Frank Lake's Dissertation

With a recommendation from Bob Zynbach and help from mmw, I've managed to find and read a disseration by Frank Lake, who wrote it for Oregon State University, and who is Karok. You can find the dissertation here. It's a very long document and I admit that I scanned over parts (especially the methods section), but I found several ideas and details making it worth the read.

About fire:

The starting of fires was considered a spiritual act capable of
serious consequences. Prayer formulas and other beliefs were associated with
burning. Once lit, fires were often spoken to as to how they should behave
and conduct themselves to achieve desired resource objectives of the igniter (p.
99).

A picture of what much of northern California and Southern Oregon looked like:

Patches and fields were located along trails that typically ran adjacent to rivers
and streams, the coast, and along ridgelines, directly connecting communities, peaks,
campgrounds, waterfalls, springs, and other favored subsistence and ceremonial
locations. Fires were also used to clear and maintain trails; rejuvenate berry patches,
wild pea fields, root and bulb fields, and orchards; for hunting; for weed control; and
to cure large fields of tarweed (Madia elegans Lindley) and grass seeds ("Indian
oats"). Daily and seasonal trail clearing activities, combined with seasonal and
occasional brush clearing, hunting, seed curing, and sprout-inducing burns were nearly year-around activities.

There is an interesting series of photographs in the paper showing that many
meadows traditionally maintained by fire have been lost. One example is at Patrick's Point (between Trinidad and Big Lagoon). When Europeans took over the area, they kept the meadows open with fire and with their cattle. When it was made into a State Park and the ranchers were removed, the spruce and shrubs began moving in. Today I know that there is at least one meadow area that the state burns occasionally to encourage the native prairie
plants.

Indians used fire to clear brush and debris from riparian areas and marshes to
stimulate new grass, plant growth, and shrub and tree sprouts. Target
species were cottonwoods (Populus balsamifera spp. trichocarpa Torrey &
A. Gray), willows (Salix spp.), tules (Scirpus acutus Bigelow var. occidentalis
(S.Watson) Beetle), cattails (Typha latifolia L.), sedges (Carex spp.), and
grasses.

At work, I’ve been harvesting bareroot Scirpus microcarpus and water parsley plants. There is quite a bit of grass thatch below, making them difficult to pull up. I use a garden fork and my hands to pull the thatch away from the base of the plants, then use the fork lift the plants. Burning the thatch would save a great deal of time. If it were my nursery and my patches, I might do some experimenting.

I liked hearing about their trails.

Trails were about two feet wide, worn into bare mineral soil, and served as fire
lines in many cases for low intensity surface fires.

There are also many interviews with elder men and women from local tribes. I'm still reading through some of them. But I really should have taken better notes, I know I'm leaving out some important things.

P.S. I'm currently reading Tending the Wild by Kat Anderson.

Boletes edulis

Found another edible. Boletes edulis. Actually, my coworker, Bill, found it. He followed me home to take some plant cuttings (mostly of Ribes sangineum) and to look at some of the mushrooms on the property. (We found many cool ones including a couple of huge black/purple ones.) We said goodbyes, he drove down the hill from our house, and then called me on the phone. He had found the largest patch of Boletes edulis that he had ever seen. In our yard! For more info about B. edulis check out wikipedia.

I've chopped them up (and cut away a few maggot-infested stems) and have them ready to sautee up tomorrow with a couple of wine agarics. I'll probably eat the mushrooms with pasta.

I promise to blog soon about something other than mushrooms. Probably Frank Lake's dissertation.

Fungi Arise!

In the spirit of All Hallow's Eve, strange mushrooms are popping up in the yard. We have...

Eye balls

the Yellow-fanged Bolete

Pumpkins in the Patch (of thyme)

Bride of Frankenstein hair

Ghostly Hordes



And the Gilled Mutant Monstrosity

(diabolical laugh)

Happy Halloween....

First Edible Mushroom

Momentous occasion!

My first edible: the wine-colored agaric. Right in my backyard. I brought one to work today and Bill confirmed it. The wine-colored agaric has a ring, pale rosy brown gills, fibrous stuff on its stalk, and dark streaks on the top of its cap; features you can see below.

(I cut off the stalk, as opposed to just pulling the mushroom up because of some advice I'd read.)

Bill recommends cutting the mushroom strait down the middle to see if bugs have worked their way up from the stalk into the cap. Um, yes. But you know I'm eating them anyway. They're my first edible mushrooms and the damage isn't that bad (and the bugs are pretty small). Don't look too closely, though.

So I chopped up the two caps, washed the pieces in warm water, and left them to soak for a while, hoping that any lingering bugs would exit.

Whoa! Look how red the water stained after soaking them for a half hour or so. I don't know if this is the reason it's the wine-colored agaric, but it sure could be.

After they were sauteed with a bit of butter, they shrunk down quite a bit, into these black slug-like things. But they tasted good. Like an over-cooked button mushroom, but with a deeper flavor.

When I'm not cooking for anyone else, I tend to go for the bare-root sort of meals. Poached eggs and toast it is. The drink in the cup is warmed up unpasteurized (illegal!) apple cider from an unnamed apple orchard. I'm probably not the first to realize this, but an easy way to make it into hot spiced cider is to add a tea bag. Mine's ginger.

The black specks on the eggs are bugs from the mushrooms.

No. It's pepper.

Et Viola. A very satisfying meal.

A note on the top prize (golden chanterelles): A few days ago I found some mushrooms that I thought might be them, but Bill said that they were false chanterelles. Their orange was too bright and their stalks were too skinny. But I'm still deteremined to find some on the property.

Hazel

I fell in love with hazel the first time I stumbled upon it in our forest. That was a few years ago, so my plant eyes were just developing. My father and I were cutting a trail and I said to myself, hey this isn't just another alder. No offense, I like alders too.

The leaves of hazel are downy soft, especially in early spring, are more finely toothed than alder, and more ovular. I also really like their arrangement on the skinny flexible stems. Hazels also have very attractive catkins in spring. I think I've seen some female flowers too (they may have just been buds), but I haven't seen any nuts. Never.

In fall, it's especially apparent that our sweet little hazel tree is really a gargantuan thicket probably many hundred of years old. Here's a look at one of it's "stools":

I say "stool" because it is a term associated with coppicing, a woodland management strategy where you cut a shrub or tree to the ground every so often to encourage new vigorous sprouts from the base. Here, I have to put it in quotation marks. Or maybe it should have been a question mark because this may have infact been a thicket coppiced by the Wiyot people at one time. I couldn't find any evidence of burning, but I doubt ashes would still be around because the soil is a mass of compost and moss. How can I tell? And the stools(?) are covered in moss themselves so I just don't know. But because of our land's closeness to the Bay, I think it is very likely their people lived here at one time.

As you can see above, the thicket is pretty extensive and there are at least four or five main stools, and they may be connected (it's difficult to tell because it's a real jungle in there). Which brings me to expressing a quandry I've had since reading Before the Wilderness. I confess that I am a bit on the romantic side about old, mysterious, "dark forest" things, and yet over the last few months, especially after reading BTW, Wendell Berry, and Noel Perry, I'm becoming more and more swayed to the management side. The solution, I know, is to manage some of it and to hang onto some of the truly amazing old things in the forest. Should I do something with this thicket or just enjoy the jungle?.

Ethnobotanical Videos

Thanks to a comment on a post, I've been searching for information about research up in Oregon and stumbled upon these native plant tour videos from 2004. Go to the link for more info.

Humboldt Botanical Gardens

A few years ago, I heard that a botanical garden was being started in Humboldt County. So I went down to College of the Redwoods, who is leasing land nearby for the gardens, to check it out. They had large signs with a master plan of the gardens in front of a large cow pasture--the future site of the gardens. It wasn't much to look at, but the idea was exciting.

Well, I've been curious ever since about how the gardens are coming. And I have a secret desire to work there, but it's run by volunteers at the moment, I need money, and the driving distance, while not great, is enough to make me be careful about signing up to volunteer.

By chance, I heard the the HBG Foundation was giving a tour of the garden site Saturday (yesterday). It turns out that it was really only open to members, but they kindly let my friend and I tag along and even offered us food and drink. Seems like a nice group of people.



Here's a view of the HBGF meeting with snack table and new greenhouse:


We're walking..


Here's a main pathway leading to a sitting area overlooking the native plant garden.


Native plant garden (one of the few areas planted) with a drain running down the middle. I'm a little concerned that the plantings are too close, but I saw some cool plants down there...

Well, I've skipped over the Moss Family Temperate Woodland garden, which will be packed with rhododendrons (mixed feelings about this), and the Wildberries Riparian area, which is being funded mostly by the Coastal Conservancy to restore and preserve the native willows and such along the creek, to get to a little slice of land that could be most interesting. It's the gardens' coastal prairie. They've planted a bunch of bulbs and native grasses in this area and are trying to beat down the weedy annual grasses by careful mowing. I wonder if they've considered burning or even if it would help agains the weeds. Weedy grasses are tough to control in large areas like this, especially if you can't confidently tell them from the natives. While it's not on the masterplan, I think an area showing the use of native plants, besides purely ornamental, would be nice.

For more info on the gardens, check out this link.