Can I eat garlic mustard?

Yes, please eat it all.  Garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) is a horribly invasive weed. TPP must make the rounds of our estate two or three times a spring to keep the garlic mustard at bay; it invades from an un-kept preserve next door. It's a biennial taking two seasons to go from seed to seed. And, yes, especially when young the leaves are edible; they have a nice peppery garlicy flavor that would probably go quite well in wilted salad or in a pesto.  A young person asked about this.  They are fascinated with the idea of foraging for edibles. So, why not collect it and eat it?  Basically, it isn't that good that it's worth it.  Think about this. The plant is native to Europe where agriculture has been practiced for a few millenia.  The plant has long been collected as a culinary herb. The really good food plants have been domesticated and are grown at least in some places for food. But not garlic mustard. Our ancestors are telling us something, but by all means collect all the garlic mustard you want. TPP would recommend collecting along a section of a walking/biking trail built on an abandoned railway line. The banks of this trail abound (too weak), are a dense, weedy, morass of garlic mustard, and all these jogger/biker types zoom/zoom-zoom by thinking (?), isn't nature wonderful?  All the botanist sees is a mess of invasive weeds, and enough peppery, garlicy greens to choke the population of Chi-town.  
Understand TPP is not opposed to foraging.  Back in the poor graduate student days TPP foraged the country side for asparagus. Clumps grew along fences in the grassy margins of maize fields, so you could ride your bike along and harvest some spears returning home with a nice veggie for din-dins. The spears were hard to see in the tall grass, so TPP would bend a discarded can (all too common) over the fence to mark the spot when the asparagus shoots were tall and easily seen so you could find the young shoots next spring. This worked well until someone figured out the marking system and foraged earlier. So TPP does not intend to discourage foraging per se, but does have a thing about invasive plants and people's insensitivity to them. One friend says she can no longer walk in woods because she can't stop pulling garlic mustard or honeysuckle seedlings.  

Ants! Equals Tropics! Aargh!

One of the more distinctive and typical features of the tropics is the inordinate prevalence of ants. This comes to mind because one little fellow just a few seconds ago, a critter only 2 mm long, just crawled out of my laptop's keyboard and stung TPP! What sheer affrontry! No where else are there so many ants, both in terms of numbers and diversity as in the tropics. At our location there are hundreds of species of ants (a colleague says over 500), mostly harmless, and a few real nasty critters, like the inch long black "bullet" ants, to some miniscule ants way less than a mm long that were found in a flower. It's pretty amazing that a 2 mm long insect can sting an organism several orders of magnitude its size, and while not debilitating it still hurt and you don't want the number a swarm of ants can deliver. But what the heck was it (TPP tends to think of an ant colony as a super-organism) doing? The answer is simple: foraging. Your first thought upon finding ants like this is to find the attractant and get rid of it ASAP. Several potential attractants were sharing the table in our cabina, some cookies, some lemon & salt plantain chips (wonderful! try them!), but not much else, and having had experience with ants in several tropical locales, all these goodies were safely being stored inside zip lock bags, a field work necessity for many reasons including excluding ants. But these bloody little ants were everywhere and they seemed centered on my laptop, and then the reason was found, a scent line had been laid along the charging cord! Not that they found anything making this foraging worthwhile, so eventually they would have left, but not before being very annoying. So first you clean off the cord, and then the floor around the cord, and then you shake out your laptop and clean under it, and of course they are coming from under the baseboard, and then you clean off the table and wipe everything down. TPP only got stung another 10 times or so in the process, and a few lingering trouble makers may get him some more. Hmm, forgot about the 3 or 4 stings to the toes. Ouch! Earlier today, a foraging trail of army ants wasn't noticed until quite a few were on TPP's boots. This particular column was raiding a wasp nest, and the wasps were swarming about helplessly while the army ants cleaned out their nest: eggs, larvae, young, trapped adults. Army ants can bite pretty hard, not scary hard, but they make up for that in sheer numbers and the speed of their over whelming attack. So best to watch out. It wouldn't be a tropical field trip unless something like this happened. This is where it would be great to have a graphic of an ant crawl up your screen.

Why we have color vision?

Here's a nice post about color vision from a blog TPP often enjoys In Defense of Plants. The two images are great because it shows you how fruit would look without color vision.  The answers given here were always part of my lectures on fruits. But in modern grocery stores you still have to know how to pick fruit that is/will be ripe especially the tropical fruits. For example, in general you cannot go by color on mangos or papaya. The flesh should just give under moderate pressure, and in TPP's opinion both are better just a tad underripe.

Over the river and through the woods

It's a wet, gloomy Saturday morning here in the upper midwest, and nothing much to do outside anyways.  Mrs. Phactor has run off to participate in a fund raising event with her professional group thus leaving TPP to his own devices.  She also left a honey-do list as if the Phactor would actually waste the whole morning blogging rather than accomplishing something useful.  So perhaps some multi-tasking is in order.  Let's see.  Item one: in the category of foraging, find and purchase aji amarillo paste.  How interesting.  A trip to Peru will take a lot longer than a Saturday morning, but it sounds like fun.  You'd think yellow chili paste would be at the local Kroger's along with Vegamite, but no.  So time to finish this, and get moving.  First, another cup of coffee and a newly made nutball cookie (my Mother's recipe) made the last time the Phactor was left to his own devices.