Happy Nest Farm La Mesa

03/31/2025

Website just published:
happynestfarmlamesa.com

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02/01/2025

I’m not very good at sharing these…

02/01/2025

Poppies from last year are self seeding. Yay!!!

02/01/2025

Perilla is such a beautiful plant! Is there anyone with recipes that use it?

01/10/2025

January tomatoes 🍅!

08/23/2024

Stinky Starfish time!!

08/18/2024

Visit from a Blue Jay

08/15/2024

08/12/2024

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=810937961121381&id=100066155537455&mibextid=cr9u03

08/12/2024

Magic in the Garden

08/05/2024

Garden firsts: Bitter melon, loofah and bird’s nest gourd.

07/26/2024

From Pascal:
The illusion of scarcity...

At this time of the years, the landscape of Southern California is turning into a desert, the hills around Los Angeles are adorned with a pale yellow color. Everything is dry and seems hopelessly dead. The same happened in the various states I visited last year, usually in fall.

But it's really an illusion, it's a landscape composed mostly of invisible but edible seeds and grains. For a large part, and mostly as a European, it is a lost knowledge.

I estimate that in Southern California alone, one could probably find 200 edible wild seeds and grains. More than 1/2 would be non-native and invasive. All of them, hunters/gatherers food from long ago and different places.

We go to the store and we think we have an abundance but that too is an illusion. For example, around 8 types of potatoes are being "offered" in a regular supermarket but people don't realize that there are around 4000 varieties of native potatoes. You get what's cheap to produce in large quantity. Where is our freedom of choice?

It's the same thing with grains and seeds, there are probably thousands of them which were eaten by our ancestors all over the world, most of them now forgotten as a nutritious food source.

Many have become unwanted weeds...

Modern agriculture - monoculture - cheaper to produce

It's a fascinating journey to rediscover some of those forgotten food and figure out the extraction and food preparation methods.

Photos: Some of the edible seeds and grains I collected in the last 3 weeks. Most of them considered unwanted "weeds"

Lamb’s quarter seeds (Chenopodium album)
Black mustard seeds
Shortpod mustard seeds
Sedge seeds
Curly dock seeds
Tansy mustard Seeds
Wild radish seeds
Wild fennel seeds
Wild oats grains
Cheatgrass grains
Wild barley
Field mustard seeds
Golden chia
California buckwheat
Plantain seeds
Poppy seeds
Stinging nettles seeds

07/08/2024

Sargent peppers tomatoes from Tomatomania. Very cool 😎 looking!

07/08/2024

Harvesting compost and building a compost pile is labor intensive. We gathered a few helpers for the task. Thanks Ramon and Christine!

07/04/2024

Around the garden today. Elderberry, beans, onions, radicchio flowers, dahlia,boullion plant, perennial arugula, motherwort, lemon verbena

07/04/2024

Here’s an example of succession planting. The old squash has lost its vigor and the new plant has started producing.