So, I have a new roommate. Sylvia, a nice girl from Michigan is moving in tomorrow. Thanks for everyone who responded to my ads. Summer weather has hit Portland, and as a result my mood, energy level, and outdoors time has hit an all-time high (for the city). Mornings I can be found drinking chicory coffee and sunbathing by the pool at my apartment complex overlooking the Willamette. Here you can see herons, geese families, and cormorants doing their thing. How great is that? I am still doing some teaching here and there, and always interested in more opportunities. We had an excellent women’s medicine making class set up as part of a series by my friend Kirsten through PSU and I also taught at the TrackersNW Women’s Wilderness Weekend in Sandy. It was a super time. We had workshops on bowdrill fires (I learned clematis stalk is a great spindle, never made a fire so easy!) belly dancing (gotta strengthen those core muscles), massage, scout games, martial arts, and more! I taught salve making, intuitive plant meditation, and DIY herbal tarot reading. This is the closest I’ve ever come to living my dream of a civilization rehabilitation center.
Photo by Adelaide Brown
I also now have a professional website to promote my herbal and ethnobotanical skills. Actually I have had it for months and it is still not quite done, but feel free to take a look: www.wildheartshealing.com. Eli helped me make this great shingle to hang on my door:
In mid-may Jana, Becky and I went to check out the camas bloom in Molalla. The biggest camas field I know of is in a horse pasture. The horses were ambivalent until I bent over and started digging at a bulb and then they came right up started nudging and teasing me. We did not eat any camas. Ideally it is harvested in fall after the flowers die and the seeds harden, although that alone is not enough to dissuade me from giving it a go now, it must also be cooked in a steam pit for a couple days to break down the indigestible inulin fiber into fructose and I don’t even have a yard.
Photo by Becky Lerner
The other day I felt like I needed to burn off some nervous energy so I walked the entire length of the 30 mile Wildwood Trail in Forest Park…on an empty stomach. It took about 9 hours. Now I’m limping a bit cause my left foot is sore, and have a blister on my right heel but am otherwise no worse for the wear. I don’t really exercise either. Imagine if I actually trained!
The biggest news is that I have been helping my friend Becky Lerner, who also has a primitive skills blog, www.FirstWays.com, with a wild food project. She signed up to eat only wild foods for a week and write about it on CultureChange.org. I’ve been serving to help identify wild foods, and places to find them, and give suggestions on how to prepare them. Turns out the project was a bit too ambitious and Becky only lasted until day 5 on the 100% wild diet, but we are still gathering. Check out her articles:
Living on Foraged Wild Foods for a Solid Week in the City
The project has been getting a lot of outside press. We appeared on KATU news, I didn’t get any “lines” in the one minute segment, but you can see me tagging along in my “herbalists rock” tank top, and, no, I did not know we were going to be filmed when I put that on.
Nice picture of natural beauty. I luv horses too.
you should really get more exercise. i used to love running, then i started smoking, then i started running again. now i love both running and smoking! i like trail running a lot better than normal running. according to your slide show, you said you should exercise more in 2009. besides, running in the woods makes people happy.
Hey Penny,
John Kallas of Wild Food Adventurer experimented with modern cooking substitutes for a camas steam pit, and found that 9 hours in a pressure cooker did the job. I tried that a couple years back and it did seem to work very well. Full details at http://farmerscrub.blogspot.com/2007/06/cascadia-wild-harvesting-report-back-on.html
Norris