On Fireweed

Last week I was working in my garden.  The patch of Canada violets was lush and green, covered with white violets.  Young fireweed stalks were coming up in a clump along the path from the gate.  They are spreading, as are the ostrich ferns, making the land their own.  I picked a tender young stalk, stripped off the leaves and peeled the cortex off to eat the soft green inner stem. Taste of spring.  Taste of locale.  Very local.  From my 10 by 40m urban yard.  Made me think back to Verly Nelson teaching me to eat fireweed on a walk nearly 40 years ago to the Kitamaat reserve on the delta of the Kitimat River in northwestern British Columbia. I found that properly peeled young fireweed stalk reminds me of raw kohlrabi, or broccoli stems.  The very young tender tops can also be cooked and eaten as a potherb; we used to combine them with tender dandelion leaves, nodding onion and, if we were lucky, morel mushroons when I lived on the Skeena near Cedarvale.

  Fireweed (Chamaerion angustifolium) has many uses.  Its magenta blossoms brighten large expanses of cut over land and burnt forest and is a great source of nectar for bees. It is circumpolar; in the British Isles it goes by the moniker "willow herb" and in Ireland, Blooming Sally.  Fireweed honey is delicious, white and a touch acidic. I used to melt honey on the wood stove to put on whole wheat sourdough pancakes a long time ago when I lived in little off-grid cabins in the Kootenays in southeastern BC. Before my daughter Rose was born. Before I moved to Gitxsan Territory in northwest BC.  Fireweed is the territorial flower of the Yukon, and one of the four Clans of the Gitxsan, the Gisga'ast.   Its image is rendered in crests and artwork.  The Gil haast, the single fireweed, is described in the migrations of  chronicled by the late Walter Wright, from Kitselas in the slender volume called Men of Medeek (Wil Robinson, 1966, Sentinel Press, Kitimat BC) The Gitxsan used to take the marrow of somewhat older fireweed stalks and use it as a binder in their table sized fruit leathers, aka berry cakes, most typically made from black huckleberry (Vaccinium membranaceum) known in Gitxsanimx as Sim M'aay, the "real" berry.  Other fruits also could be made into berry cakes, including red elder berry.  The small seedy red berries of bunch berry (Cornus canadensis)  sgan gapgoyp were an alternate source of thickening.  The late Olive Ryan, Gwans, told wonderful stories of berry camp in the subalpine on the mountain known as Steykooden, behind Gitsegukla.  People picked for a couple of weeks, and then the berries were boiled in large bentwood boxes covered with woven cedarbark mats. Rocks were heated in a fire and then dropped in to the box of berries until the liquid began to boil.  When the fruit was cooked, it was ladled onto cedar splint berry racks (skeexsin) covered by skunk cabbage leaves ["like Indian wax paper"] or layered thimble berry leaves to prevent leakage. (see Johnson 1997 Plants, Land and People, Gitksan Ethnobotany, PhD Dissertation, University of Alberta) for more detail of Olive's story and Gathering what the Great Nature Provided, People of Ksan, 1980, for more about cooking berries and making berry cakes).

The fireweed can also provide cordage suitable for fish nets and other uses.  Mrs. Harriet Hudson, Tsimshian from Kitselas, told Indigenous ethnographer William Beynon about the discovery of the use of nettle fibre to make fish nets in 1948 (narrative number 29 in Tsimshian Narratives volume 1, edited by Cove and MacDonald, published by the Canadian Museum of Civilization  in the 1987).  Incidentally, when describing how to process the nettle fibre, she mentioned that fireweed stalks could also provide a suitable string.  Harlan Smith's Gitxsan consultants from Gitwangak in the 1920's also mentioned how to make this string (Ethnobotany of the Gitksan Indians of British Columbia, edited by Compton, Rigsby and Tarpent, Canadian Museum of Civilization 1997).  Both nettle (Urtica dioica) and fireweed fibres are bast fibres, like the flax fibre (from Linum usitatissimum) that is used to make linen. Similarly, the mature stalks must be retted, that is, they must decompose just enough that it is possible to separate the fibres from both the papery cortex and the woody vascular cylinder.  To little, the fibres break with the brittle vascular tissue.  Too much, the fibres break because they are rotted.  I have tried this myself, and finger twined quite reasonable two ply cord of a pleasing reddish brown tone.
I find it comforting to have fireweed appear in my urban yard in central Alberta. A reminder of wilder and more northern places I've lived and travelled.

Spring Tonic

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Spring tonic

Working in the garden…it’s early, really early this year.  Pruning last year’s raspberry canes.  Digging the quack grass that snuck into the berry patch when we replaced the fence last fall….and I notice that I’ve uprooted some prime dandelions….so I toss them aside while I remove the quack grass and creeping campanula from the turned earth.  After a while I think….oh, I’d better take care of the dandelions before they dry out.  And I dig some more to round out the batch.  I rinse the dirt off once outside, and scrub the roots twice inside the house, removing all of the tops that have not wilted yet.  I cut the root into small relatively uniform chunks and set them outside to dry for dandelion “coffee”.  (Some of the depsides, flavour compounds in roasted chicory root, and I presume dandelion root as well, are the same as the compounds that flavour roasted coffee.  Naturally caffeine free.)

Then I turn my attention to the tops, selecting relatively undamaged crowns, pulling off older damaged leaves.  And then I think of my spring tonic on the Skeena years ago….so I check the herb bed to see if the chives are up….and they are! So I pull a handful of new chive tops in lieu of the nodding onion I used to add to my stir-fry.  I chop a half jalapeño and some ginger root (definitely not locally sourced) and heat oil in my wok (a mixture of grape seed and sesame), toss in the greens and accompaniment, and stir-fry til they are bright green and wilted.  I add slices of hard-boiled egg (those are local, from the Farmer’s market), stir a bit longer, and eat my spring tonic.  Thank you dandelions and chives.  Spring blessing.

 

As I harvest, process, and eat, I think about multi-species ethnography, research through practice, and "attending." I am reading the dissertation of a young colleague who is writing about the stories of plants and people.  I’ve also been listening to other colleagues at the recent ethnobiology conference in Tucson talking about multi-species ethnography.  So.  Definitely “located knowledge” as the dandelions are from my urban back yard.  Definitely I have been attending to the dandelions, and the ground where they grow, for the 15 plus years I have lived on this 10 by 40 metre plot of urban landscape.  The raspberries are leafing out.  Already.  At least three weeks before “normal”, whatever that is in this time of progressive and stochastic change.  The chives agree that spring is here.  The maples have opened their flowers and the honeysuckles and cotoneaster are also opening their leaves.  The ground in the raspberry patch is graced by clumps of glorious blooming purple violets. 

They are spreading rapidly, apparently undamaged by the fencing activities of the fall.  In fact, they began to bloom two weeks ago, at the beginning of April.  First blossoms of spring.  All of this in Edmonton, at latitude 53 North, in the Canadian prairies….

We read last night that this is the 11^th warmest month on record in a row, itself a record series. And this is global temperatures, not an Alberta anomaly.  Climate change really is here, and all bets are off.

Enjoying spring.  And crossing my fingers for the summer to come.

Local Foods, Food Self-Sufficiency and Food Sovereignty

Thinking about local foods again. The global food system is complex and severs links with place at the same time as it offers a dizzying array of food products from all over the world, and also does in fact alleviate famine at the local level- as long as one has the foreign exchange to pay for food. This Saturday at our local Farmer's Market in Edmonton I came across a new vendor– a sheep's milk cheese dairy. Grass fed West Friesian sheep are pastured in eastern Alberta near Kitscoty, and amazing Camebert style cheese and Pecorino produced within 200 km of where I live has appeared.

I have recently been buying sheep and goat's milk cheese at our local Italian grocery; these products come from Greece, Holland and Spain.... wonderful to be able to support sustainable "niche" farming in Alberta now when I buy cheese. This morning with my cereal (not local Alberta made) I went to my freezer and pulled out a tub of frozen saskatoons which my friend and I harvested in the summer in Mill Creek Ravine, a local semi-natural area and park steps from my door. And poured organic Alberta milk on it (the yoghurt is from somewhere in Eastern Canada).

Of course I accompanied the whole thing with good strong espresso coffee made from locally dark roasted fair trade beans; the beans were a combination of Ethiopian and Peruvian fair trade coffees. Definitely not local. Possibly more socially and environmentally responsible than Folgers or Nabob. This summer we had quite a bit of rain, for semi-arid central Alberta. That meant that local urban yard fruit trees bore heavily. For the second time in a decade or so local apricots were abundant, so much so that it was literally impossible to process all of the fruit before it spoiled. My friend Rod was calling friends and acquaintances to come pick. I made amazing "gourmet" apricot preserves and butter from his fruit, small and flavourful hardy yellow and orange apricots.

Again, the sugar to make the preserves was not Alberta beet sugar, but was fair trade cane sugar from the tropics. Hopefully less damaging than standard sugar, with its horrific labour practices. I find that certain tropical products I am motivated to buy fair trade when possible (bananas, sugar, chocolate and coffee are the prime products).

(coffee cherries photographed in Huautla de Jiménez, Oaxaca, Mexico in 1999)

unroasted coffee spread out for sale in the market in Huautla de Jiménez. People used to have garden plots in their yards. The old yards in this city were laid out with space for food gardens. Most of us have landscaped in the recent past, but tubs of tomatoes are found on decks, rhubarb plants lurk amongst the shrubs, and raspberry canes grow along garages or fence lines. I planted an apple and a sour cherry in my yard, and this year got the first substantial harvest of apples, enough to make two batches of apple butter and some pies (supplemented with fruit from a friend's abundant crop). My friend Riva, who learned the joys of berry picking on walks this summer, also converted a patch of quack-grass in her yard to a small garden, and was excited to harvest her own carrots.

She was proud to share, and pleased when I added some of her carrots to a bison stew at a recent potluck. That was local food par excellence - provided one grants the range of half a day's drive to market as "local". Bison from the Peace River country, onions,parsnips and parsley root from Camrose, carrots from Edmonton, herbs from my garden. There are areas of community garden in Edmonton, as well as in many other cities, and these also provide varying amounts of very local food to their participants. I am troubled, though, that eating local is no longer possible for many. Fast food is cheaper and ubiquitously available. Multinational businesses aggressively market their products in all corners of the globe. The Slow Food movement champions the distinctive qualities of the local, but many people cannot or choose not to afford these foods, which may cost more money and often cost more time, requiring life style commitment. So how much do these various efforts contribute to local food self-sufficiency? How much impact does our participation in local food production and marketing make? When I choose Fair Trade and organic exotic products, am I driving local prices up in the areas they are grown so that people may find it hard to access the foods that they grow? What about the pressure to grow luxury products like shade coffee or artisan chocolate? How do their ecological and human rights report cards come out?