Recently I stumbled on the SERNEC Collection database online.  This is the SouthEast Regional Network of Expertise and Collections, and you can use this system to look up plants in collections across the country with one search.  Some of the collections have preserved plants while others have photos.  You can search just one, a select few or all collections, and you can opt for scientific names, common names or family of plants.  Further, you can narrow the search down by geographical region as well.

Most of the locations that have preserved plants have more than one.  It is interesting to see the variation we get within a single item across the country.  Additionally, many of them include habitat notes with the items as well.  Just clicking on the scientific name will get you photos of the plant and the first 100 results from the database.

The link for the data base is HERE. 

You can see an example of the results for Broadleaf Plantain below.

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Today at a Household gathering I cooked my "Meal for Three or More" for the Forester level requirement.  Because I was going to be cooking for several hours, and because it was on someone else's property and I did not want to scorch their lawn, I chose to bring a portable firepit and coal table.  In addition to my small cast iron dutch oven and griddle, I got to test out my new clay cookpots from Feed the Ravens.  

fresh I filled the clay pots partway with water and sat them under the edge of the firepit to allow them to slowly come to temperature.  Thermal shock can wreck terracotta and I really like these vessels and I am hoping to get years of use out of them, so I was very cautious.

When I had a bed of coals I moved some using a shovel to the coal table and then I used a trivet from Rabenwald Metalsmything to hold my small dutch oven.  I added a half stick of butter and a large onion (I chose vidalia because I have less issues eating those that most other types).  Once the onion was soft, I chopped up 2 lbs of parsnips and added them, as well as some salt and put the lid on.  I periodically added more coals to this area of the coal table to keep the dish cooking.  When the parsnips started to dry out, I added about half cup of wine and cooked till tender.  At that point I added Sour Grass (Sheep Sorrel), but you could use Blood Sorrel if you have a high end grocery store near you, or just a spritz of lemon or even some sumac to get the sour, lemony taste.  When it was almost done I added about a quarter of a cup of bread crumbs to thicken the sauce.

The larger clay pot housed a barley and mushroom dish.  I wanted to get the barley soaking as soon as possible so I coated the inside of the pot with olive oil, added a cup of barley, and then a carton (32oz) of beef stock and a sprig of fresh thyme from my garden.  I used my griddle to saute a very large leek (white and light green parts only) and added that to vessel when I moved it to the coal table.  I could have but the leeks and oil in the clay pot and started them there, and then added the barley and broth as well. 

Basically, I just kept heat against this pot and stirred it occasionally and added salt as needed.  When the barley was half done, I tossed in an 8oz container of white mushrooms and an 8oz container of baby portabellas and a handful of parsley leaves.  It took over an hour for the barley to completely cook.  I did add a touch more water towards the end to keep it from sticking and burning inside the pot. This dish was a huge hit with most of the folks that tried it.  I would absolutely just make this as a winter comfort food!  

The small clay pot got a half stick of butter, then 2 chopped apples and a half stick of ceylon cinnamon.  As those cooked down, I added two more apples.  When it was cooked I added a couple of tablespoons of honey and stirred it in.

Finally, I griddled up some pork medallions.  I only used salt on these because I was serving them with a choice of the apples or a medieval green sauce.  The green sauce was parsley, ginger, salt, verjus and white wine vinegar.  It should include bread mashed into it but we do have one gluten free person in the group and I wanted her to be able to eat as much of the offerings as possible.

I think the food was well received over all.  It was definitely enough to feed at least a half dozen people if this was all that was offered, maybe more.  As we had other food at the event, I think maybe 8-10 people at least got to try the food.

I will also say that having the coal table can be life saving on one's back.  I spent 3.5 hours from start of the fire till the last dish was finished.

Today I murdered more garlic mustard. I have also been remulching (after many years) the front yard here. We have no real soil, so very little grows... and most of that is stilt grass. I am covering it all to hopefully have this round die off before going to seed. Then another year I can clear areas of mulch and plant native wildflowers and other things.

I do need to decide which saplings in the front yard will get to have a chance at growing. There are white and red oaks, ash (white, I think), black cherry and one redbud (that one gets a pass to see if it makes it).

BUT, I did find Longstyle Sweetroot (Osmorhiza longistylis). I pulled just one to test it out. This is a native plant, so will not become part of my apothecary (which has a 14th C English focus), but I still am testing everything safe out.

It absolutely smells of anise. I tried the leaves raw and they were tender, tasted lightly of anise and had a bitter note as well. I liked them, but the BigMan did not at all.

The root is SWEET. Delightfully so. It tingles on the tongue the way ginger does. I do not like licorice candy at all but this is somewhat dialed back from that and I enjoy it.

So I made tea from the leaves (WAY too "green" tasting for tea). The roots (sweet and refreshing but I made it a little strong). And some mint from the garden. Mixing the mint tea 3 to 1 with the sweetroot, and diluting just a bit makes a fabulous beverage. After these seed I might harvest a few more roots to add to summer beverages.

Disclaimer: I am an amateur at woodscraft and herblore.  Nothing below should be taken as advice or recommendations.  I am merely experimenting.  Please do your own research before consuming or using any plant for medicinal purposes.

​I have been putting off making spring greens and cheese pies again because I have been a bit on the strugglebus lately and while I have the oompf to go out and gather, I don't have it for making the crust.

I finally caved and bought puff pastry crusts and decided to just roll with that.  For these experiments, its the greens that matter anyways.

So today I gathered more ​Garlic Mustard (and murdered even more of it, as it is horribly invasive), Cutleaf Toothwort, Dandelion Greens, Wild Garlic, and Chives that escaped my garden.

The Wild Garlic is what we called Spring Onions or Onion Grass when I was growing up.  In the photo you can see the tiny bulbs on the ends.  I also had chives that escaped my garden and it was pretty cool to compare the two side-by-side.  The Wild Garlic had a mini version of a garlic bulb that even had little "cloves".  The leaves are round and the stems hollowish.  The runaway chives are solid throughout and look like a mini leek.

The Cutleaf Toothwort (Cardamine concatenata) is a new one to me this year and I am beyond delighted.  I found several areas where it grows, including one that is very heavily covered with it (and loads of mayapple as you go further down the hill).  This plant is a native, so not something I am looking to harvest for my SCA Apothecary (which has a 14th century English focus), but for my general Forestry and plant stuff?  HECK YES.  Want to read more about it and some uses for food?  This is a great entry from Forager Chef about it.
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So I tasted the leaves and yes, peppery!  It reminds me of a strong arugula, to which it is related, so no surprise.  This plant is a bittercress and is in the mustard family.  It had some bite!  Supposedly the root tastes like horseradish, so I plan to dig some up at a later time to check it out.

Today, however, I tossed some in a salad with some store-bought lettuce (mine in the garden is too young yet), a chopped chive and some parmesan and Italian dressing and it was absolutely excellent.  We are cooking a rib roast tomorrow and my partner wants to use the leaves to dress leftover beef sandwiches on Monday.  I am looking forward to it.

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For my hand pies, I sauteed the bulbs from the Wild Garlic in some butter, then added the greens.  I did not cook the greens terribly long, and then had melted cream cheese in another pot that I added to it and a handful of parmesan and a sprinkle of salt.

I cut the two sheets of thawed puff pastry dough into 9 squares each and laid half on a buttered pan, topped with a dollup cheese/greens, wet the edges of the pastry and placed the top over it and pressed the edges down.  I brushed butter on the top and baked them at 400 for 15 minutes.

The greens are concentrated and POTENT.  I used a little over half the block of cream cheese and almost as much cooked greens, but I could easily have used half the the amount of greens (which were, by volume, predominantly the toothwort and garlic mustard).  The pastries are still very good, but I would definitely cut down the next time and it honestly didn't need the added salt either.

And of course, I always have help no matter what I am doing outside.

This winter I started taking a different look at the plants immediately around our woodland home because I want to learn more about the lifecycles of local plants.  I want to be able to better identify them at all stages, rather than just the most obvious ones such as when they are flowering.  I also want to be able to gather some plants at various stages for different purposes.

And because I am forgetful, I also am making notes of WHERE I find things so that I can find them again later.  

What really is interesting to me is how many of the local green growing things are NOT native to this area.  So far I noted 16 plants that are coming up nearby, and, of those, 10 are not native to this continent at all.  A few are naturalized, but some are unwelcome.  (For those who do not know me, I am mundanely located in West Virginia.)

So I am cataloging the plants as Native or Non-Native (though some institutions use the term Exotic).  I am also including location where it originated and whether it is Naturalized to the area or Invasive.

• Native plants, simply put, are those that belong here and have historically been here.  
• Non-Native plants evolved in another location (quite frequently that location is listed as Eurasia).  They might have been brought here as garden items or been brought accidently as seeds with other cargo.
• Naturalized plants are Non-Natives but that have adapted to live here without harming the local ecosystem.
• Invasive plants are those that threaten the local systems and can crowd out Native plants.

Over the next few years I hope to introduce additional Native plants to the yard here.  Things like Serviceberries for our field and trying to eradicate the highly invasive Stiltgrass in the shaded front yard and encourage plants like Wild Ginger, Bloodroot and Mountain Mint instead.

I have also mentioned another Invasive here on my blog, Garlic Mustard.  I happily eat my fill of this in the spring and fully murder the rest.  I walked the lane leading into our property yesterday and saw very little of it coming up this year, compared to the last few, likely due to my willful destruction of every bit that I could find.

I am hoping to do some more campfire cooking in the next few weeks, and am eager to include some of the things growing around the house, including chickweed, hairy bittercress and spring onions... possibly even violets and redbuds if they are ready.

I mentioned in a much earlier post (HERE) that gloves or mittens would come in very handy for handling some of the plants around here, such as poison ivy.  They are also essential, of course, for keeping warm.  I decided to make a pair of medieval split mittens as seen in the Luttrell Psalter.  

The Luttrell Psalter shows both solid colored mittens and those that are particolored.  The Tübingen house book has an image of mittens that show fur at the bottom edge.  I think many (or most) of these split mittens were likely crafted out of pelts with fur/wool on the inside.  This very much simplifies the construction, as you can do butted seams with the edges of the leather, and there are no bulky seam allowances to worry about.  

I do not have a pelt I can currently cut up, and I am still trying to use items from my stash as much as possible for my projects, so I choose to work in wool.  I have some lovely coating weight wool with a heavily brushed (and warm!) surface on one side.  This cloth will fray, but not readily as it is well fulled.  This means that, while sturdy, I cannot rely on a butted seam for the construction.  This presented some issues as I need seam allowances and to get that in the the split of the mitten I would need to have the finger chambers angled awkwardly outwards.  A gusset in the split could work, but not for my tiny hands because it again creates bulky seams too close together.

My solution was to treat the mittens as I think the parti-colored option could be constructed, and add a seam down the center to join the two halves of the mitten.

I used the basic pattern from Medieval Tailor's Assistant and eliminated the gusset and added the center seam.  I did my first test in some heavy synthetic fleece, recrafted the pattern to fit my hand and worked one up in the wool.  That still was not quite right, so I worked from that to create a thir pattern from which I made my final gloves.  I am very pleased with the results and might eventually make a parti-colored pair!

Don't sew and need mittens?  Historic Enterprises also sells split mittens!

I decided on a male persona for my Forester work mostly because I like the clothing and I really like the idea of chausses because the chiggers in the summer here are just off the charts annoying.  I do plan to make 14th Century English women's clothing as well (mostly because I can get away with sandals that way at Pennsic, and because I have always loved that classic 'medieval' look).

But it is interesting that, in period, both roles that I am pursuing, Forester and Apothecary, could be held by women during the Middle Ages.  I had already read a fair bit about female apothecaries but the following article was posted to the Atlantian Forestry group on Face book discusses female Foresters in the 13th century in England.  This is key because it gave me better insight into how the position of Forester in Fee worked, and that my persona idea (being trained as an apothecary in London but returned to the family home to take over the Forester role after the plague wiped out my persona's father and older brother) is actually viable and not as convoluted as it sounds.

The article is HERE for those interested.  

This fall I harvested some dried mullein stalks to coat with flammables and attempt to use as torches.  I read in several "articles" online that mullein torches were used by the Romans.  Why the quotes?  Because not a one of those actually cite a viable source for that information.  I do not know whether it is legit or not (Roman period is not my research thing), but folklore also refers to these as "witch candles" so I thought I would give it a test regardless.  I will note that in On Simples, attributed to Dioscorides there is a reference to Mullein being used as lamp wicks and it is also called "lampwick", so that I will definitely be checking out in the future as well.

So last month I coated some of the stalks with wax.  Because of the cost of beeswax and my desire not to waste any, I chose not to fill a tall vessel and dip the stalks.  Rather, I melted a small portion and dipped the tip and just ladled the liquid wax over the rest and watched it soak in to the very dry material.  Modernly you can find mullein candles from neopagan vendors who very heavily coat them, truly making them candle-like in appearance.  They sell them as a less appropriative replacement for white sage for smudging (not a bad thing at all).

The initial test had a 3 inch flower head that gave me 5.5 minutes of well-lit burn time.  I used approximately 1.75 ounces of wax to coat the 4 stalks I had (3-4ish inches).

​Because wax likely had better uses than a quick burning torch in period, I decided to look at other viable options for this process and purchased some beef tallow and used up some expired olive oil and also vegetable (soybean) oil that was left over from frying schnitzel.

For this round I used 4 inch plants, all dressed in the same fashion (with the tip held in the oil and oil ladled down the stalk until it was well coated).  I labeled them and stood them up as I did before, lit the tops and timed them.

While the lengths of the flower heads on these were all similar, they were not exact down to the millimeter and I had no way to check for density, so some might have been heavier than others.  So this truly is not scientific, but still gave me a feel for how well the different fats performed.

In the image below, the wax is on the left, tallow, then olive oil and the vegetable oil on the far right.  The wax caught most readily and produced the most light for the duration of it's burn.  It is the only one that really acted as a "torch" for the entire duration.

The tallow performed well, but the bright light it started with settled down to something a bit better than a really good candle.  The two plant oils were more candle like until the last 5 minutes of their burn time.

At the end of ithe beeswax burned brightly for 18:42 (18 minutes, 42 seconds).  The tallow burned for 27:26 and the vegetable oil burned for 25:38.  The olive oil was burned for 21:01, but I also had to relight it at one point because it was very much struggling to really get going.

Also, I had a helper, because of course I did.  He feels that I finally have set the appropriate alter for his divine presence.