Love and Hate gum

I have come to strongly dislike the seed balls from the Sweetgum tree (Liquidambar styraciflua). They get into the grass such that the mower won't lift them out. Then I step on them and they hurt!

I usually collect them after a rain because the normally reddish color they have darkens and they really stand out against the grass. This color darkens as the balls get older. Most of the time, I toss them to the side to decompose with the rest of the leaf litter.

This time, I decided to put aside my anger and collect them as a natural bead. For your collection, get the ones that fell this year. You can identify them because they will be reddish-brown, rather than dark brown, black or gray. It is a very pretty color. The newer ones also have lots of points because no one has had time to step on them yet (I promise I'm not bitter). I was able to collect a cloth grocery bag full of them in about a half hour.

I have lots of ideas for these things. I think they would look really cool on a strand with smaller wood and bone beads as a set of earrings. Painted white, they would look fun as the trim around the edge of a natural wooden Holly King.

I know it's too late for Yule, but after trimming off the stems, I painted a few of them gold and strung them on a hemp cord to make a garland. They look great when paired with other wooden beads. I think a garland of silver sweetgum balls will look great on a tree with all white lights. I will also play around with some unpainted of course.

When stringing these up, you will need an upholstery needle, preferably one with a bladed end. The center of these things were pretty woody, so I found it easier to first pierce one side and then push the ball down onto the needle by bracing the eye of the needle down against a cutting board. Use only the very tips of your fingers pushing in between the points so you don't squish flat all of the interesting points. Finally, use needle nose pliers to pull the needle through. The stem area  has the most wood so do your best to avoid it by piercing from side to side, perpendicular to the stem.

Awww, NUTS!

This month's crafty adventure centers on nuts, but I'll bet you've not had these nut before. Today we are going to figure out if we can roast and eat a wild food: beechnuts!

The American Beech (Fagus grandifolia) produces small nuts inside of a scaly covering. These scaly nut clusters drop off in Autumn and it just so happens that one of the trails I walk was full of them! Most of the time, the nuts drop out of the scales on impact with the ground, but sometimes the two remain intact. What you see here is the scale cluster surrounding the nut shell. Under the scales and then under the shell is the edible golden nut.

It took me about and hour to collect as many as you see here. I didn't weigh them before roasting because I didn't really care how much the shells weighed. Once I got them home, I used a little quality control to remove any nuts that had cracks or tiny holes in their shells. This was a sure sign of insects boring inside to the nut meat.

Since I couldn't find a recipe on roasting beechnuts, I used a peanut roasting recipe as my basis. Given that the beechnuts are much smaller than peanuts, I used the lowest temperature of all the recipes and shortened my roasting time by a little. My goal was to roast them long enough that the papery membrane between the nut shell and the nut meat would turn brittle and rub away like it does on a peanut. I also hoped that the shell itself would get a little more brittle because cracking a raw beechnut was like trying to crush granite pebbles. I ended up roasting the nuts at 325 degrees F for 20 minutes. A couple of them popped as they baked, but mostly all was quiet. The smell of them roasting was something similar to roasted hazelnuts or hickory.

When they had cooled, I tried cracking a few open. Most had nothing inside them at all! Only the very biggest nuts had any real nut inside the shell and those were very small -- about the size of a shelled sunflower seed. The 20 minutes of roasting turned them medium brown and brittle, rather than golden brown. The outer shell was so hard that I ended up using a pair of standard pliers to squeeze them open. No matter how careful I was, I could not prevent myself from pulverizing the tiny roasted nut inside.  Its possible that with a lighter roast and more care, I could produce enough nuts to make a mouthful, but overall, the yield was not worth the rather involved effort.

So, is this crafty adventure a total wash? Nope!

The nuts went back into the oven at 400 degrees F for an additional 15 minutes to really dry them out. After 5 minutes, they all started to pop! So I took them out, cooled them slightly, and started them drying again, but this time at 250 degrees F for 30 minutes. My goal wasn't to eat them but to make them decorative. They had just changed function. My first thought was that they would be great as a natural bead, because I have a prayer cord project on my slate, but they are too brittle to pierce with a needle; they break all apart. It's possible that they will work as beads if I drill tiny holes in them with my Dremel. I will test that and get back to you. But for now, pushing a needle through them makes them fall apart.

Another use could be inside a shaker; I have a gourd that is soon to be a shamanic rattle and it could use some noisy material inside. I will let you know how I use them, but rest assured that they will have a great finish.

Home Tree Map

I very much enjoy spending time outdoors. Doing so puts my mind at peace as if I am supernaturally zapped by some Zen energy. Sometimes I go outside - even if it's blistering hot - to feel revitalized when something has kept me indoors too long. Being in my yard makes me feel spiritually connected to it. I know that a similar effect happens on a larger scale when I spend more time within my town (enjoying its event offerings and people). As I spend time in my yard, my brain comes up with fun activities for me to deepen my connection to my environment. Since I love botany, herbs and working with all kinds of plants, I knew I would have fun with this month's exercise: creating a tree map of my yard.

Of course, I started with a key or guide to the trees in my area. After moving here, I never got around to buying a local plant guide. But I'm lucky to live near all the overachievers who attend Duke University, so I was able to find some great keys through their online projects. Some of the trees were very difficult due to varietals and hybrids.

Once I knew what was growing, I started to draw it out. As I was drawing, I tried to imagine that I would have to hand this guide to someone who didn't live here who had to identify all of the trees. Even still, I'm sure the map has its confusing areas. Though I used graph paper, my drawings are not to scale. My property is wedge-shaped with a stream running down the side, so I made the front yard in landscape orientation and the back in portrait. I tried to use different colors and tree textures to show the trees since some overshadow others.

With the map finished, my next step has been assembly of a plant field guide to my yard. It only has those few plants that grow on my property, but it helps me to connect to my environment one level at a time. As I expand outward, I will begin to add entries for plants in my region of town, then to the physiographic province of my state.

When one composes a work of lore such as a local guide to plants, it is vitally important to have knowledge of the presence and an understanding of the impact of invasive species. Certainly, these species are part of nature. Certainly, they have some right to grow as they do and they can be very useful. But just as human folly allowed these species to take root in areas that permit them to function as super-beings over their comrade plants, it is up to personal human opinion whether or not one wishes to allow the continued growth of these plants.

In these situations, I ask myself these questions:
Is it abundant elsewhere?
Does it have any useful properties that would make me want it around (medicinal, incense, soil stabilization)?
Are there native plants that prefer this particular habitat (slope face, moisture level, drainage, sun/shade levels)?

My purely pagan position is this: if the plant is listed as an invasive by your local extension service, botanical society, or green smarty-pants, you can be sure that it is far from being endangered. Likely, it exists throughout your region in population densities that are detrimental to otherwise native plants. When I find a plant I don't know, I look it up and get to know it. If it has no medicinal or aromatic properties that would bribe me to nurture it or leave it alone, then I pull it up, chop it down, or spray it with killer. Losing it from my property will not endanger the plant community because my city is infested with it! What I've found is that an enormous number of other herbs begin to sprout from the seed bank in the soil. Sometimes more of the invasive plants return, attesting to their invasive nature, but more often I find new colors that have not seen sunlight for quite a long time.

Pokeberry Ink

For some reason I don't understand, I recently got onto an ink-making kick. I've been doing some reading on the different types of homemade inks and exactly how they work. I've run into a few really presumptuous craftsmen trying to make lofty liquids called ink. My opinion is that one can make all kinds of colored fluids using all different things, but an artist should know what they are making and call it what it is without making wild claims. A craft is not a badge you pin on your shirt, it enriches you for its intrinsic value of having made it. You don't need to claim it's the Emperor's new clothes. Okay, that's enough of that soapbox.

The two most common homemade inks out there are oak gall ink and poke berry ink. Different authors on the internet will tell you that the Declaration of Independence was written with each one of these. No one seems to agree which it is. I don't want to declare myself independent, I just think it would be fun to have homemade ink made from local plants - a kind of "ink of the land." My mother told me she used to use poke berries and a twig to write messages to her sister when they were back on the farm. Poke berries are abundant around me right now and oak galls are not, so I went with that color source. The problem is that there is a great deal written on oak gall ink and less written on poke berry ink. I believed that the information for the former would be helpful for the latter. Though it was useful information and I know much more about ink, what I found was that I made my craft more complex than it had to be. Art and science teach us that sometimes.

Wearing gloves, because all parts of the poke berry plant are poisonous and stain everything they touch, I collected about 7-8 ounces of poke berries. I won't go into the identification of the plant, or the other uses of the plant (poke salad), because that is a different entry. I crushed the berries inside a plastic bag to be sure they were all mashed up. I could have just stopped there, but I got caught up in the chemistry of ink, so I will take you down the twisted and unnecessary trail.

I had read that there is a chemical reaction in ink that darkens it in which iron reacts with the acids in the mixture.While I was crushing the berries, I thought to myself, "I bet the poke berry skins have lots of pigment in them -- tannins, like in the skins of grapes -- that I can extract to help make my ink dark!" That meant I didn't want to filter away the skins before the rest of the process. So I put the poke berry mash into a stainless steel pot with one cup of distilled water and started it simmering. I used distilled water to eliminate the possibility of chlorine added to municipal supply water. It also allowed me to prevent any other ions that might interfere with the chemical process that I would start in the next moment. The stainless steel pot should have been relatively inert, but I could have been wrong about that. I added one tablespoon of whole cloves to provide a natural preservative and I also hoped they would help deepen then final color of the ink. The cloves would be one of two herbal antifungal ingredients I would add to prevent any mold from growing in my inkwell.

I then added one teaspoon of iron shavings. These were intended to react with the acids in the ink and darken the color (more on that in a moment). I used the shavings sold as "lodestone food" from the local pagan/gem store. I've heard others use steel wool, which isn't truly steel, a rusty nail, or even pills of an iron supplement from the vitamin store. Now here's where the chemistry of ink comes in. The purpose of the iron was to react with the acid to create a ferrous chemical that is darker than just the acid itself. Here was also where my error, and the error of other ink makers, reared its ugly head.

Oak gall ink is made by reacting iron (II) sulfate with gallic acid. This causes a darkening of the final ink to increase the contrast on the page. This reaction cannot be done with tannic acid, as I originally thought. Even more in error was my thought that tannins and tannic acid are the same thing. Tannins, which are found in grape skins, acorns, and all through the plant kingdom as a natural astringent for plants, are related to but chemically different from tannic acid and gallic acid. It is impossible to make oak gall ink or anything chemically similar using anything other than gallic acid, which is usually found in the galls of oak trees. Now, back to the poke berries.

I simmered the mixture until it was reduced to one third of its original volume. I took the mixture off the heat and allowed it to cool until warm.

Still wearing gloves, I poured the mixture into a square of double-weight muslin draped in a glass bowl.

I gathered the edges together and began to squeeze and twist the bundle until my ink was pushed out.

When I could get no more ink from between my cramped hands, I threw the bundle away and poured my new ink into an old mustard jar that had been given a grander purpose.

As my second and final antifungal, I added a teaspoon of extract of rosemary, which I had made in the past as a medicinal. I used the finished ink to write the label on the outside of the inkwell.

Some inky thoughts:

I didn't add any gum arabic or any other thickening agent, as is used in some other ink recipes I've found. After testing my final product, I'm considering using a little to see if it improves my ink's ability to resist bleeding on low quality papers. I also think I will add my rosemary extract when the product is still hot so as to drive off any alcohol from the final product.

When I learned that there was no gallic acid in the berries, I learned that the iron shavings were useless in this recipe. The fact that there is no gallic acid also means that this ink may not destroy paper and quills as aggressively as will oak gall ink. The simmering of berry skins may have been pointless too, because I don't really know how much color they imparted to my product. I do know that the final ink had a reddish color while the precooked berries left behind a stain that was more purple, and in my opinion, prettier. For the next experiment, I'm more interested in using just crushed berries with an antifungal but no heat. So the next time I make this stuff, my recipe may be just crushed berries, rosemary extract, and whole cloves. I will keep you posted on my homemade ink progress.