Last weekend my girlfriend and I went picking wild strawberries from the forest to make jam. It was a long process - wild strawberries are probably 10% of the size of domesticated varieties, so we had to pick ten times as many. Seeing the frugality of nature made me realize that the majority of the plants in my garden would probably not last a month in nature. They put all of their resources into creating fruit which only serves to endear them to people like me, which in turn does ensure we help them reproduce. It has become obvious to me that most domesticated varieties need too much water, sun and fertilizer to keep healthy without human help.

Which brings me to the subject of evolution. A pro-intelligent design video (starring Kirk Cameron, no less) has been passing around YouTube showing how the banana is so perfectly suited to humans that only an intelligent designer could have made something so perfectly-matched (thusly, they imply god created humans and bananas at the same time). I’m setting up a straw-man here, as the argument is so vapid and ignorant that shooting it down is almost not worth the fraction of a calorie I’ll consume in typing this up. It is, of course, that if god did create the banana, he created something altogether different than what we consider a banana to be. There was an intelligent designer at work - us humans. It was through centuries of careful breeding that the human-friendly varieties of both bananas and strawberries were created. .

I have long been intrigued by the idea of growing my own food, but wasn’t sure how to go about it in the city. I had grown herbs in a window box, but nothing substantial.

This summer I decided to plant a small balcony-based container garden. I’m going to post again later in the summer when I start being able to cultivate the fruits of my labours, but I do have to say that the results so far have been incredibly positive. A dozen or so zucchinis are growing, a good thirty tomatoes, a half dozen hot peppers (enough for making a bottle or two of hot sauce), and more than enough herbs to easily meet my needs. All of this in three relatively small plastic bins and a few stray pots.

There are still a couple more months to go in the growing season, and I haven’t eaten much aside from some herbs and some zucchini flowers, but the results are pretty encouraging. Tending to the plants and watching them grow has been a great experience by itself.

For most of the year, the oyster mushroom fungus lives inside dead deciduous trees, happily digesting the cellulose of the trunk. Then, once a year, usually in May, it reproduces by growing gilled fan-shaped growths through the bark of the tree, which send out millions of tiny spores which in turn create new fungal colonies on other dead deciduous trees.

These gilled fan-shaped growths are the oyster mushrooms themselves, and they happen to be delicious. I have eaten them a few times before, but this past weekend I gathered them for the first time from the wild.

Oyster mushrooms often grow rather high off the ground, making them somewhat difficult to gather. the search involved wandering through the forrest, looking high above our heads for small white growths on rotting trees, and then reaching up with discarded branches to knock them off. After about 3 hours, we had two standard plastic grocery bags full.

A good portion of our catch, laid out before being put into the oven for drying.

Oyster mushrooms can apparently be artificially cultivated much like the plain old button mushrooms available in grocery stores. The point for me, however, was the experience of gathering my own food from nature. It was about finding out when that short ten-or-so day window to gather the mushrooms was, then learning what they look like and whether there were any poisonous look-alikes whose seasons overlapped with the Oyster Mushrooms (thankfully, there were none). It was about learning that this year was an abysmal year for these types of mushrooms, relative to past years, and that the season almost never comes as late as early June, as it did this year. It was about preparing and storing food that I myself gathered.