Red/ Geocaching/Poke Salad

 Laura goes for a 30 minute run every other day.  She likes running on flat ground.  In order to get that here she goes down to a neighboring corn field and runs.  With all the rain we have been having she says it is more like puddle jumping and mud dodging.  She is coming back from her run in the pic above.  She is in red

 I stayed home and watched red birds flying about.  I would have had more pics of red and brown birds, but I forgot to put the card in the camera.

  Poke Salad plant.  This is the start of the blooms to berries.   We were on a walk looking for our geo-cache and came upon this beautiful plant.  A family walking along the path told us the name of the plant and I came home and looked it up.  Most of the sights talked about eating it, but this site says no.  So I will be on the safe side and print this one and you can look it up your self and decide.

Don't Eat Poke Salad

Pokeweed is probably the best known and most widely used wild vegetable in America and Europe. However, a food scientist with the Alabama Cooperative Extension System says no part of this plant should be eaten by a person or animal.

"The roots, berries, seeds and mature stems and leaves of pokeweed are poisonous," says Extension Food Scientist Jean Weese. There are at least three different types of poison in this plant -- phytolaccatoxin, triterpene saponins, an alkaloid, phytolaccin, and histamines.

Pokeweed, a herbaceous perennial native to America, grows from Maine to Florida and Minnesota to Texas. Indians introduced the first colonists to pokeweed, and they took it back to Europe where it became a popular vegetable. It grows along roads and fencerows, in fields and in open woods.

Early American settlers also made a crimson dye from the berry juice. Indians often used the pokeweed concoctions for a variety of internal and external medicinal applications.

The berries, which ripen in fall, are also popular with migrating songbirds, especially robins, towhees, mockingbirds, mourning doves, catbirds and bluebirds. Sometimes the birds get drunk on overly ripe berries and fly into closed windows or sides of buildings.

For years, people have picked the young shoots and developing leaves (before they take on their reddish hue) off this plant and cooked them. The plant is still used by many people today, and the tender young shoots often appear in rural vegetable markets in the South.

Most people boil the shoots and leaves for 20-30 minutes, first in salt water and again in clean water, then eat the plant much like spinach.

"The boiling process removes some of the toxins but certainly not all of them," says Weese. I suggest that people avoid this plant no matter how many times your mother or grandmother may have prepared it in the past and no matter how good it tasted. Why would you want to eat something that we know is toxic when there are so many other non-toxic plants out there we can eat?"

Flowers

Berries red to green. 

We went looking for our cache and it is somewhere in these woods.  I have detailed geo-caching in other blogs if you want to look for more details about it.

There it is through the vines and at the tree with many limbs

Laura has the cache box,  this time it is a big ammo box.  Rog is showing Laura the hand held GPS we use to locate the caches.

She has opened the box and the first thing one should do is find the log and enter your name and date to let the person who placed the cache who and when someone last found it.  We also log this information on a computer site. 

This is our log in.  We only did one cache today just to show Laura what it was about.  


We are staying in tonight and viewing movies we got from Blockbusters.  They are calling me so I best to a quick reread and post this.