Girl……

This is it! This is what social media/smart tech have done! They’ve rotted away any distinction between private and public.

Yes, we do have the right to make demands on public behavior. Of course we do. Have you never heard of laws and etiquette? I’m not allowed to grocery shop naked. You can’t rummage through my purse. I can’t have a work meeting in the middle of a movie theatre.

I remember when it was taboo simply to answer your cell phone in public. The person answering would apologize and try to go to a more private area. Then public calls were normalized. Then putting people on speaker. Then listening to music without headphones. Do you know how many times I have hiked up a mountain or driven to the beach, only to be met with someone blaring shitty top 40 music from their portable speaker, because Heaven forbid you go one hour without noise?

Old woman yells at cloud and all that, but I can’t believe someone is not only admitting this behavior, but saying it’s a good thing! No one likes you! You’re a menace!

BEING INCONSIDERATE OF OTHERS IS STILL BAD.

It was obnoxious when it was youtube.

It was obnoxious when it was music.

It was obnoxious when it was the radio. 

It was obnoxious when it was dudes wanting to talk to you instead of letting you just read your freaking book.

Do you want to be this guy? Because being obnoxious in shared spaces is how you become this guy. 

Wear your damn headphones like an adult participant in the social contract.

Best art history lesson ever, thank you

Harry is happy to have a friend regardless of his murderous tendencies.

Personally I love squash blossoms stuffed with ricotta and fried in a pan. Not ideal if you also want to harvest squash, though.

Spoken like a woman who’s never used garlic blossom in a stirfry, had an elderflower fritter or used Calendula and Nasturtium in a salad.

Borage! Looks like blue stars and tastes a like lightly sweet cucumber. The young leaves tase like cucumber too!

The flowers that come from any brassica (cabbage, radishes, broccoli, kale, etc) are all excellent and taste like the rest of the plant.

Queen Anne’s lace blossoms, (daucus carota, just like our domestic carrots) super common wild plant, and the flowers make a jelly that tastes kind of like pink lemonade?? It’s /delicious./ but make 100% sure you have a correct identification as water hemlock and other toxic species look similar.

Rose!!! Rose flavoured things taste exactly as they smell. So scrumptious!

Same with lavender and lilac, and violets! The list goes on! 🤩✨🌱

Here are some of my local (PNW) favorites:

[X] Big leaf maple (Acer macrophyllum) blossoms are excellent in fritters.

[X] Dandelion (Taraxacum offinale) is also excellent in fritters, or my favorite is separating the petals and mixing them into pancake batter.

[X] Miner’s lettuce (Claytonia sibirica) flowers have a delicate, lettuce-like taste.

[X] Oregon grape (Berberis/Mahonia aquafolium) flowers are delightfully sour. I like to pick off a few small flowers from the cluster!

[X] Wood sorrel (Oxalis sp.) also sour (from oxalic acid).

[X] Red clover (Trifolium pratense) is mildly sweet.

When eating wild plants, you should be completely certain in your identification and aware of any lookalikes. Be sure you are allowed to harvest and that the area has not been sprayed by any chemicals. Many of these plants are also medicine, so you should be sure that you can safely ingest them (do your research before putting things in your face pls). This was just intended to get them on your radar!

Resources for plant identification.

Roses are delicious. Lavender is delicious.

Chive flowers are also edible, and bonus points because chives can be invasive if they go to seed, so by eating the flowers you contain the plant to only where you want it to grow!

Elder flower has toxic lookalikes, so watch out for that.

My favorite flower of all flowers to eat that I eat every spring when I see it. Those weird shapes purple flowers, but the ones with the round leaves. It’s got kind of a walnutty flavor. Look alikes include dead nettle which is also edible and ground ivy which is also edible. I think the only bad look alike is stinging nettle, but it has very different leaves (and is also edible, but you have to process it first not to get stung)….i think these are all mints btws

My friends and I used to eat deadnettle out of the yard! My friends taught me it was edible but my parents always looked askance and my mom was convinced it was making me allergic. I’m convinced it probably had the opposite effect