Edible Shoots

        There was a time when I lived in a sleepy, cold town all alone, having the luxury of a lovely friend, a small car, and a camera. We roamed around the places, exploring things no mortals we knew ever dared to. Once, he came up with a plan to watch the sunrise and had breakfast sitting on the top of a huge boulder, crowning the edge of a mountainous height and cutting steep slope that people feared to peep down. The mountain peak known as Habla is one of the peaks on the Aseer Mountain range, which is part of the Sarawat Mountains, running parallel to the Red Sea’s eastern coastline, extending the Hijaz Mountain range to the Southern borders of Saudi Arabia.                                               Part of the plan was to start way earlier so that we could watch the sunrise, and December was never kind to the people of this part of the world. Being so precarious and knowing much more about what was happening around me, I said no without sounding blunt. Still, I had to follow

  The Earth in Her Hands is a book by Jennifer Jewell that covers 75 extraordinary women in the world of plants . It tells us stories of womenfolk who put their life into plants, or the plants chose them to live their life with. Like most exciting things happening in my life, I stumbled upon this title recently while researching a related project online. It was love at first sight, and I got addicted to it while listening to the book on Audible, waiting outside our university dental clinic for my wife to have an appointment. Thanks, Dr. Abdul Qadar, for a three-hour long session on an emergency basis before he leaves for his home for the annual vacation. Each woman has a unique plant journey to relate to, which will take us for a ride through the ever-exciting botanical world. They are cherry-picked from various fields like botany, garden nursery, floral design, garden, photography landscape architecture, farming, seed banks, herbalism, and food justice. The common thread all these

          We have been missing those lovely, feathered friends for a while. We all wondered where all our birds had gone to. Yesterday, as I was helping an uncle prune his garden, I had a realization for an obvious reason. The peaches and figs in his garden have been left mostly unharvested. As the orchard was well-walled, no one dared to step in, and the birds would in no way be prosecuted for fruit poaching. They must have been feasting on it. There were too many fruits fallen and rotten under each. The season’s harvest is too big for little birds to devour. And they can’t squirrel it away for winter. The ground was littered with a rainbow of rotting fruits, the sweet scent of decay filling the air. We had grown friendlier ever since we moved in, and they seldom flew off even when we walked closer. We moved in the winter; at a time, they were desperately looking for food. My wife readily sensed a need and kept a bowl of grain and water in another one against the wall. They were happy

         Around 7000 years ago, the Chinese invented the art and science of spinning cocoons of silkworms into smooth thread and weaving it into the lustrous fabric for the fabulously rich world. They raised silkworms feeding on cultivated white mulberry plants. The secret was successfully guarded for thousands of years and resulted in one of the largest travel and transport networks, later known as the silk route, over land and sea. Traders travelled to distant lands on foot, on horseback or by caravan, following a confluence of trails leading to China, and brought the silk and sold it at bazaars and caravanserais en route. (Caravanserais were roadside inns where travelers – caravaners - could rest and recover from the day's journey.) The route connected the civilizations in the East and the West for about 1400 years. I captured this photo of our daughter Aishah holding a bowl of sun-ripe mulberry freshly plucked  in the little garden of our property owner, Abdul Azeez Abdullah Ya

People in the Arabian Peninsula were largely pastoral in their culture. Livestock was one of their mainstays. Cattle, sheep, goats, and camels were a part of their tribal lives. Interestingly, there are over 100 words for camels in the Arabic language, just as Eskimos have more than two dozen words for snow. The animals they kept gave them milk, meat, leather, manure to cultivate their crops, and a pet to take care of or play with. Camels were their only cars until not too long ago. Milk is still an important item on Saudi tables, and they know a lot of dishes with dairy. It is also worth noting that in desert dwellers’ long history with milk, their genetics have favored them to have comparatively few cases of lactose intolerance. There are still very rich people who take more pride in the number of sheep or camels over the luxury cars or assets in real estate they own. This herd of cattle belongs to the Bos Indicus breed, characterized by humped shoulders and pendulous dewlap. It is h