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Once you begin to be sensitive to plant identification, its easy. One should always pause when a "cherry" does not have that single "stone" in the middle just like the whole prunus family. Choke cherry has the characteristic hard single stone like cherries, plums and peaches. The buck thorn has four or so seeds.
The leaf characteristic of a buck thorn is also unique, which like the plantain has the unusual apparent parallelism in the veins which is unusual for dicots which what a tree falls under. You will see true vein parallelism in monocots(single seed leaf) grasses, lilies and onions.
The vein's of the dull green leaf on the cherry differs greatly reaching the leaf edge as a sprawl. Untitled Document
Its a piece of cake when you are used to looking at such things.
I especially like people to tell the difference so they don't kill choke cherry mistaking it for buckthorn.
Yep, the first thing I noticed that clued me in to my favorite (not!) little buckthorn tree was the bark on the trunk. It is distinct from choke cherry. Then I noticed the spikes (there weren't that many really) on the branches. At that point I knew. Also, I've been watching the choke cherries and buckthorn trees over the summer. The buckthorn berries tend to be more spread out and intermingled with leaves, were as the choke cherries tend to grow in clumps and hang below the leaves. As for the leaves themselves, my bad eyes can't tell the difference. I'll have to examine them a bit more closely.
Yep, the first thing I noticed that clued me in to my favorite (not!) little buckthorn tree was the bark on the trunk. It is distinct from choke cherry. Then I noticed the spikes (there weren't that many really) on the branches. At that point I knew. Also, I've been watching the choke cherries and buckthorn trees over the summer. The buckthorn berries tend to be more spread out and intermingled with leaves, were as the choke cherries tend to grow in clumps and hang below the leaves. As for the leaves themselves, my bad eyes can't tell the difference. I'll have to examine them a bit more closely.
I have great enmity with buckthorn and with blood spilled on both sides. I have pulled hundreds of saplings in the forest, and hand sawed many of them, including a park were some lady thought I was crazy or something cause it was green. I ended up impaling myself on one. It became infected enough for me to visit the doctor. This was to clear out some buckthorn that was strangling the choke cherries.
With choke cherry, once you remove the more astringent skin and get to the pulp on ripe fruit, its really quite good. With a good food strainer, its rather easy. I also understand you can smash and dry the pits like the Indians. Though for that I will proceed with caution given the cyanide generating compounds, aka cyanogenic glycosides of cherry pits. I have never made the famous jelly, but then the wild black cherry did that nicely for me last year. I made a pudding with acorn flour thickener this year. It make decent fruit leather as well. It was not a good year for black cherry though. I was hoping for a nice hard cider from it this year.
In response to original questions about baking/cooking from scratch...
I live in town,(not by choice at this time) only a mile or two from grocery stores etc. Even so, I do almost all cooking/baking from scratch. Only thing we buy ready cooked is fried chicken about 2x a month. Too messy for me to make at home and it tastes better than what I can do.
We are ex-military cooks so we know how to cook from scratch. I began cooking at a very young age (7 or 8)and love to bake more than anything. I have a bread machine that gets a lot of use. The house smells great and the bread tastes better than the store bought stuff.
Can bake just about anything,and the waistline shows it. My one downfall is anything Chocolate and Pasta.
Also make our own pizza's that beats anything one can get delivered. Don't know if it's cheaper because of everything we put on it, but it definately tastes better.
Don't grind my own flour(yet) but I do grind my own pork for homemade bulk sausage and patties. Can control the amount of fat as well as removing the chemical preservatives somewhat.
I have a good size collection of cookbooks (second time around) on a number of different cuisines and use them regularly, so our menu's are never boring. Every now and again we get into a rut, but for the most part we eat a good variety of food. I think we have been out to eat about once a month if we're lucky. We can cook really good tasting meals at home a lot cheaper and we don't miss having to look presentable when in public.
Ah ha, so that's what this single plant out back is, a Buckthorn. It's just one plant so far as I can tell, and I was saving it for powder horn thorns. I found it in shorts, and got stuck lightly. Not bad enough for an infection.
I find most thorns on tree like plants tend to cause wicked infections if you get stuck hard enough. The only thorns that don't seem to cause infections to me are roses, beach roses, raspberries and a wide variety of black berries. Locust and ironwood thorns are plain nasty for infections.
I live, unfortunately, in the middle of Minneapolis. I'm a country guy at heart and would be in the middle of the mountains of Wyoming or Montana if I had my way. But, I'm in the city and make the most of it.
I'm hardly off-grid, but I pretty much live like I am. I don't own a TV, radio, stereo, CDs, DVDs, toaster, dishwasher, car, microwave, etc., I cook completely from scratch, including my bread.
I'm in the process, however, of re-evaluating my lifestyle. Sadly, there are toxins all around us. They're unavoidable, unfortunately. I do what I can to keep my apartment free of them. I make my own cleaning supplies, including laundry soap and dryer sheets. But, I've started feeling sluggish and listless lately so I'm in the process of changing my lifestyle to an even simpler one.
My body no longer tolerates eating meat and dairy very much. My taste for sweets is all but gone. And any time I do eat some kind of junk food, my body moans and complains at me! Even when these things are home made, they still don't feel right.
So, for at least 90 days I'm switching to a vegan lifestyle. I'm going to start by juicing and detoxing for 30-60 days. Then I'll incorporate fruits, veggies, nuts, seeds, legumes and healthy grains into my diet. Even when it comes to grains, I'll be doing some research to make sure they're not GMO grains. I've been hearing that all grains are now GMO. I know that's true about soy. There's not a natural soy plant left on the earth so soy, in many expert opinions, should be avoided by everyone - especially men. But, I haven't checked into the claim that all grains are currently GMOs. If I find they are, I'll avoid them.
I won't go 100% raw because it's just not feasible. I'm looking forward to starting. My new juicer should arrive tomorrow. I spent two weeks researching them to find out which one best suited my needs. I wanted one that gave the best quality juice, easy to clean, juices a good variety of fruits and veggies (hard and soft) well - including greens, and took up as little counter space as possible. After much consideration and many comparisons, I went with the Omega VRT350 HD. It's all those things and more.
Good for you! I have an Omega 8004. I liked it because if you lose power you can detach the auger to a manual base and still have your juice. I considered getting the one you got as my prior juicers were the centrifugal kind and they would juice fruits especially in a second and the VRT 350 seems to handle fruit and carrots better too but it can't be used manually. (I had a Juiceman 2 for years but it was terrible at doing greens).
There are some manual juicers out there for well under $100 that look like the do a great job.
Look up Lou Corona on YouTube to see what juicing and live raw food can do for your health. You'll find a guy in his late 50's that looks like he's 30. He once was in horrible shape too. His story is really inspiring. He's so strong he can hold all his weight on his fingers and he doesn't work out really. BeLive's mentor Lou Corona - YouTube
I've adopted a diet that is nutritious and simple so I don't need gadgets or electricity to prepare my meals: a roasted potato, some butter and salt from the cache, & a piece of meat. We eat a lot of food raw and have been for a long time so we aren't likely to go down with a trivial infection.
Meat and Potatoes isn't what any decent Naturopath would recommend as the healthiest of diets that is for sure. You need legumes and green veggies, nuts and seeds and grains with your meat and potatoes-- ideally.I guess you said you at raw food too which is a good thing.
Dirk Benedict who was a meat and potatoes guy got prostate cancer in his mid 30's and wrote Confessions of a Kamikazee Cowboy that is about how he got rid of his cancer completely via a macrobiotics diet which primarily consists of whole grains and fresh vegetables. Macrobiotics does recommend cooking the food but that may be because people's digestive systems, especially those with cancer, are so compromised from years of abuse from a poor diet and prescription drugs -- especially antibiotics which kills the friendly bacteria -- they can't absorb the nutrients from raw veggies.
He says he looks younger in movies he did in his forties than those he did in his 30's before he was diagnosed.
Ah ha, so that's what this single plant out back is, a Buckthorn. It's just one plant so far as I can tell, and I was saving it for powder horn thorns. I found it in shorts, and got stuck lightly. Not bad enough for an infection.
I find most thorns on tree like plants tend to cause wicked infections if you get stuck hard enough. The only thorns that don't seem to cause infections to me are roses, beach roses, raspberries and a wide variety of black berries. Locust and ironwood thorns are plain nasty for infections.
Eattheweeds.com has some good info and pictures of plants that are safe to eat. Here is a YouTube video the guy has which is fun. I wish I could do what he's doing. I'd love to be able to go out in my back yard and pick weeds for my salads other than Dandelion.
Meat and Potatoes isn't what any decent Naturopath would recommend as the healthiest of diets that is for sure.
Meat raised on grass has everything a plant does and more. I'm sticking with meat. Lots of animal fat too. Only a few small potatos a day and some medicinal herbs from 'around.'
Incidentally, I did macrobiotics & lo-fat nearly veg and was sickly and anxious. Drank green juice* daily & got hi blood sugar. But thanks for the concern.
* still do the occasional wheatgrass shot once in awhile, tho, but nothing else
We're 3-4 hours from the nearest grocery store, so we buy a lot in bulk all at once and do a lot of home cooking and preserving. We still buy a few commercial canned goods, but I'm an obsessive label reader and only choose brands that don't have questionable ingredients. We currently purchase the majority of our meat and seafood, but I try to get locally raised/caught and naturally raised/caught as much as possible and supplement with wild game and fish. Eventually we will have a large enough garden and our own livestock, and won't have to rely on as many commercial products.
Since we are also off-grid, we rely more heavily on shelf-stable products (canned and dried) we purchase or process ourselves than folks with large freezers and grid power. Until we get our gardens and livestock up to production levels, perishables are a luxury. We do grind our own flours and bake (sort of) our own biscuits and flat breads... we're intending to build a wood-fired earth oven so we can bake proper yeast breads instead of relying so heavily on pit baking in the dutch oven (which hasn't been 100% successful for us yet). We've also been looking into a stove-top portable oven for our woodstove, and possibly a small LPG range that would allow us to bake indoors when it's too cold to use the earth oven outdoors (you're not getting an outdoor oven to baking temps long enough when it's -40 outside!!).
I am chemically/food sensitive, and my hubby has some food allergies, so we've noticed a big difference now that we're making and processing most of our stuff. We both have some problem with corn and soy derivatives, which are in almost every kind of commercial processed food available... finding homemade recipes where we can control the ingredients and quality while getting a flavor, texture and keeping ability as commercial products we enjoy is an ongoing process of trial and error. Some of the homemade stuff tastes even better, and now we can't stand the commercial stuff. Also, we have a more difficult time tolerating some of the commercial additives (tvp, high-fructose corn syrup, modified corn starch, etc) because we've flushed them out of our system and the allergic reaction is immediate and noticeable now that we're not constantly exposed.
We do eat many wild forages, including "weeds" like lambsquarter, miner's lettuce, fiddleheads, dandelions, fireweed, rose hips and labrador tea. There are many more wild edible plants, but I want to go out with my native guide a few more times before I'll feel confident I don't mistake a toxic look-alike There are tons of wild berries, and after going with a native guide a few times am confident in harvesting those. Lots of edible mushrooms, but I think I'll stick with my guided forages for now since I've had mushroom poisoning before and the toxic look-alikes are really tricky up here (in some places and species, the differences are more obvious).
ETA: being off-grid, nearly all our kitchen and food processing appliances are manual. I haven't found a really good manual juicer for most fruits yet (citrus excluded), but will be trying a steam juicer soon. I do make thicker veggie juices with my food mill, as well as purees and pastes of veg & fruit for cooking and condiments. In most cases, I try to eat fresh as much as is possible given our circumstances, but otherwise rely on time-tested preservation methods (canning, drying, fermenting, salting, smoking) rather than any new-fangled artificial chemicals or preservatives. The only fancy things we rely on (which are actually based on old tech) are nitrate cures, vacuum sealing, oxygen absorbers and dessicant packs.
Last edited by MissingAll4Seasons; 09-18-2011 at 04:30 PM..
Meat raised on grass has everything a plant does and more. I'm sticking with meat. Lots of animal fat too. Only a few small potatos a day and some medicinal herbs from 'around.'
Incidentally, I did macrobiotics & lo-fat nearly veg and was sickly and anxious. Drank green juice* daily & got hi blood sugar. But thanks for the concern.
* still do the occasional wheatgrass shot once in awhile, tho, but nothing else
It helps if you do it under the guidance of experts or at least someone else who has done it before successfully if you don't know what you are doing.
These people Kushi Institute - where health comes naturally are the experts at it. Michio Kushi is the father of Macrobiotics in this country. Christina Pirello has written many Macrobiotic Cookbooks. She herself was diagnosed in her 20's with Leukemia and had six months left to live and REFUSED to be poked and prodded by the medical establishment and turned to Mischio Kushi who introduced her to a mentor and now she is in her 60's -- completely cancer free all those years, THANKS TO MACROBIOTICS. Healthy Dinner Recipes, Vegan, Vegetarian cooking, Vegan Diet, Osteoporosis Treatment
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My one downfall is anything Chocolate and Pasta.
