First Batch of Doompunk Photos Is Up!

The full set's at our Doompunk site but here are some highlights:

Garden Update

Latest photos of the garden! You can see that the eggplants are coming along well, as are the tomatoes. The first ripe tomatoes have come in, and they are soooo tasty. Nothing compares to the salty/sweet/umami flavor of fresh tomatoes picked off vines you grew yourself! The peppers were a complete loss. The herbs are doing all right, but the lettuce and beets didn't get very big--I think I need to thin them a lot more than I did.

Here's one of the eggplants:

The tomatoes:

No More Crackspider!

Hooray--no more Crackspider! Here is my first completed crochet project--a water-bottle carrier with a drawstring.

Mysteries of Seward Park

Joseph and I went back to Seward Park to forage again. I have read that salal berries can be used like blueberries in pie, so I wanted to collect a big bag of them and try it. This time, though, we ended up on a different trail, where the salal was sparse and what berries we found were dried up and unappetizing. Even with the paucity of berries, there were some interesting and mysterious things to be discovered.

First mystery: what is leaving all this fur around? It has guard hairs in it like dog fur, but we saw it everywhere! Unless someone was shaving Akitas in the park, I think it probably came from a wild animal--maybe the feral rabbits? I was tempted to try to collect it and make yarn from it (hey, free yarn!) but there were bugs in one clump, so it wasn't a good idea.


We also found a mysterious sap-producing tree. It was too tall to be able to see what its leaves looked like, except that it's a broadleaf of some kind. Here is a picture of its bark:

The leaves in that picture belong to a nearby bush and not to the sap tree. The sap tree's branches are all really high up.

This is the sap. It seeps out and makes long projections that look a lot like Gummi-Worms. This is not an evergreen tree and the sap-gummis aren't pitch. I tasted one to see if I could identify it, and there was a mildly sweet taste--not as sweet as maple sap--but what was really interesting to me was the mouth-feel of this stuff. It was slightly slippery and humectant, reminding me of glycerol. Once I know for sure what kind of tree this is and how edible the stuff is, I may be able to make my own dry-mouth treatment stuff!

We also saw a really big owl. The picture of the owl is a little blurry, as the light conditions were kind of weird and I didn't get close enough. The owl seemed to regard me as no threat; he looked at me a bit as I approached, but didn't hiss or puff up or fly away. It looked like he just thought I was an interesting oddity. He looks sinister in this picture, but owls are actually real sweethearts who love to snuggle.

Berries and a Couple of Nuts in the Park

Now that last week's heat has broken and the clouds have returned, we've resumed our forest walks (I hesitate to call them "hikes" because we don't go camping during them yet, and we just wear ordinary clothes like any other day, no "hiking equipment" required) and wild-food foraging.

Yesterday we explored Seward Park, which has old-growth forest and lots of hiking trails. The main trail was too crowded for us--meaning we were seeing people and dogs about every five minutes--so we went on the back trails.

I had brought a bag for blackberries (there are tons of feral blackberry bushes everywhere!) but I forgot to pack the field guide to edible plants, so we kind of ended up guessing about the berries we found.

For our first non-blackberry find, Joseph spotted these berries growing on a grapelike vine. He tasted one and said it tasted sort of like a grape. We collected a sample of that one to bring home and identify. That turned out to be currants!

Then we found something that looked a lot like a blueberry, but not quite and on the wrong kind of tree. I was pretty sure they looked like something I used to eat as a kid while blueberry hunting, so I tasted one, and the berry was sweet and pleasant. However, it was not what I used to eat! It was actually a salal berry. They can be used in pies.

Toward the trail's end, Joseph saw some fuzzy things hanging in a bush and asked me if I knew what they were. Guess what? I did! They were hazelnuts, just like the kind my dad gathers by the coffeecanful! The hazelnuts are still scarce (they ripen later on in the fall) but it sure is good to know where they grow.

We walked a total of 4.5 miles, which is less far than a walk in the woods normally takes us.

Fun With Knitting

Knowing how to make cloth is an almost magical skill, but one that had eluded me for a long time. My grandmothers each tried to teach me the mysteries of knitting and crochet when I was a kid, but it always seemed like I produced a knotted mess instead of neat rows of stitches.

Because I was such a fiasco with yarn, I had given up on learning to knit, until Joseph and I started talking about learning useful doom-based survival skills. We got some yarn and some crochet hooks, studied a book called Knitting With Balls, and watched numerous tutorials online.

Joseph showed more aptitude from the beginning.

Look, here he's made a square!

My first few attempts came out looking like Crackspider had been at the yarn.

After taking apart and re-trying a few of these interesting creations, I managed to produce this:

It's still a little like a Crackspider weaving, but you can see some stitches in it that resemble actual stitches.

Eventually I had Joseph demonstrate to me exactly how he was making it work. I needed a real-time, three-dimensional demonstration because I have trouble visualizing things in three-d and I also have some task-ordering difficulties (whee!). I had to get a kinesthetic sense of where the yarn and the crochet hook should be, and in what order things should move.

After a few demonstrations and a lot of practice, I managed to do this:

Check it out--not only is that a square with mostly good stitches, but I even managed to change the direction of the stitching a few times! Eventually I should be able to make actual items out of yarn.

Garden Update

The garden is coming along nicely! There are some very beautiful flowers on the eggplant.


The tomatoes are beginning to form, also!