Tonights salad the base of which is weeds - chickweed, speedwell, fennel, bitter cress, chicory and mizuna all cut up very finely.  I added match sticks of carrots and radish as well as pieces of yakon, apple, and sunflower seeds. The dressing I am enjoying at the moment is: a heaped tsp of tahini, 1/2 tsp of mustard, 1/2 tsp tamari, 1 table spoon of cider vinegar and 1/4 cup of olive oil. Mix it all together well.
For decoration I added spray free tomatoes. Delicious!!

Did you know that in many places around the world they have Dandelion Festivals that celebrate and highlight dandelions with food and beverages made from the whole plant. The theme through many of them is to support organic land stewardship practices and the desire to change the toxic herbicide spraying practices in parks and wild-land maintenance.  I thought that was SO amazing.   Here you can see what they do in Durango, Colorado for their Dandelion Festival.
Other festivals are held in the Netherlands, Nova Scotia, Japan (called the Tampopo Festival), four cities at least in Canada e.g. Halifax, Ottawa, Stratford and Waterloo, and many places in the US.  We need one in New Zealand don't we!!

Its winter here rather than the spring/summer in the northern hemisphere so I've been busy digging dandelion for their roots, cleaning them, cutting them up (as you see below) and then lightly roasting them for an hour on a low oven temperature to the make them totally dry and to bring out the flavour. Then I've been making this delicious warming dandelion tonic which is nice and frothy!!

Dandelion Cacao Warming Tonic

 2 T dandelion roasted root
5 kawakawa leaves or 2 licorice teabags
5 cardamom pods

 Bring to the boil in 3 cups water.
Simmer for 20 minutes
Strain and pour into the blender.
Add 2 generous tablespoons of cacao powder
1 T coconut oil, 1 T honey

Blend mix. Pour frothy, steaming tonic into mugs and enjoy!
This is really delicious.

Spotlight on Green
To me, Green smoothies are amazingly nutritious, restorative and enlivening.  They maintain health, detoxify, and build us resilient immune systems.  Green smoothies are totally embedded in my own daily rhythm giving me diversity in my diet that my body totally needs. A green smoothie per day provides an entirely RAW meal chock-full of enzymes and puts pure goodness into my body and is imperative to my body’s daily nutrition.  However, some of us have chronic conditions that need extra healing and targeted nutrition. 

I am the kind of person who is always researching and looking out for that extra special thing that can benefit and heal me, and I've recently discovered something special that I’d like to share with you, something i feel will make a very positive difference in peoples’ lives. It’s a special blue-green algae that releases our body’s very own stem cells. Stem cells allow a body to repair itself from previous damage and to renew itself on a daily basis from general wear and tear and detox pollutants as needed. When we are young, our bodies are able to continually repair and regenerate while also staying on top of all its daily priorities. When our stem-cell release is impaired or restricted, our bodies are always trying to play 'catch-up' and we see and feel signs of degeneration, imbalance and a lack of mental and emotional ease. 

Simply put, no matter how healthy your diet is … without your stem cells doing what they did back when you were young … our bodies are breaking down a little more each day. Therefore Ageing in itself is simply the break-down of the body faster than it can regenerate itself. This is very apparent when you compare how adults heal in comparison to a child.

Stem Cells are a bit like blank canvasses, in that they can adapt to become ANY cell in the body, this is what makes them so special and important in the process of regeneration and repair, and how the SAME product can produce very different results in different people - depending on THEIR area of imbalance.

So you can see that Stemcell nutrition is also very important, and this is what the algae does.

The algae is sustainably harvested at specific times - which i have personally researched as this is a very important aspect to me.  It comes from a pristine environment called Klamath Lake in Oregon near where I used to live - small world !  This product has over 2 decades of research, with many heart warming testimonials… One person has recovered from Parkinsons, while another person fell 5 stories and had a rapid recovery which confounded medical doctors. If this interests you as much as it did me - and you would like to know more, i invite you to check out these 3 short videos (5-7 mins) on each of the 3 products that are synergistically engineered to work together - these are presented by Dr Christian Drapeau who is the formulator (www.christiandrapeau.com)

STEM ENHANCE ULTRA: https://youtu.be/4Ap2W3PjX_8
CYACTIVE: https://youtu.be/r59zpJ2xvFI
PLASMAFLO: https://youtu.be/4gPtzaHQflg
Please contact me julia@juliasedibleweeds.com if you would like more information and would like to be added to our private algae group STEM CELLS & SUPER HUMANS - and i will be more than happy to share this wonderful information with you.

Speaking engagement this month
June 2nd I was invited to speak to the Bay Bloomers Garden Group in Te Puna.  They were a lively, enthusiastic group of women very interested and curious to learn more about wild edible weeds.  One woman was so inspired she quoted this poem to me which she knew off by heart from Gerard Manly Hopkirk (Born 1844- Died1889)

“What would the world be, once bereft 
of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, 
O let them be left, wildness and wet; 
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”

I love this beautiful poem!

Oca is one of the highest vegetable sources of carbohydrate and energy. They are a good source of pro-vitamin A (beta carotene), and also contain potassium, vitamin B6 and small amounts of fibre. Yellow-orange coloured varieties indicate the presence of carotenoids; whilst red skins and red specks in flesh indicate the presence of anthocyanins

Roots are a theme running through this newsletter and here you can see a comfrey root.  I measured it but have forgotten the length.  You can see how they would be able to accumulate minerals going down into the earth that deep. It is quite staggering and also why permaculturists like to have it around fruit trees. When the leaves die down they give their goodness to the surrounding plants.