Three Ferns

The motherwort was as tall as me so it was time to harvest.

I never cut down the whole plant, just midway down so that it will keep growing. Maybe a second harvest, if I’m lucky.

I always let my plants dry for a day or two before I hang them. I want some of the moisture out so they don’t mold. I hang them in small bundles for the same reason.

These will hang for as long as they need to be dry, but I always put them in the oven before I store them, just to make sure there isn’t any moisture left.

I went out to my fiddlehead spot, knowing that it was close to the end of the season. This is the location that got decimated by floods last year, so I didn’t harvest. Walking around today I feel devastated by how other people forage and just completely take from plants without a care in the world. Almost every plant was left with one leaf or none at all. I don’t understand people‘s thought process behind this. If they continue to do this year after year, they will have fewer and fewer plants until there are none at all. In the last nearly decade that I’ve been coming to this particular spot, I would say the ostrich fern population is about half that it was.
Today I took a very small little handful from a few plants that didn’t have any missing fiddle heads. We all need to do better.