Freeze Dried Garden Tomatoes

Freeze Dried Garden Tomatoes
Freeze Dried Garden Tomatoes
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Wednesday, September 8, 2010

EDIBLE BERRIES FROM THE KOUSA DOGWOOD

The idea that a person must buy every morsel of food that they consume from a grocery store.....has become deeply entrenched in our society. Our intricately woven structure of commerce can be fairly fragile. Natural disasters, trucking strikes,accidental food contamination, inflation, possible restricitve government laws, agricultural terrorism....etc can all play a role in bringing this corporate food system to a standstill and or make food unaffordable. This blog is about taking back at least some of the responsibility for the food we eat. The process of learning and experimentation can be alot of fun and very rewarding. It is crucial that we learn what we can and pass it on to our children.

Even if you live in the city with a balcony or in suburbia, with a small plot of land.... there are choices you can make which will help the environment (more diversification) and will help save money while at the same time you will able to grow much healthier fresher food than you could ever buy in the grocery store. Keeping up with the Jones...as far as who has the biggest most weed free expanse of lawn, can be boring and toxic (chemicals used to keep it perfect looking). Why not be different and become a positive example for your neighbors...by utilizing all of your land or part of it with vegetable gardens and edible landscaping? Check out the video in the sidebar...down near the bottom...called Homegrown Revolution. I found it to be very inspiring.

The picture above is a photo of our Japanese or Kousa Dogwood that we had for years shading our deck. I must admit that it was a bit messy. I was always sweeping the flowers and mushy berries off of the deck. But...it was so beautiful.....in the spring with the long lasting flowers and in the fall with the brilliant berries. The tree has since died and I miss it. The part that really upsets me though is that for all of the time this tree graced our deck, I never even once suspected that its berries were edible. I found out about the berries the year we had to cut the tree down...and it was too late. There is one small consolation though....This year we found a small seedling growing out from under the deck which was the offspring of our original tree. We transplanted it close to where the parent tree had been....and it is doing very well. Maybe in a couple more years we will be able to try those beautiful berries that the birds loved so.

Maybe you have a Japanese Dogwood near you or you may want to plant one. See the video below to learn more about these berries

4 comments:

  1. This is SO cool! When I was a landscaper in W. MAss. I planted countless of these trees with no idea that the fruit was edible. Now I will forward this to many of my former clients to let them know that those gorgeous trees have more uses than 'just' 4-season beauty!

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  2. Well that's fun....I'm glad you ran across this. Evidently though...from what I've read...some trees produce better tasting berries than others.

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  3. And they are delicious!

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  4. W.V. country with msny of these, for a few years I've eaten a few, but all of them were really tasteless. See what happens this year, as this is the first year that birds have been eating. Most all the older trees are thirty to fourty years old, & some coming thru the decades.

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