Plump Plants

Sea buckthorn shouldn’t be the northern edible darling that it is. It’s got huge thorns. The berries are so tart they’re almost inedible. It’s impossible to harvest other than painstakingly by hand (although there’s a trick I’ll get into later). It suckers like crazy and can overwhelm other plants if you’re not careful.   And yet, it’s all over permaculture, natural health, and northern growing blogs and websites. What gives? It’s no accident that sea buckthorn (Hippophae rhamnoides) has the word THORN in it. The plant is technically a shrub, but it can grow to tree-like heights of 25 feet plus. The...

Sometimes I encounter a plant that has adapted so thoroughly to its native habitat that it blows my mind. The silver buffaloberry is one such specimen.  Other buffaloberry varieties propagate by layering (meaning the branches droop down and grow roots where they touch the ground). Silver buffaloberry (Shepherdia argentea) shrubs instead produce suckers underground. This means that they readily survive the wildfires that are a fixture in the prairie ecosystem. When a fire rips through, the plant that’s above ground gets burnt up leaving the healthy and robust root system below ground. Once the coast is clear, new shoots emerge and...

A wild raisin might sound like a shrivelled old grape you stumble across on the forest floor, but it’s not. It’s a whole plant! And it’s native to Ontario. The wild raisin (Viburnum nudum var. cassinoides) is similar to its viburnum cousin, the nannyberry, but distinct in a few ways. You can tell the difference based on the shape of the leaf, and the size of the drupe/seed. Not that it’s a huge deal since both are edible—this isn’t one of those plant identification nightmares where one type is delicious, the other spells certain death and there’s almost no way...