The secret, abandoned, out-of-the-way blueberry patch that I wrote about three years ago? Yeah, forget about scoring any berries there anymore.  The patch has blown up, the word leaked out and spread out like the tarps and sheets we used to use in the gathering of those sweet little blue spheres.

Kristin and I took our friends Monica and Nick down to Wilmington with one of our “missions” of the trip being the collection of vast quantities of berries. This wasn’t meant to be.

A recent rain had knocked what was left of the ripe berries to the ground for the ants to carry off. What little was left were slightly under ripe and tangy, not worth more than a few pops here and there. The people had invaded and stripped everything else away.

At least it was a nice day – cool, sunny, perfect just for being outside and walking around. The focus quickly changed from the blueberries to the downtown farmer’s market and to fig gathering at the beach.

Last month while chasing pigs through the woods (a story that I will write about soon) I stumbled into a large area filled with Common Mullein – Verbascum thapsus. Mullein likes to grow in recently disturbed areas, and this place was really disturbed – trees uprooted and bulldozed away into giant piles.

Mullein is a fascinating plant. It easily colonizes disturbed areas, but its growth requirements prevent it from becoming invasive. Too much shade and it is all over for this plant. Rapid succession from other plants will crowd it out.

This early succession plant can actually make itself less viable by its own presence. A study in the Journal of Ecology conducted in our area concludes that as the years progress, the plant will become smaller and smaller and seed production will drop off significantly each year. According to the study, the first generation produced five times as much seed as the third generation.

Our friend Nick came over, so he and Kristin decided that we should go out to the spot and harvest some of the mullein leaves.  These first generation plants had some giant leaves, meaning less time harvesting and more time picking the ticks off our legs.

Mullein has many medicinal properties – it can be made into a tea or smoked to battle a cough. Sounds counterproductive, right?

The plant is also referred to as Nature’s Toilet Paper, but the irritating hairs that cover the plant make me think that you would need to be in some dire need to use it for that purpose more than once in a while.

The dried stalk contains many oils that supposedly make it a good torch.  I am going to try it out this Fall after the stalks are up.

In my line of life you have to embrace some level of hypocrisy.  Anarchism is an imperfect ideology, especially in day to day application.  In regards to food, we build momentum against industrial agriculture, monoculture, neocolonialism, global food distribution systems and chain grocery stores while building regional food systems, community gardens, CSAs, and cooking for Food Not Bombs.  I work on the latter all while relying heavily on the waste streams of the former.

The whole dichotomy came into focus (again) as I was hauling ten pounds of bananas out of the dumpster, taking in a nice and cozy 2600 mile diet subsidy.  We are building a farm with a focus on self sufficiency.  Since that goal is way off, we rely very heavily on the waste stream.

I have written about dumpster diving in the past, but the level of food and resource rescuing we do now is pretty unprecedented.  The chickens eat it (bananas and melons are their favorite), the goat eats it (cabbage trimmings are always available) and we all certainly do our part to go through as much of the food as we can.  The pigs are coming soon; they will eat whatever we other critters cannot get through.  Clothing, shelving, buckets, cardboard, wire, dishes, and a billion other things get converted into feeders, mulch and everyday farm equipment.

Artichokes, red peppers, starfruit, melons, red bananas, eggplant, avocado, asparagus – a sampling of the seasons from around the world, all held up by petroleum and horrible working conditions – picked, packed, shipped and then thrown away while still edible.  It is basically a punch in the face of all the work done … The wasteful practices are illustrated over an over again by the sight of good food going to the landfill.  But we intervene, daily, breaking the waste chain, feeding ourselves and others while the world dies around us.

Yesterday – in ten seconds in the grocery store dumpster – I pulled out an entire case of tomato sauce.  Twelve jars with an expiration date sometime in 2011, undamaged and unopened, thrown away simply because it was delivered to the wrong store.  So it gets thrown away.  Not donated, not given to employees, not sampled out.  If a punk wasn’t there to rescue it, it would be on its way to the landfill at this moment, the jars broken on the sides of the trash truck and contents stuck on the gears and plates and pieces of a wasteful world.

But if that waste stream stopped suddenly (like we want it to), our current food paradigm would change radically.  We are not yet growing enough to feed ourselves.  Entire subcultures are built on the availability of trashed food, websites and blogs are devoted to one thing only -

Every year in the US nearly 100 billion pounds of edible food are sent to landfills by retailers, restaurants, and consumers. It’s also estimated that only about 4 billion pounds of food would be necessary to eliminate hunger in America.

Don’t get me wrong, a huge pot of dumpster veggie soup is delicious, but with Trashy Gourmet I hope to show that dumpsters offer an endless array of options for your culinary delight. So start diving, get cooking, and stuff your face while you help save the world! Eating against capitalism tastes so good.

Can we eat our way out of capitalism?  Can we reconcile our goals with our current actions?  Pass me an avocado and we’ll talk about it later…

Our land is still pretty mysterious, not knowing what is around or who is around.  With each trip some of the little secrets are revealed, and I feel that we are becoming more and more part of the sparsely inhabited community.

We met a neighbor who told us a little about the trail network that crosses a dozen or so properties (ours included) and found out more of the family history of the place we bought.  The trails are miles long, dumping out onto various properties or ending up at creeks and roads.

As a start, we walked west on the trail that leaves our property.  It was apparent that the forest had been clear cut in recent history, more recent on the properties south of this particular trail.  Many of the older trees were spaced in a way that indicated that the land had been used as a pasture.  Almost all of the large trees had scarring from when they had been used as fence posts.  Others were just big and dead.

The recently cut forest gives great glimpses of how succession works in our area. We have several models in action though.  Since clearing land for pasture usually leaves the remnants of hardwoods in the area, what would usually be pine dominated growth is now a heavy mix of young hardwoods.

Also, since we have not begun farming our open space yet, fast growing scrub and trees are coming up all over.  Sweet gum, tulip poplar, sumac and cedar are already a few feet high in some places.

So, with the research I was able to look through, I figure the forest around us was cut more than thirty years ago but less than seventy years ago.  I could be wrong as I am also relying on some things that I learned twelve years ago in ecology classes.

Along the trail we found some late ripening wild blueberries.  If I had to guess, they will probably ripen around the first of September.  I haven’t been able to find the name of the wild berry that ripens late.

We also saw quite a few wild creatures, from deer to beetles to spiders.  Several large spiders made great use of hollow tree parts for their webs.

This luna moth (Actias luna) was at the end of its life, having lost its tails.  The adult moths live only a week, long enough to mate.  They don’t even have mouths to eat with, such is the singularity of their purpose.

Noel caught a crayfish (Cambaroides sp.) big enough to use as fishing bait but not big enough to make a very good meal.

The stony creek at the end of our walk deserves much more exploration.  I imagine we will all spend a lot of time there poking around among the rocks and pools.

From the looks of the high banks, it also looks like we could have some nice little swimming holes if the rain would cooperate.

As usual there is an end of the line, which we will be sure to adhere to until we can get some permission to trespass.  It usually isn’t hard to get such permission as long as the owners know your name and intentions.  It should come in time, but we have enough space to explore for the time being…