My take on permaculture is that before you bring in the heavy equipment and start carving out gardens, orchards and waterworks everywhere, it’s a good idea to get acquainted with what’s already on your land. Here are some photos from a couple of weeks ago of some favorite northern Vermont natives.

Fiddleheads…

The ones on the left are ostrich ferns, and delicious raw or cooked. Notice the smooth dark brown papery stuff around the emerging fronds, and the dark green color. On the right is the toxic interrupted fern, which has fuzzy stuff both white and brown on the emerging fronds.

My favorite patch of wild leeks…

Allium tricoccum. Actually I prefer them at a slightly earlier stage. They have a woody bulb at the base of the plant, which I pulled up for the photo. When foraging, I normally just pinch or cut them off a bit below ground level and leave the woody bulb in the ground, and use them like other green onions. The season for eating coincides with black fly season.

One of the precious few bits of plant lore handed down to me by my grandfather was that the Cowas (the native Americans in this area, my ancestors) would eat lots of these leeks, and rub their sweat all over their bodies and clothes to keep the black flies away. My grandfather also said I wasn’t allowed to do this.

Anyway, the city of Winooski and the Winooski River are named for allium tricoccum.

And the morel of this story is…

These and several more large morels appeared under one of our apple trees. I suppose we could have been good little ants and dried or canned some for winter, but they all got sauteed at once in a little bit of olive oil, with asparagus fresh from the garden, and some chopped winooskis thrown on top at the end of cooking. No regrets.