2086 Field trip & picnic – what a day!

Meeting point at Nida carpark

After many weeks traipsing through the dunes, forest and beach of the Curonian Spit, collecting spruce shoots, nettles, raspberry leaves and mosquito bites, talking to local biologists and foragers, concocting jellies and pancakes and fermented sodas, we finally hosted this year’s annual field trip & picnic on 22 June 2086!

Thanks to everyone who came along – amateur lichenologists, artists, interpagans and everything in between. For those of you unfortunate enough to have missed out on this special bumper edition (back on Lithuanian soil for the first time in decades!), here’s a taste of what the Society got up to.

Follow the fish!

Toasting the locally extinct arctic raspberry, and the miraculously alive-and-well wild strawberry, with wild strawberry kvass (fermented soda).

UFO landing site: space lichen, astrobiology and Cold War luxuries.

Blinis with un-caviar. Each amateur lichenologist dollops a spoonful of un-caviar onto a neighbour’s blini while saying ‘kosmičeskije sso-sstanivlenija‘ (‘in cosmic co-becomings’).

Flummery! Made with agar and blueberries from the old forest. With a side of Permian mass extinction and microplastic futures.

The Great Tuning Fork

A full report from the Society will be published in the forthcoming Nida Art Colony Log: On Rites and Terrabytes, due for release later this year.

Big cheers to Sepideh Ardalani for helping with food wizardry, Diana Pusko for foraging advice, the interpagan intentional community for their extraordinary un-caviar, and Nida Art Colony for letting us crash their symposium! See you somewhere else next year!

Next Up: Annual Field Trip & Picnic 2086

‘It’s not the age of reason … it’s the era of flummery, and the day of the devious approach’ –Trouble with Lichen (1960).

The T. Rudzinskaitė Memorial Amateur Lichenologists Society cordially invites you to its Annual Field Trip & Picnic to be held in 2086 on Nida. This year we are fortunate to gather on the UNESCO World heritage-listed biocultural landscape of the Curonian Spit, Eighth designated Eco-Zone and home to countless rare communities of lichen, as well as the wonderfully prehistoric (and once-extinct!) Baltic Sturgeon.

We will meet promptly in the carpark of Nida Art Colony on Friday June 22, 2086, at 14.30 for immediate departure. Enthusiasts are advised to bring a carrier bag and water, and to wear a hat, sunscreen and comfortable shoes for walking through forest and sandy terrain. Be prepared for mosquitos! Speculative flummery will be provided.

Numbers are limited, please RSVP by emailing. Hope to see you there!

Have you seen this fish?

This year the Amateur Lichenologists Society was invited to have a presence in Vilnius, with the opportunity to show some work alongside Žilvinas Landzbergas in the Vilnius Academy of Arts Glass Pavilion, as part of the exhibition Teleport to Nida.

That’s our life-size baltic sturgeon on the glass (long ago extinct in the wild), the exact length of the last one caught in the Baltic Sea. Here also is the text that went along with the display:

“Did you know that the iconic Baltic Sturgeon is considered a ‘living fossil’ that was for a short time extinct here in Lithuania? The Sturgeon’s ancestors survived ‘the Great Dying’ (the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event) some 200 million years ago, in which 96% of marine life disappeared. In 1996 the last wild specimen of this prehistoric fish to be found in the Baltic Sea was hauled out at a remote island in Estonia, 2.9 metres long and weighing 136 kg. In 2057, after decades of a committed reintroduction program, healthy adults born in captivity and released into the Neman River were once again observed at the Curonian Spit, leaping from the water in what some believe is a kind of communion with their oddly kindred space lichen.”

 

wild strawberry kvass

More experimenting with kvass, a fermented soda popular in Russia that can be made with any number of things.

Our second attempt uses wild strawberries – Fragaria vesca, ‘fraisier des bois’ – collected around the beach at Nida. Evidence from archaeological excavations suggests that Fragaria vesca has been consumed by humans since the Stone Age http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue1/tomlinson/part2.html#S711

Recipe from Sandor Katz here

Seems you basically just cover the berries in sugar water, 1:1.5 ratio, and wait.
Let’s see..!

We would have like to have tried this with the arctic raspberry or arctic bramble, the ‘superior berry’ (rubus arcticus) of the sub-arctic region, but that’s now extinct in Lithuania. In other places it’s also on the decline – in Finland the decrease in forest fires have adversely affected it (it likes the nutrients from forest ash and post-fire gets a better run than competitors); while in Estonia and Scandinavia, agricultural and forestry developments which drain soil have had an impact, since it likes wet soil and in dry conditions is overgrown and replaced by other species.


 [image from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/79/Rubus_arcticus.jpg/440px-Rubus_arcticus.jpg ]

https://www.balticforestry.mi.lt/bf/PDF_Articles/2011-17[2]/Vool_2011%2017(2)_170_178.pdf

flummery

flummery is both a fluffy 17th-19th century dessert pudding, and a load of nonsense.

‘It’s not the age of reason … it’s the era of flummery, and the day of the devious approach’ –Trouble with Lichen (1960)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flummery

some incredible specimens here
http://www.historicfood.com/Jellies.htm

& a little on isinglas (swim bladders of sturgeon) which were a common ingredient in flummery
https://food-hacks.wonderhowto.com/news/weird-ingredient-wednesday-isinglass-or-why-your-guinness-has-fish-it-0161766/

Yellow Flummery

a pretty basic recipe here, using berries https://permaculture.com.au/davidson-plum-rainforest-flavours-in-the-kitchen/

https://1tess.wordpress.com/2008/08/13/blueberry-gems/ 
https://books.google.lt/books?id=uCRdqi4lvK8C&pg=PA53&lpg=PA53&dq=blueberry+flummery&source=bl&ots=edOyqufQi6&sig=PMLJOx7XcWqKqtV8xYPuiGvQRNQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiMx5Cfz9jbAhXBDywKHQ1lCmwQ6AEIazAO#v=onepage&q=blueberry%20flummery&f=false

http://www.cooks.com/recipe/2i8iz3ay/blueberry-flummery.html