Apple #385: Manzanita plants

Now for another entry about the things I encountered during my recent trip to California.

As I was wandering around up in the hills of the high desert in southern California and looking at all the really fantastic plants around me, I noticed that the branches of one plant were two different colors. Some looked all dried out and dead-gray, and others were a bright red. Crazy! thought I.




I thought maybe one plant was growing right up next to another one, and that this was just a fluke. But I turned around, and there was another one. It was doing exactly the same thing.



I straightened up and looked about me and realized I was standing in a whole grove of these things. It was almost like an orchard that somebody had once planted and then abandoned. They were growing all over the place.


Only a small portion of the maybe hundreds of these plants growing on the north side of the hill.
(Photo by me, the Apple Lady)


I have since learned that the name for a whole bunch of plants growing together like this is "community."

After a few hours of walking around up there, I went into town into the local library. I was looking through some books they had about native desert plants, comparing the photos on my camera to the photos in the book, when a kind soul sitting across the table from me asked if I was looking up local plants, and was I trying to identify them. Yes, I was, I said.

His name was Oliver, he told me, and he very kindly looked at my photos of this odd plant and said right away that it was Big Berry Manzanita. Except first he told me the genus and species name (Arctostaphylos glauca). I blinked at him and asked him for the common name.



Big Berry Manzanita (according to Oliver)
(Photo by the Apple Lady)


It turned out he could identify nearly all the plants I had taken pictures of by both the genus and species name. He rattled these things off like they were his first and last name. So Oliver was extraordinarily helpful. Most of the plants whose pictures I may share with you in coming entries will probably be identified courtesy of Oliver's help.


Close-up of the leaves of the Big Berry Manzanita. Lots of the photos of this plant that I've seen online have a whitish-gray (glaucus) cast to them, and they look dusty. These leaves look pretty shiny to me. But one California nursery's site says that the Big Berry Manzanitas do well in very hot regions, including the Joshua tree woodlands. On the south side of this hill is where I saw all those Joshua trees. So even though these leaves don't look glaucus to me, I'm sticking with Oliver's identification -- Arctostaphylus glauca.
(Photo by the Apple Lady)

• There are all sorts of different species that get called by the common name of Manzanita. Some sources say 50, some say 76, others say as many as 106. Most of them grow in California, but some also grow in other places like Arizona and New Mexico, the Atlantic seaboard (Florida, Alabama, etc.), and even as far north as Canada.

• Manzanita is Spanish for "little apple" because when these plants produce fruit, they do look like little apples.

I had thought these were berries, but Oliver told me they are actually galls. Galls, he explained, happen when insects burrow into the leaves or bark of a plant and lay their eggs in the tissue. The plant produces a lot of goo that swells up around the opening the bug has made -- sort of like a blister, I guess -- and the insect larva lives in there. Now that I know those are essentially bug pods, it makes me feel all itchy and crawly to look at them. Aren't you glad I shared this piece of knowledge with you?
(Photo by the Apple Lady)



This is what the berries of the Big Berry Manzanita actually look like.
(Photo from Las Pilitas Nursery)

• You can eat the berries and the flowers, too.
  

• You can also make a cider-like drink with the berries, but don't go on a long trip afterwards because it's a pretty strong diuretic.

• People have also used the bark to make tea, which supposedly helps to assuage nausea.

• Butterflies and hummingbirds also like the flowers. In fact, as I was standing on the crest of the hill where these manzanitas grew, a really loud buzzing sound shot right past my left shoulder and I barely had time to whip my head around and see that it was a green hummingbird that had zoomed past me.

• Manzanitas are evergreen plants, which means they don't lose their leaves.

The fact that manzanitas are evergreens seems a little strange because I saw a lot of them with brown leaves like this. Not only were some of the leaves on this plant brown, it was as if someone had drawn a line down half of the plant; all the leaves on the left were brown while all the leaves on the right were green. I don't know if you can tell this from the photo, but what's even more strange is that the trunks in the green leaves are gray, while the trunks among the brown leaves are red.
(Photo by the Apple Lady)

• The wood is orange or red because of all the tannins in it. Tannins are very bitter and, for some organisms, even toxic. So the tannins help protect the wood against bugs and animals. In addition, most manzanita bark peels off a layer each year, which helps to shed anything that might have grown on it in spite of the tannins.
  

• People call manzanita "mountain driftwood" because the wood is so smooth and twists into such interesting shapes.

• Because manzanita wood is so slow-growing, it's very dense, which makes it for good firewood because it will burn for a long time. Be careful if you're burning it in an oven or a chimney, though, because the wood can burn so hot it could crack even a cast-iron stove.

• That's especially intriguing because botanists think that manzanitas originated about 15 million years ago and hybridized as the parent plants were burned up in fires. Some of the newer species will only produce viable seeds after a fire has heated up the plants.

• It seems like these plants just keep getting associated with fire. One variety of manzanita plants is kinnikinnick, which a lot of native tribes used to smoke as tobacco or burn as offerings to the spirits.

• One guy who makes his own pipes has made a few out of manzanita wood. They're pretty attractive.

• People also like to use manzanita branches in aquariums because its tannins won't leach into the water. Bird-owners use manzanita as roosts for their pet birds because the twisty branches give the birds interesting things to hop and climb on, and the wood is smooth and strong.
  

• Manzanitas are also becoming very popular to use in centerpieces. A lot of brides out there are frantically looking for manzanita branches. I'm not going to tell them where they can find these plants.

Here's some mountain driftwood for a bride's reception. Come on, it's nature.
(Photo by the Apple Lady)



Sources
USDA Plants Profile, Arctostaphylos Adans. manzanita
Jeff Schalau, Arizona Cooperative Extension, Backyard Gardener, Growing Manzanita, February 26, 2003
Guillermo Cabrera, Manzanita Park
Ron Sullivan and Joe Eaton, "Mysterious manzanita baffles homeowners," San Francisco Chronicle, May 7, 2008
Las Pilitas Nursery, Manzanitas from Central California
Mike Vasey, Why is manzanita bark so smooth and red? BayNature, April-June 2003
Geoffrey Coffey, "Manzanita charms Bay Area terrain," San Francisco Chronicle, December 18, 2002
Biology Online, gall

Apple #384: Moths to the Light

So I know I said I was going to post a bunch of entries about my recent trip to California. But most of those entries have to do with plants. So instead of giving you a bunch of plant entries in a row and making you thoroughly sick and tired of plants, I thought I'd space them out a little bit.

So I'm going to tackle a question recently posed by faithful Daily Apple reader Tim, who asked:

Hey, I've got a Daily Apple question: Why do moths go toward the light? Had a beautiful moth bouncing around in here for a couple nights. What draws them to the light? If they like light so much, why don't they just get up in the daytime like the butterflies? Riddle me that!

I'm going to spare everyone the atrocity that would result if I tried to put the answer in a form of a riddle, or a rhyme even, and I'll just give you the facts. Or I should say, theories.

• Most moths are nocturnal, so they wake up and go looking for food at night. They're not going to get up in the daytime like the butterflies because they're wired to do otherwise. This would be like the Apple Lady going to bed before midnight. Unthinkable!

• Of the moths that are nocturnal, not all of them fly toward a light. But as for the ones that do, they tend to zoom toward the light bulb and ping around it for a while. Or, in the case of an open flame, they fly toward that and flutter around it and sometimes even fly into it and get incinerated.

• So once again, we turn to the scientists for the answer to a "why" question. As I've learned in the years I've been doing this here Daily Apple, scientists are terrible when it comes to answering the "why." This case is no exception. They don't really know why moths fly toward the light. But they have some theories.

• One theory that's probably the oldest, or anyway gets tossed around the most, is that because moths are nocturnal, they use the moon as their navigational reference point and they think that artificial lights are the moon.

• Scientists have discovered that moths have a kind of internal compass (similar to that which Monarch butterflies have) which they use to keep themselves oriented at a certain angle relative to the moon. When the moths see an artificial light that they think is the moon, they fly toward it thinking that they will never actually get there but that it will remain far up in the sky and they will have to stay at that certain angle relative to the moon. But, surprise surprise, they do get to the moon (which is really the light bulb). This confuses the heck out of them, they back off, and then their navigational compass kicks in again, and they try to maintain that angle relative to the moon/light bulb, only to fly into it once more.

If you're a moth with a miniscule brain, would you know which of these lights is the moon?
(Photo by Olga Levina)

• A few moth scientists don't like this theory so much. They say the patterns of moths' flight as they circle the moon/light bulb don't match up with the patterns that would result if the magical navigation-angle theory were true. I'm also wondering, if moths are so easily confused by artificial lights, how the heck do they manage to get where they're supposed to go, especially if they're migrating moths?
  

• One moth scientist in particular, Henry Hsiao, has proposed another theory, which has two parts. The first of these is that moths are trying to protect themselves from predators. If a moth is sitting on a bush, let's say, and something is sneaking up from the ground to eat it, the moth is going to fly away. To a moth active at night, dark equals ground while light equals sky and moon and therefore safety. So according to this theory, when a moth zooms toward a light bulb, some predator has just tried to eat it and the moth has just flown like a bat out of hell to get away from it and, surprise, finds itself at the moon.
  

• Once the moth is at the moon/light bulb, the moth realizes it's too close and tries to get away, or back to the darkness. However, surrounding every light source is a thing called the Mach band, which is a darker band of light. The moth thinks this darker band of light is the actual darkness and it circles around the light, trying to keep itself in the Mach band which is about a foot away from the light.

Look at the white circle of light in the middle of the purple. After a second or two, you'll notice a darker ring of purple about halfway out from the middle of the circle. This darker circle is not actually there; it's only an illusion produced by the eye. This darker circle is what is called the Mach band, and it's what Dr. Hsiao thinks that the moths try to keep themselves in as they're circling a light bulb.
(Image from Perceptual Stuff)

• I have some problems with this theory, though, too. If this were true, the moth would fly in concentric circles and it would not keep going back to the light bulb, pinging off it, and back again. Also, why does light equal safety when the moth is in the bushes, but then when the moth is at the light, the moth decides that dark equals safety? And that Mach band is pretty small, especially compared to all the dark outside the circle. It's tough for me to believe that the moths really prefer the Mach band to all the dark that's farther outside of the circle.

• It's also worth noting that Dr. Hsiao's theory includes the assumption that the moths are confusing the artificial light with the moon. In part one of his theory, they're assuming the light equals the moon and that they should fly toward it. So I don't see him necessarily contradicting the moon theory after all.

• But what about when the light source is a candle? One scientist named Philip S. Callanan did a bunch of work with optics and infrared rays, and he said that it is male moths who are flying toward the candles, and they're following their sense of smell as well as sight. Callanan says that moths use a combination of smell and sensitivity to infrared light patterns to detect the presence of female pheromones. A candle emits an infrared spectra of light that's really similar to that of a female moth, so the male moth flies toward the candle expecting it to be a female moth. And then the male tries to mate with the supposed female, but instead gets scorched.

Moth flying toward a candle.
(Photo by Tony)

• This doesn't account for the moths' behavior around light bulbs, though, so I'm dissatisfied with it.

• Another scientist says that when the light source is flame, the moth has no "evolutionary history" to tell it that the heat associated with the flame is too hot and that it should not fly straight into it. It's flying to the flame, thinking it's the moon, but because it doesn't know to avoid heat, it gets toasted.
  

• At first this seemed pretty ridiculous to me because flames have been around for a lot longer than light bulbs. I mean, when there's a forest fire, are all the moths just diving into the fire? But it turns out, somebody researched exactly this, and yes, the researchers saw the moths heading straight into the fire.

• Elizabeth Gerson and Rick Kelsey, who work for the US Forest Service, did an experiment using pandora moths that live in Oregon. They caught about 200 of the pandora moths in two light traps, and then they set a controlled fire near the traps. They put the traps on the ground near the fire, opened the traps, and watched what the moths did. Very few moths flew out of the light trap. Of those that flew, three of them "spiralled into the flames." Most of the moths crawled out instead of flying, and half of those that crawled out walked straight into the fire and burned. "Radiant heat did not seem to deter pandora moths from entering the flames."

Coloradia pandora, the moth that Gerson and Kelsey saw walking into the fire. I think that unit of measurement is centimeters.
(Photo from Moths of Southeastern Arizona)

• Even though I have seen a moth fly into a candle, I find this utterly shocking, that moths would walk straight into a forest fire. I mean, where's the sense in that?

• By the way, this study also tested the moths' responses to different colors of infrared light. They found that the moths didn't seem to care what color the light was, which suggests that Callanan's theory is a bit wobbly. Callanan and Gerson were each testing different species of moths, so it's possible they could both be true. But I find Gerson's study in which they saw the moths walking into the fire to be more compelling.

Apparently if you're a moth, when you see a fire like this, you say, "Hey, wow, I want to get right in the middle of that."
(Photo of a forest fire near Big Bear Lake, CA by Fotoguy77, I think)


Man, I just can't get over that. I ask again, how does that make any kind of sense?

Well, after all this, I haven't answered Tim's question -- at least, not to my satisfaction. But it looks like the light bulb = moon theory seems to be the one that's winning. That is, this is the best theory scientists have right now, until somebody does some more research and maybe finds out that moths are doing something other than confusing the moon and light bulbs.

For now, I think the short answer is, "Moths fly to the light because they're stupid." Along those lines, these people are demonstrating for us the logic of moths. Except they have sense enough to quit after a while.

P.S. After calling all moths stupid, I have to amend my statement. Because I remembered the moths we learned about in the Joshua Trees entry, the ones who are solely responsible for pollinating those wacky and friendly plants. So I'm going to say that the ones who do not head straight for the flames -- in Gerson and Kelsey's study, that was slightly less than half -- those moths are not as stupid.


Sources
The Straight Dope, Why are moths attracted to bright lights? January 27, 1989
Howstuffworks, Why are moths attracted to light?
NPR All Things Considered, Why are Moths Attracted to Flame? August 18, 2007
Happy News, Why Are Moths Attracted to Light? September 26, 2007
James K. Adams, Why are moths attracted to lights . . .
Wikipedia, Moths
Philip S. Callanan, Moth and candle: the candle flame as sexual mimic of the coded infrared wavelengths from a moth sex scent (pheromone), Applied Optics, December 1, 1977
James L. Oschman and Nora H. Oschman, Electromagnetic communication and olfaction in insects, Frontier Perspectives, September 22, 2004
Elizabeth A. Gerson and Rick G. Kelsey, "Attraction and direct mortality of pandora moths, Coloradia pandora (Lepidoptera: Saturniidae), by nocturnal fire," Forest Ecology and Management, October 22, 1997

Apple #383: Joshua Trees

All right, I'm back from my trip. And I have many questions, of course. I took a lot of photos with my new camera mainly of plants, so a lot of my questions have to do with plants.

The first plant I encountered which made my jaw drop at its sheer insanity was the Joshua tree. I had no idea what they were when I first saw them and they looked to me like something straight out of The Lorax.


The Lorax and the Truffula trees, which he turns into thneeds. Everyone needs a thneed, right?
(You can get a painting of this image from Tiffany Duening at SprayGraphic)



A stand of Joshua trees, Palmdale, CA. Don't they look a lot like those Truffula trees?
(Photo by the Apple Lady. How exciting that I get to say that!)

All of these photos, by the way, were taken in Palmdale, California, which is in the Mojave Desert.


Apparently, I'm not the only one who confused Joshua trees with something else. They have been misunderstood, reminded people of other things, and mis-named several times.

• Natives who lived in this area for centuries called the tree "hunuvat chiy'a." That's not really a misunderstanding or misnaming, it's just an alternate name.
  

• German immigrants thought they looked like the prophet Joshua praying to God with upraised arms and pointing the Israelites to the Promised land. So they called them Joshua trees.

• Other German settlers who came to the Antelope Valley where lots of these trees grow thought they were date palm trees. So they named the place Palmenthal, which later became Palmdale.
  

• In fact, they're not even trees. They are Yucca plants, which used to be classified as part of the lily family (now they're grouped with Agaves).

• The full Latin name for the Joshua tree is Yucca brevifolia. It is closely related to the Mojave yucca, the Yucca schidigera. The two plants often grow near each other, and they look very similar except the Mojave yucca's leaves are wider and longer, and there are fibrous threads that stick out from the edges of the leaves. I don't think I have any photos of the Mojave yucca, but if any of you plant enthusiasts out there spot a misidentification, please let me know.

Another thing that makes them look weird is the bark. The spines on the top dry up and turn gray as the plant grows, but they don't fall off. They stay shaggy on the trunk. In the photo below, you can see that on the trunk on the left.


Joshua tree trunks.
(Photo by the Apple Lady)

Some of the trunks didn't have that shaggy stuff on them. On the trunk in the foreground, you can plainly see the bark, no shaggy old spines on it. Eventually the shaggy spines drop off, exposing the bark. But based on the fact that I saw so few exposed trunks, I'm guessing it takes a long time for the spines to drop off.


As far as plants go, there are a lot of unusual things about Joshua trees.

• They are monocots, which among other things means they are a flowering plant and the vascular tissue that goes up the stem to feed the plant is scattered throughout the stem, not bundled into a single ring.
  

• This means they don't have growth rings so you can't figure their age that way.
  

• Based on guesses about the growth rate of the plants, some of the oldest trees are estimated to be between 800 and 1,000 years old.

• The old ones can get to be anywhere from 30 to 80 feet tall.

The Joshua tree sticking up was much taller than the others I encountered in the area. I'm really bad at guessing heights and distances, but I put this one at maybe 10 or 12 feet tall. It might be even taller than that, though.
(Photo by the Apple Lady)

• It's rare, though, for the trees to get that tall because of the way they grow. They grow vertically until a blossom starts at the knob-end of the branch. The new growth will veer off to the side and continue from there. That's how they wind up looking all twisty.

The almost right angle turns in the Joshua tree branches are where it has blossomed in the past and the new growth has veered off from there in another direction. To the left of the Joshua tree is a silver cholla cactus.
(Photo by the Apple Lady. That's me!)

• The roots go only about 2 or 3 feet deep underground. But at the end of the roots are large bulbs which act as reservoirs that hold water. The importance of these bulbs and the fragility of the roots are what makes the Joshua tree very difficult to transplant.

• Joshua trees will bloom only if the plants have the right amount of rainwater and if temperatures are right. There is a saying that they bloom only every seven years, but that's only an indication of the fact that blossoming can be very erratic from year to year.

• When the plants do blossom, the buds open only at night and usually only partially, revealing the seed pod at the center.
  

• The terminal blossom only blooms one time and then the core of the blossoms dries up and falls off.

Blossoms at the terminal end of a Joshua tree. The one on the left has partially blossomed. Sometimes the green buds never do open all the way. The pointy one at the top is all done blossoming and will fall off eventually. I don't know if it's unusual or not for one terminal end to have two blossoms on it.
(Photo by the Apple Lady)

• For a long time, scientists thought that only one species of moth pollinated Joshua trees, but it turns out there are actually two, depending on whether the trees grow in the eastern or western part of the range. Still, that's not very many species for the plants to rely on for their propogation.

• The yucca moths fly around at night -- which is when the blossoms are open -- collecting the pollen until they have enough collected to form a sticky ball. The female moth then forces her sticky pollen ball into a flower, fertilizing it, and also injects her eggs. When the eggs become larvae and hatch, they eat some of the seeds within the flowers. Others that they don't eat get blown away to make more trees.

• In addition to the moths, multiple species of birds (including orioles, wrens, owls), animals (lizards, chipmunks, woodrats, snakes) and insects (moths, ants, termites), rely on the Joshua trees, making their homes on or near them or using them for food.

Native folks have found all sorts of uses for Joshua trees.

• They used the pointy part of the spines to sew with.

Close-up of spines on Joshua tree plant. Faintly in the background is another blossom that's finished.
(Photo by the Apple Lady)

• They smashed up the leaves to make a pulp, which they then used as soap, shampoo, or for washing clothes.
  

• They sewed or wove the leaves together make sleeping mats or to make a kind of roofing material that was resilient and waterproof.

• They roasted and ate the buds, which have a very high sugar content and taste sweet.
  

• They ground up the seeds and made them into flour or ate them whole.

• They used the roots to make a tea to treat gonorrhea.
  

• Since some of the smaller root fibers are red, they wove those into their baskets for extra color, or they used the fibers to make red dye.

• They used the cylinder-like trunks like cans to store nuts and berries.
  

The hollowed-out inside of an old Joshua tree stem. It felt pretty fibrous when I picked it up and part of it crumbled and broke away pretty easily. But it's so nicely circular, I can see the desire to store things in there. Also, you can see how there wouldn't be any "rings" to count like in a regular tree.
(Photo by the Apple Lady)


White folks in the late 1800s and early 1900s tried to find commercial uses for Joshua trees. They came up with various get-rich-quick schemes for the trees, but all of them were pretty much dismal failures. I read about these ideas in various print sources at the Palmdale City Library's excellent local history room, but I didn't take good enough notes so I'm a bit fuzzy on the details.

• One guy from San Francisco thought he could sell all kinds of the wood to make paper pulp. So he had a bunch of Chinese laborers chop down acres of Joshua trees. All the wood got loaded onto ships but then either they couldn't get the OK to sail or a storm came up but anyway the wood sat on the ships and got soaked and all the wood spoiled. Thousands of trees had been cut down to no purpose.
  

• Somebody else thought he could make an alcoholic drink from the roots that would taste similar to bitters. So he dug up a lot of roots to make a big batch of the beverage. But "nobody could tolerate it."
  

• Because the bark of the tree absorbed moisture very easily, someone else thought the outer fibers would make terrific wallpaper. So they cut down a bunch more of the trees and experimented with various dyes and solutions. But the fibers soaked up too much moisture, and then it all dried out really fast, which made the bark shrink and it fell off of the wall to which it had been stuck. So no Joshua tree wallpaper.

• For a while, the US government used the wood to make splints and prosthetics during World War I. But the wood turned out to be not as ideal as they'd initially thought and people preferred splints and prosethics made of other materials. So more of the wood went to waste.

• Currently, nobody has any commercial uses for Joshua trees. In fact, the plants are now protected. If anyone wants to dig one up, they have to get permission, pay a fee, and they are required to plant the tree elsewhere. Failure to do any of this will get you a hefty fine.

(Photo by the Apple Lady)

After I hung out with the Joshua trees for a while, they started to seem very friendly. Like families of alien alpacas or something. But mainly families. Above you can see a slightly taller one and many young ones that I thought of as "children" of the older plant. I'm not the only one who sees them as people; one scientist said, "To try to describe the average Joshua tree is a little like trying to describe the average person."

It's nice to know that people are looking out for these plant families.


P.S. Yes, there's also U2's album The Joshua Tree. You can download the whole thing as an MP3 for $9.50 from Amazon.


Sources
National Park Service, Joshua Tree National Park, Joshua Trees
Mary Evelyn Austin, Joshua, My Love, 1987 -- a much better resource than it sounds
Graeme Somerville, San Francisco State University, The Biogeography of the Joshua Tree (Yucca brevifolia), Fall 1999
Geocities (soon to be extinct), Palmdale History
Desert USA, Joshua Trees
Michael Mares, Encyclopedia of Deserts, 1999, pp 315-316.
Jeremy Yoder, Joshua tree genetics suggest coevolutionary divergence, Denim and Tweed, October 2, 2008
Sustainablog, Joshua Trees and America, January 21, 2009
UC Berkeley, Monocots versus Dicots

Trip

I'm going on a trip. I'll be back in about a week & a half. In the meantime, here are some songs for your entertainment. They might also have something to do with where I'm going. I selected some of the less obvious choices in the hopes of finding something you might not already know about.

You could watch one every few days or so to tide you over until I return. You could post a comment and tell me what your favorite California song is. You could peruse a past entry of mine about vacations.

Or you could use the time while I'm away to tell me what ideas for Daily Apples you encounter. If something strikes your curiosity button, post a comment to this entry with your question, and I'll do an entry about it when I get back.

Gipsy Kings - Hotel California, 1990

Marlena Shaw - California Soul, 1969

(Sorry about the Garfield. It goes away eventually.)


Kings of Leon - California Waiting, 2006

Joni Mitchell - California, 1970

Wolf Parade - California Dreamer, 2008

Hey Ocean - A Song About California, 2008

However you choose to spend your time while I'm away, you can be sure that, for my part, I'll be compiling items that make me curious and that I'll want to investigate for you. So stay tuned to see what your fellow Daily Apple readers and I want to learn about!

Apple #382: Honey

Honey has come up in conversation a couple of times in the past few days. So it's time to learn a few things about honey, methinks. It's pretty miraculous stuff.


(Photo of honey from Bitterroot Restoration)

• To make one pound of honey, bees may visit more than two million flowers to gather enough nectar.

• A worker bee may visit 50 to 100 flowers before going back to the hive to unload the pollen.

• One worker bee produces 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in her entire lifetime. She only lives for 36 days, but still.

• Honey can vary quite a lot in terms of its color, flavor, and sugar & water content, depending on what flowers the bees visited to make it. In the United States alone, there are over 300 different varieties of honey that are produced and sold on a regular basis.

• Lighter colored honeys are generally milder, while darker honeys are more robust in flavor. Darker honeys also contain more antioxidants.

Bud Ashurst's honeys, showing how different varieties vary in color. Left to right are alfalfa, clover, orange, and sage. He sells each 12 oz. bear for $15.

• Fireweed honey has a citrus flavor. Tulip poplar honey is fruity. Tupelo honey is spicy.

• Even though honey isn't entirely sugar, depending on the variety, it can be up to 1.5 times sweeter than granulated sugar.

WHAT'S IN IT

• Honey is made of

1. Glucose (sugar)
   
2. Fructose (sugar)
   
3. Water
   
4. Sucrose, maltose, kojibiose, turanose, isomaltose, maltulose (more sugars)
   
5. Oligosaccharides (carbohydrates)
   

• Nutritionally speaking, there are also essential proteins and amino acids in honey, as well as antioxidants, a few vitamins and minerals, and enzymes that help to break down the sugars.

• Because liquid honey is only 20% water, it is supersaturated. The stuff it is supersaturated with is sugar (70%).

• Because of all that sugar, honey will eventually crystallize.

• If stored at room temperature, crystallization may happen in months or even weeks. If your honey has crystallized, you can re-liquify it by warming it gently to about 140 degrees.
  

• Careful not to heat it up too much, though, because if it gets too warm, the honey will break down, and it can ferment or even begin to grow bacteria.
  

• You can keep honey from crystallizing in the first place by storing it at temperatures cooler than room temps or by keeping it in air-tight containers.

Leslie, pouring honey she and fellow beekeeper Bill have collected from their hives.
(Photo from the Green Grower. The rest of this page has a lot of photos about beekeeping and making honey.)

• A lot of people like to say, "They found honey in the pyramids and it was still good! That's how you know it never goes bad!" Except nobody says in which tombs or who found it, or when. Which makes me wonder if this information may have gone bad as it's been passed all around. Because, as we have just learned, honey can actually go bad, if it's not stored properly.
  

• In one particular pyramid, the honey that was found had been stored in a corked container -- the archaeologists opened the vessels, so who knows if the honey is any good now -- and they described it as "almost liquid," and that it has "preserved its scent." No idea whether they tasted it or not.

BAKING WITH IT


These dark honey cookies are made with honey and sugar. Available from Madeira Shopping for €4,20 per bag.

• If you want to use honey instead of granulated sugar, here's how:

• If the recipe calls for one cup or less than a cup of sugar, you can use equal amounts honey as sugar. If it needs more than a cup of sugar, substitute 3/4 cup honey for each cup of sugar.

• Also reduce another liquid in the recipe by 1/4 cup

• Also add 1/4 teaspoon baking soda to neutralized the acid in the honey

• Also reduce oven temperature by 25 degrees to keep the your goodies from browning too quickly.

A WARNING, HONEY

• Honey may also contain the spores of a toxic microorganism, Clostridium botulinum. You may know it by its more common name, botulism. This microorganism shows up in dirt and "raw agricultural products" (I'm pretty sure that means poo), and the wind can blow that around and it could get on flowers that the bees then pollinate. So it's possible that the bees' honey contains some of that botulinum.

Clostridium botulinum. The stuff that, in large doses, gives you botulism. The same stuff that people get injected into their skin.
(Image from Softpedia)

• Adults have enough bacteria-fighting stuff in their intestines, they're not bothered by it. Infants, however, don't have the "microflora" in their intestinal systems yet, so they can be very susceptible to the bad old Clostridium botulinum. So honey producers and doctors alike recommend not feeding honey to infants until they are one year old.

• Infant botulism is extremely rare. But if it strikes, it's really bad. First the babies cry more weakly usual, they get constipated, they'll be very feeble about eating, and they'll get an all over muscular weakness.
  

• If it's not caught in time, the baby can become paralyzed. So if you see this happening in your baby and you think he or she might have eaten honey, take that baby to the doctor immediately.

HONEY AS HEALER

• C botulinum may be one of the few microorganisms that honey is powerless against. Because honey contains all sorts of antimicrobial properties that kill off other microorganisms.

• In fact, Roman soldiers used to put honey on their wounds to help them heal. People have also used it for centuries to treat burns and ulcers.

• The reason honey works to heal wounds is that it sucks up water. When put on a wound, the honey will draw the water out. When the wound is dried up, the bacteria and yucky stuff can't thrive in the wound.
  

• Additionally, when combined with water, an enzyme in honey called glucose oxidase forms hydrogen peroxide, which is a mild antiseptic that keeps wounds clean.

• Even the antioxidants in honey have antibacterial properties. They have been found to be effective at keeping away such nasties as E coli and Candida.

• Some doctors say you could apply regular old supermarket honey to a minor cut or burn and expect to have results similar to or perhaps better than an antibiotic. Some varieties of honey are better at wound healing than others -- one variety from New Zealand called Manuka is supposedly the best of all -- so you might get better results from the darker varieties.

One company is making a wound treatment product (bandage) called Medihoney that uses "medical-grade" honey along with some other ingredients that form it into a gel that stays in place. So far, their clinical trials have yielded promising results.

I had a photo up here of the bandage, but it's kind of unpalatable because there's also a rather large wound in the picture. But if you're interested, you can click to see honey bandage at Apitherapy News.

• Research has also shown that a teaspoon of honey can help relieve a cough. In one study, coughing children between the ages of 2 and 18 who were given honey saw significantly better improvement over those given a store-bought cough suppressant.
  

HONEY HELPS YOU STAY PRETTY

• The fact that honey attracts and retains moisture (the word for that is humectant) has made also made it a very popular cosmetic ingredient for centuries.

• Cleopatra used to take honey and milk baths to keep her skin soft.

See? Look how smooth Cleopatra's skin is!
(Photo from Suzanne Cross' hard-to-read site, Princeps)

• The last mistress of King Louis XV, Madame du Barry, used to put honey on her face in a mask and then she'd lie down for a while as it moisturized her skin.

• Queen Anne of England and Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, used concoctions that included honey on their hair to keep it sleek and shiny.
  

• I used to have some stuff to put in the bath that had honey in it, and it did make my skin feel very soft afterwards.

• So the next time you're looking to entice Mark Antony, maybe try a honey & milk bath first.

VERSIONS OF HONEY

• Comb honey -- this is the comb and honey together, both of which are edible

Comb honey photo from The National Honey Board, who can help you find people who sell comb honey in your area.

• Cut comb -- most of what's in the jar is honey, but there are also chunks of comb as well

• Liquid honey -- what we typically buy at the store

• Crystallized honey -- liquid honey that's been allowed to crystallize over time

• Creamed honey -- a.k.a. whipped honey, this honey has been crystallized but in a controlled way so that the crystallized honey can be whipped into a spreadable form, like butter.

Creamed honey, from the Honeybee Centre in Canada. They sell their creamed honey for $3.99 CAD for a 250 gram jar. They can only sell to customers in Canada at the moment.
(Photo from the Honeybee Centre)

Sources
National Honey Board, Honey: A Reference Guide to Nature's Sweetener, Infant Botulism Fact Sheet, Beauty and Honey, Honey Trivia
The World's Healthiest Foods, Honey
Hsiao-Ching Chou, "On Food: How sweet it is: The secret life of honey," Seattlepi, September 3, 2003
Health Benefits of Honey, Honey and Death
Adam Voiland, "The Healing Power of Honey," US News & World Report, October 7, 2008
Charles Downey, "Doctors turning sweet on healing with honey," CNN.com, March 8, 2000
Carolina Country, Carolina Honey, Which kind of honey tastes best?
Mark Andrews, "The Private Tomb of Yuya and Tjuyu in the Valley of the Kings," Tour Egypt
eHow, How to Substitute Honey For Sugar in a Recipe
The Cook's Thesaurus, Sugars

Apple #381: Blisters

This weekend, it was really nice and sunny here, so I decided to do some yard work. Nobody ever raked up the leaves from last fall, and when the guys come to cut the grass every few weeks, they leave all the clippings so those pile up too. So even though my backyard is quite small, I had a lot of raking to do. And I got a blister on the inside of my thumb. Two of them, actually, one on each hand in almost the exact same spot. But the one on the left hand showed up first and was far worse.

After the blister tore and opened up, smart me started pulling up dandelions, getting my hands good and dirty. Of course I wasn't wearing gloves. And of course I got dirt in that open blister. I thought, ah, that'll wash off.

But two and a half hours later when I was done and washing my hands, though I could get the dirt and mud off of everything else, I couldn't get it to come off of that spot of exposed skin. I tried water, soap and water, hydrogen peroxide, Neosporin. It wouldn't budge.

I slathered on the Neosporin, bandaged it up again, and went about my day. Hours later, it was throbbing. I took off the bandage and looked at it and it was all gooey and bright pink. I touched a Kleenex to the places where the dirt was, and the goo came off and so did the dirt. So I got as much of the dirt off that way as I could, washed it all again, more hydrogen peroxide, more Neosporin, another bandage.

I didn't bandage it up overnight because I remembered my mom saying things about blisters needing to "breathe." (I think now that she must have said this about burns, not blisters.) That turned out to be a bad idea because any time I turned over in my sleep, I managed to brush that open blister against a fold of pillow or sheet and the wincing pain woke me up every single time. Did smart me get up and put a bandage on it? No. Smart me kept trying to sleep like that.

Now today, I kept bandaged it up all day. Felt much better, except when something bonked the place where I have that blister. The skin all around it is quite tender. When I took the bandage off, I saw that the open spot is now a deep, angry red.

Wait a moment! I now have a brand-new digital camera! And I can actually show you what this looks like, instead of trying to find somebody else's photo that is only an approximation!



There it is! That's my thumb! And its blister. On display for the whole world to see. It feels a little strange, actually, showing everybody my thumb. Not that people can't normally see it in real life. But you know what I mean. This is different.

But I shall press on! In the name of science and knowledge and education and all those good things, I show you my thumb!

The blistered place looks even more red and angry in person.

So I want to know, is there anything special about taking care of a blister that I don't already know? Apart from getting a lot of dirt ground into that tender, underneath skin, was there something I did in my blister ministrations that I shouldn't have?

• First of all, the blisters I'm talking about are due to pressure or friction, not burns. If you have a blister from a burn, stop reading this and instead follow the Mayo Clinic's advice about treating your burn blister.
  

• For pressure blisters, it's best if you can avoid breaking the blister. The liquid under the skin is called serum. It's what's in your blood minus clotting agents and red blood cells. It acts as a cushion and it contains all sorts of helpful stuff that aids in healing and helps keep away bacteria.

• Wash your hands with soap and water before touching a blister. Blisters can get infected pretty easily, even if they are unbroken.
  

• Most blisters will eventually break on their own, and they are supposed to do that.

Unbroken blisters that developed after walking about 3 miles. Probably in uncomfortable shoes.
(Photo by leeives on Flickr)

• If a blister is really giving you trouble and it hasn't broken yet and it's painful because it's swollen with fluid, you can break it yourself. If you do that, make sure to use a needle that you've sloshed with alcohol or passed through a flame to sterilize it first.

• Do not break a blister that has blood in it.

• Once the blister is broken, wash your hands first (check), apply an antibiotic ointment (like Neosporin, I did that), and cover with a bandage or gauze (I did that, too).

• Change the bandage any time it gets wet or dirty. (I've gone through lots of bandages because it's hard to get them to stay on my thumb.)

• A few first aid sites say to remove the flap of dead skin, which is called the "roof," by the way. But most say to leave it alone because it will help to prevent further infection.
  

• You should allow the blister about 7 to 10 days to heal.
  

• If the blister develops pus, swelling, red streaks leading away from the wound, increasing pain, or gets warm, that is a sign of infection.

• If it gets crusty and "drains honey-colored fluid," or if you get a fever and chills and vomiting, that's the sign of an especially bad infection, and you'll want to call your doctor ASAP.

• To prevent getting a blister in the first place, you can apply moleskin (I could never get moleskin to stay stuck for any length of time at all) or you can get these things called blister plasters. Blister plasters are supposed to help protect the skin from friction, or if you already have a blister, they'll also work like a bandage and keep it from getting dinged up any more and promote healing.

Blister plasters are more widely available in the UK. This particular kind is made by a company called Afmeting and sells for €9.95 for a pack of 20 from Happy Steps.

• Here's a version marketed for women for $6.95 for a pack of 3, and here's a version that's not so girly for $15 a box.
  

• Blister plasters are supposed to be especially good at sticking, so you can put them in curvy or complicated spots like the side of a toe or your Achilles heel or the inside of your thumb. If you warm the plaster between your hands for about a minute before applying, it sticks better. The plaster isn't supposed to peel off, even if it gets wet, but some people say it does anyway.

• Or as my friend Elaine pointed out, I could have worn gloves. That probably would have helped.

Sources
Mayo Clinic, Blisters: First aid
WebMD, Blisters - Home Treatment
Sports Injury Clinic.net, Blisters
Treatblisters.com, Intro and Blister treatment
Firstaidkits.org, Blister First Aid and Treatment
Sportsactive: Actively tested: Blister plasters, The Independent, September 31, 2001

Apple #380: The Hokey Pokey

While I was at home for the Easter weekend, I took a bath. I only have a shower here, no bathtub, and because I do enjoy a nice hot bath with lots of bubbles, I take advantage of the bathtub whenever I'm at my parents' house.

I assure you, by the way, that your Apple Lady always bathes in the complete and appropriate bathing attire.


(Photo from the Library of Congress LC-USZ62-120028-1902, sourced from Victoriana.com)

So there I was in the bathtub, fully enjoying the relaxing steaminess. I even put my face in the water and that was relaxing too. As I did so, the words from part of the Hokey Pokey came to me: "You put your whole self in, you put your whole self out. . . ." As I leaned back in delicious comfort, I sighed and said, "That's what it's all about."

As I continued to relax and enjoy my steamy soak, the words from the Hokey Pokey played themselves over and over in my brain. Then I suddenly paid attention to what they were saying. And I had an epiphany. The Meaning of the Hokey Pokey was revealed to me.

It's all about how to live, I realized. Or, it's a description of how we live and learn. First we try things out, a toe or a leg or an arm at a time. Then we get the head into it. But it's not until we throw our whole selves into it that we really get it. That's what it's all about.

I am truncating the extent of my realization. Believe me when I say my steam-inspired revelation went into great detail. I interpreted the song line by line. I thought, that's why we do the Hokey Pokey at weddings, because you have to throw your whole self into a marriage if it's going to work. I imagined issuing a call that we should do the Hokey Pokey at all major life events, not just weddings but baptisms, first days of school, first days of a new job, moving into a new house, maybe even the opening ceremony of the Olympics.

Now that I am dried off and well away from the bathtub, I recognize the, uh, head-over-heelness with which I embraced that idea.

But I do have some lingering questions. Where did that song come from, anyway? Does it have some other meaning that I'm not aware of?


Guests at a wedding in Ohio, putting their right arms in. And sort of tentatively, at that.
(Photo from Chris Glass' journal)


It turns out, this simple question about what I thought was a simple song has overturned a rock and revealed everything from lawsuits to bigotry to cocaine. And ice cream.

• The Hokey Pokey was written by a man named Larry LaPrise, originally from Detroit.

(Image from goodworksonearth)

• He was a musician with a group called the Ram Trio. LaPrise along with his two bandmates made up the song while the Ram Trio were performing for a bunch of skiers at a resort in Idaho.

• The song was such a hit, they recorded it in 1949.

• In 1953, another bandleader named Ray Anthony bought the rights to the song and put it on the B side of the Bunny Hop.

• In the 1960s, Roy Acuff's company bought the rights to the song, and that's when the song really took off.

• LaPrise went on to work for the US Postal Service.

• In 1992, LaPrise said of the song, it's "like a square dance, really. You turn around. You shake it all about. Everyone is in a circle, and it gets them all involved."

This bride and groom are doing the Hokey Pokey with feeling.
(Photo from the blog English Rules)

• Now, over in England, they have a version of the song called the Hokey Cokey. The lyrics are strikingly similar to the Hokey Pokey, and you're supposed to do the same kind of leg in, leg out, etc. dance. It was very popular with the servicemen during World War II.

• Some people have said that "hokey cokey" is a bastardization of a phrase that is said in Latin at Catholic masses. The phrase is hoc est corpus meum, or "this is my body," which the priest says when elevating the eucharist.

• People claim that "hocus pocus" is a phrase that Puritans used to make fun of the Catholic mass and the Latin-speak that priests used, and that "hokey cokey" is another such phrase.

• They say that the Hokey Cokey song and its motions was intended to make fun of priests and the various gestures they used during the eucharistic prayers.

• Just recently, in fact, people in Scotland and England have been calling for legislation to ban the song and to include punishments for people who sing and dance it in public as committing a hate crime. Apparently some fans of one Scots football team were singing it in a jeering fashion at fans of another Scots football team. Then this business about how it's supposedly an anti-Catholic song got brought into the mix.

• Well. This sounds like a lot of going overboard to me.

At Gulliver's Theme Park in Milton-Keynes, England, Gully Mouse and his friends are doing the Hokey Cokey. This doesn't look like a hate crime to me.
(Photo from Gulliver's Theme Park)

• When I delved into it further, I discovered that the grandson of the guy who wrote the Hokey Cokey said it didn't have anything to do with Latin or priests or Catholicism or any of that. It is about ice cream.

Al Tabor, at the left, and his band at the club where they first played the Hokey Cokey.
(Photo from the Hokey Cokey Man, website of the play about Al Tabor's life)

• This guy, Alan Balfour, said his grandfather, Al Tabor told him that ice cream sellers used to go up and down the street chanting, "Hokey pokey, penny a lump, have a lick, make you jump!" to sell their ice cream. (He lived in London's East End where people used to talk like that. Except if you're cockney you say 'okey pokey.) So he used that phrase to write a song that he thought would cheer people up during a world war.

Hokey Pokey is also a vanilla ice cream with toffee bits that's very popular in New Zealand.
(Photo from Jeremy & Andrea on Flickr)

• Then a Canadian officer said Tabor should change it from "hokey pokey" to "hokey cokey," because "cokey" means "crazy." So he did.

• He first performed the song the Hokey Cokey with his band in 1940.

• In the meantime, we have yet that other songwriter in the mix, Jimmy Kennedy. He was a well-known Irish songwriter in the 1940s, and he wrote a song called the Cokey Cokey in 1942.

Jimmy Kennedy, renowned Irish songwriter and creator of the Cokey Cokey.
(Photo from Culture Northern Ireland)

• His son says his dad told him he wrote the song based on a Canadian folk tune sung by coal miners, who were proclaiming the wonders of cocaine. So "coke" would have a triple meaning here -- coal/coke, cocaine/coke, and as we learned just a bit ago, crazy/cokey. Except Kennedy, Jr. said his son wrote on the back of the original sheet music that "'cokey' means 'dope-fiend.'"

• Kennedy, Jr. also says his dad told him how he came up with the song. He said he was watching a bunch of Canadian soldiers, stationed in Britain, singing and dancing at a nightclub in London and having a great time. He said when he got back to his hotel, he wrote a chorus based on the feet and hand movements of the soldiers. Over the next couple of days he wrote some more lyrics and made some adaptations, but in the end he had the Cokey Cokey. A song to cheer people up during wartime, as he'd intended.

• He originally published the song as the Cokey Cokey, but the name was later changed to The Hokey Cokey.

• When our old friend the Hokey Pokey was recorded, Kennedy sued LaPrise (but not Tabor -- why, I don't know) for copyright infringement. The two wound up settling out of court.

• If you try to buy sheet music of the Hokey Cokey, it's got Jimmy Kennedy's name on it.

• Copyright for the Hokey Pokey is still listed as Acuff-Rose Music from when Roy Acuff bought it.

• Here's yet another version of the Hokey Pokey, with new lyrics from Wine-O, and danced by two young men, one of whom almost loses his pants twice.

Guests hokey pokeying at a wedding in 1990. This is what it's all about.
(Photo from paulbavol at Flickr)



Sources
"The Hokey Pokey Man Is Dead at 83," The New York Times, April 11, 1996
Stuart MacDonald, "Hokey Cokey: no Catholic dig," The Sunday Times Online, January 11, 2009
Auslan Cramb, "Doing the Hokey Cokey 'could be hate crime,'" Telegraph, Decmeber 21, 2008
Randy Boswell, "Canada's Hokey Pokey cause of England dust up," Canwest News Service, February 6, 2009
Fred R. Shapiro, The Yale Book of Quotations, Jimmy Kennedy entry, page 419
The BS Historian, What if the Hokey Cokey IS what it's all about?

Happy Easter

(Photo from Sotirov's brother.)

Mahalo has lots of instructions for coloring Easter eggs, from simple to fancy.

Apple #379: Dandelions

Another sign of spring: dandelions blooming in the yard.


(Photo by Ron Schott)

• Dandelions were introduced by Europeans to the Midwest to provide spring food for the honeybees they'd also brought over from Europe. Those Europeans, dragging their crap around with them everywhere.

• As you probably have learned at some point, the name dandelion is a run-together version of the French Dents de Lion, which means teeth of the lion. People aren't sure whether the teeth are supposed to be the jagged points on the leaves or if it's the golden yellow flowers which are reminiscent of a golden lion that appears in heraldry.

• Here are some other names for dandelions:

1. Swine's snout
2. Irish daisy
3. Blowball
   
4. Priest's crown (for when there are no seeds left)
5. Monk's head (ditto)
   

• Dandelions produce a huge amount of nectar. Scientists have observed 93 different kinds of insects visiting dandelions to collect it.

• Dandelions are weeds because they are wild and they crowd out other plants. Their large leaves block other, smaller plants from getting the sun they need, and they absorb nutrients from the soil that other plants need.

• Dandelions grow in lawns where the soil is acidic and weak and there isn't much competition from the grass. One of the best ways to combat dandelions is to improve the soil. In the autumn, spread mature compost over the yard. That will help to reinvigorate the grass come spring.

• Also, if you spread lots of grass seed to keep the grass growing thickly, there won't be as much room for the dandelions.

This is Taffy the dog, who seems a little bemused among the dandelions. I don't know how well you can see this, but the grass is sort of patchy, which makes it easier for the dandelions to grow.
(Photo from bionicdan's blog, which has a ton of huge photos and is slow to load.)

• You can also pour boiling water over the individual plants to knock them out one by one. Corn gluten meal works, too, and so does vinegar. Careful, though. Any of the three sloppily applied could kill other stuff nearby.
  

• You could spray them with Round-Up or your favorite herbicide. But then you wouldn't be able to eat or steep any part of the plant. This is important because there are so many things you can do with dandelions:

• Make rubber. The gooey white stuff inside the dandelion stem, which is latex, was used to make rubber during World War I. Science Project Ideas has instructions for making a rubber band from dandelions. (If you're allergic to latex, you'll want to pass on this one.)
  

• Make wine. You don't need any fancy equipment to make it, just the blossoms, some sort of container to put the liquid into, and the time and patience to stir it each day until it's fermented. Collect the flowers when they've just bloomed, which is usually in the spring. Be sure to remove any green bits at the base of the flower because those are especially bitter. Then follow a recipe for dandelion wine. Here's one recipe that also uses oranges, lemons, and cloves. This one uses raisins and banana as well as lemons and oranges, and there's a photo of preparing the blossoms.

A glass of dandelion wine, made with lemons and oranges in the Coke bottle standing nearby. Photo and wine by donosborn, who has says it's probably around 10% alcohol and its flavor improves after the first year or two. He's got a link to more info about how he made his wine.



Dandelion Wine is also the title of a book by Ray Bradbury. It's about Douglas Spaulding, who is 12 and is waking up to the wonders of the world around him. It's beautiful and joyous. I loved it when I was a teen-ager.

• Make coffee. In the fall, pull up the big, fat taproots, clean them, and dry them. Roast them until they take on the same color as coffee, and then grind them up. Put them in your coffee maker the same way you would regular coffee. Since dandelions are very similar to chicory, I expect the dandelion coffee would taste like chicory used as coffee.
  

• Eat the leaves. They are hugely nutritious, with all kinds of iron (better than spinach) and beta carotene (better than carrots) and a host of other vitamins. Best collected in early spring before the flowers bloom, the leaves can be used raw in salads, or steamed or sauteed and eaten the way you'd eat any green vegetable like spinach or Swiss chard. Here's a recipe for dandelion greens sauteed with garlic.

• They do have a bitter edge to them. One way to reduce that bitterness is to boil them in water, change the water, and boil them again.

This is what you pick. Only pick leaves you're sure have not been sprayed with herbicide!
(Photo from Budget Gourmet Kitchen)


This is what they'll look like after you've sauteed them.
(Photo by madball911)

• You can also eat the big, fat taproot. Boil it, change the water, boil it again, or simmer it slowly for a long time. You can eat them the same way you'd eat other root vegetables (like potatoes) or the same way you'd eat the greens.

• Make tea. Collect and wash the greens. You can use them right away when fresh and steep about 4 greens in boiling water for 20 minutes. Or you can dry them first in a low-heat oven and then make your tea. Use one teaspoon of the dried leaves per cup of boiling water per person. Either way, it's best with a slice of lemon.

Or you could buy a box of somebody else's dandelion tea and steep that. This box of 30 tea bags from NOW foods will set you back only $2.87.

• Here's another caution: one word in French for dandelion is pissenlit. It means "wet the bed." This is because dandelions are a diuretic. That might be something you want since it does help to cleanse the kidneys. But it's also something to keep in mind when you're considering whether to have a cup of dandelion tea right before a big road trip, say.

• Tell time. When the blooms have gone to seed, puff on them to make some of the seeds blow away. Keep doing this and count with each puff one o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock, etc., until all the seeds are gone. Supposedly the time you end on will match up with whatever time it actually is. Supposedly.

(Photo from Meg Roberts' blog)

• Put your thumb at the base of the dandelion blossom, chant, "Mama had a baby and her head popped off," and on the word "head," flick your thumb to pop off the head of the dandelion. Great fun, isn't it?

• I looked everywhere to find out where that little game comes from and nobody knows -- at least, nobody online at these here free Internets. People from all over the country and in England too say they played it as children, but none of them can say what it means or where it came from.

• Different people do use different pronouns in there. Some people say "her head," some say "his head," and some say "its head" (often inserting the incorrect apostrophe). For those of us who say "her head," the "her" refers to the baby, since that is the closest noun to which the pronoun can refer. A lot of stressed-out moms out there feel like it should refer to the mom, but it's actually the baby's head that's popping off.

P.S. If you're curious about Easter-related topics, check out the links under Ripe Apples at the top right corner. Happy Easter!

Sources
Alex Russel, A Dandelion is a Weed, All About Lawns
Marion Owen, Seven ways to get rid of dandelions . . . Organically!
Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides, Dealing with Dandelions
Compact Oxford English Dictionary, weed
Wildman Steve Brill, Common Dandelion
Dandelion tea, Dandelion tea recipe
Botanical.com, Dandelion