Adventures in Food

At Kew Gardens on Saturday there was a fab event showcasing various kinds of ethnobotanical research that goes on here and there. I went along and met various friends from life and internet, and discovered some really great new plants to eat from the weed-bed. I've also got all interested in collecting english plant lore for Ethnomedica so if you have some ancient plant remedy to tell me please do. I met some really great people with weeds to eat so I thought I would mention it and then I will go and find the weeds for myslef and report back. One particularly cool thing was eating thistles, speficially in this case, Sow Thistle. Anna showed me how to cut away the spines and gave me the stem to try. Its crunchy and juicy and fresh tasting, vaguely in the same food bracket as celery I suppose. A lot of the plants at the stand were things you know very well from the garden, little hairy things that grow in the grass or along the cracks in the paving. In fact hairs and spines are a g...

I don't have photos this time but have been bee-servicing again. This time we were just scraping honeycomb wax from the wooden frames so they can be reused for the coming year and the new bees. Bees are in a bad way and unlike other creatures in a similar, or worse, situation, People are notcing. This is because a) bees are quite cute b) people like honey c) bees pollinate fruit crops, and the fruit crops are suffering. I saw a little while back a Haagen Daaz campaign to help honeybees - because the bees are not there to pollinate fruits, and this is making it harder for the ice cream manufacturer to source and pay for fruits. It is a very serious problem in the US and also I have rumours from China and the Ukraine that they are losing fruit crops. One of the main threats to British honey bees is a parasitic mite called Varroa destructor. Originally confined to Asian honey bees, it has spread across Europe and reached England in 1992. It now infests 95 percent of hives. You can get...