Spring Wildflower Pilgrimage Day 2

Here are my notes from Day 2 and pictures can be found HERE:

Our morning session was about Native Americans using Nature’s Garden led by Karen LaMere from the Winnebago trip.

1. Pioneer men married Native American women for sewing, nurturing
2. Cherokees invented the first alphabet.
3. Fishing involved putting black walnut husks in a mesh bag. Put it in a small pool of water and let it soak. The toxins will stun the fish and make them float up to the top of the water.
4. 3 Sister=corn, beans, squash
5. Dandelion:use roots for tea, greens for salads, and make wine
6. Cattails – new shoots; peel off green leaves, eat whitish stalk like celery.
7. Rosehips – eat skin, spit out seeds, eat rest of it.
8. Nettles – boil 3 times and strain to get rid of hairs, cook with butter and garlic.
9. Queen Anne’s Lace
10. Ginger Root
11. Spearmint
12. Peppermint
13. Wintergreen
14. Partridge berries – eat off ground
15. Juniper berries – make tea
16. Slippery elm – tea
17. Pumpkin seeds
18. Black walnuts
19. Pemmican
20. Wild Rice
21. Hominy
22. Don’t harvest all plants so they can regenerate
23. Books: Edible Wild Plants by Petersen; Native Harvests by Barrie Kavasch– recipes; Spirit of the Harvest by Beverly Cox and martin Jacobs

After lunch we did a wildflower hike from Indian Gap to Newfound Gap. These are the flowers we saw:
1. Spring Beauty (tons all over; the ground was carpeted with this!)
2. Trout Lily
3. Bluets
4. Clinton’s Lily
5. Club Moss
6. Rugel’s Ragwort
7. Viburnum
8. Yellow Birch tree - good for fires
9. Beech
10. Spruce – has square needles
11. Canada Mayflower
12. Turks Cap Lily
13. Yellow Mandarin
14. Toothwort
15. Squirrel Corn
16. Black Cohosh
17. Jack in the Pulpit
18. Umbrella Leaf
19. Partridge berry
20. Indian Cucumber

Come back tomorrow to hear about Day 3.

Posted on the Successful Teaching Blog by loonyhiker (successfulteaching at gmail dot com).
Original photo by Pat Hensley