Fall 2008

MLT Newsletter

   As editor, my first MLT newsletter came out in the winter of 2001 soon after the election of 2000 was decided by the US Supreme Court. What a difference 8 years have made! The 9-11 attacks, with 2 resulting wars and many casualties followed by one crisis after another that the discredited Bush administration seems too incompetent or unwilling to confront. The loser of that election, on the other hand, came back with a slide show on global warming, a movie, an oscar and the Nobel Peace Prize. An African-American President is now moving into the White House that was built with slave labor!
   We hear the term “tipping point” thrown around when referring to “Peak oil” and the ongoing climate change which has the earths buffering capacity being overwhelmed. Attempting optimism I'm hoping we have reached the “reverse tipping point” in agriculture and environmental degradation where people pick up their hand tools and small tractors and start growing their own food again. Forests will be allowed to mature and be managed with selective cutting and mountain top removal for coal will be stopped. Solar panels and wind generators will dot the landscape next to homes and wind farms will populate the landscape along with the food producing kind. Unlike our financial system and our credit card debt, we will live within our means and derive sustenance from the sun through photovoltaics, wind, and photosynthesis, not the fossil energy surplus from past epochs.   To paraphrase what Al Gore wrote over 15 years ago, Earth will be in balance. Oh, well, this may all be a pipe dream, considering the messiness that our democracy produces.
   2008 was a bountiful year for both us and the raccoons. My electric fence failed but not before getting enough sweet corn frozen for the winter. Of course I am still preserving food as if we are a family of 4, not 2 as has been the case for over a year since both of our “replacement units” are away in college. Succumbing to “preaching”, nature is bountiful and provides a template for living within our means.
   I hope to have another MLT newsletter for you later this winter, but not before you write me some articles!    Jon at tomar@i2k.com

Submitted by: Donna McClurkan:

Fair Food Matters (FFM) hosted Southwest Michigan’s first Fair Food Film Festival in November. We wanted to get our community asking where does our food come from? and why does it matter? During the planning process, the Festival team previewed several films which highlighted the many problems with our industrial food system. Some of these films were quite grim, and there was some debate about the tone we wanted to set for our first Festival - we settled on “hopeful” and chose four films to achieve these goals: (1) increase community awareness/education of local food and food systems; (2) facilitate community building by capitalizing on momentum around local food; and (3) facilitate exploration of the economic potential for local food initiatives in Southwest Michigan. King Corn explores several of the issues highlighted in Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, including the pervasiveness of high fructose corn syrup and the conditions under which animals are raised. The Real Dirt on Farmer John is a quirky, engaging documentary about one man’s transition from traditional farming to American dreamer and visionary – Farmer John heads one of our nation’s largest Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms. The Organic Opportunity explores how one community built a thriving economy around local and organically grown food. Muskegon filmmaker Chris Bedford was on hand for Q & A. Community building around food was the focus of our program at the Kalamazoo Public Library. We showed segments from three films (Sweetland, The Grocer’s Son and Donut Day) interwoven with wonderful stories from community members Anne Lipsey, Linda Mah, Beverly Folz and Christine Brown, 5th graders Alisha Lighting-Poucher and Alaya Neville (Woodward Elementary).

We own King Corn, The Real Dirt on Farmer John and The Organic Opportunity and plan to make them available at screenings throughout our community in ’09 and beyond.

Appreciation is extended to eight generous community partners who made it possible to bring our Festival to SW Michigan: Kalamazoo Film Society, Bronson Hospital, Kalamazoo Public Library, Kalamazoo Valley Museum, Kalamazoo College, Portage United Church of Christ and Michigan Land Trustees. Our logo is courtesy of Mehring Design.

The Gift of Acorn

By Rita Bober

Aha, fall is here at last. We are finally digging up the last few sweet potatoes and regular potatoes, covering the beets and carrots and harvesting kale, Brussels sprouts and Swiss chard. They are all great vegetables to add to our storage of food for the winter. But ever since Norm and I have become gluten free in our diets, I have been thinking about alternative flours to use. Acorn flour comes to mind. Fall is the time of year to collect acorns. Several years ago, when Norm was studying the Kamana naturalist program, he collected white acorns and made flour out of them. He then made some bread. It was great tasting so perhaps others would be interested in making this product.

There are several different species of Oak native to Michigan. The White Oak group (Quercus alba L.) is the best for collecting and making bread because it has little tannin.   However, it produces an abundant crop only every four to ten years. The Chinkapin (Chestnut Oak-Quercus muchlenbergii) and Bur Oak (Quercus macrocarpa) are also native to southern Michigan and it is suggested that their acorns would also be sweet and edible but we haven’t tried them.

White Oaks are a classic eastern tree with wide spreading branches and a rounded crown. After a killing frost, the round lobed leaves turn a deep purple-red color. Oaks sink a deep taproot and can live over five hundred years. That is good as it may take fifty years for the White Oak to produce its first crop of acorns. However, the acorns mature in one growing season and are sweet. The acorn meat is high in protein, carbohydrates and fat. The Native Americans of the Great Lakes area call this tree “Mitigomin” – “tree with good seeds.” The People did not grow wheat or oats to use as flour for bread. They used what was gifted to them by the great Oak tree.

The Red Oak is part of the Black Oak group. Both grow in southern Michigan. The acorn of the Red Oak take two years to mature. Acorns in this group have so much tannin, it may not be worthwhile to collect them. But if that is the only acorn you can find, there is a way to remove the tannic acid.

First collect your acorns. Make sure to identify the trees from which they come. And thank Creator for this gift of food. In her book, It Will Live Forever: Traditional Yosemite Indian Acorn Preparation, Beverly Ortiz describes the process of preparing acorns according to the Yosemite Miwok/Paiute People. Details of preparation vary from group to group for the various Indian groups around the country. For this group, the most popular Oak to use is the Black Oak. It drops acorns twice, the first group of acorns is mostly unhealthy, worn and insect-infested acorns and they don’t pick until the second acorns drop usually in late September or early October. These good acorns are heavier than the others. You will need to inspect each acorn for worm holes and bumps. Leave those for the animals to eat; chipmunks, squirrels, and deer all like to eat acorns. It takes about four pounds of acorns to come up with about four cups of whole, clean acorns.

If they are White Oak, there is little tannic acid and you will hardly have to leach them. But first you must shell the acorns.   A fist sized rock or hammer works well. Some suggest boiling the acorns in their shell to help the shelling process. Crush the acorn meats into small pieces. Put the pieces into a pot of already boiling water. Keep the acorns boiling and you will see the water become discolored. When the water is dark brown (about 10 minutes), strain out the acorn meats and switch them to another pot of already boiling water. Continue this process until the nutmeats no longer taste bitter. For White Oak acorns, one or two changes of water will do, but for Red Oak, four or more water changes are best. You can still make sweet tasting acorn bread with acorn meal that still has some bitterness to it.   You can experiment with it. When you switch from one pot to another, you need to be sure the water is boiling because cold water seems to lock in the bitterness.

When you have leached the tannin out of the acorn meats, crush them into a meal or mush. The wet meal can be used right away in a bread recipe, or dried and stored as flour is. It will keep for a long time if kept dry. Below is a recipe we used to make a fresh bread:

Ingredients:
1 cup acorn meal
1 cup whole wheat/brown rice/cornmeal/amaranth flour (choose one of these)
2 Tbs. baking powder
½ tsp. salt
3 Tbs. sugar or maple syrup
1 egg, beaten
1 cup milk
3 Tbs. Oil

Mix all dry ingredients together. In separate bowl, mix wet ingredients. Combine. Stir just enough to moisten dry ingredients. Pour into a greased bread pan and bake at 400 degrees for 30 minutes.

Now let me explain how Norm made his flour. After gathering the acorns from a White Oak, he cracked the nuts open and put the meats in chunk-size pieces into a quart jar. He filled the jar with room temperature water and let it sit in a dark place. Each day he checked the jar and he drained and replaced the water about four times. When the water was no longer brown, he put the acorns in our blender and ground them up. Do only a few at a time as it can gum up the machine. After he had all the acorns ground up, he placed them on a cookie sheet, spread out in a thin layer and dried it. He left it sitting out in the house for several days. You can also do this in a slow oven of about 250 degrees checking regularly until completely dry. He then used one cup to make his bread and saved the rest in a quart jar (there was not a full jar left only about ½ a jar. At the time he made the bread, we used wheat flour but today would try brown rice or amaranth as an alternative.

If you are using the boiling water method of leaching the acorns, you can save the water. It is a tannic acid solution that has a variety of uses. Medicinally it is antiviral and antiseptic. You can use it as a wash for skin ulcers, ringworm and other fungal skin infections and as a cold compress for cuts and burns. Long-term intake of tannins is not healthy and can contribute to constipation and interfering with calcium absorption or cause kidney damage. This tannic acid water can help when tanning animal hides. By soaking the hides in the tannic acid water, the process becomes easier. The jars can be stored in the refrigerator. If mold forms in the jars, it can be reboiled to kill the mold then stored again.   You can also use the tannic acid water as a laundry detergent by putting a couple of cups of the solution in each load of wash; but it is best not to use with white clothes as they will become slightly tan in color. Dan Fisher of the Jack Mountain Bushcraft Guide Service in Maine also relates that tannic water is very effective in eliminating poison ivy rash. How to use it: pour the acorn water into ice cube trays and freeze. When completely frozen, rub the ice on the affected area. Cold helps with inflamed tissues, so using the ice is an ideal way for treating the rash. But be sure to not touch the rash and thus spread it to other areas of the body.

There are no poison look-alikes for acorns so it is a good food for beginners. Using the gift of acorns is a good way to begin living off the land. Give it a try!

References:
http://www.jackmountainbushcraft.com/acornbread.html
Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places.     “Wildman” Steve Brill with Evelyn Dean. William Morrow: New York, 1994.
It Will Live Forever: Traditional Yosemite Indian Acorn Preparation. Beverly R. Ortiz as told by Julia    F. Parker. Heyday Books: Berkeley, CA, 1991.
The Spirit of Healing: A Journal of Plants & Trees. Osahmin Judith Meister. Minaden Books:    Wisconsin, 2004.

Turning Your Yard Into An Edible Forest

   Norm and Rita Bober

“The ultimate goal of farming is not
the growing of crops but the
cultivation and perfection of human beings.”
                   Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution

How and what we grow in our yards is a reflection of our world view. What does your yard look like? It is said that 12% of this continent is lawns. Do you want to reduce the amount of lawn you have for a natural and edible landscape? Two workshops attended recently gave us many tips to reduce our lawns and increase the amount of native plants that provide food and shelter for wildlife native to the Midwest as well as provide food for ourselves in a natural environment. “Edible Forest Gardens” presented by Dave Jacke was held at Oikos Tree Crops in September. Jacke with Eric Toensmeier is the author of a two volumes set of Edible Forest Gardens1. The second workshop “Gardening to Save Our Insects & Birds: The Urgency & the Know-How” was presented by the Kalamazoo Chapter of the Wild Ones at the Kalamazoo Nature Center in October. Douglas Tallamy, a professor of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology was the main presenter. He is the author of the book, Bringing Nature Home.

“For the first time in history, gardening has taken on a role that
transcends the needs of the gardener…Unless we modify the places
we live, work, and play to meet not only our own needs but the needs of other species,
as well, nearly all species of wildlife native to the United States will disappear.”
                       Douglas Tallamy, Bringing Nature Home

Both workshops covered a tremendous amount of materials so we will try to cut that down to a few key elements. Both author’s describe a permaculture view of their approach to gardening. Jacke describes his design as a garden mimicking the forest. Edible forest gardening is not necessarily growing things in a forest but is gardening like a forest. It is a consciously designed ecosystem with “a perennial polyculture of multipurpose plants.” You will find many species in each patch of edible forest including fruit, nuts, greens and shoots, roots, culinary and tea herbs, mushrooms, etc. Plants would include nitrogen fixers, ground covers, edible greens, bushes, and trees. There would be maximum self-maintenance once the “forest” is established. This would lead to optimal ecological health and would improve economic sustainability. Just like the Native American practice of growing the Three Sisters garden, in the edible forest, there would be functional interconnection such as having Jerusalem artichoke growing with groundnuts. His books go into great detail describing his vision: the elements of forest architecture, its social structure, fertility of the soil, designs, and descriptions of hundreds of edible and useful species. An example of a patch of “edible forest” would include: alpine strawberries (ground cover), Dutch white clover, Welsh onion, dwarf bush cherry, mini-dwarf peach, and French sorrel - approximately 2-7 species in each patch.

1 Edible Forest Gardens, Volume One: Ecological Vision and theory for Temperate Climate Permaculture. Volume Two: Ecological Design and Practice for Temperate Climate Permaculture.

Tallamy shares that native gardening and biodiversity matter. He recommends turning your property into a wildlife preserve. That this is the last chance we have for sustaining native plants and animals that were once common in the United States. With the increase of our population (over 300 million in the United States), our love affair with the car and cheap gas and our quest for larger homes, there has been unprecedented development. City sprawl, increased suburbs, and miles of paved roads add over two million additional acres per year of unproductive land. “We have turned 54% of the lower 48 states into cities and suburbs, and 41% more into various forms of agriculture…we have taken 95% of nature and made it unnatural.” What are the consequences of turning so much land into park-like settings? It can be disastrous for biodiversity and ourselves.

All of creation needs food, shelter to survive, and to reproduce. In many places we have eliminated these options. According to Tallamy, in Delaware, at least 40% of its plant species are now rare or extinct, and 41% of its forest birds do not nest in the state anymore. In Pennsylvania, over 800 plants and animal species are rare, threatened, or endangered and 150 have disappeared. The song birds have declined 40% since the 1960’s. Birds that breed in meadows like northern bobwhite, eastern meadowlark, field sparrow and grasshopper sparrow have declined significantly and are completely absent in some areas where they once had healthy populations.

This loss of biodiversity is a clear sign that our own life-support systems are failing. “The ecosystem that supports us – that determines the carrying capacity of the earth and our local spaces – are run by biodiversity.” We humans can’t live on this earth without the plants, trees, and animals we share the earth with. It is the “other species” that create the ecosystem services essential to us. Every time a species becomes extinct, we are encouraging our own death.

Tallamy recommends we plant native species of trees, bushes and plants for our area. His research shows that alien ornamentals support 29 times less biodiversity than do native ornamentals. Landscape species from Europe or Asia have been used extensively in local suburbs. These plants are less likely to be compatible to our local insects, butterflies and moths. An insect that can’t eat a leaf, cannot fulfill its role in the food chain. Native flowering dogwood supports 117 species of moths and butterflies. Native plants do make a difference.

We need to replace unnecessary lawns and European and Asian ornamentals with densely planted woodlots that can serve as habitat for our local biodiversity. Plant the borders of your property with native trees such as white oaks, black willow, red maples, shagbark hickory among others and underplant with bushes like serviceberry, hazelnut, blueberries, etc. If everyone in a suburb or city block did this, an extended woodlot would be formed. The Kalamazoo Wild Ones will focus their programs on this process for the next two years. Check out .www.for-wild.org/chapters/kalamazoo

The debate over “invasive” vs. “native” species continues. Yet, the core issue is that of maintaining diversity so we, meaning all God’s creation, can continue to live on this beautiful planet. Remember, we are all nature!

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