Current News You Can Use

          A great eating green that holds up well through the winter is worth paying attention to.  One that also can be used to treat eye infections is even better. Chickweed under the locust trees Chickweed is already blooming and shedding seed down by the Rogue River along the bike/walking trail at the end of Greenwood Avenue.  It started growing this year months earlier than usual, sprouting with cold September rains, rather than waiting for November like recent years, or January as usual.  The early December snow and deep freeze, down to 8 degrees, didn’t damage the plants, perhaps because they were covered with snow, and they took off blooming and making seed before the end of the month.  It is probably more mature by the river than most places, temperatures being more moderate there.  Chickweed closeup I know it is seeding because I am making  chickweed tea  to treat  conjunctivitis,  A...

When I was a little girl, my daddy told me that all the canned “pumpkin” sold in stores was not pumpkin, but butternut squash.   I spent many years growing   and sometimes buying pie pumpkins and making pies out of them, and very proud of their authenticity I was, though they were different from regular pumpkin pie: lighter colored and flavored, and coarse-textured.   Then I grew butternut squash, and I found that Dad was absolutely right; the baked squash was exactly like what was sold in the cans as “pumpkin” and it made a rich, deep colored, smooth-textured pie.   So now, of course, I use butternut squash for pies. Our pilgrim forefathers may have baked pumpkin pies at the first Thanksgiving; certainly the traditions built up by advertising tell us so.   But there was an explosion of plant breeding in the 1800’s, and when butternut and other such rich baking squashes appeared, their marketers weren’t going to let little things like a name or a tradition...