i read 'em!
I read it. 
This week we found what looked like the remnants of a basic shelter (lots of dead bramble boughs that had been cut and strewn over some low-hanging branches) in a secluded little glade. IDed and tried some hawthorn leaves (the flowers are just dying back now) and jack-by-the-hedge. Also practiced rock throwing, and finding reasonable-looking throwing rocks. He can hit a target on the other side of the river, about six? metres away. I’m not terribly good (my excuse is that I spent all my time making terrible little bows and catapults, rather than throwing rocks).
Also IDed the climbing plant that’s growing absolutely everywhere as japanese knotweed, which I hadn’t known you could eat. It’s illegal to transport it here, so while I’m not worried about eating it to extinction as I am everything else, I am worried about accidentally spreading it - also that it might not be safe to eat, as the local council like to spray pesticides on everything they can. 
(Also, my partner, who has always seemed rather sceptical of rewilding, appears to have come around and is taking even more interest (and showing more natural talent) than me! I hope it lasts…)
Great! I’m glad people are reading my stuff. Not that I would mind terribly if they didn’t. I still get something out of writing it, but it is nice to know…
Yes, Japanese knotweed is a crazy invasive:
Japanese Knotweed is one of the most extraordinary examples of an invasive plant known. Firstly it is a giant herb, which every Spring grows rapidly to a height of 2 or 3 metres, only to be cut down by the first winter frost and grow afresh the next Spring. It is actually a dioecious plant, which means that you need male and female plants for sexual reproduction to occur, yet in Europe, so far, we only have female plants. Not only is it a single sex, it is also a single clone, as molecular work carried out at the University of Leicester has shown. Given that it must occupy many thousands of hectares in Britain alone (the same clone is also known to occur in continental Europe and North America), in total biomass terms, it is probably the biggest female in the world! The infestation in Swansea has been estimated to weigh 62,000 tonnes, the same as 40 blue whales. It has achieved its wide distribution solely by vegetative reproduction. That is, it has spread by cuttings or from pieces of rhizome, whether deliberately as cultivated plants or as garden discards, or inadvertently, spreading downstream along rivers after flooding events or being spread by road works or site redevelopment involving an infested area.from [url=http://www.cabi-bioscience.org/html/japanese_knotweed_alliance.htm]http://www.cabi-bioscience.org/html/japanese_knotweed_alliance.htm[/url]
But it is tasty and the hollow stems are useful for different things.
I’m glad your partner is taking an interest in rewilding!
Amen to the invasiveness of Japanese Knotweed. Quite delicious and quite spready. This was one of the first plants I learned with the Wildman in Central Park. They get pretty woody pretty fast. I never thought of trying to cut them back and see if the regrowth was a tender, though. I have yet to see them in the Ozarks.
Good news on your partner’s interest Vashti.
I wonder if it would grow well as an inside plant?
This relates back to the bear/deer inside buildings discussion:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18562479/?GT1=9951
Not the main story but off to the side: “Violent Squirrel Causes School Lockdown”.
A terribly exaggerated headline but still entertaining. Did anyone else use to read that “when animals strike back” section in the Green Anarchy journal? I always did like that section. (Maybe it’s still there. I don’t read the paper anymore.)
When I lived in downtown Charlottesville VA a calf that had escaped from a slaughterhouse ran right into our back yard. I wish we could have offered it safe harbor. It certainly deserved to live after that journey. But some guys came chasing after it and shot it with a tranquilizer.
In a move that would (if it ever got out) strike fear into the hearts of the local gardening community and get me committed to an institution, I have begun to grow dandelions. Yessir. In pots.
There don’t seem to be many in my back yard, so I’ve potted up the few existing feeble samples (nice and deep for that juicy taproot) and I am giving them the best possible care with a view to kick-starting the population that has been so ruthlessly exterminated, cursed and otherwise persecuted by my neighbours…
In other news, on the hygiene front, I’m trying to wean myself off dependence on soaps and lotions, and instituting a water-wash only regime. It’s actually worked pretty well, just a little more scrubbing action and greater frequency of ablutions has produced results as good as a soap wash, with the exception of my hair… but even that’s not too bad (the key to that will be a diet that doesn’t make it spew industrial amounts of grease).
Niether of the two are particularly tool-related but hey, I’m goin’ one step at a time here…
I’ve seen big old dandelion greens for sale in certain stores so someone somewhere is growing them on an industrial scale. Burdock too. Kinda crazy. I think it is a fine idea to plant weeds though. Bigger roots, easier to dig, easy to grow. I’ve thought about that with burdock especially because it is usually so damn hard to get the root out of the ground.
I use soap very sparingly, but I do wash the hair. Diet definitely makes a difference. Back when I was a raw foodist my hair was much less greasy and my armpits didn’t stink at all. One day after a long hike I asked my sister to smell them and she couldn’t smell a thing. Believe me, she is the first to let me know if I stink.
Asking “hey sis, come smell my armpits” would be unthinkable in my family. You got some interesting folks… ;D
i work once a week at the farmers market and we sell dandelion greens to idiots for $2 a bundle
If I ever get a garden going this year, I’m definitely going to transfer some dandelions into it. I had some dandelion root out of a friend’s organic garden, and they were amazing and huge.
I’ve done the water wash thing before–mostly in college when I couldn’t afford much and did without of a lot of things. I got the idea from my dogs. Their coats seemed so clean and soft after a rain, so I figured it would work for humans too.
yeah, this happened to me too! now (no paleodiet) they only stink when i drink caffeine. weird, huh? even weirder: the only other time i had b.o. appreciably while on paleo happened when i stayed at a to-go-unnamed commune, with just my girlfriend and the older couple that ran the place. the older guy had temper tantrums that i never could get used to, especially as they’d come out of the blue after a really nice day/week. i now know that you actually can smell fear (or anxiety, or just plain stress). cuz i stunk of it.
in case you recognize this from your own raw food experience, i should mention too that eating paleo has also given me an immunity to certain ‘bugbear’ plants of the wilderness: poison oak, poison ivy, poison sumac. injectables, like nettles, devil’s club, etc., still will give me a reaction, but not as bad as before.
paleo rox!
a freebie for you scouts out there, consider going paleo so that you can build a shelter in the middle of a patch of poison ivy. talk about ultimate secrecy. 
in case you recognize this from your own raw food experience, i should mention too that eating paleo has also given me an immunity to certain 'bugbear' plants of the wilderness: poison oak, poison ivy, poison sumac. injectables, like nettles, devil's club, etc., still will give me a reaction, but not as bad as before.
Hmm I never noticed. In fact the last and only time I got poision ivy really bad was when I had a boyfriend who was hyper scared of poision ivy and I accidentaly spread it to him too. He was always getting pissed at me for accidentally walking into it. You don’t want to know how many fine days outdoors were ruined by this very subject. Which brings an interesting twist into the conversation. If fear can make you stink can fear make you itch too? Did I get it so bad and spread it to him precisely because he hated it so.
in case you recognize this from your own raw food experience, i should mention too that eating paleo has also given me an immunity to certain 'bugbear' plants of the wilderness: poison oak, poison ivy, poison sumac. injectables, like nettles, devil's club, etc., still will give me a reaction, but not as bad as before.
this makes perfect sense, since our reaction to the urushiol in the “poisonous” Toxicodendron plants represents an immune system response. eating paleo, you don’t ingest as many foreign proteins for your immune system to have to respond to, so it can handle other “invaders” more easily.
i would guess that you still react to nettles because they inject histamine–which (i think) our skin always reacts to. at least, when i went to an allergist, and he pricked my skin with all the different allergens, he used histamine as the control allergen to make sure he had administered the test correctly.
apparently, our bodies also release histamine during orgasm which probably explains (combined with the serotonin that nettles inject as well) why some people find them “stimulating”.
[quote=“Kaliverdant, post:47, topic:183”]In other news, on the hygiene front, I’m trying to wean myself off dependence on soaps and lotions, and instituting a water-wash only regime. It’s actually worked pretty well, just a little more scrubbing action and greater frequency of ablutions has produced results as good as a soap wash, with the exception of my hair… but even that’s not too bad (the key to that will be a diet that doesn’t make it spew industrial amounts of grease).
Niether of the two are particularly tool-related but hey, I’m goin’ one step at a time here…[/quote]
i havent used soap or shampoo or lotion or anything human made by the industrial system. i take baths in the lake as soon as it opens up in the spring. i scrub with sand, works great. there are also a number of plant roots you can use like soap. ill find out what they are and post them.
there are also a number of plant roots you can use like soap. I'll find out what they are and post them.
I’ve used soapwort (bouncing bet) which grows profusely along the abandoned railroad beds here, but It’s not strong enough to degrease my hair which is really all I care about…in my civilized life. If I was uncivilized I probably wouldn’t care if my hair were greasy. The local indians put bear fat and sunflower oil into their hair to make it MORE greasy.
In other news I’ve got a new article for y’all :
http://www.rewild.info/fieldguide/index.php?title=Project_Failure:_May_7-13
Nice penny. I really enjoy reading these.
there are also a number of plant roots you can use like soap
i know yucca root has saponins in it. i’ve used it before. just pound the root in a dished out place in a rock with a little bit of water, and as you pound, the saponins froth up.
Willem,
your story about the guy with the temper tantrums reminds me of something. You see I really like the work of herbalist Susun Weed. Her style is great because she uses common weeds and she encourages people to touch and taste the plants and disparages little pills and shipping little bottles around the world. In short she promotes the old style wise-woman ways. Well she lives in the catskills and so I went to a four day class at her house and I don’t know if I will ever go back because she is nuts. She insults her paying guests. She throws temper tantrums several times a day. She has these apprentices (a motley looking crew who are only allowed one shower a week, and are perpetually covered in poision ivy) and they pay thousands of dollars and travel thousands of miles to come study with her and many of them end up leaving during the first week, if not the first day and I’m not sure if they get a refund. She swears and screams at them. “You’re cutting the onions too big! Now you’re cutting them too small! What are you an idiot? Are you a baby? Do you need me to hold your hand?” She claims that she enjoys this scary reputation, that it means only the serious ones stay. She claims that she is always in control. That she knows exactly what she is doing and that this is part her shamanic training part of of breaking down the ego.
I can see how that could be true. A bit like an herbalist boot camp, but actually I think she is just delusional. For one she has work study days where people come to volunteer on her farm for one day a month and half of them end up leaving early too. They didn’t come for any shamanic training. They just wanted to learn how to milk goats and make a wild salad. In my short class one mother who was there left early because Susun screamed at her for using bug repellant containing essential oils around her baby. I just can’t see how treating people this way can be good. If someone is going to scream at me I’m going to make them pay for the opportunity, rather than the other way around.
I guess my question is, has anyone else ever encountered anything like this and what do you make of it? I think of it as the guru personality. Susun is a guru. She has the skills, she has the charisma, she has the charm and the fame to keep them coming. She has this way of saying things that make you believe nothing else could be true. In between tantrums it’s like nothing ever happened. She’s kind and loving, complimentary. Unfortunately that sounds exactly like the relationship between an abuser and an abusee.
:o
Makes me think of a certain fictional somebody…
“What is your major malfunction, numbnuts???”
;D
I guess I’ve met a few folks that’ll snap and insult you when minorly displeased, but I can’t say I’ve encountered it in anyone from the primitive skills field, or anybody of “guru” status. I honestly don’t see how blurting antagonisms contributes to any primitive learning process, shamanic or otherwise. There’s enough to test your mettle in the natural world without having to watch out for supposed benefactors belittling you…