Signs of spring

Taken today next to our house.

Article at Low-Tech magazine

For anyone who's interested, I wrote an article on basketry for Low-Tech Magazine, now on their web site here.

If you're not familiar with Low-Tech Magazine, it specialises in a deceptively deep question: What if high-tech solutions don't work? What if such solutions can't overcome fuel shortages, reduce climate emissions or feed tens of billions of mouths, or what if such solutions can't be sustained forever?

The magazine rescues dusty information on once-commonplace skills, and criticises conventional environmental wisdom regarding wind and solar power, and virtual commerce. It publishes detailed accounts of forgotten technologies, many from the 18th and 19th centuries when sciences like engineering were rapidly advancing but energy was still precious: floating windmills, optical telegraphs, sailing ships, timbrel vaulting, masonry ovens and so on. In short, it has proven one of the most thought-provoking and under-appreciated publications out there.

And into dust

For fifteen centuries monks worshipped at this site in the Wicklow Mountains, and some rest in the graveyard under slabs as large as tables.

Like every graveyard here, it lies in the shadow of yew trees, whose remarkable age make them symbols of life and death. I assumed that when people founded a church here, they planted yews. Yews can stand for many centuries, though, and recently I heard speculation that it was the other way around: the churches and monasteries were built where the yews already stood.

Dandelions

For some reason, when many people acquire their own suburban-style homes and front lawns, they feel they must declare war on dandelions. They spray poison on the flowers, dig the roots out with hoes, and do everything they can to insure that the space around their house is featureless and useless. A few suburbanites I know have embraced growing their own food, planting and keeping watch over their delicate crops. Good for them – but they could have also eaten the dandelions and spared themselves work on both ends. 

Dandelions are a good source of Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Calcium, Iron and especially Vitamin K – 100 grams have more than ten times your daily needs. Unlike many wild foods that take a long search, dandelions are found in almost every garden, green and field. And while many wild plants require special training to identify and discriminate from similar-looking poisonous plants, dandelions can be readily identified by every schoolchild.

In theory, the whole plant is edible, but new green leaves are best, before they form their distinctive saw-tooth shape (“lion-teeth” or in French, dent-de-lion). After that, they are still edible but quite bitter. They wilt quickly, so gather as many as you can and then drop them into cold water to keep them crisp.

Even the young leaves have a slight bitter flavour, but if that bothers you mix them with lettuce or corn salad, or other edible weeds like fat hen, jack-by-the-hedge, linden, hawthorn shoots, daisies and clover. Spring is the time when edible leaves grow in abundance all around us, so this is your chance to mix up some wild salads. 

If you want a strongly flavoured dressing to offset the unfamiliar dandelion taste, start with homemade yogurt and mix in vegetable stock, herbs, cayenne pepper, sesame oil and lemon juice. You could also make the dandelions more palatable by mixing them with apples and nuts, or in an egg salad or potato salad. 

Leaves could be picked a bit older if they are to be cooked, either sautéed into a dish like spinach or mixed into scrambled eggs or quiche. Very mature leaves should probably not be eaten except in an emergency. Of course, only pick dandelions from land you know has not been treated with pesticides, and away from any car traffic.

I cut the yellow flowers and make them into fritters. After you have gathered and washed a large bowl of flowers, cut off the base where the threadlike petals inside turn white. Take the yellow part and drop it into a batter made from equal parts flour and milk. Mix the flowers in until it is thick, perhaps with some oats for texture or some chives or other herbs for flavour. Fry the mixture like a pancake until golden brown on both sides. This is a general recipe – play with the amounts until you find your taste. 

Some people make the leaves into dandelion jam, and dandelion roots can be stir-fried like parsnips or roasted and ground into a coffee substitute. I have never heard of dandelion kim chi or pesto, but I don't see why not -- try it and let me know how it goes.

You can also make dandelion flowers into wine, in this sample recipe from Mother Earth News: Put four litres of open yellow flowers into a large pot and pour four litres of boiling water over them. Cover the crock with cheesecloth and let it sit at room temperature for three days. Then squeeze all the juice outta the flowers, throw them away and save the liquid.

Put the liquid into a big pot and add 1.5 litres of sugar, three lemons – halved and squeezed, juice and flesh together – and three oranges chopped and squeezed the same way. Boil the resulting mixture for 30 minutes with a top on the pot, then turn off the stove and let cool. When it cools to blood temperature and add yeast, cover and let sit for two weeks or until it stops bubbling. Filter through cheesecloth or a coffee strainer into a carboy, and let ferment for a few months. 

We spend millions every year ridding our lawns of flowers and plants that could be eaten, in favour of flat sheets of grass that have no function other than to require massive infusions of drinking water and pesticides. We can’t turn every college green, public park and lawn into a vegetable patch overnight, but we can stop killing off the food that grows there naturally, for free.

Originally published 2010. Dandelion nutrition: http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/vegetables-and-vegetable-products/2441/2

The Girl

The hardest thing is striking a balance. I want The Girl to learn the things that are truly important, not what her peers think are important. I want to encourage values not commonly taught to girls today. I want to prepare for the future I genuinely expect, and not what we are all told to expect.

On the other hand, a child learns from family, teachers, classmates, television and books, and those influences can complement mine and allow her a more normal childhood. Moreover, she is her own person – having a child is like getting married, in that you can influence the person you love, but cannot write them like an article. I bring my own lessons, and everyone else in her life brings theirs.

Now, going on eight years old, she shows a diverse set of influences. She plays with Barbies and ponies, watches CBeebees and Thundercats, and wants to marry Justin Bieber --- yes, he’s here too. She seems to get on with her classmates at the village Catholic school, and be a normal girl. At the same time …

***

She asked for a stay-up-late movie night, and when I asked what she wanted to watch, she said “Buster Keaton!” She particularly loves 1923’s The Balloonatic, in which Keaton fails in his attempts to impress the lovely Phyllis Haver. I think she likes the fact that Haver is a woman but competent at fishing, chopping wood and fending for herself, traits not common in female characters even today.

***

The Girl wanted to play school before bedtime, so I pretended to be the teacher, and she asked that I teach her more about the first animals, in what we call the Second Age. In the First Age of the world, I explain, there were only germs -- the Second Age came when the germs organised into the first germ cities – bodies, including ours. She loves the bizarre and oddly cute beings preserved in the Burgess Shale-- trilobites, wiwaxia and opabina – whose whimsical forms speak of God’s youthful experimentation.

“I’d like a cuddly Wiwaxia sometime,” she said. Maybe we’ll make one, I said. And is there such a thing? I thought. Of course there is. We’re not alone.

***

She also wanted to know more about how to keep valuables safe. Where do you think the best place to hide something would be? I asked.

“In a cow magnet!” she said. She knows that farmers here feed cows magnets, which are designed to sit in the cows’ stomachs and gather up all the bits of scrap and barbed wire that the cows unintentionally suck up with the grass. The resulting clump of metal sits in the cow’s rumen as long as the cow lives, and my checking this informs me that it’s called a pseudobezoar.

That’s brilliant, I said. Nobody would think of looking inside a cow. Of course, you wouldn’t get it back for a while.

“That’s okay – when I get it back, I’ll get supper out of it too.” She said.

***

She had reading to do for school, but she wanted to do it while pretending, and right now she’s into Victorian times. We talked about Mary Anning, the girl only a little older than she, who was the most skilled fossil-hunter of her age, and who meticulously uncovered the archosaurs embedded like bas-relief sculptures in the cliffs of the British Isles.

Then she pretended to be Princess Alice, daughter of Queen Victoria, arriving to inspect an Irish school in the days when Britain still controlled this land.

“You be the schoolmaster, Mr. Bogbroth,” she said. A very Dickensian name, I said, and explained who Dickens was and that it was his 200th birthday today. Could I get a more appetising name? I asked.

“Okay, the teacher can be Mr. … um …. Muntor,” she said, using the Irish word for teacher.

Okay, I said. As Schoolmaster Muntor, I introduced Princess Alice, and she read her school assignment to the invisible class before us. She then spun a story in which Princess Alice had gone lame, and Mr. Muntor, using pieces of his student’s desks and bicycle wheels, invents the first wheelchair.

What began as a stage aside during our in-character dialogue grew into a full tale, as she was carried by the momentum of her story. I put my role aside and observed her attentively, as I will one day do with her life: no longer the main character, but the audience.

Sunlit path

The apse of my favourite cathedral.

Time Machine

“I have a time machine,” said The Girl, holding up her tent.

We talk a lot about the way people lived in earlier eras, as we walk together and talk about the plants we see. I’ve casually explained that, whether in Denmark or Australia, a million years ago or a few thousand, people lived mainly by gathering wild foods, hunting, fishing, and – lately – planting and herding. We look at books to see how Egyptians built their houses or what kind of meals Romans ate.



What ages have you visited? I asked.

“A Long Time Ago,” she said, capitalising the words with her voice. “Back to the Way Things Were, in the Time of Our Ancestors.”

How long ago? I asked.

“Three years ago,” she said dramatically. “When I was four.”

Life was simpler then, wasn’t it? I said.

Photo: The Girl on a street in Dublin, on one of our weekend outings.

Dublin wall

I work across from the Guinness brewery in Dublin, a cluster of massive 19th-century brick buildings with a maze of narrow cobblestone streets and alleys running in-between. It is perhaps not the cheeriest neighbourhood -- damp, pungent, with sunlight falling in thin shafts between the barrelhouses.

It does, however, have old cobblestone streets, wooden gates and horse carriages clopping by -- and, as we walked through the streets to lunch today, a teenager smoking a cigarette while riding a horse down the road. And, if I turn an unexpected corner, I come upon something like this picture.

If you can't read it, it says, in giant letters four metres up the wall, "STONE UPON STONE UPON FALLEN STONE," and then in the Irish language, "CLOCH OS CLON CLOICHE OS CLON CLOICHE LEATHA."

I'm not certain what it means, but I like that such a thing exists for its own sake.