I had a first-hand experience of how nightshade is tricksy, yesterday evening after watering all the pots on the patio, including the one the adoptive Solanum nigrum lives in.
She threw a ton of berries, seemingly overnight, and most of them ripened at once, so I felt like I really ought to be efficient and grab my wee freezer container full of berries to add to that. It was one of those “I need to do this NOW” urges. All said, I think I am up to two whopping tablespoons of berries now. But that’s not the point…
Handling this plant makes me weird. I don’t know how else to put it. I was touching the berries and grasping a few stems to hold them steady while I plucked the ripe berries. It seemed like I was harvesting an awful long time. A couple minutes felt like a half hr, and when I got up to put the container back in the fridge and wash my hands, the sky had a weird purple color to it which it doesn’t usually at sunset. Anyway, I went in. Popped the container into the freezer, washed, came out. The sky wasn’t purple, but back to normal sunset-ish coloring. Golden.
Locked up the chickens for the night… which means I open the door to the run, unhook their door that slides up and open on the coop, slide it down and tell the biddies ‘good night’ while they’re playing musical chairs on the roost and clucking softly. Then I lock the run, and I open up the nesting box on the outside of the coop to make sure no one’s popped out a bonus egg before roosting. I usually look in and tell them goodnight again, and thanks for the beautiful eggs you goofy girls, etc. So I did that. I was looking into the coop from the nesting box and one of them looked me square in the eye with this baleful glare. She didn’t exactly open her beak to vocalize at me, but I knew she was muttering under her breath, probably something, “What the fuck are you looking at?”
Okay.
I told ‘em goodnight, didn’t think much about the glare or muttering but found it odd, and locked them up. And went inside to prep veggies for dinner, feed the cats, etc. And I kept remembering that I’d left all these things outside. First I’d left the eggs out there. Then the red noodle beans I’d harvested. Then the two tomatoes that were ripe. And the one lemon squash. One by one by one by… shit it was tedious. And then I remembered I had to haul in the trash and recycling carts from the street.
Feeding Lucy and Daisy was an experience. They hang out in the kitchen pretty much all evening, gazing at the stove like it’s their tv, so I’m used to that. What I’m not used to is them taking sidelong glances at each other, and then acting all casual and innocent when they realize I see them doing that.
But I just trudged along, stopping to make a really strong cup of masala chai.
The tea settled me a lot, and I was able to take apart what had just happened in the previous hour. It wasn’t creepy, so much as irritating because I was definitely being messed with. I mean, I could see handling belladonna seeds for planting and having a reaction. Or doing something dumb like scratching my arm after spraying aphids off the plant and handling the leaves for a prolonged amount of time. But just harvesting ripe berries? Off a plant that in parts of the world is cooked like spinach? Jiminy crickets…
Solanum nigrum has tricked her way out mead for human consumption, that’s for sure. I’ll reserve a small amount of finished mead from the current batch and add juice to it, and that’ll be my wine offering for Hekate. But I’m wearin’ gloves from here on out when I work with that plant. I don’t even want to cook the juice into a jelly.
Still, this is terribly interesting. Solanum nigrum is a wild food. People all around the world eat the ripe berries. Maybe I’m just not supposed to be one of them. I was almost disappointed the woman who appears in some reported solanum ‘trips’ didn’t make an appearance, but I did a double-take later on when I was switching on the patio light for the evening, and it looked like a women with long black hair was crouching over the barrel where I planted garlic and scallions.
25 Responses to “about that nightshade, eh….”
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Very interesting. I would say definitely listen to what the universe is telling you.
i am surprised. i looked it up on wiki here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanum_nigrum
[...]In India, the berries are casually grown and eaten; but not cultivated for commercial use. The berries are referred to as “fragrant tomato,” or மணத்தக்காளி – manathakkaali in Tamil,[...]
you are kidding me! manathakkaali is bitter, teensy and dark… and i love it! we use the dried berries in a tamarind/chilli sauce that we call vathalkuzambu. it is widely available in all indian stores. my grandfather used to grow it and we’d dry it under the sun to store for year round use. and of course, the leaves are used with dhal and in a variety of soupy dishes. are you sure its the same plant they are talking about here?
manathakkaali day is usually saturday or sunday afternoon! we’d get a nice oil massage and scalp treatment. cook in the sun for an hour and then dunked into the sun warmed/neem soaked waters. and then manathakkaali kozumbu with rice and ghee. finished with yogurt rice and tender mango pickle. and after that, we’d sleep until late evening because the oil bath and the sun and the food has a kick like you wouldnt believe. unfortunately, its also castor oil day..i.e. a spoon of castor oil for every child so that our insides are clean as a whistle. that was the unfun part. usually this is a monthly ritual. only fun because we were a bunch of kids and we had the coolest grandmother in the block. sometimes our neighbours would send their kids too. the hall would look like a war zone..kids of all ages piled one on top another in a darkened room with a rickety ceiling fan. good times!
I am wondering about this plant too. I harvested a small amount of berries yesterday. These were the only ripe ones on the big volunteer plant. All the rest still have green berries. I found that oddly I didn’t want to touch the plant. At first I thought it was because it was right next to a datura, and I don’t like the smell of datura leaves and don’t want that smell on me. Smell the flowers, don’t touch the leaves. I’m always careful about that. But I was being careful not to touch the datura leaves at all, only the black nightshade, which should not be at all problematic. I had noticed I was in a really bad mood for the past few days. I thought it was because we were having unsettled weather. But it also coincided with eating a berry a day. Still, I thought I was being too suspicious of the plant. I’ve never had any problems with this plant. Why should it start now?
I came in the house and put the berries in the freezer. Then I got madder at the cats than I have probably ever gotten. About once a day, Crazyface has to let Blackie know exactly how much she hates his guts by snarling at him and swatting at him. No blood is spilled; it’s just the typical cattiness. Blackie totally ignores this. Usually I just say warningly, “Guys!” But I was furious at them. I had to go in the stockroom to get away from them and from my anger. It was weird. It made me feel really uncomfortable. I felt like it came out of nowhere. Sitting there at my desk, I tried to analyze where the anger had come from and why I had been so grouchy for the past couple of days. All I could think of was the black nightshade.
I thought about going outside and pulling them all up. Then I thought well, I will keep the varieties separate. The only one I had tried was the straight species. I haven’t tried the chichiquelite or the Wonderberry. If they are the same way, they are toast.
But why would this happen? I feel kind of betrayed by it.
I found your blog a few days ago and I’ve started slowly reading through it – I just wanted to say how much I LOVE it! I found you quite by accident while googling some research on Hekate and I’m so glad I did.
Nellie x
was a good thing you got a forewarning of your reaction to nightshade before you consumed any! i found the reactions of your companions most interesting–wonder if they were reacting to your movements or to the presence of the plant upon your person.
10 drops of nightshade in a glass of water is a good cure for food poisoning.
Harry, I am feeling very betrayed as well. Well… really ticked. I mean come on… I found that plant in the front, the dood put her in a pot of the best planting mix in the house, damn near, and then handling the fruit makes me weird? That is so odd about you and the furkids. If you’re anything like me, which I strongly suspect you are, you’ve probably apologized umpteen bazillion times for getting mad at ‘em already
I have a feeling we are stewards of this plant, but not consumers. We were approaching it with the wrong expectations. The dood tells me they eat these berries all over South and Central America, too, but nothing much is made of them. Maybe you could try the domesticated plants, the ‘named’ ones, but I think I would be leery of doing that.
So… From here on out, black nightshade berries are for Hekate alone. And the guardians of the garden, a couple of whom I spotted yesterday afternoon (that’ll be another post later on if I have time).
petoskystone… I think the berries were messing with my perception more than anything else. The critters were being their normal critter selves. In one of his Pharma books, Dale Pendell describes what happens after he’s had 8 drops of belladonna seed tincture with Daniel Schulke, and it’s totally a perception thing.
faustian… I don’t know what to think of this. It is so strange. But like I am proposing to Harry… chances are we’re stewards and not consumers. Which is cool. And quite frankly we’re lucky nothing really terrible happened.
Nellie! Thanks for commenting
I am glad to be of interest.
I wonder if it might be as you say, that we are supposed to be stewards of the plant and not consumers. That was my conclusion quite a while ago about datura. I have planted three varieties of S. nigrum. One is the species (the one I picked the berries from), and the two others are grown especially for eating. Maybe I will try those and limit the species to seed production and spirit work. I actually have tons of S. nigrum seeds and they stay viable for up to 90 years, but it would be nice to have seeds that I grew myself to sell. More personal.
The other thing I wondered yesterday when I was looking at it with a “you son-of-a-bitch” expression on my face was whether it was testing us.
Peter… cure for food poisoning? ‘Splain, please…
Harry, I guess this could be testing us, but I have to wonder why?
It is the damndest thing. I don’t even have datura germinated, it is really dragging its feet.
The fact that we both had strange interactions with our cats has me scratching my head, too. The chickens I was not surprised by, at all, because they have a demented streak about them. But Lucy and Daisy conspiring? It just made me think back to Pendell at Burning Man w/ Schulke, watching the dancing girl in front of the dancing and undulating whale, only to find there’d been nothing of the sort next morning. And I guess that was the Solanum apparition he saw, in the dancing girl.
Maybe I should put my plant in the shade and keep it there. It is not getting much direct sun more than a few hours a day, but maybe that’s cranking up the Cranky Factor.
The testing kind of worries me though. I’m enough of a crazy plant geek that I am germinating seeds for Solanum dulcamara, Ashwagandha, and Atropa belladonna, in addition to the Datura innoxia and the Brugmansia sanguinea. Banefuls? I got ya banefuls right heah! Because why not. It’s like a door opened and it is time to grow stuff I didn’t previously entertain growing…
My rescued black nightshades are happy as clams in their little peat pots; I haven’t put them together into a bigger pot yet. Now I’m wondering do I need to build up this gang of ruffians on the patio. Ack.
I haven’t grown some of those, but Solanum dulcamara grows all over my yard, and I have never had a bad feeling from it. Seems more like a minding-its-own-business kind of plant that doesn’t have any time or interest really in people. I have handled the berries, which are theoretically edible but don’t smell very good. I wouldn’t eat them for that reason. I’ve squashed them up with my hands to let loose the seeds so I can harvest them and nothing happened to me at all. I’ve never felt anything from that plant. It’s like its energy is directed elsewhere, yet it does obviously have an interest in hanging around where people hang around, because that’s where it grows.
I’m growing D. innoxia and I’ve grown it in the past too. I like that plant a lot. Its leaves are not spiky like D. stramonium. To me, this symbolizes a difference in personality as well. Also. the D. innoxia leaves are thicker and just have more substance. Something about it is more solid and less flighty and IMO, less of an attacker. It is the plant that was the datura of choice for the native folks out your way, so I would think it would be pretty at home there, pretty comfortable. I have noticed that bugs don’t bother it as much, but that might indicate that the leaves are more alkaloidal than D. stramonium.
Belladonna is a bitch. It’s a beauitful plant, but to my mind, it is not one I really want to grow much anymore. For one thing, it killed my rugosa rose in my old place. It would be good to keep that one in a pot. It gets a HUGE root on it, and when I had to pull one out because someone really really wanted some belladonna root for a spell, it gave off a terrible smell and I got an awful piercing headache. It was the same smell that comes out of its flowers, as smell that in the flowers it hides behind a cool sweetness. Kind of like horseradish. I could see how a rose, even a rugosa, would die from having that thing near it under ground. It is also IMO way more tricksy than any of the other solanaceae because its fruits, which really are poisonous, no two ways about it, supposedly taste sweet. And they are very shiny and beautiful and plump, enticing in appearance, not like a black nightshade berry, which looks more utilitarian and uninteresting, like something made out of rubber. It’s like belladonna WANTS to fuck with a person. It’s mean. Mad. Maybe it has a right to be. I had a bunch of plants two years ago and took them all out for no good reason except that I just didn’t like the feeling they gave me. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be nice to you.
I haven’t grown ashwagandha or brugmansia, so I don’t know those. I never got any bad feelings from the brugmansias that grew in people’s yards in Florida, though.
You’re right that we both had negative interactions with our cats. For both of us, our cats are very close to our heart’s home. Dirty pool. Makes me think of what the Indians have said about datura, that it’s jealous and doesn’t want you to love anyone else. But in fact I have not gotten that feeling from datura, only that it can be dangerous but that in general, I have learned that it is more that it is not aware of its own fearsomeness rather than being straight-out mean and shitty.
I don’t know why the testing. Seems to me that if someone is willing to grow you and take care of you, you have had all the test proof you need.
Ya know… I’ve been a serious cranky pants off and on for the past week. I’m one of those people with the internal monologue going if I am under some kind of external stress, lots of deadpan zingers and snark just waiting to happen, and my inside voice has been confused with my outside voice a couple times this week. Not to anyone’s detriment around me, but I didn’t really need to comment that maybe that last caller on my customer service hotline took the short bus to school or got dropped on his head too many times as a baby. That kind of mean-spirited bullshit. The kind of stuff that just undermines who I am working at being and have gotten a lot closer to.
If something makes me feel weird about my furkids, that’s basically a declaration of war. Lucy’s a dipshit at times, but I joke about my little dumb blonde cat being a dipshit. I don’t get paranoid that she’s plotting. But again… this is the perception thing. In fact, my thought when I was deconstructing that hour of time, right afterwards was “Come on… who do you think you’re kidding? Who messes with cats and the people they own?”
I’m mostly weirded out to have had what sounds more like a belladonna reaction to something not containing atropine… Right down to the double-take at the woman who appeared for a moment leaning over the garlics sprouting… unless that was Hekate visiting the garlics because I put her altar on that soil… which is another matter entirely. Anyway. Nightshade’s being banished to the shade. I’ll proceed with the mead. One foot in front of the other. Carry water, chop wood, yank weeds, etc.
Insofar as the dulcamara, it seemed like a good relatively calm Solanum to be planting. The belladonna is going to be a diva in a pot, that’s for certain. I’m almost of a mind to situate it next to the potted wormwood. This is more about being open to growing things I haven’t previously, because, well, why not. I’ve actually read the fruits are edible if one removes the seeds, but that does not sound smart at all. I think it’s in the Sacred and Healing Herbal Beers book. He says there’s a seriously ‘heinous’ aftertaste, but the juice is drinkable. Eh… that’s not something I’m interested in. I’ve read about the belladonna trips over on Erowid, and that just doesn’t sound like fun, or even educational. I’m going forward with little expectation in any direction. I don’t expect to be educated, or bullied, or sweet-talked, or anything. I’m there to grow the plant and keep it healthy and observe what happens. Whether it gets its jollies being an asshole or not is up to the plant I figure. I will do my part. Assholery and manipulation won’t be tolerated.
I’m hoping faustian will have something to say about ashwagandha and its use in Ayurveda.
I had a neighbor who chopped down a brugmansia because the blooms’ fragrance was giving her nightmares at night, even when all the windows were closed.
Have you grown Scopolia carniolica? It sure is a pretty plant.
I read years ago that people in Australia would deliberately sleep under blooming brugmansia trees in order to get fucked up. I thought this was baloney when someone from there posted about it, but then I think it was on the North Carolina toxic plant site that they confirmed that the scent causes nightmares. OTOH, I have slept in my datura patch and have had no effect whatsoever except for it being hard to sleep on dirt.
I have grown Scopolia carniolica several times, but it dies on me, so I’ve given up growing it. I love the brown flowers. I had some with yellow flowers too. Both colors were equally read to drop dead for me! Then I had to quit selling the seeds as the wholesaler kept raising the prices. I was hoping I would be able to grow my own. Ha.
I did not know that belladonna berries could be edible with the seeds out. Sounds like a crazy idea to me. I think it’s safe next to the wormwood. And vice versa.
Re hooligan plant spirits that want to fuck with our relationship to our cats, one of the reasons why I have not done any demon raising is because I would never want anything to hurt the cats. Seems like having a demon in the house, even for a few minutes, is a real stupid idea with cats around.
I’ve actually hesitated to have anything to do w/ brugmansia because of its reputation as a sleep-disturber, but because expansion and education has to do with going beyond the comfort zone from time to time… If I can grow it and it likes the yard and its photosynthesizing neighbors, maybe it won’t be sleep-disturber.
How interesting that sleeping near datura didn’t do anything! So much for big and bad and tricksy, eh.
I’ll have to try Scopolia, but I’m sure it’s too late. I’ll get seed next year. Growing one’s own seed, har har!
I am figuring the wormwood will keep the belladonna in line. Two forms of brain rot
And I agree… summoning anything scares the bejeebers out of me, but only because of the cats. That is assuming the demon was even willing to come in with them there. I am not terribly worried about myself or the dood, and maybe that is folly, but nothing messes with the cats.
phew! sorry about earlier..i was typing in the bart and i think i ended up cut/pasting some yelp review. :-/
i lost all that i typed, of course. will try to remember.
1. true re what your dood says. its the way you approach plants. every baneful you mention is a healing plant. i suppose in india(or in older cultures that even now continue to work/eat/live amongst herbs/plants), it was necessary to get children used to all kinds of plants. exposure to them possibly wouldnt hurt them later. case in point: black nightshade/manathakkaali. we eat the leaves, dried berries….cooked well, of course. i think some of the chemicals are neutralised when you cook it..yet they retain their theraputic properties. and it is supposed to be a ‘cleanser’ of sort for all kinds of nasties in childrens’ tummies.
2. also remember the whole weekend ritual involved a through cleansing with castor oil….our insides were clean as a whistle.
recipe here: http://www.cookatease.com/manathakkali-kuzhambu-wonder-berry-tangy-sauce
http://www.indianetzone.com/25/black_nightshade_indian_plant.htm > medicinal properties
3. i have three ashwagandha..i lost one to frost last year..i dont expect it to revive..even though i have kept it potted. it is most known for enhancing male ‘virility’…but it is an all around excellent medicinal root. it is known to cause drowsiness/sleepiness. so its used for insomnia and to calm excitable people. even kids cna ingest ashwagandha without adverse side effects.
4. brugmansia..what can i say. i have four of this now..:) their smell is intoxicating. my cats love hanging near the window where the brugmansia is planted. it lives with the naustartiums and i call it the snail hatchery. i seldom have a snail problem because they are all very attached to the brugmansia..:) i have had the opposite effect…it makes me drowsy in a sweet luscious way. first i thought it had no fragrance and it took a while to detect the not-overpowering, but very present fragrance. it mingles with the roses in the evenings..its wonderful!
5. i do have a story about the black nightshade ‘lady’ tho’! you know how mothers tell kids about ‘children starving in africa’ to make them clean their plates? my mother had a whole different twist to it. she narrated the following to me..just as her mother narrated it to her. in indian mythology, annapoorna is a goddess who feeds the entire world. she resides in the city of kasi and is found seated with a ladle in her hand. she has two assistants who help to feed the entire world’s population. so..my mother likes to tell me this story of how lady annapoorani checks each plate to see if all the children have finished eating. and if anyone wastes food, it breaks her heart. so she’d go to the forest and sit on a rock by the river…and she’d weep…and weep all night long.
when i was a little girl, this woman became very real to me. in my mind, she always wore a white and red silk sari..she has long dark hair and beautiful large eyes. she was my friend and if i find her crying near the river..seated on a rock..i’d show her my clean and empty plate. soon enough, she started visiting me in my dreams. now i dont remember a lot of dreams(i still dont), but i do remember on the monthy castor oil/stomach cleansing days…i’d always dream of her. and i always woke up remember my dream and i never forgot the dream..the dreams about her always stayed with me. well..that’s my silly story..:)
faustian… wow! See, this is why I hesitate to take any one interpretation to heart with most of these plants. Unless I know someone with direct experience, or I’m consulting something that is carefully researched. Thanks for the links.
Insofar as the brugmansia, there are people who have nightmares w/ various jasminums, even. I think the grandiflorum is the worst in terms of stupefying and soporific, personally. I cannot work with it in the evening, for example. It coshes me at the back of the head and I can’t really focus. “Okay, Sara go night-night now, zzzzzzzz.” I’m sure it’s the indoles peculiar to it. Brugmansia definitely shares some indoles in common. My guess is that the aromatic effects are as much about personal chemistry as they are the chemistry of the plants themselves. Just like some people feel physically ill if they smell or taste fresh coriander, etc.
The black nightshade ‘lady’ sounds fascinating! Any goddess who wields a ladle is a goddess after my own heart
How interesting that you’ve cooked professionally and been in the business of making sure people have happy bellies…
My nana had a penchant for castor. Or mineral oil if she could not replenish the stock of castor. All us grandkids got dosed on that if we were sick with flu at her house in the summer. Unfortunately, there was no ritual attached to its use!
The thought of exposure to all of these plants and herbs from a young age, sparingly here, more sparingly or less, there, makes so much sense. In the US, predominant culture is that you can’t expose kids to dirt in the yard, or sand at the beach. Nature is dirty. Plants are poisonous. Don’t eat that dandelion. We’ve definitely succeeded in poisoning all of these, of course. I know my first solid food was probably dirt from my greatgrandmother’s backyard, when I got away from her and scooted into some dandelions or clovers, after my grandmother told me Peter Rabbit ate clover, or some such. I wanted clover. But didn’t know what it looked like, so I settled for a handful of soil… My greatgrandmother was a farmer from UT, so there wasn’t any pesticide, and she’d landscaped so that the yard took care of itself. Now? We’re just too far removed from any of this. The blight on the landscape that is the grassy lawn is just one symptom of that greater ill.
I’m still digesting your comment
if brugmansia has indoles like jasmine, then it makes sense…because i am such a jasmine whore. i think i have told you this before…here or via email..we had jasmine gardens from where we sold the flowers wholesale and for the market. we dont have it anymore, of course..altho’ i wish i owned acres and acres of jasmines..:) and tuberose! i am having trouble getting my jasmines to bloom to my satisfaction here..but i’ll make it happen. i have about 11-12 jasmine plants i think…6 of them in my ‘white jasmine corner’…except the pink jasmine, the others are not doing blooming.
if you grew up around clover, i bet you dont suffer from allergies. case in point: you know how some people are allergic to mangoes…most indians are not. we love our hundreds of varieties of mangoes. and because we grow up climbing mango trees like monkeys…in fact, where my mother lives now used to be a mango grove. of course, they had to destroy it to build homes..but that’s another story. we wont go into that. i guess we have a built in resistance to all things mango..of course this is not to say that we dont have any symptoms at all..for example..the skin of the mango does leave the inside of the lower lip all tingly…i feel it when i eat a whole mango..peel and all..but i dont break into rashes or hives etc. but here is the interesting thing…i found out that poison ivy is the same family as the mango. once agian, i *will* get a reaction to poison ivy if i were to come in contact with it..but it wont be fatal or severe. i think it has a lot to do with where one was raised..the climate..surrounding flora etc.
in india…there is the story(urban legend?) of snake charmers..who are trained from the time they were children to lure snakes and to be able to communicate with them…and they are given a tiny bit of venom every day that makes them immune to snake venom. there are many snake myths in hinduism..my favourites are the ones associated with lord shiva…another story..another day..:)
Jasmine is definitely an olfactory ravishing
I am managing to grow a Jasminum sambac with little problem. It wintered over in the side yard, and when the leaves yellowed I did the same trick as for the oranges, I dumped coffee grounds onto the straw in the pot (straw keeps it from drying out too quickly on hot days), and it made the soil slightly more acidic which helped with iron uptake. That’s it, though. I’d really like to grow more, but need to habituate a fig, a coffee, a medlar and an olive first. And then I can sow those fun seeds I got from India some months back.
Growing up around mangoes… I just cannot fit my brain around that. Mango is my favorite fruit. And we only see maybe three varieties here. Well, up to five if one gets to Berkeley Bowl at the right time. I like to get those huge green ones that resemble footballs, and let them ripen even though they’re sold green for cooking. They’re like the little paisley-shaped ones from Mexico in taste and texture. There’s a program at one of the University of FL campuses, if memory serves, that has a collection of mango trees not unlike the UCB Botanical Garden in scope. I think it is over 300 varieties? Phew.
Tuberoses hit me square in the 3rd eye. They have a chemical in common with massoia, and possibly oakmoss, both of which hit me with a little hammer in that spot. But I still like to blend with tuberose and just deal with it because it is such a versatile flower to work with. I think I could get physically ill if I overdid the tuberose, though.
Sadly, the clover doesn’t keep me from sneezing during hayfever season. Moving out of county helped, but then the big tree in the yard started throwing this horrible pollen that’s like my nose’s kryptonite. We’re taking that tree down gradually, needless to say.
Something else came to mind right after I replied previously, which you’re touching on here with where one’s raised and climate.
Terroir. What a pretentious word. But it means a lot because there are chemical differences between a vetiver grown in Haiti, versus one grown in Madagascar, versus one grown in India, etc. These all smell different although they’re all recognizably vetiver. It’s not just soil, but the composition of the soil. It’s not just the commonalities in weather preference, but the weather itself. Monsoon or tropical storms? And what is beneath the soil? Which is where the French of course go to town with wines and descriptions, and where it makes perfect sense to list appellation rather than grape varietal on the label… I laugh my ass off when I read the Kermit Lynch wine newsletters, for example, but of course a great deal of this is true. A white wine from grapes growing in limestone-rich soil is going to be minerally. Faintly acid, but cold and stony, too.
i am going to have to post some pictures of the ‘mango festival’ i went to a few years ago. i wasnt kidding when i said ‘hundreds of mango varieties’. i find the mangoes here not very sweet. esp those from mexico…its not juicy enough either. one could tailor an entire trip to india on a mango theme. i made sure that my wedding trousseau was mango themed..i couldnt get an all mango themed jewelery tho’…although i managed to sneak in a necklace, anklets and earrings…mango design!
http://www.princejewellery.com/products.asp?Category=5&ProductID=31 > can you spot the mango designs?
mangoes to us is not unlike what figs are to italians. my jaw would drop when they casually mention how streets are lined with fig trees and how its no big deal. oh well..:) to my mother, the apples here in the united states are what she covets..altho’ i had to explain to her how they wax and spray and sell you month old apples..and how they dont ever rot. apples are expensive in india and esp in south india where you cant grow them..what with our merciless heat and humidity.
never sport anything but a worshipful expression when a frenchman mentions ‘terroir’. i made the mistake of giggling once(when under the influence even) and now i have a non-friend for life. true story.
I feel envious of a couple hundred mango varieties. I have to admit that the best mangoes I’ve had were when I was living in south Florida, where they would grow completely unattended in vacant lots and so forth. There were also some mango growers there, very small businesses. That’s where I heard the adage about how to eat a mango: naked and in the bathtub. God, they were so good. Kids would actually try to knock them out of trees to eat them. I’ve had mangoes since I left, but not anywhere near as good as those. Ditto for coconuts, for that matter.
Streets lined with fig trees. That’s my kind of street!
I just can’t imagine that. Streets and vacant lots with mangoes, or streets lined with figs. I am coming really late to figs but feel like it is necessary education to learn to appreciate such an ancient cultivated fruit.
Coconuts I am not so into, although I do like the green coconut w/ a straw stuck in it when I go for chaat. If it’s too warm for tea.
faustian, I am cracking up over your mango-themed jewelry
Lovely stuff! Apples: it is because only a few are cultivated commercially that we are in this sorry state of affairs of waxing and preservation. Even the pink lady apples which were relatively new on the market 6 or 7 yrs ago are getting the damn wax treatment now. And they’re from New Zealand. However, if your mother should visit here, you could take her up to Sebastopol and she’d be in apple heaven since so many orchards are up there.
It bothers me how much spraying happens with all the pommes, too. I was watching California’s Gold last week, and Huell was on this island up in the Sac’to delta visiting a pear grower. Sez he, “Can I eat one of these?” as this bin of pears goes by on a pallet jack. Sez the grower, “Sure you can, they haven’t been sprayed in awhile.” Thanks guys, I won’t be buying pears again.
I thought I was going to grow some regular fruit trees, and so I read a pretty good book about growing apples organically. Even with organic methods, it is spray, spray, spray. That’s when I started looking into so-called small fruits. They seem not to have had all the guts bred out of them and so can still resist bugs and diseases without spraying.
re pears..i love me some seckel pears..:)
harry…i dont know about the east coast..but…for here.. i’d recommend bay laurel nursery for excellent service and really impressive fruit tree varieties..their rootstock is hardy and appropriate.
http://www.baylaurelnursery.com/order/clicksite.cgi?cart_id=&xm=on&ftr=Apples&p=Apples