Day 30

Ricky 

Foraging Day! Ricky works for Burge on different projects and is part Native American, so he's good at gambling, I mean foraging! (he'd laugh at that, don't feel guilty ;)) He's quite the character. To give you an example, he sold tomato plants (he said Cory got from family in Italy) to several friends in exchange for various plants. Nice right? Nice except the said tomato plants are actually weeds he picked at Burge. He told them they might look funny growing because they're special heirlooms.

Spiderwort

Tulip Poplar

Wisteria Vine

Ricky took us on a hike pointing out edible plants and info like you can chew on pine needles for vitamin C and make them into tea. We were foraging for lunch and ended up with poke, a poor man's spinach. If cooked incorrectly it's toxic, adding that much needed danger element to lunch. Ricky told us that tulip poplar flowers could be used in pies, so I ate a petal, not going in my pie. There's another flower called a Spiderwort which can detect radiation and turn pink! Then we looked at wisteria vines and he said that you could weave them into baskets if you needed something to hold your food, or a rope, etc. Ricky also told me you could feed a chicken glass and it's stomach would grind up the glass and when it pooped it out you could make it into a necklace. Okay, so maybe no one needed to know that, but everything else was useful.
Our lunch was poke salad, poke sauteed in olive oil and garlic, and jalapeno cornbread! Whewwee! It was delicious. You don't get a meal like that everyday!

Once lunch was done we finished harvesting for market peas, zucchini flowers, sunflowers, collard shoots, spinach and chard, red lettuce, bulbing spring onions (Vidalias transplant), red cabbage, green garlic, asparagus, strawberries, Easter radishes, beets, kale, scarlet queen and hakurei turnips, mint, sage, and catmint. Watching Daniel and Cory concentrating so hard on putting these bouquets together was a highlight to my already highlighted day!