I am grateful to be having such wonderfully diverse weather this holiday season. I sure enjoy the occasional sunshine this special time of year when the sun is low in the sky. I appreciate the unique opportunity to see sunlight where any other time the sun never reaches. What else am I excited about this time of year? Roasting chestnuts. For practical purposes however, I usually roast them in a wood cook stove rather than over an open fire.

 Those open fires tend to get the house a little smokey… I planted some chestnut trees in my “Nut Forest” plot last year. Chestnuts’ foliage appears to be quite a sought after delicacy for deer, as they don’t seem to mind penetrating through my brush fencing to have a nibble of leaves. Good news is chestnut trees coppice. This means that when anything happens to their tops, the roots grow new trunks. This is handy for both the occasional nibble of deer, as well as being able to cut the trees for wood, and have them grow right back. Chestnut wood happens to be quite excellent. It is rot resistant so can be used for outdoor applications, like cedar.

 Chestnuts are different from other nuts in that they’re starchy and sweet, rather than fatty and high in protein. This makes them more perishable, which is why chestnuts are only found in stores in fall and winter. A species of chestnut called the “American Chestnut” used to grow on the east coast up until 100 years ago when the introduction of a blight nearly brought it to extinction. Fortunately, because of our dry summers here, the blight cannot survive and thus we are able to grow the American chestnut here. Contrary to European and Asian chestnuts, these trees grow much larger and have an upright form, which makes them much more useful for their wood. The nuts of the American chestnut are sweeter although smaller than their relatives, and considered superior in flavor.

 I’ve planted some of these in the Nut Forest where their upright form will be utilized, providing a forest-like setting. So far I have personally only seen isolated trees in Coos County. Chestnuts require at least 2 different trees for pollination. They appear to be susceptible to post hole beetles, for which I recommend planting comfrey right underneath chestnut trees. Comfrey provides habitat for over 100 kinds of spiders, some of which will gladly eat any beetles in sight. A few years ago I had such spiders living in comfrey save an apple tree by eating beetles that were infesting it. This year I will be planting a few more chestnut trees, this time inside the deer fence, with comfrey underneath them, of course. Happy holidays and happy planting!

Throughout the last 10,000 years of human settlement in the southern Oregon coast, salmon have been a critical part of people’s diets. I am amazed to hear old timers’ stories of how not terribly long ago salmon were so plentiful one could cross streams over the salmon’s backs (I don’t know if anyone actually attempted this or if it just makes a lively description), and the splashing sounds of their swimming upstream were so loud they would reverberate throughout the forests.

Last week, just before the start of that cold spell, with fellow Mountain Homesteader Chip Boggs, I went out to do a salmon survey in Walker and Rink Creeks. Chip and I had been talking with the Coquille Watershed Association about having a salmon habitat improvement project in Walker Creek this coming summer. They suggested we perform a survey in the creek before the project, to see what the salmon population looks like presently. Not having done this before, we didn’t know exactly what to expect, but we knew what salmon look like, and we were given a description of what a gravel bed in the stream that was used for spawning looks like. So on a frigid cold morning, with frost still on the ground, we went down the road and into Rink Creek, bodies shivering, eyes and ears wide open. My intent was to walk slowly and deliberately, carefully looking for any splashing of live fish, or carcasses lying in the water.

I had never actually seen salmon in the wild before, only in aquariums and in sandwiches. The water was getting deeper and deeper in spots, at first knee depth, then thigh depth, then, yup, water up to the waist. Vegetation was pretty thick, mostly brambles. It was a pretty intense combination, having to crawl through and underneath blackberry vines while traversing through water. What really happened was me trying to go as fast as I could, towards drying up and thawing out. “Did you see that?” Chip yelled out at me, from downstream. “I saw a fish!” he said. I rushed back downstream towards him, and indeed, a fish was swimming between the 2 of us. It looked smaller than we expected salmon to look, so we weren’t sure what kind of fish it was. It swam towards the bank, and idled for a minute.

Without much hesitation, I lunged at it with bare hands. I found myself holding the tail of a now much larger looking fish, clearly salmon, flailing its body back and forth with all its might over the water. I let it go and watched it swim away, overjoyed with the experience. For a moment I even forgot I was soaking wet and freezing cold. We kept going, and within a few hundred feet I saw something that looked fishy in the water. It looked like either a fish carcass that resembled an old piece of wood or a piece of wood resembling a fish carcass.

I stopped and looked at it more closely and still couldn’t tell. As I reached into the water to touch it, I couldn’t believe I couldn’t tell apart fish from wood. It appeared that the water was really distorting the image somehow, as out of the water it no longer resembled wood at all. Although quite smelly, I brought it over to the neighbor’s house to inquire what kind of salmon it was. I learned not only how to identify the fish, but also how to tell its gender.

The theme of this week past has been freezing cold weather. Every clear crisp autumn day followed by rapidly declining temperatures as soon as the sun disappears beyond the tall firs and cedars of the forest. This morning the thermometer showed just about the lowest temperature I had ever seen here – 19.5 degrees.

When it gets abnormally cold like this (or hot, or dry, or wet or anything out of the ordinary, really), I take a walk around, observing how all the different plants react, patterns of frost on the ground, where the ground is frozen, and things of that sort. It is my nature to always test the limits of what’s possible. This manifests quite directly in some of my plant species selections. Ever heard of anyone growing lemons outdoors here in the Coquille valley? Meyer lemon is a particular cultivar reported to withstand cold down to 18 F. Upon a visit to Florida a few years back, I brought back with me Meyer lemon cuttings, which I’ve rooted into 8 lemon trees. I planted 5 of these outside last year, 3 of them in a passive solar greenhouse, which just stores solar heat and otherwise is unheated. The other two I planted right outside, although on the south side of a wall.

This wall reflects sunlight and captures heat during the day, and as temperatures drop at night, it comforts the lemon tree by radiating that heat. This keeps the air temperature a few degrees warmer than elsewhere, which can save a plant from freezing or be the defining factor in ripening fruit (such as figs in our climate). The trees upon planting were only about 8” tall, but they were already flowering still in their pots. I had been picking the flowers off to focus the plants’ energy towards growing bigger first. I didn’t know the flowers possess the most intoxicatingly enchanting fragrance of citrus I could imagine. Picking the flowers off the plants soon became my most enjoyable maintenance task as the food forester. I would carefully pick off one flower at a time, rub it inbetween my fingers, and then take my hands to my nose and breathe in the incredible scent.

The flowers smelled so good I wanted to eat them! I did discover one day that I could take them and put them in water, giving the water an amazingly delightful fragrance and refreshing taste. This week I went to check on the planted lemon trees. Upon my inspection of one of the trees, I gasped so intensely I nearly fell over when I saw there was a green lemon hanging from a baby lemon tree only about 12” tall! This was one of the 3 trees in the greenhouse. I think a part of me couldn’t really believe it was possible to grow lemons here. That part of me shattered this week, and I find myself now more excited than ever about experimenting, being hopeful, and just going for it. I did cover up the two outdoor little lemon trees with plastic jugs, just to give them some extra protection, just in case. They indeed seemed quite content in their little bubbles of (relative) warmth this frigid morning.

Anything I can do for my little babies… Ish Shalom is the Food Forester at Mountain Homestead, a center for education and development of rural American skills located right outside Coquille, in the forested Walker Creek Valley. You can reach him at P.O. Box 905, Coquille, or ish.shalom@gmail.com

I was delighted this week to get to see a flower I’ve never seen before. This was a Yacon flower. Yacon is a perennial root vegetable from the high altitudes of the Andes, down in South America. It is in the sunflower family, and a cousin to the better known Jerusalem artichoke or sunchoke, also a perennial root vegetable. I have been growing yacon for 4 years now, and this is the first time I’ve gotten to see it flower. Just last night we had our first real frost here, and the yacon plants appeared to suffer the most from it, having their tops shrivel brown and die as soon as they thawed out. Every year until now, we’ve gotten frost which froze the yacon before it had a chance to flower. That’s okay though, as it grows back from tubers.

In fact, it grows 2 separate sets of tubers. One set is smaller and rounder, all clumped together shallowly at the base of the plant. These tubers have “eyes” on them, like potatoes do, and those will grow into new plants come spring. I usually dig these up and divide them every year as I can never get enough delicious yacon. Fortunately, the other set of tubers are the ones that are eaten, so there is never that difficult decision to make – to eat it or plant it? These grow deeper, and are much larger and shaped like cylinders. Our climate here on the Pacific coast is quite unique. Especially here in Coquille, we get the moderating effects of the ocean, while being far enough away from it to not be all that windy, foggy or cold.

 Thus we have the opportunity to grow unique kinds of crops that can’t grow almost anywhere else in the country. Besides yacon, also from the Andes are Mashua and Oca, both also perennial root crops. Having evolved in a highland tropical climate, these plants rely on length of day rather than temperature to determine their life cycles.

Not until autumn, when the days get shorter, do these plants get triggered to put energy into their tubers. In most of the northern part of the country, day length shortening coincides with the onset of freezing temperatures, which these plants cannot tolerate. With our moderate climate however, we get to still have a pretty long frost-free period for quite some time after the fall equinox, when the days begin being shorter than the nights. This is when root crops such as Oca, Yacon and Mashua begin focusing their energy into their storage tubers, to get ready for winter, when their tops all die back. These three happen to be some of my favorite vegetables, and I find myself eager for winter, when the tops of these plants shrivel up, and the tubers are ready to harvest. The yacon tubers are amazingly delicious eaten fresh out of the ground (after cleaning them, that is). They are crispy and mildly sweet, reminiscent more of a fruit than a vegetable, an excellent snack it is (especially with peanut butter).

 It is also excellent cooked, and can even be boiled down to make a sweet syrup. Oca is also delicious fresh from the ground, it is also crispy and mildly sweet, with a bit of a tartness, somewhat like an apple. Rootfruit, I like to call these two. Mashua, on the other hand, is only eaten cooked. It has a unique flavor, somewhat like potatoes mixed with almonds, delicious! It makes potatoes seem dull and tasteless. All 3 of these can be dug up for eating anytime between now and spring, when they start sprouting. Any tubers left in the ground will just grow new plants for next year.

As winter is approaching, my squirrel instincts are telling me to store food for the winter. In our mild climate, however, storing food isn’t as necessary as it is in colder climates, where everything including the ground freezes and the only foods to eat are ones put in storage.

In the winter, the garden here is abundant with fresh greens, over a dozen various root crops (beets, parsnips, carrots, yacon, oca, mashua, potatoes, salsify, yam, sunchokes, rutabagas, radishes, turnips, groundnut, earth chestnut, horseradish, Chinese artichoke…), overwintering broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and more. My squirrel self, though, is really into eating nuts in the winter. Besides being a traditional food for the holidays, nuts are a wonderful high protein snack. Just the right thing for those frigid wintery days where we need food just to stay warm … Also a great addition to cakes, cookies and salads. A couple of weeks ago, some friends and I were driving back home from visiting Crater Lake. On the side of the road, I spotted a group of walnut trees. As this was the precise time of year for the nuts to have just fallen, we stopped to check.

 Indeed, walnuts covered the ground, and not only on the ground, because somehow hundreds of them had nestled themselves into the ground as well, with just enough of each shell sticking out of the ground to be noticed. After quickly emptying every bag and pack we happened to have in the car, we ran off to gather (or dig up) the nuts. After filling up bags rather quickly, I went back to the car to look for something else to put nuts in. I grabbed a towel, laid it on the ground, poured a bag full of nuts onto it, and then pulled up the corners and tied them up like a hobo sack on a stick. It was pretty close to sunset so we only had limited time for collecting, and we had to be creative. In about half an hour, the 4 of us gathered about 50 pounds of nuts before it got too dark to see anymore.

 Almost all these nuts have turned out to be perfect. No insect damage, no duds, all beautifully filled nuts, currently drying by my woodstove. Over the past 7 years, since I’ve become fascinated with tree crops, I have always stopped to take a look at various fruit and nut trees when I see them on my travels. I find them ranging from very attentively managed, to completely neglected, overgrown with all sorts of vines and brambles. Observing these trees has provided me much practical information, seeing different trees in different situations, and how they respond, how they are pruned or how they prune themselves, how productive they are in those various conditions … I have found that the different cultivars of fruits and nuts make a huge difference in their ability to cope with less-than-optimal care.

Nuts with thicker shells, for example, appear to be more resistant to insect pests than varieties selected for ultra-thin shells. Apples, pears and peaches all have varieties selected for resistance to scab and other diseases, which makes them able to produce flawless fruits without having to be annually sprayed. Even without recognizing the particular variety of a fruit or nut tree that is found to be a particularly healthy specimen, these can be propagated by cuttings or grafting or the like. I encourage anyone to keep your eyes open, look for productive trees, wherever you go. If they are well maintained, stop and ask how they’re cared for, you can learn a lot this way. If neglected looking, and still productive, this is a good sign that this type of tree is a good choice for that area. Try rooting a cutting from it or growing a seed from it. Somewhere out there, there is the perfect tree for each and every one of us to grow, anywhere we are…

I love climbing trees. Trees are the structural supports of the whole forest. Being so much taller than they are wide, forest trees really need to be climbed to really appreciate their structure in the forest. I find that cedars are usually the easiest trees to climb around here, as their lower limbs often remain sturdy all the way down to the ground. Today, however, I climbed a Douglas Fir on the edge of the property.

 I did use a cedar growing right next to it, to climb up on, to get to the first branches of the fir, which were well out of reach directly from the ground. Climbing up conifers is usually quite easy, as far as climbing trees goes, as they conveniently have nice strong limbs about every 3 or 4’, which is typically how much they grow every year, before putting on a new set of branches. Ascending over 100’ above the forest floor, the view changes quite dramatically on the way up. First, I can see clear over the understory of salmonberries, huckleberries (which can get quite tall when they are growing out of 10’ tall springboard notched old growth stumps), vine maple and ocean spray. Then I get to the tops of the alders, which just appear as a carpet of scattered leftover fall leaves, by now turned half-yellow. Occasionally I’ll see the top of a Scouler’s Willow or a bitter cherry.

 As I continue ascending, I can begin seeing out of our valley, and can see the ridgeline between Rink and Glen Aiken creeks, and I can even see beyond it, all the way across the Coquille valley. There is one Douglas Fir, on the highest spot on the property, at just over 1000’ elevation, where the ocean can be seen on a clear day, and to the east, I can see all the way across Lee Valley, and the Siskiyou ridges to the south. I’ve climbed this tree before for gorgeous sunsets and full moon risings (after which I’ve had to hike back for a couple hours in the dark).

 As I slowly descend from the forest canopy, I have a renewed appreciation for the life of the forest. Bending down over fallen trees and low branches becomes slightly more natural than it was before (when I would instinctively reach for a saw to cut them out of my way). My vision becomes a little more attuned to seeing bits of moss, lichen, or mushrooms. My steps become somewhat lighter, and everything just appears slightly more beautiful. On my walk back to the homestead, I do a little bit of weeding and mulching around trees I’ve planted. I spot some oyster mushrooms that I gather for my next meal. The wind blows, the trees dance. All is beautiful. I give thanks for the forest.