• 3 tablespoons mirin (Japanese sweet rice wine)
• 1 1/2 tablespoons rice vinegar (not seasoned)
• 2 1/4 teaspoons umeboshi plum vinegar
• 2 tablespoons umeboshi plum paste
• 1 1/2 teaspoons reduced-sodium soy sauce
• 3/4 teaspoon packed light brown sugar
• 4 1/2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 3 tablespoons finely chopped green shiso leaves (about 9)

• Pruning young fruit trees
• Pruning young blueberry bushes

Planting and Care Instructions (non-acid loving plants)

Planting instructions

1. Skim off grass or weeds and their roots from the soil surface.
2. For the planting hole, loosen the soil in an area three times the width of the container and to the depth of the container. Before removing soil from the hole, add a good general purpose organic fertilizer, rock phosphate, greensand, earthworm castings, and agricultural lime if needed. Mix these ingredients in the hole to achieve a homogenous soil mixture. Note: Do not add organic matter into the planting hole, unless the soil is extremely compacted. In this case add no more than 10% by volume and plant high. If adding organic matter to soil it is better to do it to whole planting beds, not individual planting holes, and till all amendments into the top 6 inches of soil. Save your organic matter for a good mulch layer!
3. Excavate enough soil to plant the container.
4. At this time, crack the bottom and sides of the planting hole with digging fork.
5. Water the plant in its container thoroughly or dip plant in a seaweed solution.
6. Remove the plant carefully from its container.
7. Loosen the plant’s exterior roots and separate and spread any circling roots.
8. Place the plant in the hole at or above the soil line (NOTE: IT IS BETTER TO PLANT IT TOO HIGH THAN TOO LOW).
9. Replace excavated soil around the plant’s root ball and lightly firm to hold plant in position.
10. Create a water mound around the outside diameter of the hole.
11. Mulch with a good organic mulch 2” deep. Keep mulch away from the stem of the plant.
12. Water the plant well. Use a seaweed solution during transplanting if possible.

Watering schedule

Fertilization schedule

• We welcomed everyone with an “Appalachian Reishi” mead apperitif. 
• I had been working on a stew since the day before, based in a stock made from cracked, roasted turkey bones from a pastured heritage turkey raised by Gateway Farm at Earthaven Ecovillage in Black Mountain, simmered with a little hawthorne vinegar for 24 hours until a rich, creamy broth remained. 
• In the stewpot was hominy I made from Oaxacan Green corn we had grown the previous fall cooked in white oak ashes, some ice cube trays of frozen ramps (wild onions) from spring ’09, spicebush berries, sun-dried tomatoes from a friend’s garden, and roasted green chiles I had brought back from New Mexico. 
• One guest, Natalie, brought a crock of shredded venison that she and her partner had hunted and processed, and a big frozen block of peppered deer sausage from earlier in the season for brunch the next day. 
• Alan brought a jar of dried Maitake mushrooms, my personal favorite, and another jar full of dried ground nettles. 
• Joe was trying to cram a candy-roaster squash roughly the size of his torso into the oven, and the 20 pounds of goat meat from a goat he had slaughtered earlier in the year waited in the freezer for our next stew.
• We added some venison, goat, Maitake and nettles to the stew, and moved on to the hominy cornbread, chickweed pesto, and wild mustard salad dressed in walnut oil, occasionally cleansing our palettes with wild blueberry and muscadine wine, blackberry sassafras beer brewed in a base of maple sap, and James’ elegant, bronzy persimmon and autumn olive mead. 
• In the morning, we had a brunch with eggs and fresh “walking” onion greens from our friends down the road, hominy corncakes with maple syrup we cooked down from sugar maples last winter, venison sausage and stimulating rounds of toasted yaupon holly tea (a native close cousin to yerba matte).

Zev Friedman was raised in a patch of kudzu in Sylva, NC and has a B.S. in Human Ecology from UNCA.  He now owns Urban Paradise Gardening (www.upgardens.com), a permaculture design and installation business, and has recently joined Living Systems Design, Chuck Marsh’s permaculture design firm. Zev is a wild food vagabond which means he grows, gathers, processes, and cooks much of his own food in tandem with a group of similarly obsessed friends.  He makes shoes, baskets, nets, bags, tools, cook pots, furniture (and wants to learn to build bicycles!) from wildcrafted and cultivated materials. Within permaculture, Zev specializes in forest agriculture and useful fungi, and spends his spare time writing, teaching, making up stories, playing banjo and brewing birch beer.