Merrimack Valley Magazine

Eating the Weeds

July 31, 2021 by Katie DeRosa

Summer Foraging From Backyards to Backwoods

Foraging is Mother Nature’s scavenger hunt. Outdoors, we find many hidden gems in the form of what most call weeds. Once you start learning and building your foraging confidence, this activity can quickly snowball and begin to transform the way you look at everything from your lawn to your local hiking trails. Before you set off on your first expedition, here are some guidelines.

General Guidelines for Foraging:

1. Always be 100% certain of what you are eating before you eat it. Assume your discoveries aren’t edible until proved otherwise. Check multiple sources to confirm.

2. Tread lightly and be mindful of sustainability. Lots of things live under our feet. Research what is a considered a sustainable harvest of the plant you seek, never taking more than what you need unless it’s invasive. Often, other animals or insects eat it, too.

3. Keep an eye on where you are foraging. Beware of common dangers such as poison ivy and ticks, and be on the lookout for less common concerns such as giant hogweed. Don’t forage in areas treated with chemicals or possibly contaminated with heavy metals or pollutants.

4. It’s easy for new foragers to get lost. Use good mapping software and make sure your phone or GPS unit is charged. Better yet, learn map and compass skills.

Bonus Tips for Foraging:

1. Find something good? Pin-drop the location on your phone’s mapping app so you can return. I also set reminders to check these spots when the time is right — many common edibles are only available for short periods of time.

2. Bring the right gear. I keep a couple of bags and a knife with me every time I forage. It’s also useful to bring along a small field guide.

So, on to the good stuff. The following are a few species to look for in the summer months.

Wild Blueberry (Vaccinium sp.)

Here’s one we all know and love, but finding blueberries in the wild makes them even more fun and delicious. Who doesn’t love wild blueberry pancakes?

ID: You’ve got highbush and lowbush blueberries; they have small, ovate and alternate leaves on woody branches. Their flowers in spring are small, white to pink, and grow in clusters, each with five petals fused together into a bell shape. The berries have a five-pointed crown on the end and often have a white bloom. Highbush can get taller than the average person, and lowbush are about shin height. They like acidic soil, so look for them around evergreen trees in July and August.

Turn these tasty berries into a blueberry sumac (see below) jam or just enjoy them as is. We aren’t the only animal that likes these, so leave some behind.

Garlic Mustard (Alliaria petiolata)

Garlic mustard is a blessing and a curse — it’s exceptionally invasive and a bully. It spreads seeds readily and inhibits the growth of other plants. Whenever you see this plant, you’re doing the world a favor by pulling it out and throwing away whatever you don’t use (NOT for compost). However, garlic mustard is one of my favorite plants to forage because it’s everywhere and you can use it almost year-round.

ID: Garlic mustard is a biennial, meaning it has a two-year growth cycle, with a shifting appearance as it develops. When you break or crush the leaves, you’ll smell garlic and a hint of mustard. In spring, it sends up a flower stalk with a seed head that looks like a mini broccoli. The flowers are small, white and four-petaled. The flowers turn into long, slender capsules filled with dark-colored seeds. When ridding an area of garlic mustard, it’s best to pull the plant by the roots before the seed pod sets. It grows in partially shaded areas that have been disturbed by humans.

The leaves are the least bitter and most tender in early spring. Cook them quickly with olive oil and salt, make them into a pesto, or add them to homemade sauerkraut for a kick. Before the flower heads open, you can use the top few tender inches like broccoli rabe. You can even use their roots as horseradish. For this, it’s best to find thick roots and peel off the tough outer part, mince the inner roots and mix them in a splash of vinegar. If they’re too tough, make an infused “horseradish” vinegar.

Staghorn Sumac (Rhus typhina)

I know how many people will react to reading about staghorn sumac. Isn’t that poisonous? I would love to get the phone number of poison sumac’s marketing team because it did a bang-up job of promoting it. There is a poison sumac, but its appearance is wildly different from the edible varieties. The beautiful and striking conelike clusters of the immediately recognizable staghorn are pink-red and upright, not the drooping clusters of greenish-white berries of the far less common poison sumac.

ID: Staghorn sumac commonly grows along highways and often goes unnoticed until you know how to ID it, at which point you start to see it everywhere. It reaches a height of 10-12 feet. In the fall, the compound leaves (many leaflets on one leaf stem) turn a lovely pinkish scarlet. The most common form of sumac in our area is called staghorn sumac because it has a fuzzy antler appearance. It grows in open sunny areas, often at the edge of fields. The berry clusters are ready to pick in mid to late summer, when they are rust colored. The coating on the outside of the berries is the tasty part. To tell if they are worth harvesting, touch the middle of a cluster and lick your fingers to see if it has a lemony tang. Taking a few clusters from each tree won’t hurt them.

To make pink lemonade, soak the clusters in cool to room-temperature water and break up the clusters, massaging them a bit to get the berries to give up the goods. Strain, and you have an unsweetened lemonade — a great source of vitamin C. You can also dry the berries to create a lemony spice, or use the lemonade and/or dried sumac to make a nice “lemon” wild blueberry jam!

Chicken of the Woods (Laetiporus sp.)

Certainly not a weed, but sometimes treated as one by those who don’t appreciate its value, this mushroom is easy to spot and ID.

ID: The first thing to note is that the underside has no gills. It is a polypore mushroom, which means the bottom will appear smooth with many small holes (these are the pores). They grow as a group of thick, stemless, fan-shaped caps, one often overlapping the other. They are shades of orange to yellow-orange, making them really stand out. They are commonly found growing out of dead or dying oaks, but can also grow from other trees. Look for these in late spring through fall. If they seem bug ridden or dried out, leave them.

I think these are best when breaded and fried; they really do taste like chicken. Be sure to try a small amount at first and wait a day to make sure it doesn’t upset your stomach. This is a good policy to employ with any new edible. Because of the dangers associated with mushroom poisoning, it’s also helpful to attend guided walks sponsored by organizations such as the Boston Mycological Club.

I hope searching for some of these wild edibles brings you joy and lets you connect to nature in our fast-paced, electronics-centered world. Nature always has something to teach us! Happy foraging.

Wellness Wednesday – 3/10/21

March 10, 2021 by Kristin Cole

Let’s face it: some health and wellness advice can get a bit redundant. Eat your vegetables, sleep enough, drink more water. This week, let’s shake things up. We’ve got some interesting links in the lineup that include surprising, out of the ordinary scientific research on mushrooms, reading, music and more. Buckle up and get ready for some weird science.

Eat More Mushrooms

Mushrooms are a great source of vitamin D and zinc, and are known to lower blood pressure while giving your immune system a boost. A recent research study also found that increasing the amount of mushrooms in your diet increases vital nutrients, while having “minimal to no impact on overall calories, sodium or saturated fat.” Specifically, an 84-gram serving (described by researchers as “five medium white mushrooms”) “resulted in an increase in potassium, copper, selenium, riboflavin and niacin, but had no impact on calories, carbohydrate, fat or sodium.”

If you’re looking to add these nutrient-packed fungi into your diet, here’s 54 mushroom recipe ideas that are worth trying.

Hold on, I’m not done with mushrooms yet. If you won’t eat mushrooms, like my mom, what about living in one? Scientists have developed a “mushroom brick” that can help architects and engineers fight climate change. Check out this article by Justin Calma, and the included video about these revolutionary mushroom bricks.

“Materials made with mycelium, the fungal network from which mushrooms grow … produce far less planet-heating carbon dioxide than traditional materials like cement,” Calma writes. “An added bonus is that mushrooms are biodegradable, so they leave behind less harmful waste than traditional building materials. Mushrooms can even help with clean-up efforts, feeding off things that might have otherwise ended up in a landfill, like sawdust or agricultural waste.”

Nutrient Check

Most of us have a general idea of what our body needs to survive and remain healthy. Nonetheless, we often still lack vital vitamins and antioxidants, (like us New Englanders and vitamin D in the winter) and our body actually tells us when it needs a boost. Refer to these five signs your body is missing key nutrients — for you might realize your body is missing something. I learned that bleeding gums means you may need more vitamin C, and skin redness or irritation is linked to consuming sugar, salt and refined grains.

More Books, More Music, Better Brains

Now moving from the physical to the mental. Who doesn’t love to read, right? Whether you read for pleasure, or read to learn, reading isn’t just an intake of information — it actually rewires your brain. This article from Inc.com found that there is increasing scientific research supporting the fact that reading “doesn’t just fill your brain with information; it actually changes the way your brain works for the better as well.” One of my favorite things in the article was the fact that reading exercises our ability to empathize: “If a character in your book is playing tennis, areas of your brain that would light up if you were physically out there on the court yourself are activated.”

Reading exercises your brain, and music connects it. Another recent research study found that long term musical training resulted in increased brain connectivity. The study, described here, found that “musicians also had stronger white matter connections between auditory regions and lobes involved in various types of high-level processing. Musicians that began their training at a younger age had stronger structural connections than musicians with a later start. These results demonstrate how experience shapes the brain, especially early in life, and how enhanced musical skills are represented in our brain.” Knowing this, I might need to tell my older brother that my little nephew due in July does not need to be a wide receiver, but a jazz musician.

Ease Loneliness With Rituals

All this talk about our brains reminds me that we are nearing one year of COVID-19 lockdowns. Quarantine and social distancing have altered everyone’s lives, and for those living alone or missing loved ones, the past year has been especially difficult. If you are experiencing increased loneliness, read about this study that found that odd rituals can help. From dunking a tea bag repeatedly to licking the cream off an Oreo, researchers found these unique rituals alleviated loneliness in participants. With daylight savings coming this weekend, don’t forget that brighter, longer days are ahead.

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Good Reads and Listens

Get Walkin’. Dust off your treadmill and get ready to try out the latest workout trend: the 12-3-30. This is a simple workout that guarantees significant calorie burn. All you need to do is set your treadmill to an incline of 12, walk at a speed of 3 miles per hour, and continue this for 30 minutes.

Horror Buffs. Have you found yourself drawn to horror films lately? This article from Psychology.com discusses the reasoning behind why people are drawn to horror movies during the ongoing pandemic. Check it out, then go watch Ari Aster’s Midsommar!

Listen to Trees. For a unique way to relax, check out Tree.fm, which allows you to listen to the sounds of forests from around the world. It’s a great way to take a break from work, lose your eyes and travel to peaceful nature in far away countries right at your desk.

Fungal Matters – Cultivating Mushrooms in Coffee Grounds

June 30, 2019 by Sarah Courchesne Leave a Comment

The comings and goings of mushrooms are inscrutable. At least to the untrained eye, which mine is. There was the tuft of alcohol inkies that appeared overnight in the middle of the yard one year and then melted away and never came back; the batch of cheery yellow parasol mushrooms in the pot of a houseplant I was nursing back to health; the elfin toadstools that sprouted out of the sill of my shower in a rented apartment one time. Mushrooms make plain how humans got the idea of spontaneous generation — that rotting meat generates flies of its own accord, or that swamps produce clouds of mosquitoes out of miasma. Mushrooms appear to come out of nowhere, from no source, and suddenly.

Being visual creatures, humans see a mushroom and equate it with the fungus itself. This is a backward view, though an understandable one given that they are conspicuous and, in the case of Pleurotus ostreatus (the species usually meant when we say oyster mushroom), delicious. But mushrooms are simply an appendage of a much larger organism, a temporary reproductive organ employed to deploy spores and then dismantled by rot. Just as you have to tend a tree to get the apples, you have to tend the whole fungus to get the mushrooms. Mushrooms seem to pop up out of nowhere because the body they belong to is usually underground or inconspicuous — a mat of tendrils nosing through the dark. For those hoping to grow their own mushrooms at home, understanding the nature of Pleurotus holistically will make the work much easier.

If you read a bit about cultivating your own oyster mushrooms, you will see a great deal of optimistic cheerleading. “Easy to grow!” “So simple!” “Enjoy fresh mushrooms with literally zero effort!” Like most such claims, it would be better to approach them with a skeptical attitude. I have taken in many a houseplant billed as “easy care!” or “impossible to kill!” and promptly killed it. It’s true that oyster mushrooms are willing to grow on a wide range of substrates and do not require extensive daily attention, but, as with impossible to kill houseplants, there are always ways to go wrong. Learning some basics about oyster mushrooms can help you avoid the particular pitfalls involved in growing them at home.

Oyster mushrooms are fairly easy to find in the woods in just about any season, and, like many wild foraged or hunted foods, they tend to have a richer taste than domestically raised stock. At least, thus sayeth the foragers I listen to; my palate is never sensitive enough to detect such differences. I am pleased when I can tell that leftovers have gone bad, and sometimes I fail at that and eat them anyway. In any case, there are other substantial benefits to home growing mushrooms: no potential to fatally confuse an edible species with a toxic one, plus the convenience of countertop freshness and accessibility, rather than an uncertain walk in the woodlands or the disappointment of a grocery store-bought carton of mushrooms found slimy and moldering in the fridge drawer on a frazzled work night.

Oyster mushrooms can grow on many things — straw, sawdust, an old hardwood log — but it turns out that used coffee grounds are particularly well suited to the task of hosting them. The reason lies mainly in the suppression of competition. The thin filaments of the fungal body, called hyphae, and referred to as “spawn” by fungus farmers, can be outcompeted by common molds in the environment. Substrates like straw have to be pasteurized before adding the spawn. The beauty of using used coffee grounds is that the high heat of brewing effectively pasteurizes the grounds, killing off any competitor organisms and offering a clean bed for the hyphae to grow through. The setup is time sensitive, and the grounds will be swiftly colonized by undesirable molds if not inoculated with mushroom spawn within 24 hours of brewing. You can put your grounds into a purpose-built bag from a kit online, or you can make your own out of a bucket or other plastic container with holes drilled into the sides.

Oyster mushrooms have preferred moisture and light levels, optimal spawn-to-substrate ratios, ideal air circulation patterns. Their “easy to grow” nature depends on these requirements being met, but a careful reading of the instructions provided by the more reputable online mushroom spawn purveyors should keep you on the right side of things. Growing mushrooms in coffee grounds is a bit like having an ant farm. The hyphae burrow through the earthy grounds, and the mushrooms, once they appear, grow fast enough to almost watch. Less mobile than ants, true, but hovering where fungi do, somewhere between animal and vegetable, not less animate, and certainly as captivating.

Elizabeth Almeida, (above) farmer and owner of Fat Moon Mushrooms, is a grower of gourmet, organic mushrooms for restaurants and boutique grocery stores in the Merrimack Valley region of Massachusetts and New Hampshire. She shared five tips for The Bean Magazine’s readers on growing oyster mushrooms.

1. Humidity is critical. Spritz growing mushrooms with water several times a day.

2. Fresh air is also important. Keep your grow kit in a place where the mushrooms can breathe.

3. Mushrooms double in size daily. Harvest when they stop growing and the edges uncurl.

4. Double your yield! After harvesting the first batch, let your block rest for a week. Soak it in cold water for 4 to 6 hours and start the process over.

5. It’s best to eat oyster mushrooms immediately after harvesting, but if you need to store them in the refrigerator, put them in a brown paper bag so they can get the oxygen they need to stay fresh.

Find out more at TheFatMoon.com.

Medicinal Mushrooms – A Backyard Pharmacopeia

April 28, 2018 by Sarah Courchesne Leave a Comment

In one of my favorite David Attenborough clips, his soothing narration goes on as a tropical ant, in a close-up, repetitively wipes its antennae and clacks its mandibles. Then it climbs a plant stem to a particular height, clamps down its jaws and dies. In a time-lapse sequence that follows, a grayish horn grows up from the base of the ant’s armored head. This horn is an Ophiocordyceps fungus, the fibers of which his body has hosted, and which took up reins running as fibrils through all his muscles and drove him up here. After he died, his body was at just the right height for the fungal spores to drift down onto the columns of living ants passing below and infect them, too. When you search for examples of other cordyceps genus online, the twin questions that define our relationship with fungi pop up first: “Can they infect humans?” and “What are the benefits?”

I trained as a veterinarian, and what we learned about fungi was largely adversarial and typical of the Western system of medicine. Fungal infections are rare, at least in otherwise healthy individuals. Still, we were warned and found examples in unusual instances. For example, there was the dog with the chronically bloody, infected nose who turned out to enjoy rooting in the moldy compost pile and now had a festering granuloma up her snout. Or the seabird, kept in a confined space, immunosuppressed and breathing the close, terrestrial air, found on postmortem to have his insides blanketed in blue-green bread mold.

We learned how hard it is to treat fungal infections. Limited as we may be in our fight against bacterial infections, fungi are a different thing altogether, in a literal sense. Most of our medicine is about differential killing. We try to exploit the vulnerabilities in the bacterium or the parasite that human cells do not share. We try to avoid collateral damage. But fungi are often too like us to find a wedge that will drive us apart. Their cellular structure and function is more like ours than we might wish to believe.

Fungi have a plant-like stoicism, but, it turns out, with something more like an animal body. We were taught to see them as invaders to be fended off, slow- and quiet-growing infections that were often untreatable by the time we noticed them. Still, fungi have also given us much of our arsenal against other attackers. When Alexander Fleming discovered the antibiotic properties of a common mold, there was Penicillium he saw in the petri dish, wearing its clear halo of vanquished bacteria.

The Merrimack Valley boasts a number of mushrooms that have been traditionally used for their therapeutic properties, although learning to properly identify and use them takes training and patience. The maitake, otherwise known as the hen-of-the-woods (left), grows at the base of oaks trees. Reishi, right, has been used as medicine for over 2000 years. In recent years, there has been an explosion of interest in the health properties of fungus. Much is yet unknown. Left photo: ©Brebca-stock.adobe.com. Right photo: ©ukjent-stock.adobe.com.

Fungi in many forms had been good medicine long before Fleming knew anything about them. Across the world from Attenborough’s ant, on the Tibetan plateau, a fungus in the same Ophiocordyceps genus (this one commandeers a caterpillar’s body) has been prized as medicine for kidney and bowel disease, high cholesterol and sexual dysfunction. This last is probably the reason for its wild popularity in global markets, and the subsequent over-harvesting of the fungus for profit.

Many traditional medicines derived from fungi have drawn the attention of scientists who can point to the many bioactive chemical constituents and speak of the intracellular and extracellular polypeptides and nucleosides present in the organisms. As yet, however, no one has ever succeeded in replicating in a lab the complete process of the fungus infecting a caterpillar and directing it, zombie-like, to the right location for launching a crop of spores. It seems nature will keep her own counsel on that.

Thinking about these far-flung species far from home, I picked up the quirky and beautifully illustrated field guide “Fascinating Fungi of New England” for the view closer to home. Written by Lawrence Millman, a mycologist who lives in Cambridge, Mass., it is a marvelous little volume, approachable for the beginner mushroom hunter. As you leaf through the contents, the species list alone speaks to the multiplicity and poetry of fungal nature. Here are the familiar chanterelle and oyster mushrooms, but also the train wrecker, stinky squid, alcohol inky and destroying angel. Scanning the pages I’d looked through countless times before, I noticed for the first time that here also was chaga, a fungus I know from a mushroom coffee my husband likes to buy. Chaga is medicinal, and I searched the book for others, finding that the ubiquitous turkey tail fungus can be an adjunct in cancer therapy, and that maitake, which sits like a fluffed hen at the base of old trees, aids the immune system. A walk in my own backyard, it turns out, reveals a whole pharmacopeia.

Recently, I was listening to mycologist Paul Stamets on the radio. He was trying to define why mushrooms unnerve so many people. Mushrooms are only the temporary reproductive organ of a vastly larger fungus that runs its filaments, called mycelia, underground or into the corpus of a tree, or whatever its food source is, sometimes for acres. We don’t usually notice these mycelia, but they are the true body of the fungus. The mushrooms pop up, often overnight, deploy their spores and quickly melt away again.

Stamets thinks it’s this ephemeral quality that unsettles us, but I was struck by something else he said about how we see these organisms. He talked about how extreme a spectrum they run in terms of their effects on the human body. Some are good food, some are good medicine, some have hallucinogenic properties, and some will kill you in even the smallest amount. There they are, side by side in your backyard, striking in how quickly they appear and are gone — another intimation of their eerily animal-like nature. So we ask the same questions of them that we ask of our fellow humans: “Which can harm me, which can nourish, which can heal?” As with humans, fungi, with their complex natures, can do all three.

Wellness Wednesdays – 6/28/17

June 28, 2017 by Joseph Girard-Meli Leave a Comment

WELLNESS TIP OF THE WEEK

Mindfulness: Moments of Peace in a Stressful Society

Do you know about the practice of mindfulness? It’s a prevalent method of reducing stress that’s used by everyone from executives at fast-paced companies to behavioral health patients practicing dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT). Put simply, mindfulness is the practice of slowing oneself down and focusing only on the task at hand; for example, if one is washing dishes, one can keep all focus on the act by focusing on things like the temperature of the water, the feeling of soap suds in one’s hand … and, of course, the motions required to get those dishes clean! In a world filled with distractions and opportunities to multitask, this is naturally a lot easier than it sounds. But it’s also a great way to get things done more quickly and efficiently — without your mind wandering to the next thing on your list, which is bound to bring nothing but anxious feelings.

HEALTH IN THE VALLEY

GMO: Food or Foe?

Local Experts Discuss the Pros and Cons of Genetically Modified Organisms

Perhaps you’ve heard the term at your local health food store. Or maybe you’ve read that General Mills no longer uses them in Cheerios. Or that starting in 2018, Whole Foods Market will require all suppliers to label whether their products contain them. Wherever you’ve heard the term, it’s likely you have questions about GMOs — what they are, how they’re used, and what they mean for your health… (read more)

WELLNESS AROUND THE WEB

The World’s Most Dangerous Mushroom

Californian foragers have been suffering the wrath of an innocent-looking mushroom called amanita phalloides, which has accurately come to be called the “death cap” due to its devastating effects on those unfortunate enough to take a bite. While the harmful ‘shroom does apparently taste delicious, the enjoyment doesn’t last long before violent vomiting begins. The real danger comes to the human liver, which is ravaged by the toxins until they’re flushed out — which, if carried out too late, can require a liver transplant to fix. One 18-month-old girl, fed a meal of the mushrooms by her unsuspecting mother, now has permanent neurological damage. (via The Washington Post)

Feel Like You’re Pushing People Away? Try Toning Down the Negativity

If you feel like you’re sabotaging yourself in social situations, you might want to check on the type of vibe you’re putting out. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, but almost nobody likes a Debbie Downer — life is hard enough without someone’s negativity clogging up what should be time to have fun and let loose. The Art of Manliness considers five major points about being negative that are good to keep in mind if you don’t want to be considered “that guy.”

– Negativity points to undesirable underlying personality traits.
– Complaints make your life seem problem-ridden.
– Complaints are boring.
– Negativity boomerangs back.
– Negativity is contagious.

Study Finds Even More Benefits of Exercise

There’s no doubt that exercise is good for us, but a new study has proven that the benefits tend to spread out of the purely physical and into the rest of our lives. Published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, the study looked at 179 college students’ exercise activities and other actions over the course of 21 days. What they found was that students who exercised on a given day tended to be more social and ambitious than on days when they did not exercise, and that the positive social activity often carried through to the next day. The moral here: don’t tell yourself you’ll feel better when you exercise … go out and exercise, and you’ll feel better! (via The Wall Street Journal)