Junuary Walk

Good news, everybody! June 19th marks the day we FINALLY TURNED OFF THE HEAT!

Bloody hell. Its always so fecking cold! I was told at work that “oh yeah, its always cold this time of year here. We call it June-uary” OH HOW QUAINT GOD DAMN IT! Mostly I’m just pissed because I bought this toque that was obviously someones first attempt at a hat and now Ive been wearing it for like 9 straight damn months! BAH! I SAY! BAH!

Anyway, these pictures are from my day off on Tuesday. It was sunny, and I decided to go for a walk and do a bit of foraging for some goodies. Flowers are starting to bloom, and leaves are all sprouting up and so many things are edible! My front lawn is pretty much a salad. All it needs is some thousand island and voila.

I packed my Foraging Kit:

– bottle of water
– camera
– cool shades
– a variety of plastic baggies
– a glove for picking prickly things

And I set off! I was fully imagining I was Princess Nausicaa in the beginning of The Valley of The Wind where she’s running all around collecting specimens in glass tubes….. My brother and sister may be the only ones who know what the hell I’m talking about. But that movie was my life as a girl.

 

I needed to collect some caribou moss, as usual. We go through a lot of it. I candy it and put it on cakes. Today I made a little forest scene on top of a birthday cake with candy dirty, and candy rocks, candy moss and then shooting up through it was real violets on their stems. It looked pretty cute. Im probably the only mofo putting shit like moss and candied beets on people’s bloody birthday cakes and getting away with it.

These little bell things are cute, not 100% sure what they are though. I think they will eventually be a berry.

Nice patch of creeping juniper here. I use the branches for syrups, or blitzed up in sugar for flavouring things. I also use the berries. There’s so much juniper here that I sometimes fantasize about opening a gin distillery here.

Now this is what I was really after; fireweed. The leaves taste exactly like tea, and the blossoms make a beautiful ruby red, perfumed jelly. Not enough were in bloom and the few that were were covered in bees frantically scraping up all the polleny goodness out of them. I felt too guilty taking away what limited blooms there are here from  the old bee’s so I’ll save it for next week.

These little darlings are spruce tips. Each three fingered prong gets these beautiful, super flavourful little bud on them. They are DELICIOUS and packed with vitamin C. Im doing all sorts of stuff with this, because the syrup and jelly is a beautiful purple colour.

They are full of pollen right now as well, if you can see it on my grubby little finger there.

 

Oh a bone!

I trudged my way up the hill, on my search for a better picture of some ice bergs. They have been so close and beautiful and I have no good pictures of them!

See them there.. those wee white specks in all that blue? Yeah thats them!

I took a break by this pond, which had this tangle of bog rosemary growing in it.

 

Beautiful little pink flowers.

I love anything with the prefix of “bog”. It’s charming.

All around the pond was a thick, green moss looking exactly like the shag carpeting that was in my nan’s living room when I was a kid. It was nice to sit on, in the sunshine, staring at my murkey little pond and eating random stuff.

I mentioned caribou moss, now this beautiful little puff ball is reindeer moss. Its finer, and grows in orb shaped puffs. Its lovely. And actually, not moss, it’s a lichen.

So cute.

Labrador tea, starting to bloom. They get pretty white flowers.

More fireweed growing in amoungst some short birch trees.

I found this weird stuff, and it was very pretty. I tried a bit, and it tasted like INTENSE seaweed followed by the unpleasentness of what I imagine licking an infected wound would taste like.. yeah.. like.. rot and pennies and blood and salt. Bleah. I really, really regretted that. But just in case I was wrong, I had another. CB told me that when he would go mushroom picking with his Poppy, he would have baby CB put anything they tasted in their pocket just in case it made them horribly ill and they needed to identify what it was. I should have put some of this in my pocket… because I was maybe worried I was going to die. DONT EAT RANDOM SHIT OFF THE GROUND, KIDS! Stay in school dont do drugs.

“Oh sweet, alfalfa sprouts! BLEH A DEAD MERMAIDS BUTTHOLE!”

And back home again.

There’s a lot more stuff out there thats ripe for the picking; burdock root, dandelion leaves, sorrel, baby violets, labrador tea, chicory, clover, pungent sweet gale.. nettle, wild mint.. lots of leafy stuff thats good for eating. I’ll keep posting what I do with what I collect. SEE YA!