Maintaining—and harvesting—a patch of common milkweed can help monarch butterflies survive while providing us foraged food as well. The monarch butterfly—Danaus plexippus, if you prefer its scientific name—is in a very vulnerable place right now. These butterflies have a delicate existence in which their reproduction depends upon the milkweeds. There are 73 distinct species of…
There are really no two ways about it: if you like spinach, you’ll like lamb’s quarters. It would be difficult to walk around Cape Cod’s green spaces without finding large stands of this wild edible plant lining roadsides and trails among the dandelions and raspberry brambles. Prolific in much of the northeastern United States, lamb’s…
A pile of #2’s says summertime, unrushed afternoons, and a morning spent with dipnet in hand. There’s just something uninspired—something ostentatious—about ordering jumbos. Demanding the biggest crabs the Bay has to offer, hulking battle-scarred survivors who have bypassed a billion crab pots only to end up savaged by your Carvel Hall knife. Go to any…
Alex McNaughton puts B.C.’s forest bounty on the best restaurant tables. Even as a kid growing up in the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island, Alexander McNaughton knew how to find wild edible treasure. “I probably picked chanterelles before I was 10 years old,” says McNaughton, whose childhood pastime grew into a career as a professional…
Five years ago, Diego Marlar, co-owner and founder of Stone Lizard Hops Farm in Belen, was enjoying a beer at a local brewery when he asked the bartender where the brewery sourced its hops. To his surprise, the answer, as it is for most New Mexico breweries, was the Pacific Northwest. Although the craft…
