…What I came to say was

Teach the children about the cycles.

The Life Cycles. All the other cycles,

That’s what it’s all about, and it’s all forgot.

— Gary Snyder, “For/From Lew”

Today is the Equinox.  By the time this magazine is ready, Easter will be over. The Full moon will be passed.  Earth’s cycles will be changing quickly. Before Europeans, Native people would be digging roots or gathering camas, wapato, or cattail shoots.  The Salish word for Spring is “a Time of Gathering.”  Gathering was a matter not just of time, but of place and people. Different plants grow best in different places.  Indigenous people went to those places. We try to make wherever we live a place to grow our food. 

We try to make our same foods grow in every place. More often we try to get food from every place at one grocery supermarket.  Often, we can even get seeds there.  This consolidation of supply and access to food has dramatically diminished the genetics of world food production. Maize, rice, wheat, barley and sorghum are the 5 main world food crops.  No fruits, vegetables, animals, spices or many other things are on the list. If you buy seeds to grow any of those things, they were probably grown in huge quantities in the Midwest and sold worldwide, often in patented varieties.

Looking at the brilliant pictures and glowing descriptions in seed catalogs we lose sight of the inherent nature of seeds to adapt to individual climates and locations. A lot of local people are trying to change that perception and the supply chain.  I met several of them at a seed swap held at the Fruitland Valley Winery recently. There was a lot to learn.

Bezaleel Israel has been collecting seeds from his gardens for over 25 years.  You can order the seeds BZ grows through the website, BZFarm.org. Click on the button to “buy seeds” for a list of 20 kinds of vegetables and 70 different varieties of seeds within them.  There are regulations on seeds for sale. Seeds must be tested every five months for the percentage of germination expected. For these 70 varieties, BZ and fellow farm collective member Chrys Ostrander must do germination tests in addition to collecting, cleaning, storing, packaging and labelling the seeds. 

Developing the best seeds is another story. They have drier upland sites and bottomland sites in at their Eco Village site near the US/Canada Border north of Northport. Within one kind family of plants, say corn, the plants different varieties can cross-pollinate if near to each other.  Sometimes crossing is done intentionally as with the Yukon Standard hybrid corn BZ breeds. Planting and pollination need to be controlled closely. ”Hybrid vigor” is the tendency for hybrid crops to grow more vigorously than their parents.   By crossing varieties, you can create new ones and the seed saver only needs to choose seeds from the best of the offspring. From the third generation on the plants self-select so the new variety becomes “stabilized”. Carefully avoiding crossing keep the traits you want. This is the principle of Heirloom seed preservation. Another key to understanding the process is that seeds adapt progressively from generation to generation when grown in one location. This is the principle of seed localization.

There is another philosophy and approach. At that same seed swap Dana Combest represented the Huckleberry Range Community Collective (HRCC) (www.facebook.com/groups/thehrcc). It is a private group. So, you need to enter some information about your name and generally where you live. This serves the purpose of making it truly local. They began in 2019 as mostly a tool-sharing group. In 2023 they branched out into seed and plant sharing.

Dana introduced me to a new term, “Landrace Gardening.” It doesn’t have anything to do with the land speed record.  Landrace is actually an old term meaning “a local cultivar or animal breed that has been improved by traditional agricultural methods” (Oxford Dictionary). HRCC offers for sale a small book with excerpts from a larger work by Joseph Lofthouse on Landrace Gardening, How to grow food when you can’t buy seeds, fertilizers, or pesticides. (lofthouse.com) His philosophy is that the best cultivars for our gardens are grown as genetically diverse, promiscuously-pollinating crops.  He uses examples from his own experiences in a high-altitude farm where he could not grow many warm weather crops until he started saving his own seeds.

The method could be called “survival of the tastiest.”  But it starts with just plane survival.  Lofthouse does not fertilize, irrigate or use pesticides.  In fact, he welcomes weeds and pests. It is a little like a mosh pit. You plant seeds from a wide variety of sources, trust that they will cross-pollinate and that the genetic diversity will overcome all obstacles in those plants that survive with the gardener having to amend the environment very little to ensure survival.  Lofthouse does select for the tastiest survivors because that is what his customers value in his seeds more than toughness, abundance, shipability, storage etc. Rather than lock on to a likely survivor to keep pure, he encourages the continued introduction of genetic variety so that plants can respond immediately to changing climatic and soil conditions.

Although many of the seeds provided by HRCC may be landrace varieties, they received donations of seeds in bulk which are distributed through their seed library for free. They buy fruit plants at wholesale and pass the savings on to members. They sponsor seed and plant swap events like the Slow Food Event at Fruitland Valley Winery.  Others were held in partnership with the Hunger Coalition (https://newhungercoalition.org/) and the Permaculture Guild (inlandnorthwestpermaculture.com). Check those sites and the HRCC Facebook page for more information. There will be a Plant, Seed & Root Swap on April 6, 2024 at the library in Kettle Falls, WA., and another May 4th at Stranger Creek Grange.

In her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer has a story, Mishkos Kenomacwen: The Teaching of Grass. In it a student proposes a study to determine whether picking sweetgrass using traditional methods increases or depletes the population.  Learned professors dismissed the premise saying that “Everyone knows that harvesting a plant will damage the population.”  The student persisted and proved that by picking the sweetgrass respectfully, only taking half and leaving some soil disturbed she had created room and light for the remaining plants to expand and grow more vigorously than the test plots which were left alone.

A traditional harvest of root crops in the spring has a similar effect. If you thank the best plant in a group, leave it there, promise to take only what you need and leave the rest, you are selecting the best plants to survive and leaving enough for diversity. The effects will be similar to the sweetgrass story and the landrace practice.  Learn the cycles !

I became more intensely interested in Indian Hemp after hearing Bill Layman talk about how strong it is during a presentation on the fishery at Kettle Falls.  The J-traps that hung in the falls to catch salmon could hold 250 fish, many weighing 50 pounds each.  That’s 6 tons of fish. Add several strong men to throw the fish to shore for another half ton, all suspended by Indian Hemp ropes.  What is this stuff?

You can be thrown off immediately by the term Indian Hemp. Just as natives of North America are not from India even though called “Indians”, Indian Hemp is not “hemp”. “Hemp” is a German word referring to the plant known in Greek as “kannabis”.  Switching from Greek to Latin is not much help.  The Latin name for the plant is Apocynum cannabinum, which perpetuates the cannabis confusion.  If we get back to the Arocynum part, it breaks down to “Poisonous to dogs”, “Keep away from dogs” or more

Image From Emily S. Kloosterman, Wikimedia Commons

commonly “dogbane”.  This is referring to the fact that indian hemp is related to milkweed.  They both have a sticky sap that protects them from most insects and is slightly poisonous to humans though it can be used as medicine.  Although the sap is toxic to browsing animals, the nectar is sweet and important for the monarch butterfly and some other insects. The plant  is also known as amy root, hemp dogbane, prairie dogbane, Indian hemp, rheumatism root, or wild cotton.  I will stick to dogbane.

There are two main types, apocynum cannabinum and apocynum androsaemifolium.  The cannabinum is typically 3 feet tall and is the preferred variety for making cordage.  Androsaemifolium is also know as “spreading dogbane” and is usually 2 feet tall.  Both prefer sandy but also wet soil with some shade.  Both grow all over North America in abundance.  (It’s nice to have something native and useful that is not endangered.)  Dogbane is a perennial.  It grows from the same roots year after year.  In fact, harvesting it every year makes it grow better, very sustainable and low tech. It would have been readily available on seasonally-flooded wetlands along the Columbia River.

The stalks of this plant have been used as a source of fiber to make bows, fire-bows, nets, tie down straps, hunting nets, fishing lines, bags, and clothing. (Travels into North America: Kalm, Pehr (1772) The Sinixt were known for making rope suspension bridges over creeks along their trails.  The bridges stretching out to favorite fishing rocks at the Kettle Falls fishery were also made of Indian hemp.  It was also used to make cloth and bags.  That seems too tedious to us in the technological 21^st Century.  I remember watching a circle of Indian women in Mexico shucking corn together and talking away.  Tedious to us can be fun to others.

So how do you get to the fiber part? It’s easy and doesn’t require tools.  The time to harvest is in the Fall, though the dried stalks make it through the winter and seem to work fine right now.  In the Fall it turns yellow, making it easy to spot. Over the winter it turns reddish and then fades to brown or gray.  Break off the dried stalk with your hands and remove the small branches at the top.  Then squeeze the stalk.  It breaks into several strands with the dried pith in the middle and the fibrous skin starting to peel away on the outside.  To separate the fiber, break off pieces of pith working your way along the strand.  If you try to peel off the whole skin at once, some sticks to the pith and you get less. Now you have a workable length of fiber that is very flexible and strong.  The seeds can be ground into an edible powder and the sap can be mixed with clay to make gum.

The fiber can be twisted into cordage and be built up into rope.  There are plenty of videos on the Internet that will make the method more understandable than I can in writing.  I am hoping to show kids how to use it to make small bracelets as a craft project during the 2025 bicentennial commemoration of the establishment of Hudson’s Bay Fort Colvile in 1825.  To test the process, I hung a small peg in the center of the strand and twisted the ends together on the other side of the peg.  After a few minutes I had a cord with a loop at one end.  I tied off the ends so they would not unravel but if you were making cords and eventually rope, you would keep adding pieces of fiber to the twisted ends.  Eventually I added a few beads and made the bracelet in the picture.  Before I did that, however I wanted to see just how strong this stuff is.  You could work up a scale to measure weight hanging from it and add more until the cord broke to get a real measurement of test strength.  I just tied it to a ten-pound kettle bell exercise weight.  The thin cord made from just one of four strands from the original stalk held it up easily.  No wonder they thought of it as hemp!

Wolf Lichen

Sometimes my wife, Cheryl, kids me about staring at the ground.  Admittedly I do that often.  Until a recent snowfall, we were experiencing an open winter.  There was no snow on the ground but lots of other things were visible.  One of the most prominent that caught my attention was a particular kind of lichen, very fuzzy and the color of the Seahawks’ neon jerseys.  When much younger, that plant struck me as something that it would be easy to make miniature trees from for my HO train set.  It still held together well even when dry.

Now I am associating its color with some seen on blacklight posters of the 60’s and 70’s. They would glow under ultraviolet (UV) light, I wondered what that lichen would look like under UV.  (We will get to that later.)  The main question about lichen is more like “What the heck is it?”  It’s basically a fungus with a built-in food supply from algae.  In fact, some forms host both green algae and blue-green algae.  The fungus part needs the algae, but the algae can survive in water without the fungus.

I have some experience with algae.  In college biology I followed up on a suggestion that algae grew quickly in water and could help the world food supply.  I had also heard that adding carbon to the process might speed it up.  This was wrong on many levels but nevertheless I concocted an experiment where I grew unicellular green algae in two carboys, the big glass bottles used to supply water for water coolers.  One was left alone in the sun.  The other was also in the sun but had carbon dioxide injected into it from a simple system that piped CO² off evaporating dry ice into the carboy.  I ordered the green algae and set up the dry ice bubbling into just one carboy.  A day or so later a loud “kaboom” was heard all over campus.  Word got back to me that it was my algae experiment.

Behind the dorm, next to an adobe wall, I discovered the problem.  Very cold CO² condenses water on a copper pipe.  Very cold water, freezes into ice and seals the tube.  A sealed tube doesn’t let evaporating CO² escape.  Essentially, I had created a dry ice pipe bomb.  That took a while to live down.

The algae growth went sideways too.  When I looked at it under a microscope there were lots of living creatures in there moving around.  None looked like the algae I started with.  It turns out that millions of life forms float around in the air column and come alive when they find water.  Looking for answers about what lichen eat and how do they reproduce, I found out that basically they eat air, especially moist air and they absorb many of those other things floating around in the air.  That’s why this moist Fall-Winter had them expanding everywhere and falling to the ground.  They can also extract minerals from rocks and probably tree bark.

Reproduction is a little trickier. Lichens do produce spores. But the spores only produce fungus, not lichen.  They also produce soredia, a cluster of algae cells wrapped in fungus filaments.  Even more straightforwardly, they make isidia, basically miniature lichen.  Since lichen can dry up completely and survive until they get wet again, isidia are not hard to imagine.  They can themselves be spread in the air column or be carried by insects, some of which dine on lichen.

Everything about lichens seems to be a little tricky.  There are about 18,000 named species.  But since many kinds of fungus seem to be able to form a symbiotic relationship with algae, there are potentially 250,000 combinations.  Lichens produce over 700 organic chemical compounds.  Some like Reindeer Moss, which is really a lichen, nourish reindeer and other arctic animals.  Others are poisonous.

That neon lichen that first piqued my curiosity is called Wolf Lichen. It is said to have been used to poison wolves in Europe, which raises questions like “Why would wolves eat something poisonous?” One article noted that Wolf Lichen was mixed with ground glass and presumably some kind of meat to poison the wolves. Indigenous people ate certain kinds of lichen.  Lichen can store vitamin D, that we usually get directly from sunlight, for use in the darker times of the year.  Other uses include clothing, dye, and medicine.

A very common use of lichen comes from its diet of air.  Lichen die in polluted air, a canary in the coal mine kind of “use”.  In fact, the Forest Service tracks the lichen population on over 10,000 plots to monitor air pollution.  Not only does what kills lichen make it interesting, it can live for decades, even centuries because of its ability to dry completely and rehydrate.

Getting back the original question about how lichen responds to ultraviolet light, I got out my handy-dandy 365 nanometer LED UV flashlight and started looking at the ground at night.  Bam!  There are an amazing number of things that light up in different colors at night under UV light.  Many of them are probably lichen, but not the neon green Wolf Lichen.  Not letting well-enough alone, I googled do lichen fluoresce?  Yes!

Canada has a fascinating website, https://Nature.ca with pictures of fluorescent lichen.  One, taken by Dr. Robert Lücking at Las Cruces Biological Station in Costa Rica, shows five different fluorescent colors next to each other on one branch. I wasn’t so lucky with Wolf Lichen, but love this picture.

Nature.CA features a lichen that grows there, Candy lichen (Icmadophila ericetorum). It is a “favourite” of many naturalists because it’s easy to recognize, with its pink fruiting bodies on a mint green crust, and its memorable alternate common name of fairy puke. It also glows under UV.

Aspicilia fruticulose, rim lichen, grows in Idaho among many places and holds a distinction not claimed by any other lichen.  Samples of aspicilia fruticulosa from Spain survived 18 months attached to the outside of the International Space Station.  Lichens can cope with radiation 12,000 times the lethal dose for humans and still carry on photosynthesizing.  These properties prove the concept of Lithopanspermia, which postulates that life forms could have arrived on earth via rocks travelling through space.  Move over cockroaches! There’s a new player in the game of cosmic survival.