Paleoforaging - The Ethnobotany of Some Central Texas Plants w/ Cyrus Harp

<v Speaker 1>All right, welcome to the Crime Page A Body Doesn't Podcast.
<v Speaker 1>Now today I've got a guest whose page social media
<v Speaker 1>page I've been admiring for a while. And if you
<v Speaker 1>know me and follow this podcast, you'll know that I normally,
<v Speaker 1>except for a few chants, a few chants I guess creators,
<v Speaker 1>I tend to get bored with the foraging content. But
<v Speaker 1>a few months ago, or maybe a year ago, I
<v Speaker 1>found a page based here in Texas, based out of Austin,
<v Speaker 1>that I found fascinating and the foraging information was presented
<v Speaker 1>through a lens with a lot of focus, especially on
<v Speaker 1>indigenous cultures and Native Americans and historical the keyword historical
<v Speaker 1>uses of these plants. And so with me today is
<v Speaker 1>Cyrus Harp, who's an author you just put a book
<v Speaker 1>out too, right, Yeah, and author and ethno biologists and
<v Speaker 1>to me, you're an ethno bondist. And yeah, man, thanks
<v Speaker 1>for coming on the page. I'm excited to talk to you.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, thanks for having me man. Yeah, I've been admiring
<v Speaker 2>your work since I first started with the social media
<v Speaker 2>a couple of years ago. You really got a bunch
<v Speaker 2>of really interesting stuff, especially with Texas. I've only seen
<v Speaker 2>cool Texas plants that I never really looked at and
<v Speaker 2>shown them to me. So that's been really cool.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, the plants in the geology here are the most
<v Speaker 1>the most interesting thing. And but you know, at the
<v Speaker 1>end of the day, the page I do isn't for everybody,
<v Speaker 1>but it's you know, for those that it is for,
<v Speaker 1>they seem to like it. But but first off, I
<v Speaker 1>guess I mean, I want to talk to you about
<v Speaker 1>a number of the things that I that you know,
<v Speaker 1>you put out on social media and just the interesting
<v Speaker 1>facts and historical information. But but first off, I guess
<v Speaker 1>I should ask how did you get into all of
<v Speaker 1>this and and how did your focus on plants and
<v Speaker 1>especially the historical the history of it? Where'd that, where'd
<v Speaker 1>that come from? How did it start?
<v Speaker 2>Well, it really kind of fell into it just encountering
<v Speaker 2>some ethnographies in grad school. So I was I did
<v Speaker 2>a biology degree or ecology degree at ut and then
<v Speaker 2>I was more focused on like plants and insects, and
<v Speaker 2>so I applied got a PhD program at Berkeley studying
<v Speaker 2>actually trunk coal force ecology with the you know, looking
<v Speaker 2>at insect or bivery on tree canopies. So my, my
<v Speaker 2>advisor was a botanist, and so I went into there
<v Speaker 2>thinking I was going to do that, and about a
<v Speaker 2>year or so and so I had already been into
<v Speaker 2>like forging and just like primitive skills stuff from young age,
<v Speaker 2>but really just sort of goofing around. The one thing
<v Speaker 2>that I always had back of my mind is like,
<v Speaker 2>where where's all this stuff coming from? Especially with the forging.
<v Speaker 2>You would see people saying like this is edible, but
<v Speaker 2>it was just never really clear to me how this
<v Speaker 2>was known. And I also had long standing interests in
<v Speaker 2>American Indian uses of the land and how they lived
<v Speaker 2>off the land for thousands of years, about all this
<v Speaker 2>like modern development, and so California was one of the
<v Speaker 2>last states to be colonized, and so we had this
<v Speaker 2>really unique period around I think eighteen ninety six is
<v Speaker 2>the term ethnobotany was coined. And then from around then
<v Speaker 2>and through like the nineteen forties, there's a lot of ethnographers,
<v Speaker 2>anthropologists and ethnobotanists actually studying the Indians who were still
<v Speaker 2>you know, living their traditional life ways at the time,
<v Speaker 2>especially in California, you have people living true hundred gather lifestyles.
<v Speaker 2>In the early nineteen hundreds, and then we had anthropologists
<v Speaker 2>going around actually documenting it. So it was throughout like
<v Speaker 2>global history. This is kind of an unprecedented sort of
<v Speaker 2>combination of things. And so out of that comes a
<v Speaker 2>huge body of work ethnographies and ethnobotanys just describing the
<v Speaker 2>lifeways of indigenous peoples and more. Really in North America,
<v Speaker 2>there's a lot of them. But I was in California
<v Speaker 2>and that's some really good ones there, and so I
<v Speaker 2>started reading those. And you know, when I had applied,
<v Speaker 2>I had said one of my interests was ethnobotany and
<v Speaker 2>ethno entomology or uses of insects, and so I was like,
<v Speaker 2>I'm gonna do this as kind of like a little
<v Speaker 2>side project. I started out doing the native uses of
<v Speaker 2>California natives of insects specifically for eating, and so I
<v Speaker 2>did some research on that and came up with a
<v Speaker 2>few research posters for conferences and a couple of lectures
<v Speaker 2>on that. But at the time too, I was like, wow,
<v Speaker 2>there's all these plant uses and a lot of these
<v Speaker 2>plant species are also in Texas, and I plan on
<v Speaker 2>going back there. So I started building up a manuscript
<v Speaker 2>so I would go in any plant genus that occurred
<v Speaker 2>in Texas. I would record all of its uses for food, medicine,
<v Speaker 2>and material by indigenous people's and so over like ten
<v Speaker 2>years I built up you know, well, I dropped out
<v Speaker 2>of graduate school after like four years because I was like,
<v Speaker 2>I don't really want to do this. I started teaching
<v Speaker 2>forging classes on the side based on what I learned,
<v Speaker 2>and I just didn't like the direction it was going with.
<v Speaker 2>It was so much with like politics, like you've got
<v Speaker 2>to you have to be very well liked, I think,
<v Speaker 2>and you have to be very concentrated on like buying
<v Speaker 2>for grants and publishing and stuff.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it sounds like total health.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, And as my my work for DRESS, I started
<v Speaker 2>to realize I was much more interested in that's eth
<v Speaker 2>no bodanyth no biology stuff. And I didn't really see
<v Speaker 2>a way that I could publish any sort of thesis
<v Speaker 2>that would satisfy the requirements of my degree because it
<v Speaker 2>was going to be descriptive science and they want me
<v Speaker 2>to do like, how am I going to do some
<v Speaker 2>sort of statistical analysis on this WARFA? You really can't.
<v Speaker 2>And descriptive science is just like completely pushed to the wayside.
<v Speaker 2>It used to be that was like the majority of
<v Speaker 2>what was done, but now it's like not even considered science.
<v Speaker 1>So what do you what do you mean explain to
<v Speaker 1>everybody what you mean by descriptive science. What would that be,
<v Speaker 1>like a paper or something that just describes how something
<v Speaker 1>was used, or how something occurs or how something grows
<v Speaker 1>in habitat and what kind of ecology it exists. Is
<v Speaker 1>that is that kind of what you mean or what?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, basically just describing patterns of nature something where you're
<v Speaker 2>not really the lack of statistical analysis of like numerical
<v Speaker 2>data sets is the only real difference. Like if you
<v Speaker 2>go to some island like Darwin and they're just recording
<v Speaker 2>all the species that you happen to come across, that's
<v Speaker 2>descriptive science. But if you were to, you know, do
<v Speaker 2>a sort of a regular transsect of the island and
<v Speaker 2>then take notes of what species you find at each
<v Speaker 2>you know, point on that transsect and do a statistical
<v Speaker 2>analysis of you know, the distribution of species and the
<v Speaker 2>diversity and all. I thought that would be real science.
<v Speaker 2>But I mean, like there's huge value just in describing
<v Speaker 2>and I would say, uh, in the initial stages in
<v Speaker 2>many sciences, the descriptive science is really the backbone of it.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, one hundred percent. And I think, you know,
<v Speaker 1>there's for the more statistical stuff that's really important, especially
<v Speaker 1>if you're you know, you're measuring you know, pollinators or
<v Speaker 1>you know, pollinator ratios for a certain species of plant
<v Speaker 1>or something like that. But there's got to be room
<v Speaker 1>for the stuff that you're talking about, for the descriptive science.
<v Speaker 1>And certainly when I come across papers that are like that,
<v Speaker 1>those are always the more fun ones to read.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, there's a lot of interesting stuff like that. But
<v Speaker 2>it's like I guess also the lack of an experiment
<v Speaker 2>would be a definition of the descriptive science.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, definitely, Yeah, Like what's what's the point? If
<v Speaker 1>there's no point, then we you know, that's not public.
<v Speaker 1>There'sind of like that thinking like you know, and descriptive science,
<v Speaker 1>there's not well what are you hoping to achieve? What
<v Speaker 1>are you measuring? And it's like I just wanted to
<v Speaker 1>study this landscape. There's no end goal of you know.
<v Speaker 1>I think if I could just interject for a second, two,
<v Speaker 1>I get people. I don't know if people do things
<v Speaker 1>like grad school. I mean, I guess for some things.
<v Speaker 1>It's interesting, but especially when you live in a country
<v Speaker 1>where you know science is just going to be perpetually defunded.
<v Speaker 1>You know, people ask me what should I do, and
<v Speaker 1>I'm like, oh, get an electrical you know, license electricians degree,
<v Speaker 1>you know, like and then study. But make sure you
<v Speaker 1>have time to study your stuff on the side, and
<v Speaker 1>don't get off into a lot of debt. Don't buy
<v Speaker 1>dumb shit you don't need, because there's just you know,
<v Speaker 1>the future. People spend all this money going to school
<v Speaker 1>and then come out and can't get jobs because our
<v Speaker 1>society doesn't respect science.
<v Speaker 2>You know.
<v Speaker 1>It's not like India or China where people are getting
<v Speaker 1>paid to write floras or getting paid you know, where
<v Speaker 1>they actually fund science people. Science isn't really funded here,
<v Speaker 1>especially now. So I can definitely see. So you dropped
<v Speaker 1>out of the graduate program.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so I was. I had a fellowship for five years,
<v Speaker 2>and so I was, and I kind of about two
<v Speaker 2>years in I started to have doubts and then by
<v Speaker 2>the third year I was like, yeah, I don't think
<v Speaker 2>I'm gonna do this. But I still stuck around for
<v Speaker 2>the fourth year for that funding. And during that time
<v Speaker 2>I just like went all in on doing my research
<v Speaker 2>manuscript for like going through all these ethnographies and stuff
<v Speaker 2>and kind of just doing the bare minimum outside of that.
<v Speaker 2>But I didn't take the fifth year. I'm honorable like that.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I feel you. It's you know
<v Speaker 1>when you said California was this last state to be
<v Speaker 1>colonized when I was living out there, because I lived
<v Speaker 1>out there for twenty years, that was something I always
<v Speaker 1>thought about. I'm like, oh, the death cult reached here last.
<v Speaker 1>That's why there's still so much compared to the rest
<v Speaker 1>of the country. And that's why there's not only a
<v Speaker 1>lot of public land, but a lot of intact habitat
<v Speaker 1>left too. And I I think, you know what, who
<v Speaker 1>was it, Ishi? What was the There was a gentleman.
<v Speaker 2>I was just about to mention, Yeah, people are interested
<v Speaker 2>in this sort of thing. It's it's a very famous book. Ishi.
<v Speaker 2>I thinks the Last wild Indian some on my bookshelf
<v Speaker 2>right here, written by a very big anthropologists at the time.
<v Speaker 2>Well actually this book was written by his wife. But uh,
<v Speaker 2>I think Kraber, Alfred Kraber, he uh was the one
<v Speaker 2>who was like basically the caretaker or the guardian and
<v Speaker 2>essentially for ishi. His his tribe was completely murdered by
<v Speaker 2>my settlers, and then he just showed up in at
<v Speaker 2>like a some some town in reading, California, I think,
<v Speaker 2>and the sheriff just like didn't know what to do
<v Speaker 2>with him, so locked him up. And then Alfred Krab comes,
<v Speaker 2>he hears about this, and he comes from he was
<v Speaker 2>at Berkeley, and he comes and like gets the guy
<v Speaker 2>and takes them back to UC Perkeley. It just like
<v Speaker 2>has him living like in the museum essentially like doing
<v Speaker 2>flint napping and like making bows and then like writing
<v Speaker 2>about him. It's a very like sad story if you
<v Speaker 2>really look at it and think about it. But it's
<v Speaker 2>also very interesting to see because he was living it
<v Speaker 2>was a traditional hunter gatherer for his entire life until
<v Speaker 2>you know, maybe his late thirties or mid thirties, when
<v Speaker 2>he the last of his tribe died and he'd didn't
<v Speaker 2>want just wandering around for a while. I think they
<v Speaker 2>called him stealing or killing some like livestock or something. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>it's a really crazy story.
<v Speaker 1>I remember I was in I forget what county it was,
<v Speaker 1>if it was Butte County. It was somewhere near Chico,
<v Speaker 1>but I was there was a McNab cypress stand that
<v Speaker 1>was on private land that I wanted to go document
<v Speaker 1>because I was really obsessed with the cypresses, the California cypresses,
<v Speaker 1>the genus Hespero Cyprus. They used to be in Compressis.
<v Speaker 1>But that got it got the whole, it got split
<v Speaker 1>up when the DNA was looked at and was realized
<v Speaker 1>there you know, Old World and New World cypresses, they're
<v Speaker 1>different genara, They're they're pretty diverged. But I was I went,
<v Speaker 1>you know, you had to go on this. I was trespassing.
<v Speaker 1>I was like, this is like ten years ago. And
<v Speaker 1>I ended up meeting the owner when I was there
<v Speaker 1>and he was cool with it. But yeah, I had
<v Speaker 1>to like hop this gate and then I took a
<v Speaker 1>bike because it was like an eight mile ride in.
<v Speaker 1>I took a bike in my dog and made it
<v Speaker 1>to this cypress grove because you could see it on
<v Speaker 1>the satellite. I mean, cypresses are very distinct. This like
<v Speaker 1>blue foliage and that was growing on this gabbro soil,
<v Speaker 1>which is like this weathered oxidized, bright red soil. And
<v Speaker 1>it was right across from I guess the cave where
<v Speaker 1>she had been living on this big canyon, like this
<v Speaker 1>vast like canyon. You know, it was like half a
<v Speaker 1>mile across, and it was it was out there. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>it's still so rugged out there. It's crazy like out
<v Speaker 1>by like you know, Oraville, Chico, Feather River. It's fucking crazy.
<v Speaker 1>But but yeah, it was a cool It was a
<v Speaker 1>cool story. I remember, you know, reading that when a
<v Speaker 1>friend who had told me about that, had done a
<v Speaker 1>survey at that population for PG and E that cypress
<v Speaker 1>population mcnabbs cypress, really cool tree. It smells incredible. It's
<v Speaker 1>got resin glands and fire dependent cypress got seraoninous cones
<v Speaker 1>that don't open unless they're supposed to fire. But he
<v Speaker 1>told me about it and he's like, yeah, it was
<v Speaker 1>right across from Echi's the Echi Wilderness, and so yeah,
<v Speaker 1>that was how I first learned about it, and I
<v Speaker 1>looked more into it who he was. But anyway, okay,
<v Speaker 1>sorry not to not to digress, but so you were
<v Speaker 1>you were you dropped out of the grad program, but
<v Speaker 1>you were still you obviously had a passion for this stuff.
<v Speaker 1>It wasn't just you know, I'm doing this because you're
<v Speaker 1>supposed to go to college and get a job and
<v Speaker 1>whatever you were. You were very passionate about this. So
<v Speaker 1>where'd you end up going after that? What happened?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah? So it was funny you say people should do
<v Speaker 2>electrician or something did, because I mean I wasn't then
<v Speaker 2>become electrician. But I basically spent like six seven, maybe
<v Speaker 2>even eighty years just doing a remodeling and property management
<v Speaker 2>and Austin. So I bought I had like saved up
<v Speaker 2>a bunch of money in my for my fellowship my
<v Speaker 2>last two years of grad school because I was already
<v Speaker 2>planning to split, and so I bought an r V
<v Speaker 2>and so I didn't have to pay rent because Berkeley
<v Speaker 2>is super progressive like that, they'll just allow you to
<v Speaker 2>park an RV on the street and live out of that.
<v Speaker 2>So I bought an RV for like three thousand dollars
<v Speaker 2>and just saved as much as I possibly could for
<v Speaker 2>my fellowship. And then because the housing market in Austin
<v Speaker 2>was booming at the time, and my family had been
<v Speaker 2>doing some sort of real estate deals in the town,
<v Speaker 2>so they knew how to do it. So I moved
<v Speaker 2>back in town. With that that money I saved for
<v Speaker 2>my fellowship, I put a down payment on a house
<v Speaker 2>and just remodeled the whole thing myself with like I
<v Speaker 2>was like going around town, like tearing down people's decks
<v Speaker 2>that they were trying to get rid of, to get
<v Speaker 2>scrap lumber and all this stuff, and just spent like
<v Speaker 2>a couple of years doing that, and then flipped that
<v Speaker 2>house and made a big profit, and with the profit
<v Speaker 2>of that, bought two other houses and did the same
<v Speaker 2>thing with those. And I was also doing a lot
<v Speaker 2>of uh like repairers handyman work on the side and
<v Speaker 2>property management work and just trying to save up money
<v Speaker 2>and build a sort of base. But also at the
<v Speaker 2>same time, basically all my free time I would spend
<v Speaker 2>doing my research and then also just going out in
<v Speaker 2>the field making sure I knew how to identify every
<v Speaker 2>plant and trying to replicate all these historical indigenous practices
<v Speaker 2>that I was reading about in my research. So I
<v Speaker 2>was planning eventually to do well what I'm doing now.
<v Speaker 1>And so but you and you basically moved back to
<v Speaker 1>Austin from California then after you left the GRAB program, right, yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>So you took that lens you had in California for
<v Speaker 1>and you would had you already been into plants already,
<v Speaker 1>I mean like studying, were you studying Bonnie or you
<v Speaker 1>knew some of the genera out there or what.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, definitely into Bonnie from since since my undergressure years.
<v Speaker 2>I would say that the plants and the insects were
<v Speaker 2>my biggest interests.
<v Speaker 1>It's cool, It's it's really cool to learn, you know,
<v Speaker 1>to become familiar with the genus or a family a
<v Speaker 1>thousand miles away and then come to you know, to
<v Speaker 1>a place like Texas and see variations on that same
<v Speaker 1>genus but that have speciated for Texas conditions, you know,
<v Speaker 1>summer rain instead of summer dry, heavy limestone soils because
<v Speaker 1>limestone basically it creates new species of plants because of
<v Speaker 1>how stressful it can be to grow in. I guess
<v Speaker 1>that must have been really exciting for you too, to
<v Speaker 1>see genera you were already familiar with, but different variations
<v Speaker 1>on them.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. It definitely totally opened my perspective on things to
<v Speaker 2>out there for a long time and learn all the
<v Speaker 2>plants in California. It's actually California is more plant species
<v Speaker 2>than any other state. Yeah. And then also at the
<v Speaker 2>time I wasn't flying back like I would visit back
<v Speaker 2>to Austin for holidays and stuff, but I never flew.
<v Speaker 2>I would always drive all the way there and back
<v Speaker 2>because there's so much beautiful landscapes along that whole route
<v Speaker 2>in the Southwest and throughout you know, the mountains of California. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>and so I just so many different variations of plants
<v Speaker 2>and ecologies, and so I definitely turned them around my
<v Speaker 2>old perspectives from just like living in one place. Yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>you mentioned Cyprus thing in California. I didn't not know
<v Speaker 2>that that was there because I've heard of that in
<v Speaker 2>like central Mexico.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's it's loose Hispera Cyprus loose to tanicas the
<v Speaker 1>Mexican one, and they grow at like nine thousand feet,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and these like really relatively cool basically like
<v Speaker 1>the climate of San Francisco, but with summer rain. But
<v Speaker 1>then there's like nine species in cal and they're all
<v Speaker 1>really rare. They're all you know, they're all relative, and
<v Speaker 1>they're relatively restricted to soil special soil types. I think
<v Speaker 1>all of them are restricted just you know, unique soil
<v Speaker 1>types like Hespero sippers sargentii only grows on serpentine McNab.
<v Speaker 1>Cypress only grows on serpentine and gabro, you know, ultramafic
<v Speaker 1>rocks Hespero, cipprss bakeriye, grows on old lava flows where
<v Speaker 1>it's like the only thing that can colonize some of
<v Speaker 1>these lava flows. Like if you got to like Timbered Crater, California,
<v Speaker 1>Cuyamaca cypress down south grows on I think that grows
<v Speaker 1>on Gabro too. Tacate cypress grows on gabro. You know,
<v Speaker 1>like all these soils that only exist because of the
<v Speaker 1>subduction zone that once existed off the coast of California.
<v Speaker 1>It's all these you know, ultramafic rocks that you normally
<v Speaker 1>encounter on the ocean got basically shoveled off onto the
<v Speaker 1>side of the former continent or the old California, you know,
<v Speaker 1>the North Americ count But anyway, but yet I think
<v Speaker 1>Texas the only one that we get Isspera ciprus Arizonica
<v Speaker 1>and Big Bend. There's like a little disjunct population down there.
<v Speaker 3>But anyway, so the one in central Mexico, where does
<v Speaker 3>that grow on some weird soil types.
<v Speaker 1>No, it's just like a forest tree. It's more common
<v Speaker 1>and it grows all the way down. It's planted in
<v Speaker 1>Costa Rica. They say it's not native, but I mean it's,
<v Speaker 1>you know, Costa Rica. I'm sure it was there at
<v Speaker 1>some point because it's Costa Rica's not far from Mexico,
<v Speaker 1>and it's got a lot of the same conditions and
<v Speaker 1>high elevations, you know, like these cool foggy forests. But
<v Speaker 1>you know, if you like just outside of Mexico City
<v Speaker 1>in the mountains, you can see Uspera ciprus lusatanica and
<v Speaker 1>they formed these big trees, like beautiful trees, tall forest trees.
<v Speaker 1>But the ones in California are all adapted to fire,
<v Speaker 1>and I don't think Lusatanica has adapted to fire. Maybe
<v Speaker 1>it is, maybe it's adapted to some sort of disturbance
<v Speaker 1>or something. But yeah, they're cool though. They all smell
<v Speaker 1>really good, and they were great. I was using them
<v Speaker 1>for illegal tree planting because if you plant them in
<v Speaker 1>the winter in full sun, they'll sit tight through the
<v Speaker 1>dry summers and then just continue growing. They grow fast too.
<v Speaker 1>They're really fucking great. They smell good. The foliage kind
<v Speaker 1>of smells like lemonye pine, you know.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, apparently Cortes when he was pillaging the area. He
<v Speaker 2>built all these palaces out of that species and like
<v Speaker 2>totally deforested the surrounding areas in that species, which kind
<v Speaker 2>of makes sense to all. The cypress family has great
<v Speaker 2>wood for construction.
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah, super resistant. Yeah, they did the same thing.
<v Speaker 1>Where I am on the border, on the south border
<v Speaker 1>by mccollan in the Rio Grand Valley with all the
<v Speaker 1>monazuma cypress unrelated. I mean it's in the same family
<v Speaker 1>but different genus, but there used to be these gargantuan trees.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, it's the same species you get in Austin,
<v Speaker 1>you know, the one they call bald cypress in Austin
<v Speaker 1>is actually just the northern end of a monazuma cypress
<v Speaker 1>population that goes all the way down to Wahaka and
<v Speaker 1>I think the Guatemala two. But but yeah, they took everything.
<v Speaker 1>It's fucked, you know, it's a fucking death cult. But anyway,
<v Speaker 1>but yeah, so, okay, so you're back in Texas and when,
<v Speaker 1>So when did you really get into doing what you do,
<v Speaker 1>into things like flint napping, learning, like do you how
<v Speaker 1>to use fibers? Uh, you know, food sources, stuff like that,
<v Speaker 1>Like how when did you really get get into, you know,
<v Speaker 1>doing that as much as you are now.
<v Speaker 2>Well, I started that back in grad school in California,
<v Speaker 2>and the flint mapping specifically there was Uh, I just
<v Speaker 2>started to get into that in my own. It's at
<v Speaker 2>the same time, you know, I was just really into
<v Speaker 2>ethnal models. Just like one of the things that's been
<v Speaker 2>fascinated me since childhood is like how indigenous people living
<v Speaker 2>off the land, like completely like hunter gatherers, styling a
<v Speaker 2>lot more of course horticulturists and stuff, but I was
<v Speaker 2>just like fascinated by that, that lifestyle, living directly with nature.
<v Speaker 2>And so I was like looking on YouTube videos how
<v Speaker 2>to flint nap and all this stuff, because they also
<v Speaker 2>have an obsidian in California. And I went out my
<v Speaker 2>mine some oubsidy on my own and there was a
<v Speaker 2>guy with a website, Dino Labisi's some Primitive Skills website,
<v Speaker 2>and he had regular meetings at like a public park
<v Speaker 2>in the Bay Area. So I just started showing up
<v Speaker 2>to that and some of these like I didn't know
<v Speaker 2>it at the time, but they're like big old school
<v Speaker 2>names and the flint napping game, and so I would
<v Speaker 2>go and nap in the park with them, and then
<v Speaker 2>I basically just kept that up because I also knew
<v Speaker 2>and Austin had some of the best quality flint in
<v Speaker 2>North America. So I can get any high quality shirt
<v Speaker 2>for flint mapp anytime I want. Here the fun thing
<v Speaker 2>to do, just like I like the things where I
<v Speaker 2>can go out and interact with nature. So doing that
<v Speaker 2>and also with the plants and the quarter, it's just
<v Speaker 2>like I'm always trying to figure out, like how what
<v Speaker 2>it would be like to be a human and paleolithic,
<v Speaker 2>like actually relying on nature entirely for your survival, wild nature,
<v Speaker 2>Like what all of those things would look like?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, oh yeah. For me, I think the thing I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I'm like, I'm really interested in how a gave can
<v Speaker 1>be turned into a fiber, you know, take just from
<v Speaker 1>the leaf blades, you know, and I've seen videos on it.
<v Speaker 1>It's really fascinating stuff. But for me, it's more like,
<v Speaker 1>you know, I love these plants so much, and I
<v Speaker 1>love what they do. I love, you know, the millions
<v Speaker 1>of years of evolution they've spent on this landscape, forming
<v Speaker 1>relationships with the insects and the fungi and the people
<v Speaker 1>and so it's kind of like a way for me
<v Speaker 1>to pay homage to them. Like I just you know,
<v Speaker 1>there was a lady here who made she would make
<v Speaker 1>like jewelry stuff. I'm not like a jewelry guy either.
<v Speaker 1>I don't wear jewelry. And I had like a I'm
<v Speaker 1>wearing like a bracelet I picked up in Ecuador in
<v Speaker 1>a market for like two bucks made out of palm fiber.
<v Speaker 1>But aside from that, I don't really wear anything. But
<v Speaker 1>she she had made, she was making like beads. She
<v Speaker 1>was turning like you know a lot of legumes, their
<v Speaker 1>seeds memozoid trees, the mimosoid subfamily that where they're so
<v Speaker 1>they're so common in the deserts. There are seeds you
<v Speaker 1>could turn into a beachs like senegalia, berlandiery ebony seeds
<v Speaker 1>Texas ebony, which is a memosoid legume. And so I
<v Speaker 1>was like, could you make a necklace and not to wear,
<v Speaker 1>but I just want to like hanging on the wall
<v Speaker 1>out of like Dermatophylum, the mountain laurel, which is a
<v Speaker 1>horrible name for a plant. It doesn't grow in the
<v Speaker 1>mountains and it's not related to laurel at all. It's
<v Speaker 1>a beam. But can you make a necklace out at
<v Speaker 1>Dermatophylum and the Rapdodis snail shells, I think you get
<v Speaker 1>you get rapdotas snails up there too, right where the
<v Speaker 1>habitat is still intact.
<v Speaker 2>I don't know about that one.
<v Speaker 1>I've seen it. I saw them in Fort Worth. I
<v Speaker 1>saw him in Fort Worth at a at a prairie
<v Speaker 1>site near a bus stop, and I was like, oh,
<v Speaker 1>I didn't know that came up this this north anyway.
<v Speaker 1>So she made like a little necklace out of that,
<v Speaker 1>and I just I just love having that stuff around me.
<v Speaker 1>You know, it's like it's part of the land. That's
<v Speaker 1>just it's just won't make sense. But I guess you know,
<v Speaker 1>for all this like finding information about this stuff, did
<v Speaker 1>you have trouble doing that because a lot of this
<v Speaker 1>information is lost or it's just it's I mean, what
<v Speaker 1>how are you doing research on this? Were you having
<v Speaker 1>to like consult old books? How did you go about it?
<v Speaker 2>Well? First time I say that about the like appreciation
<v Speaker 2>of the nature, that is one of the biggest reasons why.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, for me, it's like kind of one and
<v Speaker 2>the same. I think I'm fascinated by this stuff because
<v Speaker 2>I appreciate nature, and I also think that other people
<v Speaker 2>would appreciate nature more if they knew just how fascinating
<v Speaker 2>it was, and that's why I share it. I've also
<v Speaker 2>made necklaces out of I mean a Boodhist prayer beads
<v Speaker 2>out of the Texas Mala marl cool.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>The research I started out in like university libraries like
<v Speaker 2>at Berkeley, and then when I moved back to Texas,
<v Speaker 2>I started I also looked at the University of Texas
<v Speaker 2>library here, and I would just like go through all
<v Speaker 2>the sections where I knew that such references would be in.
<v Speaker 2>But then I also got pretty good at finding them online.
<v Speaker 2>There's a lot of like like archive dot org is
<v Speaker 2>a good source for a lot of these old like
<v Speaker 2>public domain publications, and just like a lot of I
<v Speaker 2>don't know, just searching online and building up a massive
<v Speaker 2>reference library, like I have a digital library that has
<v Speaker 2>many thousands of files, and also have a physical library
<v Speaker 2>too that's substantial, but not nearly as much as a
<v Speaker 2>digital one. So I just kind of read through all
<v Speaker 2>of those. That's why it's taken so long, because a
<v Speaker 2>lot of them are just like I don't know, like
<v Speaker 2>an early expedition in account like a Spanish expedition. Like
<v Speaker 2>the diary. You can read that whole thing. It's like
<v Speaker 2>five hundred pages and you'll maybe get like a dozen
<v Speaker 2>sort of references to some use of plants. That's not
<v Speaker 2>like so Ericans to be useless. But when you do
<v Speaker 2>find those, it is can be very fascinating and I'll
<v Speaker 2>still give you some interesting context all that. But there
<v Speaker 2>are a lot of like ethno botanies like strictly and
<v Speaker 2>those were have been the most useful front research on
<v Speaker 2>what I've prioritized, like for my im both I recently
<v Speaker 2>published that's basically every ethnobotany that I've found from North
<v Speaker 2>America is included in that because there's you know, usually
<v Speaker 2>one hundred or so or plant species, and some of
<v Speaker 2>them are from Texas. A lot of a lot of
<v Speaker 2>them are from Texas.
<v Speaker 1>Offs mm hm for the amount of philum for the
<v Speaker 1>Mountain Laurel. Do you know. I've got some guy once
<v Speaker 1>who told me he had he had ground that up
<v Speaker 1>and consumed it when he was a kid. And he's like,
<v Speaker 1>I get what he said. I think he said it
<v Speaker 1>was like it sent his ass to the moon. But
<v Speaker 1>then he puked and he was just like it wasn't pleasant.
<v Speaker 1>He's like, I never did it again, but they do
<v Speaker 1>get you fucked up. He was some old Texans, some
<v Speaker 1>old dude I met in San Antonio. He didn't seem
<v Speaker 1>like the kind of kid that the kind of guy
<v Speaker 1>who had have a story like that either. But you know,
<v Speaker 1>I definitely thought higher of him after he had done that.
<v Speaker 1>I was like, Oh, wow, you were kind of loose
<v Speaker 1>back in the day. What's yeah, do you know, Uh
<v Speaker 1>was that used a lot for that or what's the
<v Speaker 1>history of.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, that's one of the most important plants, uh, at
<v Speaker 2>least ceremonially for for American Indians and Texas Historically hunters
<v Speaker 2>that do not recommend anyone try anything with those beans.
<v Speaker 2>There extremely poisonous for one of most poisonous plant species
<v Speaker 2>in Texas. A single bean can kill a grown adult.
<v Speaker 2>But you know, if you do swallow a whole bean,
<v Speaker 2>it's probably going to pass through digestive system. But if
<v Speaker 2>you were to crush up old bean, there's a good
<v Speaker 2>chance that it will kill you. But well, he crushed
<v Speaker 2>it up.
<v Speaker 1>He said he didn't die. Yeah, he said he crushed
<v Speaker 1>it up, but he didn't die. But it was fucking
<v Speaker 1>it was. But anyway, sorry, go ahead.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, you it's possible to survive he ate a whole
<v Speaker 2>one maybe, but that's not the way it was normally
<v Speaker 2>consumed historically. So the way they did it was just
<v Speaker 2>a weak cold infusion of a small amount. So they
<v Speaker 2>would take one or maybe multiple beans and then crush
<v Speaker 2>them up into a powder, mixed that with cold water,
<v Speaker 2>and then they would pass that bowl around and then
<v Speaker 2>each take a six of it through a straw. And
<v Speaker 2>it's had to be sort of a stimulant and u
<v Speaker 2>fork effects, but it's pretty clear that they're consuming rather
<v Speaker 2>small lots of it. I haven't tried it myself. I
<v Speaker 2>want to, but I'm also just.
<v Speaker 1>Like it's I mean, if you do, definitely take notes,
<v Speaker 1>but but yeah, I'm just you know, because that's what
<v Speaker 1>you know, the mescal beans, that's what mescaline was was
<v Speaker 1>named after. And there were were there were a bunch
<v Speaker 1>pulled out of White Shaman Cave. They were found in
<v Speaker 1>White Shaman Cave on the Pecos with like a five
<v Speaker 1>thousand year old drive payoty button.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it was a big part of the ceremonial culture,
<v Speaker 2>especially the payoti ceremonial complex. There's a few good articles
<v Speaker 2>Shorties wrote about that. But if they were, they probably
<v Speaker 2>were consumed rich realistically along with payoty at least at
<v Speaker 2>some point or in some times and places. But they
<v Speaker 2>were also more into the nineteenth or the twentieth century
<v Speaker 2>being used more just as a ceremonial object in paired
<v Speaker 2>payoty ceremonies. So they would have beads, bead necklaces of
<v Speaker 2>the Texas model moral being for those ceremonies. And they're
<v Speaker 2>also just used for what would you call it a
<v Speaker 2>sort of medicine like not in like the modern medicine
<v Speaker 2>tern but it's kind of like for for luck, for
<v Speaker 2>for sort of metaphysical purposes. It would be kept on
<v Speaker 2>the person by some of some authors say, uh, every Indiana,
<v Speaker 2>Texas was carrying Texas nonin ol being just for those
<v Speaker 2>ritualistic purposes. But they're also very commonly used for beads
<v Speaker 2>like on on legging fringes and stuff like that.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's a beautiful seed. It's I mean, it's it
<v Speaker 1>doesn't surprise me at all. Do you know, uh, any
<v Speaker 1>other any of the other of those leggings, like like
<v Speaker 1>Texas Avenue are you familiar with any uses for those
<v Speaker 1>or how they were used in the past.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, Evanopsis at Bono, Yeah, that has an edible use.
<v Speaker 2>It doesn't occur in Austin, so I haven't been able
<v Speaker 2>to try it.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I'll bring you some seeds sometimes because uh, I
<v Speaker 1>think especially with climate changes, you know, who knows it'll
<v Speaker 1>maybe it'll. I know they're they're frost tolerant. But I've
<v Speaker 1>heard with the seeds, you know, they occur in these
<v Speaker 1>like thick woody pods, and the pods beautiful too. After
<v Speaker 1>the seeds come out, they look like a keyboard on
<v Speaker 1>the inside, like a piano keyboard. They've got the you know,
<v Speaker 1>the holes where the seeds sit. But I've heard you
<v Speaker 1>can pop the seeds like popcorn. You can roast them
<v Speaker 1>and they'll kind of pop like that. And if you
<v Speaker 1>get them when they're soft, when they're still green before
<v Speaker 1>they turn that like beautiful burgundy brownish red, that that
<v Speaker 1>they're edible too. But goddamn, that's one of my favorite trees.
<v Speaker 2>Man.
<v Speaker 1>They smell incredible when they bloom. Their heat tolerant as hell.
<v Speaker 1>They're slow to get going. They need a little bit
<v Speaker 1>of cover. They're not like a pioneer species. They're slow
<v Speaker 1>to get going. They need shade when they're young, but
<v Speaker 1>once they get established, I mean they turn into the
<v Speaker 1>size of oak trees, you know, just these beautiful, really
<v Speaker 1>fragrant and really important nitrogen fixing plants. So yeah, I'll
<v Speaker 1>bring you some seeds, man, I want to get I
<v Speaker 1>want more people to grow those up there too. I'm
<v Speaker 1>sure they probably survive in San Antonio or their marginal maybe,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know.
<v Speaker 2>I have seen I found one growing. And also I
<v Speaker 2>don't know who it was planted or not. It was
<v Speaker 2>kind of in an area possibly was planted, but it
<v Speaker 2>was grown all right, But yeah, I do you have
<v Speaker 2>it recorded? My research is being eaten. I also follow
<v Speaker 2>a person down in South Texas. Is just similar stuff
<v Speaker 2>to mean, who's eaten them? But so, the seeds were
<v Speaker 2>eaten by early Texans and Mexican folk. The soft beans
<v Speaker 2>were boiled with milk and served with pepper and salt,
<v Speaker 2>and the hard black beans were made into a coffee substitute,
<v Speaker 2>which they always say coffee substituting. People think that means caffeinated,
<v Speaker 2>but that just means some dried roasted plant material made
<v Speaker 2>into a detoxin or infusion.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it was.
<v Speaker 2>It was reported that if a large amount of the
<v Speaker 2>beans were eaten, it can cause a discharge from the
<v Speaker 2>urethra like that caused.
<v Speaker 1>By It's amazing. I'm gonna have to try that. It's
<v Speaker 1>a it's a fucking great genus. There's there's one that
<v Speaker 1>grows in Baja California, sir. Which gives you an idea
<v Speaker 1>of you know, which is like four thousand miles away,
<v Speaker 1>three thousand miles away, So it gives you an idea
<v Speaker 1>of how old this lineage is. If there's one, you know,
<v Speaker 1>they there's the lineage diverged. There's a one in South Texas,
<v Speaker 1>one in way down in Bay, California, sir. And then
<v Speaker 1>there's one in Sinala. I think that's really rare, and
<v Speaker 1>another Eponopsis species. But I love the genus, man, It's
<v Speaker 1>one of my favorite trees. And they're really easy to
<v Speaker 1>grow too. They just you know, you just got to
<v Speaker 1>collect the seeds. So I think I'll, yeah, I need
<v Speaker 1>to do that. But all those leggings are so fucking dope,
<v Speaker 1>man like like misky, Like what's up with misky? That
<v Speaker 1>was obviously a really important one.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, the most important wild flat food in the Southwest,
<v Speaker 2>no question. It's most underrated wild edible for sure. And
<v Speaker 2>the way it gets hated on Texans is just so
<v Speaker 2>shameful because people are like, oh, it takes over and
<v Speaker 2>it's invasive. But it's not invasive and it doesn't really
<v Speaker 2>take over. It's just because the land was clear, clear
<v Speaker 2>cut for like ranchers. Yeah, then it and it springs
<v Speaker 2>back so easily, be says the deepest taproot of any
<v Speaker 2>plant species in the whole world, go to two hundred
<v Speaker 2>feet deep.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's a fucking great plant.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. Wait, what'd you call it?
<v Speaker 1>Freato fight p h r E A t O and
<v Speaker 1>you know, and and the reason is common. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>it kind of drives me enoughs and people call it invasive.
<v Speaker 1>It's that's so ship for brain, It's it's like not
<v Speaker 1>invasive at all. It's a pioneer species. And when you
<v Speaker 1>graze the ship out of a land and don't do
<v Speaker 1>don't do rotational grazing, it's the only thing that's left
<v Speaker 1>that in prickly pair because the cows don't eat it
<v Speaker 1>because it's you know, misky has big spines when it's young.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it was probably being dispersed by gomf theers and megafauna,
<v Speaker 2>which is why livestock eat it now. And I think
<v Speaker 2>that's also why it produces so many giant pods, and
<v Speaker 2>why that has all that sweet and messa carp tissue,
<v Speaker 2>and also why the wood is very strong and but
<v Speaker 2>also pretty uh, pretty springy. It was actually used by
<v Speaker 2>bows by some natives, and also has the thorns to
<v Speaker 2>deter excessive breakage from dompier browsing.
<v Speaker 1>But let's talk about companies like that's like mammots basically, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>kind of like.
<v Speaker 2>An elephant type thing, big old. I think they have
<v Speaker 2>more like shovel shapes. Uh what's it called tusks? Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>probably also giant sloths could have been browsing on them.
<v Speaker 2>They definitely seem to be coated for megafauna dispersal that
<v Speaker 2>and fact then nothing really stirses them now. The livestock
<v Speaker 2>is uh what do they call them? That? Uh?
<v Speaker 1>An anachronism some of these some of these plants and
<v Speaker 1>evynopsis is like this too. It's got that zig zag branching,
<v Speaker 1>which you know, that's a whole phenomenon in New Zealand,
<v Speaker 1>the divaricating branching. I mean that's that was a result
<v Speaker 1>of co evolution with MOA's. You know, I just love
<v Speaker 1>being able to look at a plant you could tell like, Wow,
<v Speaker 1>something was fucking with this hard in its past. You know,
<v Speaker 1>like that's next, something was selecting for this. This kind
<v Speaker 1>of shit doesn't just evolve unless something is there that's
<v Speaker 1>really really putting a lot of herbivore pressure on it.
<v Speaker 1>And you know, I look at this stuff and I
<v Speaker 1>just am so curious about some of the large mam.
<v Speaker 1>You know, it wasn't a result of deer and bison.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you can look at this stuff and you're like,
<v Speaker 1>that's not deer. Like deer, something wouldn't evolve that extreme,
<v Speaker 1>like you know, two or three inch long spines in
<v Speaker 1>some cases and zigzag branching as a result of deer.
<v Speaker 1>So you know, what was it? Like, what is It's
<v Speaker 1>gone now? But the evidence that it was here for
<v Speaker 1>millions of years is still around and you can see
<v Speaker 1>it in the plants.
<v Speaker 2>So what's the explanation to the zig zag branching because
<v Speaker 2>I definitely noticed that.
<v Speaker 1>Ski well for yeah, and you see even like Colubrina
<v Speaker 1>tech census to hog plumb, which is buckthorn family, but
<v Speaker 1>that it deeters herbivy, it makes it. It creates a cage.
<v Speaker 1>The branching creates a cage around the plant, and if
<v Speaker 1>the branch dies, you know, it creates a cage and
<v Speaker 1>then the plant can re sprout from the center, but
<v Speaker 1>it's now got this cage around it. In the case
<v Speaker 1>of MOA's, I think a lot of it was. You know,
<v Speaker 1>it's not just the zigzag branching. Moas are the giant
<v Speaker 1>flightless extinct land bird in New Zealand. It went extinct
<v Speaker 1>before European settlers even got there. The Maori drove it
<v Speaker 1>to extinction. But the branching is zigzagging, it's divcating. And
<v Speaker 1>then it's the leaves are axillary, they don't have a petiole,
<v Speaker 1>and they're small, and so you can't just like grab
<v Speaker 1>a hole. You know. You contrast that with like the
<v Speaker 1>leaves of you know, another hardwood species. It's just got
<v Speaker 1>luxuriant draping foliage where a nerve of work and just
<v Speaker 1>chew off a huge you know, grab a mouthful and
<v Speaker 1>show it off. In the case of this zigzag branching,
<v Speaker 1>you've got to kind of go from point to point,
<v Speaker 1>and there's long nodes in between them and the the
<v Speaker 1>the leaves are small, so you're not getting that much
<v Speaker 1>return on your investment, and I think it just discourages
<v Speaker 1>that way. And it's they normally have thorns on them too,
<v Speaker 1>like all the zigzag plants you know. But but yeah,
<v Speaker 1>Colabrina tex census ebony, miskit does it. But miskit has
<v Speaker 1>thorns too, you know. And then once they reach a
<v Speaker 1>certain height, like miskuits stop producing thorns at like eight
<v Speaker 1>or nine feet. It's a lot of people don't realize
<v Speaker 1>it's because there's you know, above the height of which
<v Speaker 1>a herbivore could reach. It doesn't make sense to expend
<v Speaker 1>calories into producing spines anymore. So Parkinsonia Texano does that too.
<v Speaker 1>But but but yeah, but anyway, but back to miskit.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, I love just taking like misky fruits, the
<v Speaker 1>bean pods and just putting the you know, the fleshy
<v Speaker 1>meso car with the seeds in it in my mouth
<v Speaker 1>as long as it's like already starting to turn light brown,
<v Speaker 1>if they're still green, it's kind of bitter, and then
<v Speaker 1>just kind of sucking on it and then spitting the
<v Speaker 1>seeds out like you would sunflower shells. What was the
<v Speaker 1>whole I mean what this was used for flower though,
<v Speaker 1>I mean this was used for a bunch of different processes, right.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so it would be the staple carbohydrate for all
<v Speaker 2>Southwest snake. Essentially everywhere mosquite grows, mesquite pods would be
<v Speaker 2>the staple carbohydrate. So yeah, a lot of people more
<v Speaker 2>familiar with it in recent times grew up in the
<v Speaker 2>areas of a mosquite are consuming a lot. I could
<v Speaker 2>just describe just tune it up and spinning out the
<v Speaker 2>fiber and so from a squite. I have more research
<v Speaker 2>on my scheite than any other plant specieds, like by
<v Speaker 2>far in my book where I try to keep it
<v Speaker 2>as condensed as possible, it's still like ten pages long.
<v Speaker 2>So use in a lot of different ways. But it
<v Speaker 2>can be summarized pretty easily into two main consumption methods,
<v Speaker 2>either a drink or a flour. So the drink is
<v Speaker 2>the easiest way, and I'm pretty much til all the
<v Speaker 2>news we're using it as both. So the drink would
<v Speaker 2>be made simply by crushing up the whole pods and
<v Speaker 2>a mortar and pestle or then you know, so maybe
<v Speaker 2>sometimes a mono matasse and then taking that whole crushed pod,
<v Speaker 2>mixing water with that and then straining it, and then
<v Speaker 2>that messic tissue is just like it's eighty seven percent carbohydrate,
<v Speaker 2>and so that those sugars just easily leach out into
<v Speaker 2>the water like almost instantly, and it produces a sweet
<v Speaker 2>drink that's kind of got like a camera in caramel
<v Speaker 2>flavor to it. So that's for sure the easiest way
<v Speaker 2>to process it. I don't know the traditional method a lot.
<v Speaker 2>You can't even just do it with a couple of
<v Speaker 2>rocks in a bowl of water. But one way it's
<v Speaker 2>even easier if you have modern technology, is just to
<v Speaker 2>throw a bunch of those pods whole into under with
<v Speaker 2>water and just blended up and then strain that their
<v Speaker 2>water mess strainer. It takes hardly any effort at all
<v Speaker 2>because that would.
<v Speaker 1>Be seeds too. You just put the seeds in there too,
<v Speaker 1>you do, but.
<v Speaker 2>The seeds aren't really where you're getting the nutrition. So
<v Speaker 2>this is a very very common thing I get with
<v Speaker 2>people not understanding the difference between the beans, the seeds,
<v Speaker 2>and the pods. I mean, now, I'm sure you know,
<v Speaker 2>but the like in internet comments, I'll get people who
<v Speaker 2>are just absolutely convinced that the beans were the food
<v Speaker 2>source from mesquite pods, which you know, it's excusable because
<v Speaker 2>they're referred to as mesquite beans most of the time,
<v Speaker 2>and people just don't really understand where the nutrition is
<v Speaker 2>coming from. So that you have the mesquite pod, which
<v Speaker 2>is the whole fruit, and then you have the outer
<v Speaker 2>layer of fiber skin, and then just inside that you
<v Speaker 2>have the messo carp, there's a spongy tissue layer that's
<v Speaker 2>like almost entirely sweet carbohydrates, and then inside that you
<v Speaker 2>have the bean or what most peop would call the bean,
<v Speaker 2>which is really the indocarp or like this hard shell
<v Speaker 2>that surrounds the seed inside. And so the seeds were eaten,
<v Speaker 2>but not by many natives. I think only four tribes
<v Speaker 2>I found in my research is you know, probably thirty
<v Speaker 2>five or forty other indigenous people's in my research, only
<v Speaker 2>about four of them eight the seeds at all. And
<v Speaker 2>so if you want to eat the seeds, you have
<v Speaker 2>to crack open that indocarp, the bean shell, and then
<v Speaker 2>you get that seed inside, which is kind of a
<v Speaker 2>hard seed, has a pretty thick seed coat, and so
<v Speaker 2>the endocarp is edible, but It also has highlight high
<v Speaker 2>concentrations of trypsins, which is like an anti nutrient, and
<v Speaker 2>its digestion which can be cooked cooked to make more digestible.
<v Speaker 2>And three of the four tribes that ate the seeds
<v Speaker 2>did cook it. But you know, it's a lot more
<v Speaker 2>effort to get the seeds.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and most of the nutrients is going to come
<v Speaker 1>out of that mesocarp too, because that's the sweet stuff. Man,
<v Speaker 1>that is like, that's sweet. Have you ever had They
<v Speaker 1>call it ice cream bean? They're like these four foot
<v Speaker 1>long but they're only like the diameter of maybe two
<v Speaker 1>of your thumbs put together, like smaller than the diameter
<v Speaker 1>or a golf ball, inga inga edgeless. It's another it's
<v Speaker 1>another mimosoid legging. Have you heard of that before?
<v Speaker 2>Oh? Yeah no. In my undergrad years I did some
<v Speaker 2>study broad and Coasta Rica and traveled through Central America
<v Speaker 2>and then my beginning of my graduates school research.
<v Speaker 1>It's so good, it's me it's brilliant. Yeah, it's the
<v Speaker 1>same thing. You're eating the mesocarp, you're eating the fleshy stuff,
<v Speaker 1>and that that of course is evolutionarily advantageous. That's what
<v Speaker 1>the thing evolved with That's why the mesocarp evolved. It
<v Speaker 1>tastes sweet so that you know you're yeah, and I'm
<v Speaker 1>supposed to eat the seeds. Was to eat the whole thing,
<v Speaker 1>shout out the seeds or discard the seeds and eat
<v Speaker 1>the the sweet stuff inside. But goddamn they sell those.
<v Speaker 1>I went to this market. My my buddy Cruise took
<v Speaker 1>me to this market in Ecuador when we were down there,
<v Speaker 1>and he kept he wouldn't shut up about he was
<v Speaker 1>so obsessed. And I was like, oh God, fine, we'll
<v Speaker 1>go to the fucking market. I'm not really into that,
<v Speaker 1>but whatever. I went there and I was blown away.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't want to leave. They had all this cool stuff.
<v Speaker 1>They had fibers made from the the native palms down there.
<v Speaker 1>I mean it was like I did a video on it.
<v Speaker 1>I was so fucking taken with it. You would have
<v Speaker 1>loved it. It was such incredible. It was such an
<v Speaker 1>incredible place, you know, and it wasn't and it wasn't
<v Speaker 1>hokey or fucking corny or anything like that. It was
<v Speaker 1>like just the Yeah it was. It was dope. It
<v Speaker 1>was a really cool spot. But yeah, I mean it
<v Speaker 1>was like an ethnobotany uh field trip. Basically, I didn't know,
<v Speaker 1>you know, it was unintentional. I didn't know it was
<v Speaker 1>going to turn into that, but that's what it was.
<v Speaker 1>It was so cool.
<v Speaker 2>But anyway, Iane, it's just like a whole different world there.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Oh yeah, And they had they were island these
<v Speaker 1>like necklaces and bracelets with the fibers made from I
<v Speaker 1>don't know if it was a I think it was
<v Speaker 1>a bactress species of poem B A C. T r
<v Speaker 1>I s. And then the the beads were just legume species.
<v Speaker 1>I could tell they were legume seeds, but they were
<v Speaker 1>like black and red and some were just red and
<v Speaker 1>then some were brown. It was just it was such
<v Speaker 1>a fucking cool Maybe some area, Yeah it was Arethrana.
<v Speaker 1>They've got like eighty foot tall erth Rhna's down there,
<v Speaker 1>like the erth Rhyna and the upper Amazon are completely massive,
<v Speaker 1>you know, but and Aerithryna's toxic too, right, those bright
<v Speaker 1>red seeds the coral beans they used to.
<v Speaker 2>Come Yeah bean those are Travis County two. They're just
<v Speaker 2>in central Texas. I don't really ever see those though. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>it's yeah, definitely.
<v Speaker 1>Very Yeah, they're like a more that Erathrena are basic
<v Speaker 1>as a more eastern species. But then when you get
<v Speaker 1>into to uh like the Tucson area, there's Arethrina. There's
<v Speaker 1>a fucking rest stop where they've got arethrina. I forget
<v Speaker 1>the species name. And if I look at my one
<v Speaker 1>app but it's everywhere. It's like all over this shitty
<v Speaker 1>rest stop. It's amazing, you know. So it's it's and
<v Speaker 1>they're beautiful. The seeds are beautiful, and the flowers are
<v Speaker 1>really cool. They're all hummingbird pollina of course by them. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>I hope you don't mind my.
<v Speaker 3>Oh it is supposedly in small doses, uh possibly valued
<v Speaker 3>as agen in Mexico that the Chalctaw name for the
<v Speaker 3>local species we have is translates to the spirit beings
<v Speaker 3>and they're associated also with uh those day sure and
<v Speaker 3>Cooti ceremonies.
<v Speaker 1>Mm hmm. Yeah, oh, I got it. There's so much
<v Speaker 1>I want to ask you, but I hope you don't
<v Speaker 1>mind my rambling. I like it, you know, I've got again.
<v Speaker 1>I like that. I like that sound of a conversation
<v Speaker 1>between two friends after a long day. But but but yeah,
<v Speaker 1>so so Miski was important as hell, and you can
<v Speaker 1>make a drink from it, and it was at all.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, So the the other main way of processing the
<v Speaker 2>ski was to turn that messa carp into a flour,
<v Speaker 2>which is relatively simple but more laborious than the drink.
<v Speaker 2>You do start out just sort of the same way
<v Speaker 2>pounding it, but for that you have to really make
<v Speaker 2>sure they're super dry. So when you on the tree,
<v Speaker 2>they dry for the most part. If you like shake
<v Speaker 2>them a little bit, you feel little bit of rattling.
<v Speaker 2>And that's also the time when they're dropping. That's when
<v Speaker 2>they're basically fully matured. But a lot of times if
<v Speaker 2>you try to pound them up at that stage, they'll
<v Speaker 2>just turn into a sticky mass and you'll you'll not
<v Speaker 2>be able to get a flower team at all. So
<v Speaker 2>you gotta do some additional drying, either in the sun
<v Speaker 2>or sometimes they use the oven a little bit. To
<v Speaker 2>the sire and Bay the California, they used hot sand.
<v Speaker 2>The would sprinkle hot sand over them to sort of
<v Speaker 2>just get a little bit of toasting on them to
<v Speaker 2>make sure they're fully dried out. But if they are
<v Speaker 2>fully dried, you can pound them up and those that
<v Speaker 2>MESSI carb tissue sort of powders and then you just
<v Speaker 2>shift out the beans and the fibers, and what's left
<v Speaker 2>over is that that MESSI car powder tissue, and then
<v Speaker 2>so it would take that then the cakes by like
<v Speaker 2>spreading out into a layer, then sprinkling a little bit
<v Speaker 2>of water over that, and spreading out some more of
<v Speaker 2>the powder on top of that, sprinkling more water and
<v Speaker 2>just doing that to build up big cakes that they
<v Speaker 2>would use for They would dry those in the sun
<v Speaker 2>and then use that and their household for just storage
<v Speaker 2>of just a carphydrate stores so they can use anytime.
<v Speaker 1>God, I want to try one. I want to try
<v Speaker 1>one of those. I bet they taste good because misky,
<v Speaker 1>you know, misky pods are. I'll use those to stay
<v Speaker 1>up if I got like a long drive at night,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and I don't want to do sunflower seeds
<v Speaker 1>because they're too salty. I'll just grab some misky fruit,
<v Speaker 1>which if it's the right time of year, the pods
<v Speaker 1>at the right you know, and they if they're dry enough,
<v Speaker 1>they're not still you know, green with some of the
<v Speaker 1>red streaks in them, and just chew on those while
<v Speaker 1>I you know, it helps keep me awake, just I
<v Speaker 1>think just the you know, chewing on something, but with
<v Speaker 1>the putting it in the blender, wouldn't that I mean,
<v Speaker 1>because you don't want to grind up the seeds? How
<v Speaker 1>do you How do you avoid grinding up the seeds
<v Speaker 1>or does it not? Really? You just do like a
<v Speaker 1>light blend or what.
<v Speaker 2>Well, at least in my blinder, which is a pretty
<v Speaker 2>powerful one. It every day, and the seeds don't grind
<v Speaker 2>up in the blender, and you know, maybe they'll some
<v Speaker 2>will kind of crack a little bit or something, but
<v Speaker 2>it's not really getting much into the drink there. Mostly
<v Speaker 2>they're going to stay intact. Often they'll stay in that
<v Speaker 2>into a car bean show. So I don't really worry
<v Speaker 2>about it.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, okay, okay, cool, and then it's like a sweet drink.
<v Speaker 1>Then you produce yeah yeah, damn. What is okay? I've
<v Speaker 1>got again, I've got a shift ton of stuff. I
<v Speaker 1>want to ask you about agarita? Have you made agarita
<v Speaker 1>like lemonade before? What's the use for that? And that's
<v Speaker 1>also I mean that was I know. It's the roots
<v Speaker 1>have berberine in them, that yellow compound. I learned about
<v Speaker 1>that with some of the Mahonia species. The plant they
<v Speaker 1>call Oregon grape the common name another bad common name
<v Speaker 1>in northern California. The relative of that that we have
<v Speaker 1>here berberous trifolio lota. What's what is that? What can
<v Speaker 1>that be used for?
<v Speaker 2>So the roots are in the I think just all
<v Speaker 2>the way tissue that has that berberine. And they keep
<v Speaker 2>on changing these these genus names in the al Berbers recently,
<v Speaker 2>and yeah, back to berbers. I'm just I just call
<v Speaker 2>it berbers. Yeah, but I don't I haven't found any
<v Speaker 2>medicinal use in my research of indigenous pequels of the Agarita,
<v Speaker 2>but a lot of modern herbalists will claim that the
<v Speaker 2>burberine is good, the only good pull us to mine
<v Speaker 2>make sure, because sure, I don't remember any medicinal uses offhand,
<v Speaker 2>but those fruits are for sure one of the best
<v Speaker 2>wild area edibles in the area. Yeah, no medicinal uses.
<v Speaker 2>I found them every six strong indigenous peoples at least.
<v Speaker 2>But for sure that that yellow wood, and especially in
<v Speaker 2>the roots, is a popular dye. It makes a really
<v Speaker 2>beautiful bright yellow dye. And you don't need like a
<v Speaker 2>mortgage or anything but that you that you just boil
<v Speaker 2>it in some water. But the fruits are nice because
<v Speaker 2>they're berries. Those seeds are so small you can just
<v Speaker 2>tune up and swallow them a whole, and so I
<v Speaker 2>don't really do anything fancy with them. I basically just
<v Speaker 2>gather a whole bunch and eat them fresh and plain,
<v Speaker 2>or making the preserves, or more than anything, dry them.
<v Speaker 2>So for basically any fruits or really any plant product
<v Speaker 2>in general, that indigenous peoples were forging, drying them was
<v Speaker 2>just the number one way to preserve anything. And you know,
<v Speaker 2>you can take a whole bunch of dried agorita fruits
<v Speaker 2>and just silk them and water and reidrate them if
<v Speaker 2>you want them fresh or to do something else with them.
<v Speaker 2>But I actually invented a whole like forging net set
<v Speaker 2>up to specifically forage algorita because they're small and they're
<v Speaker 2>kind of dis burst throughout the plant, and they're so
<v Speaker 2>spiny you can't really it's senseless to pick them one
<v Speaker 2>by one. You're just gonna get a whole lot of
<v Speaker 2>pokes in your hands and it's gonna take forever. So
<v Speaker 2>I have this little tool that I made. I take
<v Speaker 2>a piece of picks plumbing tubing, I mean, I also
<v Speaker 2>use like a hoop of willow. But you just make
<v Speaker 2>a ring about a foot and a half or two
<v Speaker 2>feet in diameter, and then I sew like a canvas
<v Speaker 2>cloth to the edges that like I cut it in
<v Speaker 2>a circle that's bigger than the hoop, so and then
<v Speaker 2>a soa edge on so it kind of hangs down.
<v Speaker 2>It's kind of like a little net or a shallow
<v Speaker 2>little collection surface because I was used to use like
<v Speaker 2>a baskets, but they'll like when So you put the
<v Speaker 2>collection container underneath the plant, and then you hit the
<v Speaker 2>plant with the stick.
<v Speaker 1>So I so you've got like a wingdsick. You've got
<v Speaker 1>what looks like a wind sock with the plumbing hoop
<v Speaker 1>forming the frame and then the canvas acting as like
<v Speaker 1>a funnel beneath it.
<v Speaker 2>Pretty much, it's not quite that deep though, it's all
<v Speaker 2>I would say. It only hangs down maybe six inches
<v Speaker 2>because I want to be able to like shove it
<v Speaker 2>in between layers of branches. So this is a very
<v Speaker 2>popular method of collecting like small seeds, small fruits, grass
<v Speaker 2>grains by indigenous peoples. They would take a basket or
<v Speaker 2>some sort of collecting receptacle, put that underneath the plant
<v Speaker 2>and then just strike the plant with either stick or
<v Speaker 2>a special like basketry racket, and it causes the fruits
<v Speaker 2>or seeds to dislodge and be propelled into the receptacle.
<v Speaker 2>And so start doing that with agorito with this little
<v Speaker 2>stuff that I have, because I noticed when I do
<v Speaker 2>that with like a basket, that would tend to bounce
<v Speaker 2>off the bottom and bounce out. So it was like
<v Speaker 2>the soft cloth will be a that absorb that impact.
<v Speaker 2>So I just stut that in the plant and then
<v Speaker 2>whack it with the stick, and you can get insane
<v Speaker 2>amounts of agorita in a good season. I'm talking like
<v Speaker 2>twenty pounds in an hour of like agorita fruit. So
<v Speaker 2>you're gonna get like a bunch of debris along with
<v Speaker 2>that in this method. But you can either window that
<v Speaker 2>away or put it in like a big bowl of
<v Speaker 2>water and like a bunch of that debris will float
<v Speaker 2>to the top and you can skim it off or
<v Speaker 2>like pet the hands in there and the debris will
<v Speaker 2>stick to your hands and you can just sort of
<v Speaker 2>sling it off and keep cleaning it through that way,
<v Speaker 2>or strain it through a basketry strainer or something. It's
<v Speaker 2>not too hard to remove all the debris, but you
<v Speaker 2>can get a whole lot of that agora.
<v Speaker 1>That's the plant that I wish more people crew. I
<v Speaker 1>don't see anybody selling that in any of the native
<v Speaker 1>plant nurseries.
<v Speaker 2>You know.
<v Speaker 1>It's I don't know if it's just an aversion to
<v Speaker 1>spiny plants or what, but it's such a great I
<v Speaker 1>grew a couple of seedlings. The seedlings can be really fragile.
<v Speaker 1>There's just it's just that, you know, they need that
<v Speaker 1>window of not too wet, not too dry, and then
<v Speaker 1>kind of probably a little bit of shade when they're young.
<v Speaker 1>And then once they get old or once they reach
<v Speaker 1>you know, like ten inches not old, once they reach
<v Speaker 1>like ten or twelve inches, then they can take full
<v Speaker 1>sun depending on where they are. But goddamn, is it
<v Speaker 1>a beautiful plant, man, Just those like those glaucous blue
<v Speaker 1>leaves and then the red berries and yellow flowers. It's
<v Speaker 1>I wish it was more common in cultivation, you know.
<v Speaker 1>That's the whole thing I try to get people to do,
<v Speaker 1>is learn the plants around you and appreciate them. Don't
<v Speaker 1>pretend you're somewhere else, and don't plant Nandina domestica if
<v Speaker 1>you live in Austin, you know, I need I encourage people.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you find some teenagers that are hungry for vandalism.
<v Speaker 1>You know, they just everyone's like that. When they're a teenager,
<v Speaker 1>you get like a shitty attitude full of piss and vinegar.
<v Speaker 1>You know, instead of, you know, get them, instead of
<v Speaker 1>like you know, going out to destroy mailboxes, convince them
<v Speaker 1>to just go out and start vandalizing Nandina domestica. Public property,
<v Speaker 1>private property, doesn't matter. Just go find some Mandina domestica,
<v Speaker 1>destroy it, rip it out. You know, it's it's you're
<v Speaker 1>doing a good service. It's vandalism for the public good
<v Speaker 1>because that thing is that's invading.
<v Speaker 2>Those Nandinas. They have very fragile stin. I typically are
<v Speaker 2>just have one fixed stin. So what I'll do is
<v Speaker 2>I'll be walking down a trail and every time I
<v Speaker 2>see one on the side, I'll just take my hand,
<v Speaker 2>just grab the stem and then snap it away from
<v Speaker 2>me and just basically destroys the whole plant. But it
<v Speaker 2>feels like a losing battle.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I mean, it's it can be done. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>you get just get we need to just get people
<v Speaker 1>to stop planting them. You educate people. A lot of
<v Speaker 1>people won't care, but a lot will, and a lot
<v Speaker 1>will be like, oh, this is invading the you know,
<v Speaker 1>the land that I love, and it'll it's it's smothering
<v Speaker 1>the plants that make Texas Texas. Maybe I shouldn't plant it.
<v Speaker 1>And it's just like a tacky horticultural filler. It's garbage.
<v Speaker 1>It's a garbage horticultural plant. You know, it's associated with
<v Speaker 1>like suburbs and like the Wells Fargo Bank landscaping. But anyway,
<v Speaker 1>going to matatees, I saw something you had done about
<v Speaker 1>grinding stones and matates and how to like basically start
<v Speaker 1>setting one up. How how did you? How did you
<v Speaker 1>do that? What's the process of that?
<v Speaker 2>So that would just be pecking, so you just like
<v Speaker 2>you take a softer stone, which you're gonna like I
<v Speaker 2>had made a limestone mortar and pestle in this way.
<v Speaker 2>But a lot of different stone working methods use the
<v Speaker 2>principle of pecking, which is just hitting a hard a
<v Speaker 2>soft stone with a harder stone. So I'll just get
<v Speaker 2>like a chirt cobble which is pretty hard, and then
<v Speaker 2>just start wailing on a softer limestone rock and then
<v Speaker 2>they'll cause little divots and then you'll make the sweet
<v Speaker 2>those out and just keep going. I mean, my life's
<v Speaker 2>one moretar in about four hours, just hitting it over
<v Speaker 2>and over and then I mean, as you get down
<v Speaker 2>to it and want to have more finished product, use
<v Speaker 2>a sand to as like an abrasive. So I just
<v Speaker 2>use like river sand, put it in that bowl, and
<v Speaker 2>then use like a quartz cowweal to sort of move
<v Speaker 2>that sand around and grind the edges to make it
<v Speaker 2>a smoother surface, and then you can clean that out
<v Speaker 2>the whole time too. Is very helpful to have water
<v Speaker 2>on hand to rinse out all that slurry being produced
<v Speaker 2>by the pecking and the yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, I'm sure it makes this really smooth surface
<v Speaker 1>having the water there too, because you could it just
<v Speaker 1>it's less friction and easier to go at it. Where
<v Speaker 1>would you find the cobbols? I mean, are you just
<v Speaker 1>taking chirt? Because the cool thing about the geology of
<v Speaker 1>Texas is it's mostly limestone, at least in Central Texas,
<v Speaker 1>but you will get these chirt comp These they're basically
<v Speaker 1>these delicious concretions that end up weathering out of the limestone.
<v Speaker 1>And I've been on properties in West Texas where you
<v Speaker 1>can see where the shirt comes from, like the shirt
<v Speaker 1>nodules are still embedded in the country rock, in the limestone,
<v Speaker 1>and then you realize, oh, well, this just this is
<v Speaker 1>how it happens. It's rain water just slowly weathers it
<v Speaker 1>and then this thing falls out. Where are you finding
<v Speaker 1>a quartz or shirt, Like in the Austin area or
<v Speaker 1>in the Edwards Plateau.
<v Speaker 2>Just in any creek bottom. Pretty much certain areas produce
<v Speaker 2>more than others want to creek open near River where
<v Speaker 2>I live, on the east side, you get a little
<v Speaker 2>bit more, maybe on the eastern side, like other side
<v Speaker 2>of the Edwards Plasa or the Balcony's escarpment, because the
<v Speaker 2>harder stuff has weathered out of the plateau and then
<v Speaker 2>been washed out and deposited in these creeks. Whereas if
<v Speaker 2>you're like on the Plaza, a lot of the creeks
<v Speaker 2>will have to be so much limestone hard to find
<v Speaker 2>the cobbles or the hardest stuff in that. So I'd
<v Speaker 2>say just on the very edge of the scarpment is
<v Speaker 2>probably gonna be the highest concentration of the harder cobbles.
<v Speaker 2>Also a ton of fossils. For the same reason I
<v Speaker 2>got it that.
<v Speaker 1>That's so cool. Yeah, So that's kind of where it's
<v Speaker 1>all funneled off into is in the in the creek.
<v Speaker 1>So you would take these, you know, a slab of
<v Speaker 1>limestone and just kind of gently peck at it and
<v Speaker 1>then once you've got a decent divt just basically whether
<v Speaker 1>it was sand, and you would use the quartz to
<v Speaker 1>grind it, or not to grind it, but to really
<v Speaker 1>sand it down.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, the quartz was more just like a surface, like
<v Speaker 2>a quartzite cobble would be like a surface to sort
<v Speaker 2>of define how the bowl is shaped. But the sand
<v Speaker 2>is doing the real abrasive grinding at that point. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>it's yeah, definitely going to take some force to to
<v Speaker 2>peck it out and probably gonna feel a little bit
<v Speaker 2>of a jarring vibrations you're doing it.
<v Speaker 1>I was at a site in uh in the Davis
<v Speaker 1>Mountains at a friend's property that he was probably that
<v Speaker 1>he had access to, and we found a bunch of
<v Speaker 1>old matatees that like in this cave like this, Now
<v Speaker 1>it wasn't a cave, it was like under you know,
<v Speaker 1>it had been weathered out at the base of a cliff,
<v Speaker 1>and thank god, nobody had taken them, you know, over
<v Speaker 1>the last one hundred and fifty two hundred years. But
<v Speaker 1>it was pretty spectacular to be able to be there
<v Speaker 1>and look at this and think, like Jesus Christ went,
<v Speaker 1>how long ago were you know, did human hands do this?
<v Speaker 1>You know, was it two hundred years, five hundred years,
<v Speaker 1>a thousand years? I was pretty wonderful. And there were
<v Speaker 1>spots inside that because there was a little bit it
<v Speaker 1>was a the cave went in, it was a divot,
<v Speaker 1>and then like three feet above the ground. It came
<v Speaker 1>back down to the ground at like a forty five
<v Speaker 1>degree angle, and in that forty five degree angle they
<v Speaker 1>had like carved out a little shelf too, and there
<v Speaker 1>were more more grinding divots in there. But it's just
<v Speaker 1>it makes me think about how much is out there
<v Speaker 1>that's on private life and in this state that you know,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, so much archaeology has been destroyed. You know,
<v Speaker 1>you probably heard a spirit I cave in West Texas
<v Speaker 1>in Persidio County that was a site that was the
<v Speaker 1>landowner would just let looters come in and you know,
<v Speaker 1>pay me fifty bucks and I'll let you keep whatever
<v Speaker 1>you can dig in a day. And so these collectors
<v Speaker 1>would come in the forties and fifties and do that.
<v Speaker 1>And they they took two bodies out of there, I
<v Speaker 1>mean in a guy I know had done DNA sequencing
<v Speaker 1>one on a tooth from one of the bodies and
<v Speaker 1>found a living descendant that you know, shared the same
<v Speaker 1>haplotype as the DNA from that tooth in al Paso
<v Speaker 1>and then invited him to come out to the cave.
<v Speaker 1>And I was there with him, with this old old man.
<v Speaker 1>It was really cool just to I mean it was
<v Speaker 1>really you know, intense as well to sit there with
<v Speaker 1>this guy and be like, what do you think of this?
<v Speaker 1>How does it feel to be here? You know? And
<v Speaker 1>needless to say, it was you know, jarring four him
<v Speaker 1>him to know that his ancestors have been basically stolen
<v Speaker 1>from this cave. But you know, yeah, it's a really
<v Speaker 1>special site spirit I cave. I did a video on
<v Speaker 1>that too. There was there was like thirty thousand year
<v Speaker 1>old sloth dung way in the back too, which was
<v Speaker 1>fucking nuts. I mean, it was a it was a
<v Speaker 1>crazy site. But have you come across many archaeological sites
<v Speaker 1>in Texas.
<v Speaker 2>No, Yeah, there's a lot of like caves like that.
<v Speaker 2>It was a really great site because you know, they
<v Speaker 2>don't have the water destroying all the material. But I
<v Speaker 2>haven't heard about that one. I haven't really found that
<v Speaker 2>many artifacts myself. I found I don't know. I have
<v Speaker 2>found a lot of like pre forms or byfaces, which
<v Speaker 2>you know, it's the not really useful thing. It's probably
<v Speaker 2>just some engaging in quality to the rock or someone
<v Speaker 2>fashioning or really a quick and rude tool. But I
<v Speaker 2>found a handful of like arrowheads and knives and all.
<v Speaker 2>And yeah, yeah, the worst part about Texas is like
<v Speaker 2>all of it is private property and I don't have
<v Speaker 2>any public lands, especially in Central Texas, there's like absolutely nothing.
<v Speaker 2>You have some national forces in the east, but like
<v Speaker 2>the National Park in the west. But yeah, yeah, everyone
<v Speaker 2>just goes and like sells their dig sites essentially. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>a lot of people in Central Texas specifically, they're just
<v Speaker 2>like all they do this is a business. They have
<v Speaker 2>people come with like excavation machinery and dig up a
<v Speaker 2>whole bunch of stuff and just sort of sift it
<v Speaker 2>all out, and.
<v Speaker 1>Then it's so sleazy and all that information that valuable,
<v Speaker 1>you know, human information is lost and lost to science
<v Speaker 1>and not to mention to the people who you know,
<v Speaker 1>whose ancestors it was. It's it's just so this fucking
<v Speaker 1>state anyway. Sorry, Okay, well let's moving on. Uh So
<v Speaker 1>the grinding stone thing is really interesting. What about you know,
<v Speaker 1>there was a piece that you did you had done
<v Speaker 1>about bows, like you were researching what wood was used
<v Speaker 1>for bows and arrows. What were all the pieces of
<v Speaker 1>the bow, like what different species were they?
<v Speaker 2>So it was surprising when I first learned this in
<v Speaker 2>my research. But mulberry would have been the top species
<v Speaker 2>for bos in Texas in the southwest, now that it
<v Speaker 2>comes to the caveat that if they were able to
<v Speaker 2>obtain osage orange by trade, they would have probably preferred that.
<v Speaker 2>But morris my croffolil was probably the number one species,
<v Speaker 2>which is kind of weird to me because I don't
<v Speaker 2>really find individuals that seem to be large enough to
<v Speaker 2>be able to make a bow out of it. But
<v Speaker 2>I imagine, you know, back in the day, there's probably
<v Speaker 2>a lot more larger specimens.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, but before the aquafer had been drained and when
<v Speaker 1>there were still springs.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, exactly cool because so central Texas is unique.
<v Speaker 2>But because we have both morris rubra and morris mycrofla,
<v Speaker 2>and then of course it introduced Morris albo. So I
<v Speaker 2>don't I think there's one county in Oklahoma that also
<v Speaker 2>has all three species of mulberry and North America, but
<v Speaker 2>we had those two native ones here, and I know
<v Speaker 2>for sure that the Apache, Comanche and Dona with them.
<v Speaker 2>They preferred morris my krofla above all for bows because
<v Speaker 2>you know, it's also just like osage orange and the
<v Speaker 2>mulberry family, and the wood is very uh I think
<v Speaker 2>what's the term for. It has a lot of elassisky,
<v Speaker 2>a lot of spring to it, so you can bend
<v Speaker 2>it a long ways, it's not going to break. It
<v Speaker 2>was spring right back into shape. And uh So I
<v Speaker 2>actually used Morris alba because it's more common in Austin,
<v Speaker 2>and I didn't have to feel bad about using it's
<v Speaker 2>branch also because also a lot of historical negative bows
<v Speaker 2>were just made out of branches, not the whole trunk,
<v Speaker 2>although both were done. So they had had to get
<v Speaker 2>two different bow types, either recurved or stealth bow. The
<v Speaker 2>recurved bow would have been preferred for warfare, and that's
<v Speaker 2>where the tips of it sort of curve away from
<v Speaker 2>you when it's unstrung, and so when you string it,
<v Speaker 2>the tips kind of go straight up and down, but
<v Speaker 2>the middle is still bent. It just gives more power
<v Speaker 2>to the bow with the same amount of length, and
<v Speaker 2>so specifically it's better for like on horseback, you have
<v Speaker 2>more power, but you don't have a long, unwieldy bow.
<v Speaker 2>So I just made a very small straight bow or
<v Speaker 2>self bow, and just I tried to pick the simplest, smallest,
<v Speaker 2>easiest bow to make. Sale is going to use only
<v Speaker 2>stone tools the whole process, and that takes a lot
<v Speaker 2>longer and if you have metal knives and you know there.
<v Speaker 2>I actually was not able to find any like descriptions
<v Speaker 2>of how bows were made with stone tools, because by
<v Speaker 2>the time anyone's written down how these bows were being
<v Speaker 2>traditionally made, metal tools had a long and introduced and
<v Speaker 2>of course were the preferred method of processing the material.
<v Speaker 2>But I had read some stuff about how stone and
<v Speaker 2>the antler tools were used by Pacific Northwest Natives. They
<v Speaker 2>did a whole lot of woodwork, especially with through applicado
<v Speaker 2>they do with the western red seedar and those other
<v Speaker 2>similar species, and so they were kind of doing this
<v Speaker 2>sort of splitting method a lot of wedging, and so
<v Speaker 2>I just kind of goofed around until I figured out
<v Speaker 2>something that worked, which is and you know, they also,
<v Speaker 2>I did read that when they were using stone tools
<v Speaker 2>that they did prefer to work the wood green. Well,
<v Speaker 2>any other modern bosure is going to tell you have
<v Speaker 2>to dry the state, you have to cure the wood
<v Speaker 2>completely before you do any work on it at all.
<v Speaker 2>But that's actually it doesn't That is not the way
<v Speaker 2>to go if you're using stone tools. So the way
<v Speaker 2>I was doing it was, ah, I would just take
<v Speaker 2>a kind of stone wedge and then pound it into
<v Speaker 2>the end of the tree branch, and then you get
<v Speaker 2>a little bit of grasp in there, you get a
<v Speaker 2>little way into it, and then you can just kind
<v Speaker 2>of peel away an entire layer. I mean you're kind of, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>will split away, and you're not gonna be able to
<v Speaker 2>get the whole section of the branch, but you can
<v Speaker 2>get quite a bit off at once, and then you
<v Speaker 2>just keep on going down the boat and driving in
<v Speaker 2>that stone wedge. I mean, how you use like a
<v Speaker 2>quartz kyle wolls a hammerstone, and then a chert wedge,
<v Speaker 2>and then in between those I put like a piece
<v Speaker 2>of bison hide to absorb the force so it doesn't
<v Speaker 2>cause that splint.
<v Speaker 1>W So you're you're you're basically going for the heartwood.
<v Speaker 1>You're taking the outer layers of wood off and then
<v Speaker 1>just going for the heartwood. And would you find a
<v Speaker 1>like what type of shape of a branch would you
<v Speaker 1>find would you want it to be slightly bent or
<v Speaker 1>would you prefer it to be mostly straight or what?
<v Speaker 2>Well? Yeah, so well, for I'm not really going for
<v Speaker 2>the heartwood. The way I was doing it, it was basically
<v Speaker 2>just for one half of the branch should be the
<v Speaker 2>working like blank the stave, and then I shaved that
<v Speaker 2>down even further, so it ends up with the heartwood
<v Speaker 2>is almost entirely shaved off, and what I'm left with
<v Speaker 2>is just the sap wood basically from just inside the
<v Speaker 2>inner bar, the outermost layer of sap wood, and then
<v Speaker 2>into you know, the very early slayers of heartwood, at
<v Speaker 2>least in the middle of the bow. At the ends
<v Speaker 2>of the bow, it's going to be thinner, but the
<v Speaker 2>branch should either be straight or if when it curved,
<v Speaker 2>it should actually be curved the opposite way. You might
<v Speaker 2>think where the ends the face, like if you're holding
<v Speaker 2>the bow. The ends should be curved away from you.
<v Speaker 2>I've curved at all, yeah, but I just use a
<v Speaker 2>straight one because it's just easier to look at and
<v Speaker 2>to process. And then so once you get that sort
<v Speaker 2>of blank shape, which is just the sap from the
<v Speaker 2>outermost layering inside the bark to around the middle of
<v Speaker 2>the branch, you start shaving down from the inside. You
<v Speaker 2>never want to cut the outer part of the sack
<v Speaker 2>wood like that. My finished bow, the side that's facing
<v Speaker 2>away from me is going to be that first layer
<v Speaker 2>sack wood just inside of the inner bark, but inside
<v Speaker 2>I see.
<v Speaker 1>So you're doing this basically, so it's thicker on the
<v Speaker 1>outside edge, so that that's what kind of creates the spring.
<v Speaker 1>It's a more that's the more sturdy or the more
<v Speaker 1>strong side of the bow. And then the side that
<v Speaker 1>would curve would be that's where you're moving the sapwood from.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, And so to define the curve, what you're doing
<v Speaker 2>is just sort of gradually shaving away the limbs or
<v Speaker 2>each side of the bow. So the very it's a
<v Speaker 2>very tapered profile, so that the tips it's going to
<v Speaker 2>be you cut away some on the sides, but most
<v Speaker 2>of it is coming away from the belly of the bow,
<v Speaker 2>or where the bow is facing you on the where
<v Speaker 2>it would be the inside of the branch. Yeah, and
<v Speaker 2>you just sort of gradually scrape that and then I
<v Speaker 2>bend it over my knee to gauge how well it's bending.
<v Speaker 2>And then if it's I just wanted to curve into
<v Speaker 2>a smooth, even arc, And any place it's not curving
<v Speaker 2>enough or curving too much on one side and the other,
<v Speaker 2>I just shave away and then that will allow it
<v Speaker 2>to curve more.
<v Speaker 1>God damn, that's cool. That's I never I never knew
<v Speaker 1>that was how bows were made.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, what you're trying to use is like those solid
<v Speaker 2>layers of wood, because that's why you never want to
<v Speaker 2>cut the outside because anywhere you cut the layer of wood,
<v Speaker 2>it's like that whole layer is now useless and not
<v Speaker 2>doing anything for the bow.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Yeah, And most of the spring is going to
<v Speaker 1>be on the outside of the curve, correct, Like, most
<v Speaker 1>of the strength that's pulling back is going to be
<v Speaker 1>on the outside if like, if you're holding it would
<v Speaker 1>be on the outside, the side away from you.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, because that's where you have all these continuous layers
<v Speaker 2>of wood stacked up.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and so what would you use for fiber?
<v Speaker 2>For fiber, so the most popular fibers would have been
<v Speaker 2>animal based. So the sinew, raw hide or actually intestine
<v Speaker 2>was the most popular with the Commandity, because that doesn't
<v Speaker 2>that's not impacted by wet conditions as much as you know,
<v Speaker 2>sinew or draw hide is basically useless and it gets
<v Speaker 2>wet for a bowstring. But for plant fibers, excuse me,
<v Speaker 2>the agave or yucca are for sure going to be
<v Speaker 2>the number one sources of fiber in Texas, at least
<v Speaker 2>mainly just because of the way the leaf is formed.
<v Speaker 2>You already have all these longitudinal fibers that are very strong,
<v Speaker 2>and so with the agave, it's a little bit harder
<v Speaker 2>than the yukka. But that's what I used for bo
<v Speaker 2>I have made both strings out of yucco. But so
<v Speaker 2>the gave, you take the whole leaf and you cook
<v Speaker 2>it just to make it softer and easier to process,
<v Speaker 2>and then you just scrape away everything besides the longitudinal fibers,
<v Speaker 2>and so you can't can't use anything like too hard,
<v Speaker 2>so it'll break the fibers. So I just looked at
<v Speaker 2>what the Mexican people are doing because they still do
<v Speaker 2>this to make like lariats, the lasses using a gave fibers,
<v Speaker 2>and so they have like a flat board which they
<v Speaker 2>insert the one end of the gave leaf that like
<v Speaker 2>pound it into a hole insecure with like a wood wedge,
<v Speaker 2>and then so it's laying flat on this board, and
<v Speaker 2>then they use another piece of like a sharp wood,
<v Speaker 2>so I she's like a fence board that I kind
<v Speaker 2>of carved an edge to and scraped away the cuticle
<v Speaker 2>and all of the you know, the fibers and the
<v Speaker 2>fleshy stuff. It's pretty easy to do, and you've just.
<v Speaker 1>Got a leaf. I mean, it's just from a leaf blade,
<v Speaker 1>like a like a still soft, freshly cut a guy
<v Speaker 1>of a leaf blade. And I saw it done once
<v Speaker 1>on a board with a bunch of nails stuck into it,
<v Speaker 1>which obviously that would be process.
<v Speaker 2>So that would be after you scrape away like the
<v Speaker 2>cuticle and all the flesh, you have kind of a
<v Speaker 2>bunch of fibers and you still have to kind of
<v Speaker 2>culmb away the last remaining bits of fibers cleaning to
<v Speaker 2>that not fibers, but just a leaf material that's still cleaned.
<v Speaker 2>Those longitudinal fibers, and also you want to have them
<v Speaker 2>all oriented in the same direction. Yeah, they throw it
<v Speaker 2>over that like nail bed and then pull it towards themselves.
<v Speaker 2>I didn't really have that sort of setup. I use
<v Speaker 2>like a it's like a for cleaning paint brushes. It's
<v Speaker 2>basically the same thing, just a bunch of nails with
<v Speaker 2>the point sticking outward in kind of a comb form.
<v Speaker 2>But it's not quite well, you've.
<v Speaker 1>Got a video on it. This, Sorry Starry to interrupt
<v Speaker 1>you with you got a video on this on your
<v Speaker 1>page and using a gave Damn, that's fascinating. I should
<v Speaker 1>mention too. I should have mentioned that for all the
<v Speaker 1>stuff we're talking about, there's videos and paleo foraging on
<v Speaker 1>the Instagram page. Are you do? Do you do Facebook two?
<v Speaker 1>Or a YouTube channel or anything in case people want
<v Speaker 1>to see this.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I got the YouTube and the Facebook. I have
<v Speaker 2>probably more in depth stuff on the YouTube. Th I
<v Speaker 2>have the long term stuff, but I try to cut
<v Speaker 2>everything into reels and short.
<v Speaker 1>This is fascinating, man, this is fucking great. This is
<v Speaker 1>really cool. Yeah, I can see. Yeah, you've got a
<v Speaker 1>video showing the whole process. I love it. I think
<v Speaker 1>I think it's one of the things that first attracted
<v Speaker 1>me to your page and wanted me to have you on.
<v Speaker 1>It's like it's it's so unpretentious and it's so like
<v Speaker 1>just basic. It's just straight up information. You know, it's
<v Speaker 1>it's not and there's no like corny look today, but
<v Speaker 1>I'll show you how to. It's just this is how
<v Speaker 1>you do it, and this is how it was done.
<v Speaker 1>And yeah, I love I love seeing stuff like this.
<v Speaker 1>So the agave wasn't I mean, what were there in
<v Speaker 1>the Edwards Plateau. Were there any native agave species or
<v Speaker 1>was it just sodall? Because I know there's a there's
<v Speaker 1>a Gave have already ona out west and here in
<v Speaker 1>South Texas there's a Gave univitata and a Gave scaborough.
<v Speaker 1>But they were brought. I mean, there's I know one
<v Speaker 1>site above the Rio Grande River right on the border
<v Speaker 1>where those two agave species are, but they're they're not
<v Speaker 1>doing well like they're you could tell they're stressed out.
<v Speaker 1>It's just too hot for them there and they're growing
<v Speaker 1>on basically a fossilized oyster reef. And then when I
<v Speaker 1>was in the Wavo Leone I saw. I saw both
<v Speaker 1>those species Agave univitada and scabor, which is like blue
<v Speaker 1>and his scabbard leaves and Univiatada's got that yellow line
<v Speaker 1>through the center and like really fucking mean recurved teeth
<v Speaker 1>on the margins of the leaf blades. But I saw
<v Speaker 1>both those at like five six thousand feet in the
<v Speaker 1>mountains of the Siamandra, and I was like, this is
<v Speaker 1>and they were fucking happy as hell, Like they were
<v Speaker 1>happy as a pick and shit, they were all flowering
<v Speaker 1>and doing, you know, And then I realized, wow, like
<v Speaker 1>this is where they grow. The ones on the Rio
<v Speaker 1>Grande in Star County are not they were brought there,
<v Speaker 1>Like they were very obviously brought there. They did not
<v Speaker 1>get there naturally. They're just you know, they would not
<v Speaker 1>have established without being planted by people because it's so
<v Speaker 1>different from the habitat that they grow in in these
<v Speaker 1>oak forests at six thousand feet in the Sierra Mandre.
<v Speaker 1>And that was really cool to see. But in like
<v Speaker 1>the Edwards Platoria, were there any native a Gave species
<v Speaker 1>or was it mostly sod all that people were working
<v Speaker 1>with or what?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I highly doubt that there was a Native a
<v Speaker 2>gave species. It's possible some could be growing here and there,
<v Speaker 2>but those will be kind of outliers. They I think
<v Speaker 2>in like a southwest air portion of central Texas, you'd
<v Speaker 2>probably start to see them. And I do find them
<v Speaker 2>wild in Austin, but these are all going to be
<v Speaker 2>escaped from cultivation. They were super popular landscaping plant in Austin.
<v Speaker 2>So the ones that actually lived with the video I
<v Speaker 2>have about it that one wasn't just some random tract
<v Speaker 2>of woods that someone owns and just hasn't done anything
<v Speaker 2>within ages and that was you know, basically descendant of
<v Speaker 2>something that was planted there ages ago. But yeah, I
<v Speaker 2>don't think if there grow wild in Central Texas for
<v Speaker 2>the most part, so natives would have been using yucca
<v Speaker 2>for sure. Yucca probably even better for both strings, maybe
<v Speaker 2>even a little bit easier process the way a process
<v Speaker 2>that is just like killing it. I tried. I tried
<v Speaker 2>a lot of different methods, a lot of premierent skills.
<v Speaker 2>Guys will tell you to like pounded up with stone,
<v Speaker 2>like scrape it with like a spoon and all this
<v Speaker 2>other stuff. And I tried all those methods, and there
<v Speaker 2>was always just so frustrating, and I never really was
<v Speaker 2>happy with it, and then I read that some Indians
<v Speaker 2>were like cuing it up mascerting to obtain the fire,
<v Speaker 2>and so I tried that and it was just a
<v Speaker 2>million times easier because your teeth don't break those longitudinal fibers,
<v Speaker 2>and it's kind of like a passive activity, you know.
<v Speaker 2>The yuck is like poisonous obviously, and like you swallow,
<v Speaker 2>it's gonna feel like your throats on fire. Really can
<v Speaker 2>make it a lot easier.
<v Speaker 1>The the Edwards play tell Yuga.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, it's like so actually I use it for soap,
<v Speaker 2>and that's one of the biggest uses.
<v Speaker 1>For the The sapinins would suck up your throat. Yeah
<v Speaker 1>that makes sense. Yeah, yeah.
<v Speaker 2>The roots actually make amazing and soaked flatteries, and even
<v Speaker 2>after modern soap is introduced, a lot of the natives
<v Speaker 2>in the Southwest would preferentially use yucca roots soap, especially
<v Speaker 2>for washing hair and woolens. But if you boil those leaves,
<v Speaker 2>it kind of uh deactivates the sapinins, and it also
<v Speaker 2>makes a lot softer and easier to chew on. So
<v Speaker 2>the easiest way to do it is just to boil
<v Speaker 2>up a bunch of those leaves will turn kind of
<v Speaker 2>a little bit of more brownish color and become a
<v Speaker 2>lot softer, and you can just kind of chew on them,
<v Speaker 2>and then you spit out all the flesh and the
<v Speaker 2>cuticle tissue and all the you know, interstitial virus everything
<v Speaker 2>that you don't want. You're basically washing it with your
<v Speaker 2>saliva and chewing up and your teeth don't destroy those
<v Speaker 2>longitudinal fibers, and so you get a pretty good finished
<v Speaker 2>product just straight out of your mouth. But on top
<v Speaker 2>of that, I'll put it into a bowl of water
<v Speaker 2>and sort of rinse off all this stuff between those
<v Speaker 2>longitudinal fibers, and then I'll usually also do a final
<v Speaker 2>scraping with my thumbnail, just get every last bit of
<v Speaker 2>the clinging tissue. I think those are very very strong.
<v Speaker 1>People should and don't. I don't want people to do
<v Speaker 1>this with plants from habitat, obviously they want them do
<v Speaker 1>it from do it with plants from human landscaping. Like
<v Speaker 1>you see in a gave that just produced an inflorescence,
<v Speaker 1>it's gonna die, you know, in front of it. I
<v Speaker 1>just saw this at whole paycheck. I was at fucking
<v Speaker 1>whole paycheck in Lakeway, and they saw I saw, you know,
<v Speaker 1>a gave of atafolio they plant everywhere. They're all the
<v Speaker 1>same clone that was collected by John Ferry from Peckerwood
<v Speaker 1>Garden in East Texas, which they renamed some candy ass name.
<v Speaker 1>Now I don't know. Peckerwood Garden sounded great. He was
<v Speaker 1>John Ferrey was like an eccentric gay man, uh and
<v Speaker 1>like fucking great botanist. And he was friends with a
<v Speaker 1>lot of friends of mine who are much older than me.
<v Speaker 1>And he would go to Mexico and just Jesus loved plants,
<v Speaker 1>and he loved Mexico, and so he brought back a
<v Speaker 1>gave of adafolia. And there was one of those growing
<v Speaker 1>outside this whole Paycheck, you know, the Whole Foods overpriced
<v Speaker 1>health food store. And I just went and straight up
<v Speaker 1>cut it had already flowered. I took the stock, you know,
<v Speaker 1>the stocks waxy as hell. I just want to get
<v Speaker 1>people out there interacting with these things. It's so fucking important,
<v Speaker 1>even if people don't know what they're doing, go out
<v Speaker 1>there and just you learn, Just touch the fruits, get
<v Speaker 1>your hands fucking their already cut, you know, take these
<v Speaker 1>things and especially grow them to like Yuka rup pecola,
<v Speaker 1>the native Edwards Plateau yuka. Nobody's growing that. I mean
<v Speaker 1>a few native nurseries are, but not enough. And you know,
<v Speaker 1>plant these things out and put them in your yard
<v Speaker 1>if you have a yard, and just you know, after
<v Speaker 1>they die, like, yeah, look at the fibers. Touch these things,
<v Speaker 1>fondel them in your hands and and uh and just
<v Speaker 1>you know, it's it's That's one of the things I
<v Speaker 1>love about foraging. About what you're doing too, is it's
<v Speaker 1>not just even edible uses. It's fibers, uh, you know,
<v Speaker 1>fibers grind, you know, just getting people out in the
<v Speaker 1>nature and finding the different uses for these things and
<v Speaker 1>engaging with the life around them. And yeah, that fucking
<v Speaker 1>yucca species is such a such a great one. Yucka rupecola.
<v Speaker 1>And then there's you know, we get we get yucka
<v Speaker 1>trakouliana down here, do you The fruits are supposedly edible too, So.
<v Speaker 2>That's the kind of compl pid topics. So some yucca
<v Speaker 2>fruits were extremely important food sources for Southwest natives, specifically
<v Speaker 2>yucca bacada. That was a huge food source. But so
<v Speaker 2>that one the majority of the food sources coming from
<v Speaker 2>the pulp. It's like a pulpy tissue in between the
<v Speaker 2>outer part of the pod and the seeds.
<v Speaker 4>Banana, yeah for day tail, and that would be the
<v Speaker 4>biggest yucca fruit food source by far, but several other yuccas.
<v Speaker 2>The fruits were eaten in several ways, mostly similar to
<v Speaker 2>the detail where the pulp was eaten others. The other
<v Speaker 2>main way it was eaten was the immature whole fruit
<v Speaker 2>pods when they're green, they were roasted and eating a
<v Speaker 2>whole and some also the seeds were eaten, probably like
<v Speaker 2>roasted and ground up. I don't remember offhand, but not
<v Speaker 2>all yukas have that sweet, fleshy pulp. Yukarubu cola does not.
<v Speaker 2>And you know, it might be possible to eat the
<v Speaker 2>immature fruits if you you roast them or something. I
<v Speaker 2>know yucca arkansanna might possibly be eaten that's native to
<v Speaker 2>the area, that has a little bit of fleshy, sweet pulp,
<v Speaker 2>but you know, it's probably not really worth much of
<v Speaker 2>your time. The flowers, on the other hand, of all
<v Speaker 2>of the yuccas are edible. I wouldn't recommend raw because
<v Speaker 2>they still have a little of those sappenings. They cause
<v Speaker 2>a little bit of darning sensation in your throat. But
<v Speaker 2>if you cook them in anyway, they're really delicious, and
<v Speaker 2>if you like batter and fry them, they're incredibly good.
<v Speaker 1>What about what about Soto would the Dasileyrian? Was that that?
<v Speaker 1>I mean, you can, I guess you can roast the
<v Speaker 1>the hearts of it, because that's all sodall and a
<v Speaker 1>gave are there. You know, they're they're leaves protecting this
<v Speaker 1>internal battery of carbohydrates that are produced via photosynthesis. And
<v Speaker 1>then you know, like if you cut the leaves of
<v Speaker 1>an agave off before it flowers, you're left with what
<v Speaker 1>looks like a giant pine cone or a giant pineapple,
<v Speaker 1>and it's just a giant ball of sugar. And that's
<v Speaker 1>how that plant is able to send up that inflorescence
<v Speaker 1>that's twenty or thirty feet tall in a matter of
<v Speaker 1>two months. Is so tall? What was that? What was
<v Speaker 1>that used for?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah? So it was used similar to a gave, So
<v Speaker 2>I yeah, all these what you'd call them e sparagaceous
<v Speaker 2>or gaviaceous plants in the Southwest were used in the
<v Speaker 2>same way for their flowering stalks. So all of them
<v Speaker 2>had their flowering stalks historically eaten by indigenous peoples in
<v Speaker 2>the area. So it's so tall yucca and a gave,
<v Speaker 2>it'd be in the main And the flowering stalks were
<v Speaker 2>all eaten when they were young, like basically around when
<v Speaker 2>they're about the same size as the leaves, like after
<v Speaker 2>they start emerging too tall from the plant, Like if
<v Speaker 2>you get them a couple of feet higher than the
<v Speaker 2>plant and higher, they're gonna start becoming two fibers to
<v Speaker 2>be worth doing anything with. But if you find them
<v Speaker 2>they're only about a foot taller than the leaves, they're
<v Speaker 2>still probably pretty good. And at that stage they do
<v Speaker 2>just look like a giant asparagus. So those are all
<v Speaker 2>cooked and eaten, those are pretty good. But the hearts
<v Speaker 2>of yucca, I don't know. I don't think that they
<v Speaker 2>were really I've seen some hints that they were possibly
<v Speaker 2>eaten some species, but I think for the most part,
<v Speaker 2>the amount of tissue that you're gonna be able to
<v Speaker 2>get from yucca processing the hearts that way is probably
<v Speaker 2>not really worth the time when you have other things available.
<v Speaker 2>But so tall definitely was eaten that way, just like
<v Speaker 2>a gobba where you cut off all the leaves and
<v Speaker 2>you have that internal you know where all the leaves
<v Speaker 2>meat in the center that the heart or the basal rosette.
<v Speaker 2>They cut off all the leaves and you have that
<v Speaker 2>heart left and then they would roast that in the
<v Speaker 2>earth oven, just like a gave where you uh dig
<v Speaker 2>a pit and then you line that pit with rocks,
<v Speaker 2>build a fire on those rocks, sort of sweep away
<v Speaker 2>the ashes and coals, and then you put a layer
<v Speaker 2>of vegetation, like maybe some bear grass. That's another one
<v Speaker 2>that's in the same family that those flowering stalks were eaten,
<v Speaker 2>but also probably not for the hearts of the.
<v Speaker 5>Bear grass, Yeah, Nona, and those leaves were preferred for
<v Speaker 5>lining earth ovens because they don't burn very easily.
<v Speaker 2>So the line the earth of and then you put
<v Speaker 2>your planets. You're like you're a gave or stows all
<v Speaker 2>heart on that, and then another layer of bear grass
<v Speaker 2>or maybe just some actual grass and damp in some
<v Speaker 2>grass and then you bury that whole thing in earth.
<v Speaker 2>And so what you're doing is just allowing that heat
<v Speaker 2>to transferred from the rocks to the plant material to
<v Speaker 2>slow roasted over a really long period. And if you
<v Speaker 2>have a whole lot going and you want to cook
<v Speaker 2>it for longer. You can build a fire on top
<v Speaker 2>too to keep the heat going. But that wasn't always done.
<v Speaker 2>So that was done with so tall, but so tall
<v Speaker 2>they actually had an extra step where they would be
<v Speaker 2>after there were cooks that were pulled out from that
<v Speaker 2>earth oven and were dried and then ground into a meal,
<v Speaker 2>and then that meal could be mixed with water like made.
<v Speaker 1>Oh, the roasted hearts were pulled out.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. So with a god, they're ready to eat straight
<v Speaker 2>out of the earth oven. But with the soshall for
<v Speaker 2>some reason, I haven't tried this, but they would dry
<v Speaker 2>it and then grind it up before eating it.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Yeah, man. Sosol is another plant that I wish
<v Speaker 1>people were growing, and especially now since there's a sodoal industry.
<v Speaker 1>And I met a couple I met some of the
<v Speaker 1>guys that have one of the sothal distilleries. I hate alcohol.
<v Speaker 1>I don't drink, but I met a couple of guys
<v Speaker 1>that that have a soda distillery, and you know, they
<v Speaker 1>were cool, but I was like, man, you know, because
<v Speaker 1>they just go out and everyone that has a sodall
<v Speaker 1>distillery in Texas just goes out and gets it from land.
<v Speaker 1>They just basically rip it out of a habitat, and
<v Speaker 1>so they say it's sustainable, but it's not. It doesn't.
<v Speaker 1>I mean maybe if you survive, you know, but that
<v Speaker 1>they generally no. So I was like, you guy should
<v Speaker 1>really start growing these. You know, they're easy. They just
<v Speaker 1>take time. But if you start, you know, the best
<v Speaker 1>time to start ten thousand now is now, you know,
<v Speaker 1>ten thousand ceilings And it's an extremely easy plant to get.
<v Speaker 1>And it's an extremely easy plant to get ten thousand
<v Speaker 1>seeds of, Like you could get ten thousand seeds from
<v Speaker 1>shaking two or three inflorescences, you know, off a Highway
<v Speaker 1>ninety in Terrell County. Like it's not it'd be really easy,
<v Speaker 1>but nobody's doing it. I just it's like another you know,
<v Speaker 1>I always wish it was more common. I'm just going
<v Speaker 1>on a rant there. I apologize, Okay, moving right along.
<v Speaker 2>It does well. Another thing thing about sotal I mean, first,
<v Speaker 2>I agree about that. I think the liquor thing is
<v Speaker 2>kind of a new the fad basically like there was
<v Speaker 2>mescal popping off there for a while, or which is that.
<v Speaker 2>I also don't drink. I forget the names of these things,
<v Speaker 2>but the you know, it's like a tiquil of it,
<v Speaker 2>not made from the blue agave that it feels like
<v Speaker 2>soalls and the new version of that. But the seeds
<v Speaker 2>of sotal actually probably were historically eaten by natives in
<v Speaker 2>Texas and southwest Texas. They've been found in archaic period
<v Speaker 2>ovens and in a five thousand year old copper lights.
<v Speaker 2>But I haven't found any evident like historical evidence in
<v Speaker 2>the ethnographies or anything of any uses of sotal besides
<v Speaker 2>the flowering stalks and the hearts. But I did find
<v Speaker 2>some like nutritional composition evidence that there's a different so
<v Speaker 2>tall species in Mexico. There's Desalarium cedrosanum, and they're like
<v Speaker 2>super rich and protein, fats and carhydrates and are probably
<v Speaker 2>really nutritious. So I think that the seeds of so's
<v Speaker 2>all were probably being historically eaten because they're kind of
<v Speaker 2>they look like bear grass a lot where those inflorescences
<v Speaker 2>are actually just packed with tons of these tiny little seeds.
<v Speaker 2>I mean they're not really tiny, they're they're kind of
<v Speaker 2>like almost pea sized. Yeah, there can get a whole lot.
<v Speaker 1>It's so weird because everything you know, so much of
<v Speaker 1>the plants, so many of the plants and a spara
<v Speaker 1>gaelees have that phytomelanin pigment pigment that black seed. Whether
<v Speaker 1>it's you know, quote unquote rain lilies or whether it's
<v Speaker 1>you know, a gave seeds or yuckas seeds, they're little
<v Speaker 1>black flakes. But the sodall seeds are like these little
<v Speaker 1>beige balls inside of a winged capsule. You know, it's
<v Speaker 1>it's really bizarre. I'd be curious to see how they
<v Speaker 1>process those. How they got that little ball, the little
<v Speaker 1>sphere outside of that winged I guess it would probably
<v Speaker 1>just come out naturally if once you let the fruits age,
<v Speaker 1>the winged fruits. But man one inflorescence can produce thousands
<v Speaker 1>of fruits, you know, and when you go, yeah, I.
<v Speaker 2>Really want to experiment with those, I think that they would.
<v Speaker 2>You would sort of lightly pound them to loosen up
<v Speaker 2>those those winged pods from the seeds, and then you
<v Speaker 2>just winnow off all that those fibrous winged pods, Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>just to bust over and then those seeds, I'm sure
<v Speaker 2>the best thing to do is to grind them up,
<v Speaker 2>maybe toast them first and then grind them up into
<v Speaker 2>a meal. I really want to try this.
<v Speaker 1>I drive out to Alpine a lot to West Texas,
<v Speaker 1>and I'll take like Highway ninety through Sanderson, and there's
<v Speaker 1>just areas where it's just these fucking beautiful limestone road cuts,
<v Speaker 1>and it's you're already in the Chihuahua Desert. It's basically transitioned.
<v Speaker 1>You've come off the Edwards Plateau and you're in the
<v Speaker 1>Chihuahua Desert and there's fucking sodaal everywhere. There's dasilium everywhere,
<v Speaker 1>you know, And I'll take the I love the poles too,
<v Speaker 1>like I'll use them as hiking sticks and snake preventative,
<v Speaker 1>just because rattle snakes are generally kind enough to let
<v Speaker 1>you know when you're nearby, or you know when you're
<v Speaker 1>too close if you're like walking on a trail, but
<v Speaker 1>sometimes like if they just we had one at the
<v Speaker 1>nonprofit conservation property I have, which you're welcome to come
<v Speaker 1>down to any anytime. And you know, I was walking
<v Speaker 1>through checking out tortoises there, Texas tortoises, and this big
<v Speaker 1>fat diamondback was just hanging out in the path and
<v Speaker 1>I saw him before I stepped on him. And I
<v Speaker 1>was like, what the fuck man, you know, like, what
<v Speaker 1>are you supposed to let me know? Look what are
<v Speaker 1>you doing? Like this is this is fucking bullshit, like
<v Speaker 1>a little courtesy and then I and he just kind
<v Speaker 1>of looked at me and stuck out his tongue and
<v Speaker 1>then I looked at me at a he had a
<v Speaker 1>big fat rat or something in his stomach that he
<v Speaker 1>was digesting, and so I was like, oh, okay, so
<v Speaker 1>that's why, you know, I was like, fuck man, I'm
<v Speaker 1>gonna start wearing snake eaters and walking with this sodall
<v Speaker 1>poll to just you know, put it out there first
<v Speaker 1>when I'm walking through some brush. So but it's another
<v Speaker 1>you know, I can't express enough my love for that
<v Speaker 1>that genus De's allyriums cool and there's there's ones in Mexico.
<v Speaker 2>There actually number one way to start a friction fire.
<v Speaker 2>By far. I tried making friction fire, you know, the
<v Speaker 2>fire really just spin sticking to another, try to out
<v Speaker 2>with a million different materials. And once I started doing
<v Speaker 2>it with so tall, I never look back. I'm never
<v Speaker 2>using anything else.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, let's get this. Okay, so tell me, tell us
<v Speaker 1>how you do this. This sounds really cool.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, So you just take a stick, a nice straight
<v Speaker 2>section of the so tall flowering stall for example, make
<v Speaker 2>sure it's completely dried and everything, and then you take
<v Speaker 2>another section of that and you're basically spinning one into
<v Speaker 2>the other to build enough enough friction to create an emberd.
<v Speaker 2>So you know, that's the simple rundown of it. But
<v Speaker 2>if you really want to do it, you need to
<v Speaker 2>first like cut a divot into the hearth board would
<v Speaker 2>be the one that's on the ground that you're sort
<v Speaker 2>of spinning into. So you cut a divot into that
<v Speaker 2>hearth board, and then you're taking the spindle or the drill,
<v Speaker 2>which is the part that you're spinning, and you kind
<v Speaker 2>of uh carve the tip of that to be a
<v Speaker 2>little bit rounded to sort of fit into that divot. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>and then you're basically spinning it really fast, and so
<v Speaker 2>you start to build up a char. It starts to
<v Speaker 2>lightly smoke.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, but really quick. Both these both of these, the
<v Speaker 1>hearth board and the spindle are both.
<v Speaker 2>So yeah, if you want to make it as easy
<v Speaker 2>as possible on the outboard, yeah, but you a million
<v Speaker 2>different materials can possibly be used. But this is my
<v Speaker 2>for sure way to do it. And so after you
<v Speaker 2>get that divid in and you have it a spun
<v Speaker 2>for a while and you're building up some char, you'll
<v Speaker 2>see it smoking and browned and everything. At that point,
<v Speaker 2>you stop it and you take the hearthboard and you
<v Speaker 2>carve a little notch into the edge of it, so
<v Speaker 2>it should go from the outside of the stick into like,
<v Speaker 2>not not all the way to the middle of the divot,
<v Speaker 2>but you know about a quarter of the way through,
<v Speaker 2>maybe a third of the way through. And so the
<v Speaker 2>purpose of that, and then you'll continue spinding the spindle
<v Speaker 2>and burning it, and so out of that notch you'll
<v Speaker 2>start to fall little bits of like dust char, and
<v Speaker 2>on that chart is where a piece of the ember
<v Speaker 2>will land. And then start burning that little pile of dust.
<v Speaker 2>And that point you have which you can start the
<v Speaker 2>fire with you pick up. You have that that pile
<v Speaker 2>of dust being collected on a little surface that you
<v Speaker 2>placed underneath that can be just like a little leaf
<v Speaker 2>or something. But you have that pile of dust building
<v Speaker 2>up on a little leaf or a piece of leather,
<v Speaker 2>and then you'll eventually have an ember fall on that
<v Speaker 2>and you'll know because you'll pull your spindle away and
<v Speaker 2>you'll keep smoking from that little pile, and you can
<v Speaker 2>take that little pile of burning dust and then put
<v Speaker 2>that into a prepared piece of tin. Usually she's a
<v Speaker 2>bunch of shredded juniper bark.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it was like little nest of juniper bark or
<v Speaker 1>something that you kind of weave in.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, the junifer bark for sure the best source of
<v Speaker 2>tender also historically and all of this stuff or anymore
<v Speaker 2>chamber is really okay.
<v Speaker 1>So anyway, getting back, we just took a little just
<v Speaker 1>took a little two minute break right now, getting back
<v Speaker 1>to uh, some of the species I want to ask
<v Speaker 1>you about. So, so, soda was really important, Yuka is
<v Speaker 1>really important. That gove is really important, food, fiber, What
<v Speaker 1>about I know, diasporos the Texas per simmon is really
<v Speaker 1>special to you as well. You had quite a few
<v Speaker 1>pieces on that. And what's so cool about it is
<v Speaker 1>that it's instead of being Diaspors Virginiana, which can be
<v Speaker 1>a you know, a large shrub or even a small shrub.
<v Speaker 1>I just saw some in the and the nutrient poor
<v Speaker 1>bleach white sugar sands of central Florida that topped out
<v Speaker 1>of like four feet The ospros Virginiana produces a bigger fruit.
<v Speaker 1>It's from a more music and higher rainfall environment than
<v Speaker 1>the Texas version. But by Diaspors Texana, the Texas per simon,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, man, you'll see it growing with peyote. You'll
<v Speaker 1>see it growing in you know, topping out at three
<v Speaker 1>feet with that beautiful smooth bark in places like you know,
<v Speaker 1>Terrell County, uh, Star County, Jim Hogg County. This is
<v Speaker 1>a really this is it's basically a per simon with
<v Speaker 1>a smaller fruit that's built for really extreme heat and aridity.
<v Speaker 1>And it's got those smaller leaves and like little bit
<v Speaker 1>of hairs on the underside. But the fruit is really delicious.
<v Speaker 1>It is I mean, what is uh, what's your main
<v Speaker 1>gem with diaspors Texano.
<v Speaker 2>Oh man, nothing gets me more fired up, good old
<v Speaker 2>Disporus taxana. It is, for real, my favorite fruit, my
<v Speaker 2>favorite plant in the whole world. And like I always
<v Speaker 2>say that it's my favorite fruit or the best tasting fruit,
<v Speaker 2>and people think that I'm like exactly eating or something,
<v Speaker 2>but I really really mean it. It is incredibly delicious,
<v Speaker 2>and I mean we all have our tastes, but is
<v Speaker 2>just nothing else out there is like it for a fruit?
<v Speaker 2>How does it have such a rich, deep flavor and taste.
<v Speaker 2>Most fruits you think of as you know, sweet and
<v Speaker 2>have a nice fruity taste. Oftentimes they're like tangy. But Texas,
<v Speaker 2>for simon, is very different. It has like a deep, dark,
<v Speaker 2>rich flavor. Describe it as something like a prune molasses putting.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, I was gonna say molasses for sure.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, there has so much sugar. So first of all,
<v Speaker 2>the diasporas are very sweet, but this one is so
<v Speaker 2>different because it's not its tissue isn't like clear translucent.
<v Speaker 2>It is just pitch black or purple and opaque and matching.
<v Speaker 2>That is the flavor in the texture. It's the Diosprosphrygia
<v Speaker 2>also kind of that has like a gungy to latinous
<v Speaker 2>texture to it. But the Texas percimon is like very soft.
<v Speaker 2>It's like pudding.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>And there's also a Diasprus. Was it Mexican or Negro
<v Speaker 2>sipote negro? Wow, that one's in Mexico. That one's called
<v Speaker 2>the chocolate pudding fruit.
<v Speaker 1>Jesus, I'm not even familiar with that one.
<v Speaker 2>Man.
<v Speaker 1>I got just I'll look that up right now.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, it's apparently cultivated by indigenous peoples in the Tehuquan
<v Speaker 2>Valley and Puebla between five thousand BC and fifteen hundred AG.
<v Speaker 2>And they know that because it couldn't have otherwise been
<v Speaker 2>in that area they've found on that archaeobotanical record, but
<v Speaker 2>it would have been too arid in the you know,
<v Speaker 2>natural climate for to even grow, so they had been
<v Speaker 2>irrigating it there to grow. And that's the only one
<v Speaker 2>that I've seen that also has that dark tissue. So
<v Speaker 2>those fruits are a lot bigger than that Texas perc.
<v Speaker 2>God damn, that's all the Mexican percent has, Like it's
<v Speaker 2>usually like model at best. A lot of times I've
<v Speaker 2>seen it and it's just green you fee when it's right,
<v Speaker 2>But the tissue of that is black, just like the
<v Speaker 2>Texas percent. And that's the only other diasporas I know
<v Speaker 2>that has that. But yeah, Texas percentmon are for sure
<v Speaker 2>the best wild edible in the area and really probably anywhere.
<v Speaker 2>And you can get a whole whole bunch of them too.
<v Speaker 2>It's they grow really prolifically. What one really weird thing
<v Speaker 2>maybe you know something about this, is that nine out
<v Speaker 2>of ten, or they have a ratio of nine to
<v Speaker 2>one male to female. Only females produce those fruits. And
<v Speaker 2>I've never been able to figure out why that is.
<v Speaker 1>I think it's just that's just kind of the how
<v Speaker 1>nature does it. I think it's you know, it takes
<v Speaker 1>a lot more to produce fruits than to produce pollen.
<v Speaker 1>But I mean, even you know, Kukurbits tend to be moniches,
<v Speaker 1>like you're members of kukurba taste. They'll be male flowers
<v Speaker 1>and female flowers in the same plant. There's always like
<v Speaker 1>nine male flowers or you know, many more male flowers
<v Speaker 1>to every female flower. And I think it's just the
<v Speaker 1>resource issue. I don't know, someone could probably sum this
<v Speaker 1>up better than me. There's probably there might even be
<v Speaker 1>a better reason for it. But yeah, I've noticed that too.
<v Speaker 1>That's the other thing I forgot to mention. Yeah, diasporos
<v Speaker 1>is diaspors. Texana is dioecious. I think probably most of
<v Speaker 1>them are. But it's you know, so you'll see like
<v Speaker 1>males and there's a spot in San Antonio, like right
<v Speaker 1>near the freeway where there's just diaspors everywhere, and there's
<v Speaker 1>like Sodoal. It's like on this freeway embankment right like
<v Speaker 1>right above the freeway, like kind of near downtown. It's
<v Speaker 1>really cool. But yeah, if you look at the flowers,
<v Speaker 1>you know, you can you can tell like, oh, this
<v Speaker 1>is a male flower it's got many stamens, and this
<v Speaker 1>or this is a female flower it's got a giant
<v Speaker 1>ovary on it and doesn't have any any stamens. But
<v Speaker 1>I don't I'm not sure the exact cause for that,
<v Speaker 1>why there's so many more males, but yeah, it's it's
<v Speaker 1>it is a weird thing. They take forever to grow too,
<v Speaker 1>they can be very slow growing.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, that kind of that makes sense to me though.
<v Speaker 2>That's probably the best explanation I've heard for is kind
<v Speaker 2>of like I don't know, like a population energetic sort
<v Speaker 2>of results, yeah, or produce so much.
<v Speaker 1>But it's that That's the thing that's weird for me
<v Speaker 1>is that that you know, you look at like other
<v Speaker 1>persimmon species and they've they tend to be orange and
<v Speaker 1>and this one is is black. When it's ready, how
<v Speaker 1>many can you eat before you get the ships?
<v Speaker 2>Uh? Infinite, I'll take them all. I really had an
<v Speaker 2>issue with that.
<v Speaker 1>Someone was telling me it's a laxative at some point,
<v Speaker 1>which would make sense because you know, if you're you're
<v Speaker 1>eating a fruit and you you know you ship quickly.
<v Speaker 1>Your digestive system doesn't destroy seeds and it's beneficial to
<v Speaker 1>the plant. But that's cool. I have to try it.
<v Speaker 1>I'll have to see how. I'll do a test. How
<v Speaker 1>many percent's gonna eat before I get the shits I
<v Speaker 1>learned with I'll.
<v Speaker 2>Tell you what this happens. A lot with a lot
<v Speaker 2>of like wild plant foods. A lot of people seem
<v Speaker 2>to think a lot of wild plant foods will cause
<v Speaker 2>stuff like that. I really actually can see this pattern
<v Speaker 2>and any food with like people think eating a lot
<v Speaker 2>of beans causes you to be gassy and a start
<v Speaker 2>a lot, And that's true if you don't normally eat
<v Speaker 2>a lot of beans and then you eat one meal
<v Speaker 2>with a lot of beans. But if you just eat
<v Speaker 2>beans not stop, then it's never going to make you gassy.
<v Speaker 2>And it's very similar dynamic with wild foods or just
<v Speaker 2>any foods. It really is determined more by your regular diet.
<v Speaker 2>And if you're regularly eating a lot of wild foods
<v Speaker 2>and one food in particular, like the person and you're
<v Speaker 2>probably not gonna have any reaction to it at all.
<v Speaker 2>But if it's like something kind of unusual, it's much
<v Speaker 2>more likely that it will give you the ships or
<v Speaker 2>some sort of reaction.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. I learned the lesson the hard way with what
<v Speaker 1>was it the yellow dragon fruit? You know, you have
<v Speaker 1>one and it's delicious, But I got it so excited
<v Speaker 1>because they were in this market when I was in
<v Speaker 1>Ecuador or was it coastreak everywhere to fuck I was anyway,
<v Speaker 1>it was somewhere in the neotropics, and I was like, oh,
<v Speaker 1>they're cheapest. Fuck, I'm gonna eat like four And I
<v Speaker 1>ate four and I was on a bus, you know,
<v Speaker 1>and I was like, oh my god, and it like
<v Speaker 1>made my stomach gurgle like it was. And then I
<v Speaker 1>thought about it. I'm like, oh, like this makes sense,
<v Speaker 1>Like if you're some critter that's eating these things, or
<v Speaker 1>some you know, specific sting megafauna, that the plant, it's
<v Speaker 1>beneficial of the plant to produce a laxative fruit to
<v Speaker 1>get the seeds out of you before you can digest it,
<v Speaker 1>and then that's what disperses the seeds. But uh, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it was rough man. And then I was told people
<v Speaker 1>about it, and they started laughing. They're like, yeah, man,
<v Speaker 1>I'm supposed to eat more than one of those yellow
<v Speaker 1>dragon fruits. At a time, I was like a fuck.
<v Speaker 1>But you know, yo, I'll be out in West Texas
<v Speaker 1>and I'll see diasporas text aina. I mean, wild hogs
<v Speaker 1>eat them, bears eat them, every coyotes eat them. You'll
<v Speaker 1>you'll find coyotes scat piles with the diasporo seeds in them.
<v Speaker 1>They're fucking great and I've Germany had them before. They
<v Speaker 1>just take a while to get going, and I think
<v Speaker 1>they need I think you need. You know, they probably
<v Speaker 1>send down a deep tap root and then they need
<v Speaker 1>sun pretty pretty pretty soon on. I'm not sure. Mike Heap,
<v Speaker 1>who has a native plant nursery down here in Harlingen,
<v Speaker 1>grows a shit ton of diasporos. And I've got a
<v Speaker 1>seedling in my yard and you know, I've had it
<v Speaker 1>for like three years and it's like four feet tall.
<v Speaker 1>I got it when it was two feet tall. So
<v Speaker 1>they're a slower growing plant. But they're man, they're fucking
<v Speaker 1>beautiful when they're big too. Like they've got that. You know,
<v Speaker 1>a lot of people like Crpe myrtles, which I hate
<v Speaker 1>because they're just horticultural garbage. It's like fluff, you know,
<v Speaker 1>and they're they're not native here. I'm sure they're important,
<v Speaker 1>you know in Southeast days of where crate myrtles are native,
<v Speaker 1>but here they're not native, and the ones here are
<v Speaker 1>like overbred and greenhouses too. They're not using wild type species,
<v Speaker 1>they're using cultivars. But they like craymarles for that smooth
<v Speaker 1>bark and like Diaspora's Texana Man has some of the
<v Speaker 1>most beautiful bark of any tree. And I've ever seen,
<v Speaker 1>super smooth and just gorgeous, you know.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, absolutely, That's how I pick them out from the
<v Speaker 2>forest to I'll just scan the woods and look for
<v Speaker 2>that that light gray bark, but just beautiful. They're they're
<v Speaker 2>incredible looking, and they're texture too, just feeling that that
<v Speaker 2>cool touch because it's that smooth bark. And then when
<v Speaker 2>they get really big, they start to develop like this
<v Speaker 2>infurrowing of the trunks and they become this really crazy
<v Speaker 2>looking like elder sort of tree form looks like sort
<v Speaker 2>of mythical or something.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it looks like human skin almost.
<v Speaker 2>That ripple also really good wood, like their heartwood is black,
<v Speaker 2>that it's like emony. They're in the family. And apparently
<v Speaker 2>that as far as Virginiana that would used to be
<v Speaker 2>extreme popular for making it golf club driver heads back
<v Speaker 2>in the day because it has it's strong and I
<v Speaker 2>guess rebounds. I don't really know it makes a good
<v Speaker 2>glolf glow head. But that's just so.
<v Speaker 1>So dense. Yeah, yeah, is the the other plan I
<v Speaker 1>want to ask you about too, is dios or not
<v Speaker 1>diasporas Sumac is uh russ veer ens, especially like that's
<v Speaker 1>one of the most beautiful ones, especially in that you
<v Speaker 1>get it more in the drier areas like western side
<v Speaker 1>of the Edwards Plateau. I guess there's roos coppolina and
<v Speaker 1>rust lancy a lota too. But what are your of
<v Speaker 1>all the sumacs? I guess what's your favorite? And what
<v Speaker 1>are what we're What do you love about them? Like
<v Speaker 1>what are some of the ethnic botanical relevance there?
<v Speaker 2>So for for forwarding, For sure, I'm going for rous
<v Speaker 2>lancy a lota in my area, but just only from
<v Speaker 2>the fact that it's fruit start produced some really big clusters,
<v Speaker 2>so they're much easier to gather. Also pretty common, but
<v Speaker 2>you know, central Texas also has it's this weird area
<v Speaker 2>where you have a lot of different ecoregions intersecting, and
<v Speaker 2>also you know the subtropical climate, so you have this
<v Speaker 2>weird mix of species. So we have a lot of
<v Speaker 2>different roosts books that are there's four species of roosts,
<v Speaker 2>and Travis County have the Lanceolata, rusts Aromatica, and Trillobata,
<v Speaker 2>which are basically the same thing, and then rusts veerans
<v Speaker 2>and all of them all sumacs that is true and
<v Speaker 2>max and the genus. Roosts have edible fruits that are
<v Speaker 2>very tangy and a little bit sweet, and they're all
<v Speaker 2>commonly used by indigenous people anywhere. Cemacs occur for in
<v Speaker 2>very similar ways, mainly for making sumac aid or Indian lemonade.
<v Speaker 2>So the fruits are all coated with malic acid, which
<v Speaker 2>is like really tart. It's often used in a lot
<v Speaker 2>of like commercial candies to give it that tart flavor.
<v Speaker 2>A lot of people think that cemac fruits are rich
<v Speaker 2>and vitamin C because they have that tart flavory, but
<v Speaker 2>they are actually have hardly any vitamin see really rich
<v Speaker 2>in carotenoids though, and extremely rich and malic acid. So
<v Speaker 2>the way they were historically used was just soaking those
<v Speaker 2>fruits and water straining them out and having a tart,
<v Speaker 2>mildly sweet beverage. It was extremely popular. Often that sweetener
<v Speaker 2>was added, like people in the north Northeast to be
<v Speaker 2>adding maple sugar, and then the like California it would
<v Speaker 2>be adding honeydew, which is ape and shit, but it's
<v Speaker 2>really good and it's really easy to do. You can
<v Speaker 2>get a ton of those cumac fruits and all you
<v Speaker 2>have to do is you don't even have to mash them.
<v Speaker 2>You can actually just put them whole in water and
<v Speaker 2>strain them out. That malic acid dissolves into the water
<v Speaker 2>and it makes us really tart, lightly sweet drink. But
<v Speaker 2>if you mash them up when they're fresh a little bit,
<v Speaker 2>look at a little bit more of the sweetness from
<v Speaker 2>the fruit. And you can also dry the fruits and
<v Speaker 2>then grind them into a powder and use that powder
<v Speaker 2>the same way, or use the powder as like a
<v Speaker 2>spice because of roosts carraia that's a popular spice in
<v Speaker 2>Middle Eastern Cheesine.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, man, that's yeah, that's right. I just love it.
<v Speaker 1>There's a you know, they've got what is it? I
<v Speaker 1>forget the species out west. I think it's roos in
<v Speaker 1>tegrifolia in California, but it's the common name is actually
<v Speaker 1>lemonade berry and it's yeah, the fruits can be can
<v Speaker 1>be really sweet. It's wild. Yeah, same family as poison
<v Speaker 1>ivy and mango. The uh, some of the roost species
<v Speaker 1>to it. The thing that I love about them, like
<v Speaker 1>roofs virants. Man, You'll see shrubs like these six foot
<v Speaker 1>wide shrubs of roosts viants growing on like nearly pure limestone.
<v Speaker 1>I rear like four thousand feet elevation and plays like
<v Speaker 1>the glass mountains of West Texas. And it's when they're flowering,
<v Speaker 1>they're just fucking covered in cool insects, like all these
<v Speaker 1>pollinating insects, from wasps to cool flies, the hoverflies to
<v Speaker 1>weird weird native bees. It's it's a fucking you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's just it supports a lot of life. And that's
<v Speaker 1>another thing that I'm like, why don't more people great
<v Speaker 1>it's such a gorgeous plant. Ruce Veran's it's, you know,
<v Speaker 1>so glabrous and yeah, man, so really, and then you
<v Speaker 1>go to Nueva Leone and you've got ruce Paca racus,
<v Speaker 1>which looks like a it looks like ruce Vin's but
<v Speaker 1>with pubescents on it, with a bunch of little tiny
<v Speaker 1>hairs on it. God Man, nuevle Leone is so cool.
<v Speaker 1>You could go to like you know, southern and not
<v Speaker 1>southern like maybe central nueval Leone, like in the Sierra Madre,
<v Speaker 1>like six thousand feet elevation, and you can get an
<v Speaker 1>idea of what the Edwards Plateau was might have been
<v Speaker 1>like in the Pleistocene, you know, when it wasn't as
<v Speaker 1>dry and it was a little bit more mild, and
<v Speaker 1>before it was covered in strip mall, before it was
<v Speaker 1>covered in strip malls, at least the austin the San
<v Speaker 1>Antonio area, like I guess more the more appropriately the
<v Speaker 1>Balconi's Escarpment that's called let's talk about chipping, like the
<v Speaker 1>how did you get into that? And how did you
<v Speaker 1>figure all of that? Because that stuff's really fascinating. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I'll find you know, work works piles like areas where
<v Speaker 1>someone was obviously chipping a piece of shirt and there's
<v Speaker 1>flakes everywhere and maybe a few broken bits of what
<v Speaker 1>could be considered points. But but it's just you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's just there was it was such an important material. Uh,
<v Speaker 1>how does how does someone go about making you know,
<v Speaker 1>stone tools out of shirt? And how did you get
<v Speaker 1>into it?
<v Speaker 2>I just break it really carefully. Yeah, so I got
<v Speaker 2>into it, and uh in graduate schools around the same
<v Speaker 2>time and started to get really serious around primarent skills
<v Speaker 2>and learn for a little bit of some guys out there,
<v Speaker 2>but mainly just messing around on my own. Over many years.
<v Speaker 2>It was a long period where I just would go
<v Speaker 2>into my backyard every night and just spend an hour
<v Speaker 2>every day, uh, breaking rocks. And you know, it's definitely
<v Speaker 2>got a very long learning curve. So before you could
<v Speaker 2>it'll take you probably a few weeks before you're able
<v Speaker 2>to even make your first arrowhead, and then after that
<v Speaker 2>it's you know, it maybe take another year or two
<v Speaker 2>before you can consistently make like a nice, good arrowhead
<v Speaker 2>that could actually be used. And even then at that point,
<v Speaker 2>it could take you another twenty years before you reach
<v Speaker 2>like the higher levels of being able to make really fine,
<v Speaker 2>good points and being able to use some of the
<v Speaker 2>more advanced techniques like fluting. But I'm still not even
<v Speaker 2>that far advanced. I know, some other flint rapports that
<v Speaker 2>are much better than me. It just takes a lot
<v Speaker 2>of time doing probably thirteen years now. But I'm lucky
<v Speaker 2>because then Austin there's a ton of really high quality
<v Speaker 2>shirt and it's just like one of those things with nature,
<v Speaker 2>always looking for ways to fuck with nature, and I
<v Speaker 2>find these nice rocks all the time, and I'm like,
<v Speaker 2>what can I do with this? So I'll find this
<v Speaker 2>really fine flint and just start breaking it, and you
<v Speaker 2>really don't need much. Like a lot of times, actually,
<v Speaker 2>one of my favorite things to do is try not
<v Speaker 2>to use any tools at all. Just pick up a
<v Speaker 2>piece of shirt and find like a quartz cowl or
<v Speaker 2>chirt cowl, something to use as a hammerstone, and then
<v Speaker 2>see what I can make with just those two rocks.
<v Speaker 2>Usually I can't get much better than like a hand
<v Speaker 2>axe with that. But if you start using like an
<v Speaker 2>antler billet, which is just like a deer antler that
<v Speaker 2>the base of it, you round it off to make
<v Speaker 2>a sort of little rounded device that you strike the
<v Speaker 2>stone with, you can make longer and thinner flakes with that.
<v Speaker 2>And the goal is basically just to make it as
<v Speaker 2>thin as possible without reducing the width too much and
<v Speaker 2>then shaping it towards the end, and then you to
<v Speaker 2>go into pressure flaking, which is also used with antler
<v Speaker 2>or copper, and use like the antler tip to the
<v Speaker 2>point and you place the point of the antler onto
<v Speaker 2>the edge of the stone and you like build up
<v Speaker 2>a lot of force into it, and then it's the
<v Speaker 2>last second kind of push towards you and breaks.
<v Speaker 1>That's what I've seen people do before. Yeah, using like
<v Speaker 1>a piece of hide to hold the thing so that
<v Speaker 1>you don't cut your hands, and then just kind of
<v Speaker 1>like yeah, just pressure, like not even striking it, just
<v Speaker 1>putting it out of there and applaying a lot of
<v Speaker 1>pressure and then trying to like you know, flick it,
<v Speaker 1>flick it off. But uh, I guess that you're with
<v Speaker 1>the hammer stones. I mean you would find like you'd
<v Speaker 1>use a piece of quartz and you're just mainly going
<v Speaker 1>you're like splitting rocks and then you're you're once you
<v Speaker 1>get a good piece of shirt, you're trying to get
<v Speaker 1>like basically just relying that conchoidal fracture.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, exactly, because so it's like a homogeneous crystalline structure.
<v Speaker 2>It's basically the same thing as a glass so it
<v Speaker 2>always breaks in a predictable way where every every impact
<v Speaker 2>is going to leave it's going to cause a cone
<v Speaker 2>of force, and that edge of the cone is what
<v Speaker 2>you'll see on the rock. It's like a kind of
<v Speaker 2>the flake scar. And so each strike will break off
<v Speaker 2>a little cone like the edge of the cone there,
<v Speaker 2>and it's just a predictable way of knowing how the
<v Speaker 2>stone is going to break. And that's why it only
<v Speaker 2>works on certain types of rocks because a lot of
<v Speaker 2>rogues have internal fracture lines on them which they are
<v Speaker 2>going to break and you can't control it at all. Yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>because it's super sharp on the edge where it breaks,
<v Speaker 2>because it's like glass, you can It's hard to really
<v Speaker 2>talk about it without doing it.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I mean I've found, you know, plenty of chips
<v Speaker 1>and you know, anyone once you learn what shirt is
<v Speaker 1>and learn to identify it, like shirt and flint are
<v Speaker 1>basically the same thing. It's they're you know, sedimentary rocks
<v Speaker 1>of the composed mostly of silica silica dioxide. But uh,
<v Speaker 1>but yeah you got to flint that some beautiful flint
<v Speaker 1>man like purpleish gray. But yeah, so mostly like hammer stone,
<v Speaker 1>mostly using hammer, just hammer stones, and then just pressure
<v Speaker 1>flaking is how it's done.
<v Speaker 2>I guess, huh, yeah, that's Those are the two main
<v Speaker 2>components of it. There's a lot of different variations within that.
<v Speaker 2>So direct percussion flaking would be just like holding the
<v Speaker 2>shirt in one hand and then just hitting it with
<v Speaker 2>something held in the other hand. That's my favorite thing
<v Speaker 2>to do. But the pressure flaking would be the other one,
<v Speaker 2>where you it's a lot more control and there's really
<v Speaker 2>you don't do that until you've already got a pretty
<v Speaker 2>good shape already. It's basically just used for finishing up
<v Speaker 2>and refining the piece. The people also use indirect percussion,
<v Speaker 2>which is kind of a combination between them, where you
<v Speaker 2>have like something placed exactly where you want to strike it,
<v Speaker 2>like held against the piece of SRD, and then you
<v Speaker 2>use a blunt instrument so strike that tool and so
<v Speaker 2>you can use more forces but still have a lot
<v Speaker 2>more control because it's really hard to precisely place a
<v Speaker 2>blow just like hitting it with one hand.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, so kind of using
<v Speaker 1>a using a middleman rock. What about for dyes, like,
<v Speaker 1>what what were some common plants that were used for dyeing?
<v Speaker 1>I know you'd said burberous was used for yellow dye
<v Speaker 1>because you know, you could see it in the roots
<v Speaker 1>if you cut up burberous roots. What about for reds
<v Speaker 1>and other colors like that? Like, what were some of
<v Speaker 1>the you know, most common dye sources in Central Texas?
<v Speaker 2>Uh, probably a lot red. That's gonna be a tougher
<v Speaker 2>one to find, the more environrant, the color of the
<v Speaker 2>harder is to find in nature. I mean we talked
<v Speaker 2>about sumac. Sumac was actually used commonly as a mordant,
<v Speaker 2>so to like af fix guys from washing out after
<v Speaker 2>you fled. Then, Oh, you know one good one for
<v Speaker 2>like a reddish sort of magentic color of the pokeberry
<v Speaker 2>or the.
<v Speaker 1>Pope makes sense? Was there katcha Neil the scale?
<v Speaker 2>Oh yeah, coachher Nil would probably be the best source
<v Speaker 2>of red dye. I've forgotten about that one. Talking about plants, Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>those are those little scale insects.
<v Speaker 1>I know they're common in Mexico. I'll see them occasionally
<v Speaker 1>up up in Texas. It's just hard to know what
<v Speaker 1>the native range was. I assume they probably came you know,
<v Speaker 1>this far north, back in the day.
<v Speaker 2>But no, I've seen it all the time. Definitely yeah,
<v Speaker 2>that's an Also, the Virginia creeper fruits be used for
<v Speaker 2>like a reddish dye.
<v Speaker 1>Oh ship, Yeah that's yeah. What color are they? I
<v Speaker 1>mean there that's great families. So would it be like
<v Speaker 1>a like kind of like a burgundy.
<v Speaker 2>Purple or like a pinkish mm hmm.
<v Speaker 1>What about uh mushrooms where mushrooms used for any dying?
<v Speaker 1>Right there? There's not a lot of mushrooms in Central
<v Speaker 1>Texas stuff. I mean, I guess there are, but there
<v Speaker 1>there's mushrooms, but not the diversity isn't as high as
<v Speaker 1>in wetter areas.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, that's one thing. It's one way in which I
<v Speaker 2>diverge meny forging people on social media. They're always talking
<v Speaker 2>about mushrooms. I almost never do their mushrooms in any
<v Speaker 2>arid region, there's.
<v Speaker 1>Really there's not a lot of diversity.
<v Speaker 2>Again. Yeah, you're basically like if you've got some good
<v Speaker 2>rains in the winter, like maybe you'll see some oyster mushrooms.
<v Speaker 2>There's some puff balls, but and they oh chicken of
<v Speaker 2>the woods sometimes, but those are a little bit tough.
<v Speaker 2>I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>You'll get microt too, you'll get micro rhizal stuff with
<v Speaker 1>pecans Madrone and oaks, but you know, there's not and
<v Speaker 1>I guess pines. There's pinion pines and parts of the
<v Speaker 1>Balcone's escarpment, but you know, aside from that, there's just
<v Speaker 1>not a lot of mushroom diversity in Central Texas here
<v Speaker 1>to other places.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and man' I don't know for we can, But
<v Speaker 2>what I get annoyed with how people view mushrooms these days.
<v Speaker 2>It's like this weird sort of much mushrooms are magical
<v Speaker 2>sort of idea, and I think it comes from like
<v Speaker 2>the psychedelic mushrooms. People get obsessed with it. But I mean,
<v Speaker 2>like mushrooms kind of all taste around the same and
<v Speaker 2>like they're not. I don't know, I just don't have
<v Speaker 2>the same view of mushrooms that so many other people
<v Speaker 2>seem to do and think that they're so medicinal and
<v Speaker 2>magical and all this stuff. I think a lot of
<v Speaker 2>that is just people with placebo effects and this association
<v Speaker 2>with psychedelics.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, don't get me wrong, I've got friends who
<v Speaker 1>are I've got friends who are My collegests would probably
<v Speaker 1>agree with you on that. You know, it's I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I'm interested in their ecology. That's I'm always you know,
<v Speaker 1>whenever I see a mushroom, I'm like, is it a saparotroph?
<v Speaker 1>Is it? Michael Rzaal? What's it? You know, how does it?
<v Speaker 1>What is it doing? That's what kind of you know, like,
<v Speaker 1>what's its function in the ecosystem? That's what I find
<v Speaker 1>so fascinating about them. But yeah, I mean that's yeah,
<v Speaker 1>there's a lot of hype. There's a lot of hype,
<v Speaker 1>and I think a lot of it is you know,
<v Speaker 1>probably marketing. That's a good way to sell stuff, you know,
<v Speaker 1>expensive mushroom, coffee, mushrooms. I want to ask you about
<v Speaker 1>a couple more plants, then we can dip out. I
<v Speaker 1>know it's been two hours already, and I appreciate your time.
<v Speaker 1>What about what about gum weed? What about Grindelia grindelia?
<v Speaker 2>Oh yeah, that's a very interesting one.
<v Speaker 1>Asta.
<v Speaker 2>So the only one that I really personally messed around
<v Speaker 2>with is Grindelia a dnodonta, and that one there's no
<v Speaker 2>like historical uses for that species I know of, But
<v Speaker 2>the Grindilia genus, specifically Grindilias corosa, was very commonly used
<v Speaker 2>for various pieces, especially like medicinally, but also for just
<v Speaker 2>like uh, a tea made for pleasure, and also like, uh,
<v Speaker 2>what's they called an adhesive? Looked my thing? But the Grindeliata,
<v Speaker 2>it has a really great flavor and I've been using
<v Speaker 2>it for tea whenever I find it. I've been trying
<v Speaker 2>to experiment with that and seeing if it poisonous, mirror
<v Speaker 2>or whatever. I mean, I doubt I never thought that
<v Speaker 2>it was really going to but uh, it has like
<v Speaker 2>almost limity, sort of tangy flavor. It's really amazing smell,
<v Speaker 2>and it has like that sort of stickiness to its leaves.
<v Speaker 2>It produces those little droplets adhesive on resin on them,
<v Speaker 2>they Grindilia's coros. It was like used to pack meat.
<v Speaker 2>It was like used as a layer to like pack
<v Speaker 2>preserve meat and berries, and they put that in the
<v Speaker 2>raw hide containers and also just being dried and powdered
<v Speaker 2>and put over meat to prevent insects from investing the stores.
<v Speaker 2>So it has like some sort of insecticidal effect or
<v Speaker 2>preservative effect. I mean that's basically the point of most
<v Speaker 2>human spices. But because I was reading now, I was like,
<v Speaker 2>what this must be edible. And it was also used
<v Speaker 2>for a different other Grundula species and also used internally
<v Speaker 2>as a medicine. So yeah, I've just been trying that.
<v Speaker 2>Grindeliatics is the most common one in my area.
<v Speaker 1>I know, if you go north towards like the Fort
<v Speaker 1>Worth area and into Oklahoma, you get Grindelia ciliata, which
<v Speaker 1>I think, I think it's siliada, And you know, those
<v Speaker 1>can get upwards of like eight feet tall, and they're
<v Speaker 1>you know, Grindia is easy to distinguish because it's got
<v Speaker 1>big yellow daisy flower heads. But then the fieries, the
<v Speaker 1>bracts on the side of the flower head are really sticky,
<v Speaker 1>and if the flower head is just opening, it's got
<v Speaker 1>all this white. It looks like wax in the center
<v Speaker 1>of the flower head. I mean, that's why they call
<v Speaker 1>it gum weed. And I remember the California species I
<v Speaker 1>used to always hear were supposedly used as an antidote
<v Speaker 1>for poison ivy and is for skin skin remedies, and
<v Speaker 1>then you know for asthma, bronchitis and colds like the
<v Speaker 1>make a tee from. But you know, the ones here
<v Speaker 1>are pretty small, like the ones in Central Texas. But
<v Speaker 1>I know, you know, Gridillia siliada. When I first saw that.
<v Speaker 1>It was like five years ago. It was in Fort Worth,
<v Speaker 1>like or somewhere in North Texas. I was like, fuck,
<v Speaker 1>this thing is huge.
<v Speaker 2>Man.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't I didn't know grendelia could get this big.
<v Speaker 1>This is massive. It's like an eight foot nine foot
<v Speaker 1>tall grendelia. It's another another plant I wish more people grew,
<v Speaker 1>you know. It's like, like, why the fuck does no
<v Speaker 1>one grow this? You know? But the thing you just
<v Speaker 1>put out, you put out a book, and I take it.
<v Speaker 1>In that book, you have this map that I'm looking at.
<v Speaker 1>It's a map of like Texas tribes and uh, the
<v Speaker 1>Texas at the botany, you know, and yeah, the major
<v Speaker 1>Native the major Native American tribes that and what what
<v Speaker 1>region of Texas they occupied? Is that in the book? Yeah?
<v Speaker 2>It is. I made it for my research but also
<v Speaker 2>planning to put it in that book.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. And what's the name of the book.
<v Speaker 2>Native Food Plants of Texas. The subtitle is an Austin
<v Speaker 2>Forger's guide based on Indigenous knowledge.
<v Speaker 1>And so where can people buy this? Is it you
<v Speaker 1>got a website or is it who published it?
<v Speaker 2>Paleoforging, which is me? So the e book is on
<v Speaker 2>my website, which is nice. So it's like searchable. You
<v Speaker 2>can have it on your phone anytime around if you'll
<v Speaker 2>just like see if some species is edible or whatever,
<v Speaker 2>that's Paleoforging dot com slash shop would be the place
<v Speaker 2>where you can get that. And then the paperback physical
<v Speaker 2>book is just on Amazon for now. I'm trying to
<v Speaker 2>get another publisher out there, but apparently I just fund
<v Speaker 2>this out the other days. It's a number one new
<v Speaker 2>release in the Forging.
<v Speaker 1>That's cool. Congratulations, Thanks, that's great. Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna.
<v Speaker 1>I'm gonna appurchase a copy. I'm curious and I just
<v Speaker 1>want to. I like having books as reference too, especially
<v Speaker 1>when it concerns ethnobotany of places I love. How did
<v Speaker 1>how long did it take you to work on this?
<v Speaker 1>How long were you working on for.
<v Speaker 2>Well, like the background research for it, it was took over
<v Speaker 2>ten years, but like the actual like starting to do
<v Speaker 2>the final draft of the book, uh, probably about a
<v Speaker 2>year and then the last like six months basically eighty
<v Speaker 2>hours a week doing absolutely nothing but working on this book.
<v Speaker 2>It's a lot of work. But you know, one reason
<v Speaker 2>I did it this way is because I have like
<v Speaker 2>a bunch I've overd twenty foging books, and I've been
<v Speaker 2>buying every forging baryer to come across for for many years.
<v Speaker 2>And I was always just so irritated by the lack
<v Speaker 2>of references and by the lack of references how Native
<v Speaker 2>Americans were using this stuff, because I mean, that's where
<v Speaker 2>it all comes from, and people would just be like
<v Speaker 2>put put out statements and have nothing to back it up.
<v Speaker 2>And it also I got really irritated by how they
<v Speaker 2>all have the same introduced species with really wide distributions.
<v Speaker 2>I think they'll do that because I want to cover
<v Speaker 2>the biggest market that they can. Yeah, And I was like,
<v Speaker 2>I want to know about the local species. I know
<v Speaker 2>they were being eaten by Indians and they were like
<v Speaker 2>living off of this like full time. How are they doing?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, Yeah, that's that was That's something that always irritates
<v Speaker 1>me too, is it's like, oh, introduced species, but that's
<v Speaker 1>that's great, But it doesn't you know, for my own
<v Speaker 1>interests and for my knowledge, I don't care about some
<v Speaker 1>ship that you know is brought over in the last
<v Speaker 1>two or three hundred years, you know, like Mullein One
<v Speaker 1>always talks about Mullen. I fucking cad. I fucking hate
<v Speaker 1>mulling you do, like I gotta't care give the fuck.
<v Speaker 1>But that's that's like again, I guess I was drawn
<v Speaker 1>to your page just because it's there's a there's a
<v Speaker 1>focus on history and ethnobotany and where the knowledge came
<v Speaker 1>from to It's not just like ganking someone's knowledge and
<v Speaker 1>being like, oh so I just figured this out. It's like, no,
<v Speaker 1>this is this is from this historical use in the
<v Speaker 1>context of people who lived here for thousands of years,
<v Speaker 1>using plants that evolved here over millions of years. And
<v Speaker 1>so it's great stuff and I could keep talking to
<v Speaker 1>you forever. Man, we didn't even talk about like the
<v Speaker 1>prickly pair harvesting method, which is fucking ingenious. Why don't
<v Speaker 1>we talk about it really quick? How do you how
<v Speaker 1>do you what's the method you use for getting prickly pairs?
<v Speaker 1>For getting the tunas off of a prickly pair? Because
<v Speaker 1>the tunas are delicious if you pick them at the
<v Speaker 1>right time. But they're covered in those fucking glockheads, those
<v Speaker 1>brutal fiberglass hairs. How do you do it?
<v Speaker 2>Just rub them off? Everyone? That makes it so over complicated.
<v Speaker 2>Everyone's to either burn them off or skin them, that seems,
<v Speaker 2>but both of those are totally unnecessary, and I think
<v Speaker 2>just more work than is necessary because burning them off,
<v Speaker 2>first of all, like you obviously don't want to do
<v Speaker 2>that in the field because of where it prickly pairs
<v Speaker 2>grow in such a regions. And also I've tried that.
<v Speaker 2>I've done that a bunch of times, just messing around,
<v Speaker 2>and it's really not as thorough as people seem to think.
<v Speaker 2>You're not. You don't really have the same like tactile
<v Speaker 2>connection to the food. It's very easy to miss just
<v Speaker 2>one of those patches, the glow kids, and you're done.
<v Speaker 2>And it was skinning them. I mean, like that's more
<v Speaker 2>You're more likely to get the glowkids in your hands
<v Speaker 2>skinning them than anything else. And there's nothing wrong with
<v Speaker 2>the outside of the fruits. They're perfectly good to eat.
<v Speaker 2>So the way that they were most commonly removed by
<v Speaker 2>all indigenous to the Southwest like historically is just rubbing
<v Speaker 2>them off. And so I like to just use a
<v Speaker 2>wat of grass as probably the easiest thing do, or
<v Speaker 2>maybe some junifer needles. But you know, I also often
<v Speaker 2>if I'm going to go in the field, and gather
<v Speaker 2>a bunch. I'll have a specific brush already prepared for
<v Speaker 2>the purpose, and even like atual skin brush works great.
<v Speaker 2>You can just wrap some grasses together in a little bundle. Also,
<v Speaker 2>buckskin was commonly used or rush them.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, but then you'd use.
<v Speaker 2>Put on the ground and rolled around.
<v Speaker 1>You'd use a split stick. That's the other part though,
<v Speaker 1>is you're not holding with your hands. You're using a
<v Speaker 1>split stick like I see this image of you on
<v Speaker 1>the on the Instagram page. You're using a split stick
<v Speaker 1>to hold it like chopsticks.
<v Speaker 2>Basically, yeah, just like tongs. So for that on I
<v Speaker 2>just used a junifer branch, just split off some wood
<v Speaker 2>and then folded it to make some improvised tongs in
<v Speaker 2>the field. Often while just use some cheap kitchen tongs instead. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>grab grab a hold of them and then twist them
<v Speaker 2>off the plant. And then while still held in the tongs,
<v Speaker 2>I'll brush off all the glow kids and then I'll
<v Speaker 2>usually like rotate them like a ninety degrees to get
<v Speaker 2>the part where the tongues were touched in. Make sure
<v Speaker 2>I get every last bit of them off because I
<v Speaker 2>don't I don't like to another way people do them
<v Speaker 2>these days is to like gather a whole bunch and
<v Speaker 2>like put them in a bucket and then like spray
<v Speaker 2>a hose or like he's a pressure wash or something
<v Speaker 2>to wash them off, and like you can do that,
<v Speaker 2>but I don't like to put them in a container
<v Speaker 2>or like a bag in the field with these glockets
<v Speaker 2>still on, because they can stick into one another and
<v Speaker 2>then they're much harder to get out if they're stuck
<v Speaker 2>into the fruit from another one. So I'll get those
<v Speaker 2>all the glockets off before i even put them in
<v Speaker 2>my back.
<v Speaker 1>I've gotten glockets in my mouth before too, and it's
<v Speaker 1>it's fucking fucking sucks. I've gotten cactus spines everywhere except
<v Speaker 1>my fucking urethra. I mean it's you know, I've been
<v Speaker 1>fucking with cactus for a long time. So oh wow,
<v Speaker 1>lyatrous corms are edible.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, well lyatris punk tatah. They're really good, actually one
<v Speaker 2>of the best.
<v Speaker 1>But you roast them right, you can, you.
<v Speaker 2>Don't have to. Actually, in some ways they're they're kind
<v Speaker 2>of better fresh fresh. They taste basically like having sugar cane.
<v Speaker 2>They have a lot of fire risk material on, like
<v Speaker 2>the outer part there is like an inner core that's
<v Speaker 2>soft and not fibris You can just eat whole. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>but the outer part is pretty fibrous. But if you
<v Speaker 2>chew it out and just suck out the juices, it's
<v Speaker 2>like pure sugar. It's just like chewing on trigar Christ
<v Speaker 2>cook because that are a little bit better.
<v Speaker 1>Wow, that's I didn't know that. That's pretty cool. All
<v Speaker 1>the more reason to grow a shif ton of liatrists. See.
<v Speaker 1>That's the thing is like, it's especially this, like don't
<v Speaker 1>just go I encourage people to not just go out. Well,
<v Speaker 1>you can't go out to public land in Texas anyway
<v Speaker 1>because there is none, but you know, don't just go
<v Speaker 1>out the habitat and and poach stuff or gang stuff.
<v Speaker 1>Go you start growing it, grow it in your yard,
<v Speaker 1>and fucking that's all the more reason to, you know,
<v Speaker 1>grow a fucking backyard full of liatriss. I met this
<v Speaker 1>guy in Plano who's got a front yard full of liatriss.
<v Speaker 1>It looks fucking beautiful when it flowers, it's covered in butterflies.
<v Speaker 1>And then he gets tons of seed and tons of
<v Speaker 1>I mean he started off with I think two or
<v Speaker 1>three plants, and now his whole front lawn is just
<v Speaker 1>like interest. There's no grass there.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, beautiful flowers, yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Fucking great plant. Well man, thanks a lot for your time, Uh,
<v Speaker 1>Cyrus harp and uh what's the name of the book again?
<v Speaker 1>For anybody who might want to buy it, they get
<v Speaker 1>on what is it paleoforging dot com?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, or Amazon Native Food Plants of.
<v Speaker 1>Texas, Native Food Plants of Texas and uh, and definitely
<v Speaker 1>check out your Instagram Paleo Forging and the YouTube channel
<v Speaker 1>and uh Facebook. So thanks for what you do, man,
<v Speaker 1>and thanks for your time. I really appreciate it.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, thanks for having me.
<v Speaker 1>Sure thing man, all right, yeah, and I'll uh, I'll,
<v Speaker 1>i'll come up there. I go to Austin a lot,
<v Speaker 1>so i'll i'll try to bring you some stuff, especially
<v Speaker 1>some ebony seeds.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, for sure, let me know. And uh, I'll definitely
<v Speaker 2>would like to check out that preserved you got going
<v Speaker 2>down there in South Texas. What's it called again, the
<v Speaker 2>Thorn Scrubs Sanctuary.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, come down, Jim Hogg County man, just just hit
<v Speaker 1>me up. It's going to be like tolerant to be
<v Speaker 1>there without you know, getting heat stroke for the next
<v Speaker 1>five months, six five or six months, so you're all
<v Speaker 1>come anytime, Okay, cool, Yeah, it'd be great. That'd be
<v Speaker 1>great to have you down there. It's a really special place.
<v Speaker 1>There's there's tons of really interesting plants, and we've got
<v Speaker 1>another like we've got like three or four different habitat
<v Speaker 1>types just from the soil alone on it. You know,
<v Speaker 1>We've got like a wetter area that's like a misty woodland,
<v Speaker 1>and then we've got these coliche hills, and then we've
<v Speaker 1>got some of the red sand, like this red sandy
<v Speaker 1>loam that I think is like you've seen an age
<v Speaker 1>or something. It's like forty million years old, fifty million
<v Speaker 1>years old, but it's Yeah, it's a fascinating spot. I'm
<v Speaker 1>I'm really glad we were able to get it and
<v Speaker 1>protect it. So I'd love to have you that.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. Now that I'm not chained to my desk working
<v Speaker 2>on my book twenty four to seven, I want to
<v Speaker 2>try to get out and travel more. There's the Texas
<v Speaker 2>and look at the floors. I've pretty much covered all
<v Speaker 2>the interesting stuff Astin.
<v Speaker 1>It's only like five hours south to you, not even
<v Speaker 1>it's like four and a half hours south of Austin.
<v Speaker 1>So yeah, anytime. Man, you got my number now, so
<v Speaker 1>hit me up.
<v Speaker 2>All right, sounds good, all.
<v Speaker 1>Right, thanks again. Everybody else have a grass that they
<v Speaker 1>go fuck you up like