Vacuum

Juneberry season is on its way - trees are in bloom

Ben from Damn Arbor notes that the juneberries in town are in bloom, which means that it shouldn't be more than about a month before they are ready for street-side snacking. 

The forager in me always welcomes street trees that provide impromptu nutrition. Arborwiki has a brief list of some of the places where you can find juneberries downtown; surprisingly, the municipal parking lots on the west side of downtown are ringed with these trees. Keep your eyes open and get to them before the birds do.

Walking Around: bonus points

I walked a lot more today than I normally would have walked, thanks to my new game Walking Around. Here's some of the bonus points I scored that I wouldn't have scored in my previous quest, Sitting Around Typing.

Pedestrian Path (+1). It's always good to find a way to get from here to there that's not on any map. The pedestrian path I found connects Needham Road to Amelia Place. I've added that little segment to Open Street Map so that I can find it again, and so that I can cut through one more neighborhood with confidence. My son and I took this route to his summer camp today, and he suggested one more point for Unfamiliar Route (+1).

Unexpected Lunch Companions (+2). If you wait for the bus at a bus stop near a restaurant, and if someone you know happens to be driving to that restaurant, then not only can you have an unexpectedly pleasant lunch but you can also get a ride downtown. Thanks to the Toziers for the happy coincidence and for a beginning of a discussion of annexation and township islands.

Urban Foraging (+1). Juneberries are in season, which means that a carefully selected path will take you past some delicious snacks, right out there in the open, where thousands of people walk each day but none notice except the birds and a few brave souls who appreciate Amalanchier. For more berrypicking ideas, I follow Linda Diane Feldt's @wildcrafting Twitter account. For lots more detail on Amalanchier, the 1946 American Species of Amalachier has ranges and keys for native species.

Park Benches (+2). If, at the end of your trek, you stop to wait for the bus - then it's useful to note that sometimes the bus stop is close to a park which has a park bench in the shade. Douglas Park is a nice place to wait for the #4, especially if you have RideTrak running on your cell phone to tell you when to get up and walk to the stop 1/2 block south of the park. My walk the next morning circled around all the way back to this park bench.

North Star (+1). A nice night walk on a clear night gives you all of the directions you need when Polaris is visible in the north sky. The drawing is from H. A. Rey's The Stars, my all time favorite book about the night sky.

 

How do I come up with this bonus point structure? If you walk around enough, something that you see or do is bound to make you happy. Give yourself points for those happy places, and know where they are so that you can revisit them.

the farmer's market report, day 7

day 7 of a continuing series documenting my new job at annarbor.com

There's a wonderful weekly program on KCRW in Santa Monica called Good Food.  Host Evan Kleiman does a roundup of reporting from the restaurants and farmers markets around Los Angeles, with interviews with restaurant owners, talks with farmers at markets about the produce they are bringing to market this week, and feature stories about restaurant excursions into the many cuisines that make up LA.  It's a very fun show, and especially when it's the middle of an Ann Arbor winter there's something sunny and cheery about hearing that something is in season somewhere.

I went to the Wednesday market at the Ann Arbor Farmers Market today.  It's about six blocks from the office, and for a number of years I've been a regular there, either at the Wednesday or the Saturday market.  I came with pencil and pad of paper in hand and no shopping basket and walked around looking at what was there, and what caught my eye was berries - lots of berries - really, the high season of the berry season.  So to provide a proper catalog, here's what's in season at market this week:

• Strawberries.  Nearing the end of the season.
• Blueberries.  Just starting the season.
• Gooseberries, red and green.  One vendor, Wasem's.
• Currants, red and black, also both at Wasem's.
• Blackberries.
• Mulberries.  I was surprised to see them, because I think of them as street tree food, but they were there.
• Red Raspberries, both conventional and organic.
• Cherries, sweet, sour, and Queen Anne.  I've taken a taste to the sour cherries - more flavor and less sweet.

I might have missed black raspberries; they are ripe in bushes around town, including at Wheeler Park and Wurster Park.  The juneberry / serviceberry season is either over or just about over depending on the tree you go to.   Molly Notarianni, the market manager, says she saw wild gooseberries along a path around Pickerel Lake, near the stone fireplaces.

links for 2009-06-04

• telegraphic codes and message practice
  Buell's Mercantile Cypher (1860) appears on eve of the Civil War and near the end of the canal transport for which it provides language. Code compilation was still tentative at this time; its phraseology is practical but too specific and even politely long-winded, giving it the tone of an exercise book. The nature of the markings throughout the present copy suggest that it was used for preparation for another code, based on and incorporating some, and rejecting much else, of its content.
  (tags: telegraph code cipher)
• telegraphic codes and message practice, 1870-1945
  The codes did not appear out of nowhere. Their immediate tributaries were nautical and coastal signal systems (typically involving flaghoist combinations), and visual telegraphs such as the Chappé optical telegraph system that operated across France from the mid-1790s well into the 1840s. With all of these systems, each sign or combination of signs represented a word or phrase in a code dictionary.
  (tags: telegraph code signals)
• Of Secret Codes, Abbreviations, and Knowledge Lost and Gained « The Henry Ford Blog
  It turned out that what I had instead was a commercial telegraphic code. From the 19th through the mid-20th centuries, telegrams were integral to business and personal communications. Telegraph codes proliferated as a way to correspond economically and privately. Readily available code books such as the ABC Universal Commercial Electric Telegraph Code, not to mention many others, were published, with many businesses creating in-house codes. According to telegraphy historian-enthusiast John McVey, “Thousands of codes were published or issued privately, but they are largely forgotten now. They present a finely-grained window into their respective domains and their time. And they provide instances of sometimes stunning visual, technical, lexicographic and unwitting poetic achievement.”
  (tags: language telegraph ford abbreviation party-like-its-1919)
• The New “Freedom” | Front Porch Republic
  You might even call it “utopic” in Thomas More’s wry sense: a seemingly good or perfect place which is really no place at all. Computers displace us. They displace us physically - they enable us to talk to anyone, anywhere, and so forth - but they also displace us emotionally and intellectually. They confuse and distract us.
  (tags: osx freedom internet get-off-the-internet dystopia)
• /Ground: Acorn Crop Crashes?
  Logan's alternative is nimbly and seductively argued. He shows a map in which the distribution of early settled societies throughout the temperate zone appears exactly to coincide with the geographical spread of the 400-odd species of oak. He cites many cultures - in north America, ancient Mesopotamia, the highlands of Mexico - where a style of living midway between nomadic gathering and rooted agriculture was evident long before the advent of cereal farming. You could, I suppose, call it fixed foraging, the communal exploitation of a long-lived local resource. The resource was the oak tree, always there in one form or another - just above the waterline, if you were fisher-people, just below the uplands if you were hunters. And its first and most fundamental gift was the acorn, prolific, nutritious (you just needed to leach out the tannin with water), storable, cookable.
  (tags: acorn agriculture foraging oak)
• Seasoned Acorn Jelly (Dotori Muk Muchim) at My Korean Kitchen
  In my memory, I don’t think I liked the seasoned acorn jelly that much because of its bitter taste, but now I love it, it is like an adult appreciates good food more than a child. It has a slightly bitter taste from the acorn jelly and a slightly sweet and salty taste from the sauce, which I love, and this recipe is like that.
  (tags: food recipes vegetarian korea acorn)
• seven random (food) facts
  1. From an early age I was taught what was good to eat in the north woods and how to find it. If you're walking with me and suddenly I dive into the bushes and come up with a handful of berries, you'll understand. Locally this means that the first day of blueberry, raspberry, juneberry, and strawberry season are holidays, and I employ a small army of berry-picking advance scouts to keep me informed of when opening day is and how conditions are.
  (tags: food recipe berrypicking berries)
• Harvesting the wild: acorns by Jackie Clay Issue #79
  When all are done, get out your food grinder. Put a fine knife on the grinder and run the shelled acorns through it. This makes a coarse meal. Place this in a large crock or glass bowl. Then add boiling water to cover and let stand an hour. Drain and throw away the brownish, unappetizing water. Repeat. Then taste the meal. It should have a bit of a bitter tang, then taste sweet as you chew a piece. Continue leaching out the tannin as long as necessary.
  (tags: food howto recipes simplicity foraging acorn oaks survival)
• How to eat acorns@Everything2.com
  To get the tannic acid out of acorns, you need to leech them, that is stick them in boiling water for a few minutes, pour the water out, then repeat repeat repeat perhaps 25 times. Leeching is facilitated if you shell (obviously) the acorns and also chop them into fine pieces. Make sure to cut out any discolored or rotten portions of the nuts, and any grubs (unless you want to eat those too- I can vouch that they aren't poisonous but I don't know about the little cells that they build around themselves).
  (tags: acorn recipe howto)
• Harvesting the Acorns
  The reason I ask this: When I was a child, my grandfather had me pick up a small bucketful of acorns from under our pin oak tree. A day or two later, he asked me to come over to his house and he fed me acorns. The only problem I have is he never told anyone how in the world he prepared them.

  Here is some information about eating acorns or rather acorn meal. The tannins have to be removed to avoid the bitterness. I don't know what your grandfather might have done to remove the tannins in whole acorns unless the type of acorn had less tannins to begin with and could have been removed by soaking the whole acorn.

  
  
  (tags: food recipe squirrel acorn)
  
  
• 
  
  Climate change driving Michigan mammals north (Includes interview) - Digital Journal: Your News Network
  
  
  It’s a very complicated system. Oaks have “mast” cycles, which means that some years they produce tons of acorns and some years they produce few or none. Our oaks in Michigan do this as well. Mice eat acorns, and not surprisingly, in the New York study mouse numbers are linked to the mast cycles. More acorns, more white-footed mice.
  
  
  (tags: oaks acorn mast mouse globalchange)
  
  
• 
  
  My Paper Crane
  
  
  My friend Katie told me about a recipe she found for making acorn cookies. I’ve been excited to try them and found a recipe and changed it a little last night. The kids and I shaped the acorns, dipped the tops in chocolate, and then rolled them in ground walnuts. I added some finely ground coffee beans in with the walnuts for a coffee/walnut sort of flavor. The kids preferred their cookies just dipped in chocolate. If you have a nut allergy or just don’t like nuts you could try crushed cookies or something similar.
  
  
  (tags: recipes recipe cookies acorn)
  
  

Woody plants - identifying the trees of Michigan

Every year the U of Michigan teaches a Woody Plants class.  I didn't take it when I was in school, but my sister did, and it's one of these legendary courses that people remember for a long time.

Here's the links and notes I could find easily.  It's prompted by the Ann Arbor Chronicle's story about the city of Ann Arbor tree inventory going on now, which I hope will yield a precise map of where all of the public juneberry trees are.

Course listing: NRE 436: Woody Plants Biology and Identification

Woody Plants is an intensive field- and lecture-based learning experience, in which you will learn to identify 160 trees, shrub and vine species that are important in Michigan environments. You will learn about their taxonomy, distribution, habitat associations, and biogeographic history and how to identify them in their leafless winter condition. The lab component consists of weekly field trips in the Ann Arbor area, which include riparian and floodplain habitats, glacial lakes, moraines, bogs, fens and mesic forests. The lectures cover elementary aspects of plant identification, taxonomy and ecology; however, the broader themes include biogeographic history and the assembly of Michigan plant communities, both before and after major glaciations, ecological specializiation, and impacts of global warming and other anthropogenic environmental changes.

Woody Plants - Sitemaker

The required textbook for Woody Plants is Michigan Trees by Burt V. Barnes and Warren H. Wagner. The authors taught the Woody Plants class from 1965 to 2005 and know their topic well. The books are available at Shaman Drum bookshop on 311 State Street.

Burt Barnes home page at SNRE

Undergraduate and graduate teaching in forest ecology; landscape ecology; natural history, and identification of Woody Plants. Research focuses on the theory and application of the landscape ecosystem approach. Studies emphasize spatial mapping of landscape ecosystems as the basis for conserving and managing ecosystems at multiple scales. Research on diversity of ecosystems and biota in upland, riverine, and wetland ecosystems. Specific areas include genetic and systematic studies of aspen species (genus Populus), worldwide and comparative studies of east Asian and North American forests and species of the temperate zone.

An early edition of Michigan Trees, in 1913, as seen on Google Books -

Michigan Trees: A Handbook of the Native and Most Important Introduced Species

By Charles Herbert Otis

Edition: 2

Published by The Regents, 1913

Original from Harvard University

Digitized Apr 11, 2008

246 pages

seven random (food) facts

Inspired by Kate from Four Obsessions, here are seven food-related things to share.

1.   From an early age I was taught what was good to eat in the north woods and how to find it.  If you're walking with me and suddenly I dive into the bushes and come up with a handful of berries, you'll understand.  Locally this means that the first day of blueberry, raspberry, juneberry, and strawberry season are holidays, and I employ a small army of berry-picking advance scouts to keep me informed of when opening day is and how conditions are.

2.  When I was a kid we made cookies out of acorns once.  It took a long time to gather them, and a lot of work to process them, and when they finally got into the oven somehow (mysteriously) they got scorched.  I've never had the need to repeat that experience.

3.  The first complicated recipe I tried was sauce Bearnaise, using a recipe from Scientific American's The Amateur Scientist (1979 Dec, pg 178; 1981 Jan, pg 164).   It turned out pretty well.

4.  After having had sweet dumpling squash, I can't go back to ever eating acorn squash again.

5.  We are vegetarians at home, but I'm a confirmed omnivore, and so you'll see restaurant reviews of meat dishes but only vegetarian recipes.

6.  I'm bad at doing recipes because I hardly ever measure anything anymore - mostly I spice things by eye and smell, and as often as not the recipes I end up with are a description of what I did this one time with the food on hand and not instructions for what to go buy.   I'm sure that there's some recipe vocabulary in some language that I'm missing which could make them better, other than "cook until it smells good".

7.  I've taken to blogging recipes in part because it's a convenient way to look them up the next time I need to cook them, since I don't always know which cookbook on our shelf has the recipe on the menu plan for the week.

Tag: Jim Benson (e.g. "stir-fried wikipedia with pimentoes"), KitchenChick (my reliable source for Paczki Day information), and The Cottage Smallholder (who got tagged already)

making fruit liqueurs, (or) how to prepare for the holidays well in advance

It's fruit season (or nearly so) and so it's time to start thinking about what we're going to do for making holiday gifts. One staple in our house is a simple fruit liqueur of some sort, which turns sugar + fruit + vodka + time into something yummy.

We are not generally a cocktails household, so part of the corresponding challenge is giving people some sense of what do to with the jar to help them enjoy it.

Some minimal collection of things to help for this year, one fruit at a time; not exhaustive, but maybe it will help jump start next year. Ordered in rough order of appearance of the fruit here.

• Strawberry liqueur. Irene's Strawberry liqueur from The Cottage Smallholder; noting that "There’s nothing like the distraction of homemade grog when times are getting tough."
• Juneberry liqueur. Saskatoons go with gin, says contributor "prairiemaid" from Manitoba.
• Gooseberry liqueur. In the 1930s, Meltis of Bedford introduced a gooseberry liqueur sweet to the UK market which was a big success, so they say. Read Anton Chekov's Gooseberries. I don't have a recipe.
• Currants. Make cassis; here's a cassis recipe, from " The Cook and the Gardener" by Amanda Hesser, A Year of Recipes and Writings from the French Countryside.
• Blueberries. Freeze the berries first, then make blueberry liqueur.. Ex-Michigander Culinaria Eugenius has a photo of the red-purple liquid that results.

Enough for now.

2008 urban berry foraging report part 1: Juneberries in Ann Arbor

Every year around this time (June 17) the juneberry trees in the streets of Ann Arbor are ripe.

Juneberries - variously shadbush, shadberry, or serviceberry, depending on where you're from - are iron ore pellet sized, dark purple when ripe, slightly sweet with soft seeds inside that are vaguely almondy. They are not delicious, not in the sense that strawberries are delicious, but they are good to grab a handful of and snack on as you're walking down the street. If you have lots and lots of these berries (also called saskatoons), you can make a pie out of them - make a two crust pie, with a filling of 3.5 cups juneberries to 3/4 cup of sugar and 2 Tbs of flour. Here's a video from Wild Food Plants about Aunt Marilyn's Juneberry Pie. You can also dry them and use them like dried blueberries - if you get any of them home, or you can pound them with buffalo meat (from your favorite local supplier of buffalo meat) and make pemmican.

In addition, if you have surplus juneberries *and* surplus grasshoppers, and a taste for them both, there's a traditional Utah Indian recipe for "grasshopper fruitcake":

Edwin Bryant15 (circa 1848) provided one of the few assessments of grasshopper palatability by a white. following an encounter with Utah Indians, an occasion when three women appeared, "bringing baskets containing a substance, which, upon examination, we ascertained to be service-berries, crushed to a jam and mixed with pulverized grasshoppers. This composition being dried in the sun until it becomes hard, is what may be called the 'fruitcake' of these poor children of the desert. No doubt these women regarded it as one of the most acceptable offerings they could make to us. We purchased all they brought with them, paying them in darning needles and other small articles, with which they were much pleased. The prejudice against the grasshopper 'fruitcake' was strong at first, but it soon wore off, and none of the delicacy was thrown away or lost .... After being killed, they [the grasshoppers] are baked before the fire or dried in the sun, and then pulverized between smooth stones. Prejudice aside, I have tasted what are called delicacies, less agree able to the palate."

from The Food Insects Newsletter: Some Insect Foods of the American Indians: And How the Early Whites Reacted to Them November 1994. Volume 7, Issue #3.

The secret to juneberry picking in Ann Arbor is to know that you can have a big pile of delicious berries simply by walking across town in such a way that you hit a series of trees in order, no need to backtrack. Here's the juneberry tour:

Start at Zingerman's Deli on Detroit St. If you can't find it, ask a native, they'll be glad to direct you there, they're used to it. The juneberry trees are around the side on Kingsley St. Stop inside, ask if they have any juneberry jam for sale, furrow your brow disappointedly if they don't, taste something else thoughfully, then head out the front and pick more from a tree on Detroit St.

Keep heading up Detroit St and cross over to Farmer's Market, open Weds. and Sat. Look around the stalls, ask the farmers nicely if their juneberry crop is good this year, furrow your brow when they say they won't have any at market, admire the solar panels, pick up from spinach from Shannon, and then walk towards the Ann Arbor Observer on Catherine St. You'll find more berries on the side of that building, they are a bit shaded so they ripen later. Pick a small box full, head back to market, put a price tag on it, sell it - PROFIT!

Cross back toward Fifth Avenue, head over Huron St and towards the Bank of Ann Arbor. With your newfound gains make a deposit, but only after you do your harvest from the trees in front of the bank.

Keep heading south on Fifth heading towards the Ann Arbor District Library, but stop before you get there at the Library Lot parking lot and admire the prolific trees there. Consider whether the downtown library project plans for that surface lot which call for a structure to be built on that lot preserve the fruiting trees which are so characteristic of historical Ann Arbor.

Head into the library, and start figuring out what you are going to do to preserve those berries for the winter. Check the juneberry tag in the catalog; if you don't find anything, go to the MEL inter-library loan, search for Juneberry, and end up with Jacque Ferron's "The Juneberry Tree". Sit and eat your berries until it arrives.

links for 2007-06-22

• Sweet Juniper! | Japanese potty training videos
  lolpotty.jp
  (tags: potty via:kateremenwait)
• It's Back To The Future At Intel | Intel shows pedometer prototype
  But pedometers have problems, and not just in their accuracy. They don't take into account walking, standing, going up stairs, bicycling or using a stairmaster, all different grades of exercise. So Intel's whipped up a smart pedometer that knows just what
  (tags: intel pedometer walk walking walkertracker)
• I Stopped Trying To Rank for Anything When I Realized I Could Build Traffic For Everything | Scoreboard Media Group
  You see, not only was Google cranking up the Trust Knob every month, the other devastating blow to being the One Trick Monkey anchor text SEO, was that searchers are getting smarter everyday. The Long Tail is getting fatter and fatter and fatter.
  (tags: search google googlesearch sem seo longtail)
• Phil Windley's Technometria | Everything is Miscellaneous
  The idea of everything being miscellaneous at first conjures up images of chaos, but the key is to remember that this isn’t an argument against classification, but a priori classification.
  (tags: *=misc podcast david-weinberger)
• An average human being gets 400 miles per gallon at... (kottke.org)
  but we are really after a miles-per-donut metric
  (tags: efficiency exercise health walk walking walkertracker donuts metrics analytics)
• Facebook Sugar: How to Build Successful Facebook Applications
  embed the viral distribution into the application. 7000 signups per hour.
  (tags: facebook webdev want)
• Ebay's China joint venture to waste money
  Chinese competitors always pursue traffic as the first priority. They believe in the standard of getting one visitor for every penny they spend on promotion. It doesn't matter what happens next, they want to get the users to at least visit their sites. Th
  (tags: brand marketing sem promotion china penny-for-your-thoughts)
• Amazon.com: Manpo-Kei: The Art and Science of Step Counting : How to Be Naturally Active and Lose Weight!: Books: Catrine Tudor-Locke
  book on 10000 steps
  (tags: manpo-kei walk walking walkertracker)
• IT Zone merger will trim number of events - Ann Arbor Business Review - MLive.com
  "Personally, I think that SPARK has been trying to do an awful lot," he said. "We want to make sure we don't become an event planner."
  (tags: annarbor michigan spark not-the-it-zone-anymore events upcoming)
• Aquatic Insects of Michigan
  Environmental managers, researchers and students now have a comprehensive and authoritative resource for learning about Michigan's aquatic insect fauna.
  (tags: insects michigan aquatic fauna environment water)
• Google Maps: Ann Arbor Berry Picking
  Where to find berries in the Ann Arbor area - u-pick, commercial, roadside, farmers markets and farm stands.
  (tags: berries strawberry juneberry raspberry blueberry annarbor michigan fruit arborparents)