Imagine this: In a city park to have an entire wall of dead wood around the children's playground. Why? To attract all the bugs, spiders, mice, termites and other little critters that live off of dead wood, why of course.
Here the sign explains that 25% of all creatures in the forest live off of dead wood and that these days most of that wood is removed. So they've made this fence here in the middle of the city (Berlin's pop is 3.5 million) right around the children's playground. Now, I'm from the burbs of a large city and I can tell you that this would not go over well at all in Los Angeles! Attract spiders and rodents???
There are just so many things I love about these little parks here. This one is a stone's throw from our house and I just discovered it. It was so well tucked away behind the trees I hadn't noticed it.
I really love this snail!
So on today's agenda was nettle picking for nettle soup. I've seen it here in this book for ages and have wanted to try it. It stresses the importance of using only the freshest early spring nettles- otherwise it could actually be detrimental to the digestion process rather than supportive of it. The whole thing is so intriguing to me- I mean we're all wondering - Will it sting when we eat it???
Nettle hunters
They started out bare handed and brave.
But that didn't last long...
Then they wised up and wore my knitted gloves- not exactly gardening gloves but it's what we had.
Once the pot was full it was time for a little distraction.
yup. more frog catching.
Only these little guys are a lot faster and much harder to catch! We had some seriously disgusting clothing by the end of today.
This was our first return to the forest after our wild boar encounter. We all walked around with sticks in our hands until we came upon the lot in the photo below. It is intentionally blurred because it is illegal to put photos of naked people on blog without their consent! Yup, stark, butt naked. On a blanket on the forest floor. There were about 5 of them. One rather large man around 60 who was laying on his side with his rump towards us when we first noticed. Oh, how badly I wanted to take a hilarious close-up! I really did. There was a pregnant woman and a few other middle aged women - all out enjoying nature. It doesn't take much for the temperatures to rise and the clothes to fall. This aspect of Germany I love whole heartedly! It cracks me up to no end. And since they were all perfectly comfortable laying around naked I felt it was time to drop our weapons and take our chances with our wild piggy.
We were all so exhausted from our 5 hour foraging expedition we didn't have the energy left to actually cook the soup. So this post will be continued tomorrow... with recipe and review and I'll let ya'll know if our throats are burning.
