The Free Radical

Well, with all the recent rains, the puffballs are back in proliferation. I found and ate dozens of them yesterday!

For every one that I picked there were at least three more smaller ones sprouting up nearby. They should mostly be ready today. With puffballs, you have to get to them early– within the first couple of days– if you wish to eat them. As soon as they’re a bit squishy and not completely firm to the touch, they’ve already begun to convert their innards into a green gooey mess which will eventually dry out to become the spore mass ready for later dispersal. You can still eat them during this intermediate stage… but they’re not nearly as palatable.

Sometimes, in those first few days, they manage to grow to epic proportions! This pic is from a few years back when I still sported much longer hair… and at the time, I didn’t even know that puffballs were edible.

Pretty much everyone whom I bring along on my daily walks finds it rather remarkable that there’s so many interesting things to sample along the way. It’s not necessarily the volume of food I find, but the variety of flavours is always an unexpected treat.

The wild raspberries are just beginning to bloom. Now here’s an indigenous plant who produces an abundance that no one can fully exhaust. It’s simply not possible to pick all the raspberries available in a few weeks!

One thing that tag-alongs always notice is that I eat a lot of flowers. My eye is drawn to the colours… but there’s a nutritional rationale as well that keeps me coming back. Flowers produce pollen. If you wish to learn more about the incredible nutritional qualities of pollen, research “bee pollen.” Besides nectar, pollen is the other staple food which bees gather continuously.

Perhaps at my urging, you’ve recently plucked a dandelion to eat and noticed that your fingers got stained yellow even though you barely touched the yellow flower. No, it’s not the juices being pressed from the flower; if you look closely, you’ll see that it’s a powder; it’s pollen, a real treasure.

All of this inevitably leads to a deep and abiding feeling of freedom. The food is free… and often abundant… and totally awesome!