A 21st Century Wheel of the Year: Cultivating Receptivity at the Fall Equinox

Nature Mandala

The Fall Equinox is traditionally about harvest, harvesting the fruits of your labor and the fruits of the land in preparation for the coming of winter. This model of the wheel of the year focuses on earned outcomes: you’ve planted your crops, you’ve tended them all season, you’ve invested the time, and now, you are able to receive the rewards of your efforts. And a lot of our own understanding of the celebration of these seasons works on that narrative: planning, planting, tending, harvesting, and the cycle of the seasons. This same cycle is expected, perhaps, anticipated, in our everyday lives. For example, if you put the effort into getting degrees and starting a career, or if you put in a ton of hard effort at your workplace, you will eventually be rewarded with a harvest, a payoff, and a sense of stability. There’s this large sense that…

View original post 2,724 more words

Sacred Trees in the Americas: Paw Paw (Asimina triloba) Medicine, Myths, and Meaning

The Druid's Garden

PawPaw leaf – as big as your hand!

The PawPaw is a tree that is so wild and unique and wonderful, and yet, is often quite unknown–it is the only native citrus tree we have in the upper east East Coast and midwest areas. Like some of the other trees I have recently shared in this series, Paw Paw is an underappreciated and under-recognized tree. Within the bushcraft and permaculture circles, it is quite well known as an amazing tree to find, plant, and tend. One of the reasons that PawPaw is probably not more well known has, unsurprisingly, everything to do with the commercial viability of the fruits. PawPaw fruit is absolutely delicious but it only stays good for a few days after picking–so it would never survive the rigors of modern industrial agriculture. You can occasionally find it at a good farmer’s market, and it is well worth…

View original post 2,240 more words

Horehound – Herb of the Month

The Herb Society of America Blog

By Maryann Readal

Horehound leaves The fuzzy, light gray, deeply-wrinkled leaves of horehound (Marrubium vulgare) offer a nice contrast to other colors and textures in the garden. I love that contrast around the base of the red roses in my garden. Horehound is a perennial herb that grows from one to two feet tall, and can spread in the garden. It prefers dry sandy soil and a sunny location, tolerates poor soil, and is hardy in USDA Zones 4‒8. It may be started from seed in the spring, although germination is slow and sometimes not reliable. Cuttings can be taken from a mature plant or the established plant can be divided. Its leaves have a very bitter taste. Horehound produces whorls of small white flowers at the top of the stalk in the second year. The flowers are very attractive to bees, which makes for a tasty honey. The barbed…

View original post 914 more words

Starting a Successful Front Yard Garden and Avoiding Legal Trouble: Interview with Linda Jackson of Natures Harvest Urban Permaculture Farm

The Druid's Garden

Original design for Nature’s Harvest Urban Permaculture Farm

Six years ago, I shared about Natures Harvest Urban Permaculture Farm, a front-yard garden located in the Detroit metro area. When I shared this post, Linda was in her first year of gardening in this new location, and was regularly selling her produce at a local farmer’s market and engaging with her community. Here are links to my first two posts about her incredible garden that discusses the original process, design: Nature’s Harvest Urban Permaculture Farm and Return to Nature’s Harvest Urban Permaculture Farm.

A few weeks ago, when I was visiting Linda, I shared some photos of her garden to my social media, and many people responded by saying “she must not have a homeowners association”, “ how did she not get in legal trouble?”, or “my township would make me tear that down!” The questions and comments of…

View original post 3,138 more words

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

The Druid's Garden

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…

View original post 1,166 more words

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…

View original post 1,097 more words

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…

View original post 2,431 more words

Sacred Trees in the Americas – Black Willow (Salix nigra) – Magic, Mythology, Medicine and Uses

The Druid's Garden

Me under a giant fallen, but yet living, willow tree!

One of my earliest memories was of three ancient black willow trees that were down by a little creek where I lived. Although we lived on a busy crossroads in town, the stream and willows in the backyard were a quiet place, guarded by those three old willows. They looked like gnarled old women, sitting by the edge of the stream, their long branches swaying gently in the wind. When the stream waters would rise, sometimes they would look like they were wading there, branches swaying in the current. The Black Willow is an incredible tree, the largest Willow native to North America, and a great tree to get to know.

The Black Willow is also known as the Swamp Willow, Sauz, Dudley Willow, or the Gulf Black Willow. It is native to all of Eastern North America, from the…

View original post 2,181 more words

Cayenne Pepper – Herb of the Month

The Herb Society of America Blog

By Maryann Readal

Hot! Hot! HOT! – but not the hottest! Cayenne pepper, Capsicum annuum, is hot, but it reaches only 30,000 – 50,000 Scoville Heat Units (SHU) on the Scoville Heat Scale. For comparison, the ‘Carolina Reaper’ pepper reaches 1.4M – 2.2M SHU, and the jalapeño pepper just a meager 2,500-8,000 SHU. The Scoville Scale was developed by pharmacist Wilbur Scoville in 1912 to determine heat levels based on subjective sensitivity to capsaicinoids in peppers. Although modern lab methods are used today to determine the heat level of peppers, the Scoville Scale is still the common way to classify pepper heat intensity (Mountain Rose Herbs, 2021).

Cayenne pepper, a member of the Solanaceae, or nightshade, family, is native to tropical North and South America. The term “cayenne pepper” can generically refer to any of a number of peppers within the Capsicum annuum Cayenne Group, which is characterized by being…