Tomato-avocado-cucumber-lettuce wraps, with figs and grapes on the side. I make wraps like these everyday, varying the ingredients depending on what fruit and greens I have available. For super large wraps, you can use collard greens or chard.
My trusty camera phone met with an accident, and the one I’m using now isn’t really cutting it. Sorry about that.
Cherokee Purple, Super Marmande and Black Cherry are 3 of the heirloom tomatoes featured in this instalment.
A video I started before this one is coming soon, I got set back by the loss of my camera.
While foraging, I make a quick wild salad consisting of sea beets, corn marigold greens, yellow mustard leaves, mallow leaves and flowers, dandelion greens, prickly lettuce, smooth sow thistles, sourgrass, wild water-cured olives and lemon juice (from a street tree).
I wrote a brief article about a bad experience I had with Youtube’s
automated copyright violation system, and a company called
“Rumblefish”:
Basically, their system identified this video as containing copyright
infringing music owned by Rumblefish. They put ads on it, with the
proceeds of the ads going partly to Rumblefish, partly to Google.
Since there’s no music in my video, I disputed the claimed copyright
violation, and Rumblefish was sent a link to my video to check it and
see if Youtube’s automated system had made a mistake.
They checked the video, and told Youtube that there was no mistake,
and that they do own the music in the video. So the dispute was
closed, and there was seemingly nothing else I could do.
But I wrote an article about it on Slashdot, and somehow it went viral
today, spreading all over the web, and Rumblefish backtracked,
released my video and sent me an apology.
This is the notice Youtube sent me after Rumblefish reviewed my dispute:
“All content owners have reviewed your video and confirmed their
claims to some or all of its content:
I did email Rumblefish to complain, and posted a thead on Google’s
help forum, but they didn’t do anything until my article on Slashdot
went viral and woke them from their slumber.
So they’ve now released my video and removed their ads, but for a while they were making money from my video. I think if this were made more public, Google would be forced to change their system and this would stop happening. Rumblefish and other similar intellectual property companies have been gaming the system like this for a while now, and this is just the first time the public outcry has been big enough to force them to correct their behaviour.
It’s Pomegranate season again in my old Mediterranean jungle garden. It now thrives without any care. There are papayas, apricots, dates, pomegranates and grapes growing alongside wild and planted trees, herbs and shrubs that self-mulch the ground and feed the fruit-bearers for me. There are even self-seeded young pomegranate trees under the canopy that have never been watered or fed even once. Mulch can really do wonders.
The many date palms volunteered from seeds I spat out randomly years ago. They should be making their first crop next year.
It’s somewhat of a guerrilla garden since I don’t own the land it’s on. It was a vacant lot no one was using behind my parent’s house, that I decided to experiment with.
Initially the lot was covered with towering tumbleweeds on compacted and extremely saline soil, with big chunks of concrete and rebar sticking out of it. It’s unrecognizable today.
There’s an aviary hanging into the garden, and the bird manure falls into the garden, supplying even more nutrients.
I experiment with using cardboard boxes as mulch in the orchard and touch on some frugal uses for September’s gifts from the forest: leaf mould compost to start seeds, and moss for rooting cuttings.
I also sample a hearty selection of wild Autumn fruits as I wander the woods. I even come across some tree-cured olives still hanging on their trees many months after ripening.
I stumble onto a strawberry tree that has ripe fruit already; an astounding mutation considering that all the other strawberry trees I’ve seen won’t ripen their fruits until December-January. Just another example of the diversity apparent in wild seedling trees.
Finally, I happen onto another naturally-occurring edible tree guild, and before I head back to the cabin, I take a look at four ancient olive trees that were planted in the same hole. Truly the epitome of efficiency.
Wild plants featured in this instalment:
Golden Oak Tree “Quercus alnifolia” – (Acorns edible after leeching)
Mastic Tree “Pistacia lentiscus” (Edible berries & gum)
Strawberry Tree “Arbutus adrachne” (Edible berries)
Olive Tree “Olea europaea” (Edible after processing)
Sicilian Sumac / Sumach “Rhus Coriaria” (Edible / Drinkable)
Carob Tree “Ceratonia siliqua” (Edible pods)
Tropic VFN (Heat tolerant variety)
Black Cherry (smoky tasting, my favourite cherry)
San Marzano (perfect plum tomato, good for sun drying)
German Orange Strawberry
Currant Sweet Pea
Principe Borghese (the nipple tomato – great for sun drying)
Roma
Ailsa Craig (shared with a mysterious tomato-eating creature)
Gardener’s Delight (a prolific red cherry tomato, makes up the majority of my harvest)
Cucumbers:
White Wonder / Bianco Lungo
Lungo Verde degli Ortolani
Mediterranean
I make good use of some pine trees, and make some quick raw vegan cucumber spiral spaghetti using only things I picked from the garden (tomatoes, sweet peppers, mint, basil and cucumbers), as well a few of the olives I prepared in a previous video.
The tool I use to make the noodles is a Gefu Spirelli Spiral Slicer, but there are much better spiral slicers out there that won’t make your wrists sore. You can also use carrots to make this meal in the winter, or mix carrot and cucumber. Typically, zuccinis / courgettes are used, but they don’t agree with me, and cucumbers taste a whole lot better.
You’ll want to use cucumbers with small seeds, such as the Mediterranean cucumbers I use.
I take a stroll around the land in the summer heat and sample the delicious morsels I find. An unfortunate young hare had the same idea, but ran into my cat.
The wild edibles I find in this instalment are: lamb’s quarters, amaranth, prickly pear pads, purslane, wild kale, mallow, prickly lettuce and chamomile.
Sunflowers are featured as a green manure plant as well as a companion plant for shading cucumbers in the hot summer. Basil is used as a companion plant with tomatoes.
I also take a look at one of my second-year bell pepper plants, and munch on a couple of tomato varieties: Currant Sweet Pea, and an unknown cross between Black Cherry and something else.
You might notice the sparse foliage on some of my tomato plants. This land was a tomato plantation sometime before I bought it, and the soil still has disease in it, so I’m forced to strip any diseased leaves off each affected tomato plant to stop it from spreading and killing the plant.
Next year I’m going to have to plant my tomatoes on virgin land higher up on the mountain and work on curing the affected soil. My girlfriend told me she heard that old-timers planted onions and garlic to leech disease out of their soil, so I’m currently trying to find out more on that, if anyone has any information.
This is only my second year working this land, and I couldn’t be happier with it so far. There are more than 80 fruit trees (everything from apples to mulberries to mangoes), and they’re all thriving. Now that the annual green manures have reached the end of their lifecycle, it’s time to start planting perennial native green manures, but more on that later.
My goal is to guide this land into a sustainable Mediterranean food forest using adapted permaculture ideals.
Salsola Soda is one of the most under-appreciated wild plants in the world, that sadly sits uneaten while people are hungry. Unfortunately, much of its native coastal habitat in Cyprus is currently being torn down by developers.
Daniel Unedo 