The Next Small Thing

Wanda Strukus is a writer/director/filmmaker who likes small things with large ramifications.

The Community Garden Project is a documentary film about urban gardens. And community. It is about our desire for a little plot of land, and our need to grow something of our own. It is about sustainability, how we eat, and how we care for one another. Or not.
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August 8th 2011

Musings on Lamb’s Quarters, Chenopodium Album

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One of the “5 most nutritious plants in the U.S” is a tasty weed!  Oh, delicious Lamb’s Quarters!  

(from those amazing folks at the Permaculture Project!)

Posted at 4:49pm and tagged with: garden, gardening, permaculture, urban agriculture, sustainability, food, nutrition, lamb's quarters, foraging, weeds,.

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August 3rd 2011

“Not Your Grandma’s Strawberries,” or, Where the Nutrients Are (Not)

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SERENDIPITY!  

Two things happened:  

I read this article:

http://www.grist.org/food/2011-08-02-not-your-grandmas-strawberries

by Natalie Jones at grist.org about the dwindling nutritional value of our selectively bred and cultivated (for quantity) produce,

AND,

I went foraging with Russ Cohen again and learned that the “weed” versions of our cultivated plants — wild beets (aka wild amaranth and sometimes callaloo in the farmer’s market) and wild spinach (also goose foot or lamb’s quarters) are delicious and have a ton more nutritional value than the garden varieties, AND the fruit of the autumn olive (an invasive species) has 18 times the lycopene of a tomato. And, as I’ve mentioned in the previous foraging post, you can make CANDY from the fruit of the autumn olive. 

So heirloom vegetable varieties are best for growing, but mix some local weeds into your salad for healthy eating!

This foraging trip was at the lovely Allandale Farm, a very old, thriving, and wonderful farm in Brookline:

http://www.allandalefarm.com/

And Russ leads several more trips in the late summer and fall in New England, New York and Canada — check out his schedule:

http://users.rcn.com/eatwild/sched.htm

Oh, and those are elderberries up top…no autumn olives until September…

Posted at 6:15pm and tagged with: autumn olive, candy, food, foraging, garden, gardening, goose foot, grist, lamb's quarters, local, local food, locally grown, nutrients, nutritional value, russ cohen, sustainability, weeds, wild amaranth, wild beet, urban agriculture, urban farm,.