is a term I first learned as a permaculture practitioner–resilient ecosystems are those that are able to withstand hardship, recover quickly when faced with difficulty, and had a capacity to endure. In other words, a resilient ecosystem can withstand drought, flooding, or other difficulties by being adaptable, flexible, and having redundancies. Which of course, is so critical in today’s ever-changing world fraught with climate change and instability. Resilient plants are the often-maligned weeds: those weeds who take every opportunity to grow: who find a crack in the sidewalk and take root, who immediately start to grow after disruption, or who outcompete less resilient plants. They are able to be like weeds or opportunistic species, taking advantage of new opportunities, finding niches, and gracefully adapting to change. Think of the dandelion here, growing up through cracks in the sidewalk. This same…

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Our Minds Limit Science

secretsoftheserpent

Our ego mind is what limits us. We are our own worst enemies. We can’t be wrong. We have to have others think like us. The ego will get itself into trouble constantly. Science is not immune to the ego. In fact science is being run by one of the biggest ego trips ever in history. Until we get science and the human race out of the ego, we will not advance.

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Potemkin Nation — Potemkin Nation | Ecosophia

There are advantages to learning about history. One of the big ones is that patterns repeat themselves across historical time, and if you know what happened just before other societies went through the important inflection points in their life cycle, you can tolerably often figure out when one of those is abojut to happen in…
Potemkin Nation — Potemkin Nation | Ecosophia

A Blue Moon Renewing Bath Ritual with Coast & Clearing

The Full Moon on the 22nd of August is a Seasonal Blue Moon.

A seasonal blue moon is third or fourth full moon in a season. They are a reminder of your fullness and your magnetic power, and they also give us a powerful opportunity for renewal and rebirth.

This Blue Moon also takes place on the last day of the Lion’s Gate, which helps give power to the intentions we made on the new moon. This Blue Moons gives us what feels like a second chance to clear away what no longer serves us so we can begin anew, and step into the life we are wanting to create.

We are on the last months of Summer here in the Northern Hemisphere. Right now is a potent time to step into your goals and take action on your intentions. Especially as the Sun moves into the earthy sign of Virgo on the 22nd. You might find that just like gardening, before you can see any new growth, you must clear away what is blocking the path or light.

One powerful but sometimes overlooked way to release energetic obstacles and to cleanse the auric field is to use water! Water helps cleanse and clear our energy field as well as our minds so that we can focus on the path ahead and receive insights to help guide us. When we add salts, herbs, oils and crystals to the water, we add even more power towards our intentions.

Read full article at: Spirit de la Lune ~ A Blue Moon Renewing Bath Ritual With Coast and Clearing

Three Principles for an Ethical Foraging

The Druid's Garden

Foraging for wild foods, mushrooms, and wild medicines is something that is growing as a pastime for many people. The joy of foraging from the land connects us to our ancient and primal roots and allows us a chance to build a more direct connection with nature. But with any practice rooted in nature comes the need for balance and responsibility. Thus, the following principles can help wild food foragers and wild food instructors harvest ethically, sustainably, and in a way that builds wild food populations rather than reduces them. I share both the principles in text below as well as graphics. The graphics are (full size and web-sharable versions, see links) and they are licensed under a Creative Commons license. Anyone who teaches plant walks or wants to use them in foraging, wild foods, and herbalism practice is free to download them, print them, and share them! The…

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Science is Dead

secretsoftheserpent

Science is dead and we have killed it. It has delegitimized common sense. Science has become the new Catholic Inquisition. Anti-science is the new word for heretic. Science was meant to help us make choices not make the choice for us. Whales and many other animals are more valuable to us dead than alive so we hunt them. Trees are more valuable to us dead than alive so we chop them down and make lumber. The science inquisition consisting of media and technology has figured out that dead minds are more valuable than minds that think for themselves. They can make so much more money keeping people isolated on computers, television, video games and phones.

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