Bottle Brush Flower and Tree

Spring has come to the Bahamas as well as the rest of the world and all sorts of things are in bloom. The bottlebrush trees all along East Bay Street are starting to bloom. The flowers look like those brushes that are used to clean bottles. Come to think of it, I haven't seen a bottlebrush in about 20 years.

Here is my Sunday morning music as I write this:

Fake Dandelion Revealed -- Coltsfoot

My friend Danny is a better Googler than I. He was on a golf course yesterday and saw the fake dandelion flowers there. (See the blog entry immediately below this on fake dandelion flowers). He found out what they were. It is a Coltsfoot

The was the blog entry where he identified it:

http://foodunderfoot.com/look-alikes-coltsfoot-or-dandelion

and here is an excerpt from that blog:

There are some prominent differences in the flower as well (between dandelion and coltsfoot), but if you just saw Coltsfoot flowering by itself, it might be a common mistake to make.

Coltsfoot (Tussilago farfara) is useful in and of itself: more as an herb than a wild edible. The herb is a decongestant which resolves phelgm and relieves coughing, wheezing, bronchitis and asthma. The entire above-ground portion of the herb: flowers, leaves, stalk, are either dried and steeped as tea or made into a tincture by steeping in alcohol.

In Chinese medicine Coltsfoot flower is known as kuan dong hua and is used to stop cough (the dried flowers are made into a tea, often combined with other herbs.)

If you do see Coltsfoot around, though, now is the time to harvest it! Harvest the complete above-ground portion and set on non-metallic screens to dry, or hang upside-down in bunches. Or, chop the herb, fill a jar, and cover with 80 or 100 proof vodka. Steep for 6 weeks, then filter out the plant matter, saving the liquid: this is your tincture.

Coltsfoot is a mild herb with minimal toxicity, so the standard adult dose of the tincture is 2 - 4 ml/day, or about 50 drops. Children’s doses would be smaller.

Happy harvesting, and please let us know what you find and do!
~ Melissa

Well on my walk yesterday, I found another weird thing. It wasn't coltsfoot. It was actually catsfoot. Here is a pic:

Fake Dandelion Invasion

The Lovely One was off to the highlands of Scotland, and left me a honey dew list. It is " Honey do this" and "Honey do that" before you leave for work in Nassau Bahamas on Tuesday.

If you live anywhere in the northeast part of North America, you will know that we have had an amazing stretch of warm, record-breaking weather. Yesterday it was 27 degrees Celsius or 80.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Just a couple of days ago, I was chopping ice and snow trying to reduce a huge snowbank left by the snowplow, and now everything is melted away just like my retirement savings after the tech boom crashed.

So after playing handyman for a few hours, I decided to go for a walk in the balmy spring weather. I looked in the ditch near the road, and behold, I saw a profusion of yellow flowers. They looked like dandelions.
They weren't. They were fake dandelions. And they were growing in the scrubbiest of all places -- the ditch.

All of the flies, bees and bugs that hatched in the warm weather





These things seem to like growing in gravel. I have been googling like crazy to try and find a name for these things. If you happen to know the name of them, please leave a comment.

But the surest sign that spring has arrived comes from a picture that I took north of Bowmanville Ontario on Thursday.

I don't know the name of it now, but it is the old Erin Lee Golf Course on Taunton Road a few kilometers after you exit from Highway 115 and before you get to Liberty Street from Bowmanville. The course was open and it was packed.


I didn't see any fake dandelions there. But I suspect there was a lot of fake scores.