A Weird Hillbilly's Garden

[Ninurta]

Awesomeness Amigo!!! 

I love to grow my own stuff. It tastes way better and provides a really cool sense of independence. 

I do not drink or smoke but if I did, I would probably grow/make my own. Why not? The taxes on that stuff is insane when you buy it. 

Now... quinoa. Good gravy, I have been pulling that "weed" out for years. I did not know that plant was the source of quinoa. I need to re-evaluate. 

I will send pics of my stuff soon. Currently, everything is under the snow. Not very helpful.

My beer has been price-increasing by about a dollar a week for the last 6 weeks. When Grace told me that it went up again today, I told her I need to get the stuff to make my own batches.

The tobacco is not necessarily for smoking. Sure, you can smoke it, but that stuff will knock you on your ass. It ain't your normal cigarette tobacco. I'm growing it for some spook related stuff, and because it has a higher than normal nicotine content - 3X to 9X higher - I figured it would be good to extract the nicotine from to make my own vape juice. The Controllers are making vape related product impossible or very, very expensive to get ahold of. We've been making our own vape juice for a couple years now, but I figured it was about time to get a local source for the nicotine.

Additionally, I have some tribal friends who have a hard time getting genuine sacred tobacco, and have to settle for smoking tobacco. With any luck, I can fix that for them. I'm currently researching how to cure sacred tobacco, because the Indians did it differently than white folks do.

Goosefoot isn't the source of quinoa, but it is the plant ancestral to the quinoa plant. It was grown for the same purpose as quinoa bu the Indians here, and the seed can be used the same. The greens can be eaten. if eaten raw, they suppress and prevent intestinal parasites, and are loaded with vitamins and iron like spinach. A word of caution, though - if one is prone to kidney stones, goosefoot greens can exacerbate that condition.

Goosefoot is chenopodium berlanderi, and quinoa is chenopodium quinoa. They superficially look the same, and can both be used the same, but at a deeper level they are just a wee bit different from one another. I believe one of the differences is that goosefoot seeds are marginally smaller than quinoa, and the seed coat is about twice as thick. They both still eat the same, though.

There is another variant of chenopodium that has been naturalized to north America. It is native to Europe, and is sometimes hard to tell from berlanderi. That species is chenopodium album, also known as lamb's quarters. It can be eaten leaf and seed the same as the other kinds, so any differences may be purely academic.

A few different sorts are grown and consumed in Mexico. Chenopodium nuttiallae I think is the name for it. They have 2 different cultivars for different uses - one for greens, one for seeds, and the last I think the entire seed head is eaten like broccoli.

I used to go out and gather wild greens every spring - goosefoot, field cress, a couple different kinds of mint, poke weed, that sort of thing. It's supposed to be good for the blood after a hard winter, kind of like sassafras tea is.

.