May News Update

So, I have a new roommate. Sylvia, a nice girl from Michigan is moving in tomorrow. Thanks for everyone who responded to my ads. Summer weather has hit Portland, and as a result my mood, energy level, and outdoors time has hit an all-time high (for the city). Mornings I can be found drinking chicory coffee and sunbathing by the pool at my apartment complex overlooking the Willamette. Here you can see herons, geese families, and cormorants doing their thing. How great is that? I am still doing some teaching here and there, and always interested in more opportunities. We had an excellent women’s medicine making class set up as part of a series by my friend Kirsten through PSU and I also taught at the TrackersNW Women’s Wilderness Weekend in Sandy. It was a super time. We had workshops on bowdrill fires (I learned clematis stalk is a great spindle, never made a fire so easy!) belly dancing (gotta strengthen those core muscles), massage, scout games, martial arts, and more! I taught salve making, intuitive plant meditation, and DIY herbal tarot reading. This is the closest I’ve ever come to living my dream of a civilization rehabilitation center.

Photo by Adelaide Brown

I also now have a professional website to promote my herbal and ethnobotanical skills. Actually I have had it for months and it is still not quite done, but feel free to take a look: www.wildheartshealing.com. Eli helped me make this great shingle to hang on my door:

In mid-may Jana, Becky and I went to check out the camas bloom in Molalla. The biggest camas field I know of is in a horse pasture. The horses were ambivalent until I bent over and started digging at a bulb and then they came right up started nudging and teasing me. We did not eat any camas. Ideally it is harvested in fall after the flowers die and the seeds harden, although that alone is not enough to dissuade me from giving it a go now, it must also be cooked in a steam pit for a couple days to break down the indigestible inulin fiber into fructose and I don’t even have a yard.

Photo by Becky Lerner

The other day I felt like I needed to burn off some nervous energy so I walked the entire length of the 30 mile Wildwood Trail in Forest Park…on an empty stomach. It took about 9 hours. Now I’m limping a bit cause my left foot is sore, and have a blister on my right heel but am otherwise no worse for the wear. I don’t really exercise either. Imagine if I actually trained!

The biggest news is that I have been helping my friend Becky Lerner, who also has a primitive skills blog, www.FirstWays.com, with a wild food project. She signed up to eat only wild foods for a week and write about it on CultureChange.org. I’ve been serving to help identify wild foods, and places to find them, and give suggestions on how to prepare them.  Turns out the project was a bit too ambitious and Becky only  lasted until day 5 on the 100% wild diet, but we are still gathering. Check out her articles:

Living on Foraged Wild Foods for a Solid Week in the City

Week of Wild Food-Day One

Week of Wild Food-Day Two

Week ofWild Food-Day Three

Week of Wild Food-Day Four

Week of Wild Food-Day Five

Week of Wild Food-Day Six

The project has been getting a lot of outside press. We appeared on KATU news, I didn’t get any “lines” in the one minute segment, but you can see me tagging  along in my “herbalists rock” tank top, and, no, I did not know we were going to be filmed when I put that on.

Roommate Wanted!

Thinking about delving in to the Portland rewilding scene? Or just need a place to stay? I need a roommate ASAP for my 2 bedroom apartment in Sellwood, a pretty, safe, quiet Portland, OR neighborhood on the SE side of town. I live in a cute retro apartment complex that includes a fireplace,  outdoor pool, and dock access to the Willamette River. Build your own kayak with TrackersNW and you’re all set! It is a short walk to the library, coffeeshops, and New Seasons market. Near Oaks Bottom Park and Springwater corridor bike trail, connecting all the way to Boring, OR.  Rent is $462/mo plus electric and internet. I have too real-life lolcats that sometimes fall asleep hugging eachother. Open to couples & single parents. Interested? Email trackerofplants (at) gmail (dot) com.

Wild Plant Tuesdays March Series: Botany for Wildcrafters @ TrackersNW

Each Tuesday night in March from 6:30-8:30 we will be covering a different topic in botany geared toward helping you, the novice wildcrafter, identify useful wild plants. Basic edible and medicinal properties of examples covered in class will also be briefly discussed.

Tuesday, March 3rd: The seasonal harvest cycle. What to harvest when and why.
Tuesday, March 10th: Tree identification. Buds & bark. How to identify a “naked” tree. Leaf ID.
Tuesday, March 17th: Flower identification. Flower parts and terms. How to use popular field guides. Keeping a plant notebook.
Tuesday, March 24th: Common plant families. Recognizing patterns.
Tuesday, March 31st: Using simple and advanced dichotomous keys.

See you there!

Wild Plant Tuesdays in January

Spring is not yet here, so we will continue to harness the darkness of January for still, inner work. The remaining Tuesdays will consist of continued intuitive experimentation with common and local herbs. For example, we might meditate with the three different immune support herbs in one night and compare their similarities and differences, or we might spend one night working with tinctures of different parts of the same plant. As always I will reveal the identity of the plants at the end of class, along with their growth habitats and traditional uses. This is a lot of fun and I hope you can make it! The cost is $15/ class. Discount cards for multiple classes are available online. Oh, and we are no longer in the “scout pit”. Classes are now upstairs in the same building. Look out front for the TrackersNW banner.
–Penny Scout

Rewild Xmas

lolcat breakup

The beginning:

The middle:

The end:

Snow!

I am told it almost never snows in Portland…anymore. Indeed this is the winteriest I’ve seen it since my arrival. Therefore I am giving the snow storm the dubious honor of immortalization in blog format:

Chains? What are those? I’d never seen tire chains in my life before moving out here, or understood why one would use them. It is said that Portlanders don’t know how to drive in the snow. This is true. However, it is also true that the city does not have the infrastructure to clear snow. See this street? Pure ice. Northwestern Pennsylvanians can sure as hell drive in the snow, but no way my car can make it up this slope, uhuh. Shops are closed. Everyone is out walking. It’s great!

We were stuck in the neighborhood until a friend picked us up so we could go hiking in Forest Park. Forest Park now includes over 5,100 wooded acres making it the largest, forested natural area within city limits in the United States. As cool as that is, I tend not to go there often because it’s on a steep dark slope, and on the other side of the river, near downtown. In May 2004:

“Extreme cross-country runners visiting from Australia report seeing a strange older man with a young girl deep within Forest Park. With this guide, authorities made it through waist-high brush to locate the man and his daughter, who had been living near a creek in the park undiscovered for over four years. They had a dwelling, a garden plot, a full set of encyclopedias…”

We did a loop starting at Macleay Park, up Macleay trail, to Wildwood trail, to the Aspen trail and back down Aspen Avenue. Here is the Stone House. Some locals call it the witch’s house. Actually, this structure was built in the mid-1930s by the Works Progress Administration as a public restroom.

The Peters in a rare sun spot.

Here is Mt. Adams in Washington as seen across the northwest industrial area. I don’t know how good I feel about quoting wikipedia quoting white people quoting Indians, neverthless:

“Native Americans in the area have created a detailed legend concerning the three smoking mountains that guard the Columbia. According to the Bridge of the Gods tale, Wyeast (Mount Hood) and Pahto (Mount Adams; also called Paddo or Klickitat by natives) were the sons of Great Spirit. The brothers both competed for the love of the beautiful La-wa-la-clough (Mount St. Helens). When La-wa-la-clough chose Pahto, Wyeast struck his brother hard so that Pahto’s head was flattened and Wyeast took La-wa-la-clough from him (thus attempting to explain Adams’ squat appearance). However, other versions of the story state that losing La-wa-la-clough caused Pahto such grief that he dropped his head in shame.”

At least now I can remember which one is which!

Need Web Design Help for New Site

I am looking for help in designing my new website, trackerofplants.com. If anyone is interested in trading for plant classes or medicine or personal instruction this should be fairly straightforward…I have some templates I more or less like that you can go off of and the content will be very brief, about 7 pages? But I don’t know how to edit the css to get the colors and such I want or how to organize and upload files. I would like to have an online store for selling tinctures. I would also like it to be primarily a professional site, but with a wordpress blog on only ONE page i.e trackerofplants.com/blog, not blog archives running up and down the sides of every page, if that is possible. I have Dreamweaver and Nvu but I’ve already spent hours fiddling around it has become apparent that I don’t know the first thing about this stuff. Thanks,

- Penny

Wild Plant Tuesdays December Series

Intuitive Community Herbalism
Dec 2, 9, 16, 23, 30, 6:30-8:30 pm

For this radical, hands-on approach to medicine I will facilitate a healing circle. Part magic show, part democracy, part spiritual revival. Each week one participant will volunteer a current health issue they would like to work on and write it on a note card. Each week I shall “disguise” 5 ultra-local, in-season herbs and after quick but careful consideration we shall vote on the most appropriate treatment. Then we will commune, via ingestion, with the selected herb or herbs and record and share our impressions. Toward the end of the class the problem will be revealed, as well as the identity of herb, confirming our suspicions, if all goes well. Finally, if time allows, we will locate the herb growing in it’s natural habitat, respectfully harvest it and learn to make medicine together. You can’t get any more relevant than this.
Cost $15 per drop-in class, $5 per class discount available if you register for 10 classes.

A Snail Tale

Helix aspersa

“Honey, I have something to tell you. I’ve got snails.”
“What, does that mean I have ‘em too?”
So went the conversation between Urban Scout and I when I phoned from the Oregon Garden to tell him about my latest foraging score.
Long-time fans may remember my first wild snail experience about a year ago, borne of a morning of failed fishing. Those were a mysterious variety of pond snail. These were, however, real escargot, also known as Helix apersa, introduced to California for food by the French in the 1850’s. Eating snails didn’t particularly catch on, but the snails did, taking well to the mild climate.