Seeing the potential in nettles and thorns
08/29/2010

I met on Friday with Michael Pilarski, a Permaculture educator, author, wildcrafter, organizer of the annual Congress on Fairy and Human Relations, founder of Friends of the Trees Society, which has sold or given away over 200,000 trees and shrubs, and local legend—a modern-day cross between Frodo and Johnny Appleseed. 

Pilarski, or “Skeeter” as he is called, came out to our property to advise me on suitable farming enterprises that could be undertaken with little to no capital investment while generating a relatively quick return.  (With farming you typically have to wait at least four months for a paycheck—it takes that long for things to grow.  Chickens raised for slaughter are an exception—only eight weeks from hatch to harvest.)  August, of course, represents the end of the growing season here in the northern hemisphere, so we’re actually talking about a year before our first harvest. 

Skeeter stayed for a couple of hours, walking the property, asking questions, picking up handfuls of dirt and letting it fall through his fingers.  He is attuned to a level of detail to which I am blind.  Even his questions and offhand remarks were a revelation.  Potato scab?  Pick your varieties carefully.  Corn producing lots of ears and stalk but few kernels?  Again, not a good variety for this location.  Do I even know what varieties I have?  No, I haven’t taken good notes.  Had I even considered a subtlety like “variety”?  No, I’d made blanket generalizations:  I guess I’m not good with corn.  I guess potatoes don’t do well here.  Thinking I’d over-fertilized in the past, I gave my potato field no nutrients this year, starving the soil for this year’s crop.  “Did you know potatoes need to be rotated every year?”  No, I did not.  “They take a lot out of the soil because they’re so nutrient rich.”  I did not know.

Because he is a wildcrafter—harvesting wild plants for herbal and medicinal use—Skeeter is sensitive to the value of plants the rest of us call weeds—or at best compost.  “Don’t just harvest the raspberries!  You can sell the dried leaves to tea companies. They’re good as a tonic for uterine and other smooth muscles.”  Encountering a sprawling puncture vine—a truly nasty weed with thorns that can pierce your shoe or your tire—he asked for a shovel and carefully harvested it for future sale.  “It’s good for the prostate,” he explained.  Skeeter even grows and harvests nettles—the seeds and roots are medicinal, he said, while the leaves are both a food and a medicine.    

He had an appreciation for all of the plants over-running my garden as weeds.  Lambsquarter is a food as well as medicinal, he said.  Pigweed is edible.  Buttonweed, a plant I’d resented because it resists hand-pulling, is great for bringing nutrients up from deep in the soil, he explained.  Turn it into the soil and you’ve actually completed a miniature mining operation for biological nutrients.  Who knew?

So, what are the plants most suited to our little piece of paradise?  Skeeter is completing a cost-benefit analysis I’ll see on Monday, but early indications are: potatoes, berries—including elderberries, which grow wild already and are marketable both as flowers and berries, eggs, and perhaps red clover and alfalfa—not for animal feed, for botanicals.  Alfalfa leaves bring $2800/ton on the botanical market versus $200/ton as an animal food, he said.  Clearly, opportunity is all a matter of how you look at things. 

Thank you, Skeeter, for an education in seeing things differently. 

May the forest be with you.