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Larner Seeds would like to announce our participation in the National Heirloom Exposition on September 13, 14, and 15 at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds. It is open from 11:00am to 9:00pm. Admission price is $10.00 for adults, and kids 17 and under are free. Go to TheHeirloomExpo.com for tickets in advance and more information.

You may be wondering why we have chosen to participate in an event that, while admittedly wonderful, is not about California native plants. It struck us that edible native plants needed to be represented, in an ethnobotanical mode that is dear to our hearts. So, with the goal of providing information about the Original Heirloom Plants, we will be manning our Larner Seeds Booth. Come and see us!

This event inspired us to finish a project long in the making, The Real California Cuisine: A Treatise on California Native-Plant-Based Foods, Including Recipes. Here, we ask the question: Why is there no "Real California Cuisine" in California Cuisine? In a state with 52 different tribes and the largest indigenous population in the country, why are there almost no native greens or fruits included in this regional cuisine?

To help answer the question and redress this omission, after ten years of gathering information and trying recipes, we have finished the 6th member of our "Notes on Natives" series. We first published this Notes in 1991, to surprisingly little interest. But that never stops us here at Larner Seeds. By that time, I was hooked, and couldn't stop going through ethnographies and interviews for those rare bits of information that illuminate the way Californians ate for the last 12,000 years, and how the land was managed during that time.

The technologies of food preparation were intricate and amazing, and learning about them deepens the sense of connection to the land and its previous inhabitants that we experience through growing native plants. Though information from the past is intriguing, we believe in incorporating this information into the present. And we're pretty busy and pretty lazy, so with our recipes, simplicity rules. We include a mouthwatering recipe for acorn meal biscuits created by Elizabeth Barnet, (Project Coordinator, West Marin Commons Ethnobotany Study Group), our famous wildflower seed cookies, our blue wildrye gomassio, my favorite California breakfast, and others. We hope you'll be caught by the fascination of this whole ethnobotanical endeavour. And experience something of the sorrow for the loss of so much beautiful information from indigenous Californians, alongside joy and amazement at what remains.

As ethnobotanist David Barrows said of the Cahuilla in 1900,

Many of the trails once trodden in quest of food are now abandoned; great stones filled with mortar holes remain along the pine ridges and in the canons of oaks, where no Indians ever come now to gather and grind their seeds.

At least in this kitchen, seed-grinding still goes on.

Author/owner Judith Lowry with a bowl of real California cuisine

The California Cuisine Collection

At the same time, we are introducing our newest seed collection: It consists of four seed packets and a copy of the aforementioned Notes. Feed yourself in a uniquely Californian way! Seeds are for planting, not eating; two wildflowers with edible seed, one native green, and one native grass with edible seed. Chia (Salvia columbariae) Redmaids (Calandrinia ciliata) Indian lettuce (Claytonia perfoliata) Blue wildrye (Elymus glaucus). A value of $28.00 for $24.50.

SALE $28.00 $24.50

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