Wild Food – Banana Yucca from my yard

I live in the mountains of southwest New Mexico, USA. I’ve left my property wild, and have lots of native plants, but this is the first year I harvested Banana Yucca fruit. (Don’t confuse this plant with cassava yuca.) I’m no expert! Here’s my experience.

Yucca are evergreen and have beautiful flowers in the spring

Lots of critters eat the flowers, but some fruit develops. Critters like the fruit too.

I’m the critter who decided to try the fruit this August. Most of the 40 types of yuccas have dry hard fruits, but the fruits of banana yucca are fleshy and rumored to be tasty.

Roasted on the grill…

The fruit are packed with seeds, each segment surrounded by a shelly sort of case. The seeds scoop out easily. Sometimes I got the casings out easily and sometimes not.

To eat, I scraped the flesh out of the skin with a spoon. It’s mild, sweet, and soft, sort of like a ripe peach in terms of texture. Like most wild foods I know of, a lot of work for the reward.

Click here for another post from someone who’s tried eating various parts of the yucca – note the warnings! Approach any wild “food” with caution.

I’ve seen suggestions to crush and boil the seeds until tender. I did grind some seeds in my coffee grinder. They’re so hard, I can’t imagine how you’d do that by hand! I tried mixing the seed-flour with water and pan-frying, but it stayed like sand. If anyone has first hand suggestions for the seeds, please let me know.

“These fruits are a traditional food of the Apache and Navajo, prepared by roasting or baking, stripping out the seeds, pounding the remaining flesh into a pulp, forming the pulp into flat cakes, and sun-drying them for later use.” US Forest Service

Proof that eluded math for millennia… proven #maths #mathematics and, since they are still undergrads, #citizenscientist

Since the Babylonians, we all knew that the basis of trigonometry can’t be proven. It must be assumed. Until today, when a new proof has been presented!

Pythagoras’s theorem, a²+b²=c², which says that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the opposite two sides of a right triangle. It’s the basis of trigonometry, so mathematicians have long held that any trigonometric proof of the theorem would be fallacious: circular reasoning. That’s because you can’t validate an idea with the idea itself. Craig Good – sign up for Skeptoid’s Wonder of the Week

Well! At the American Mathematical Society’s March meeting (okay, it wasn’t today, but I’m just catching up) two undergraduates challenge that venerable notion.

In the 2000 years since trigonometry was discovered it’s always been assumed that any alleged proof of Pythagoras’s Theorem based on trigonometry must be circular. In fact, in the book containing the largest known collection of proofs (The Pythagorean Proposition by Elisha Loomis) the author flatly states that “There are no trigonometric proofs, because all the fundamental formulae of trigonometry are themselves based upon the truth of the Pythagorean Theorem.” But that isn’t quite true: in our lecture we present a new proof of Pythagoras’s Theorem which is based on a fundamental result in trigonometry—the Law of Sines—and we show that the proof is independent of the Pythagorean trig identity \sin^2x + \cos^2x = 1. Session abstract

As an engineer, I am only an egg when it comes to math. I stand in awe of such an accomplishment, and am happy to share my humble amazement. Perhaps a mathematician or member of the AMS can offer more intelligent comments below this post. Will this proof withstand scrutiny?

Congratulations to Ne’Kiya D Jackson and Calcea Rujean Johnson of St. Mary’s Academy, New Orleans, LA

Is spring early this year? This beats any groundhog #citizenscience #environmental #groundhog

It takes a lot of data to track how the environment is changing across America – that’s where citizen scientists come in.

The USA-NPN brings together volunteer observers, government agencies, non-profit groups, educators and students of all ages to monitor the impacts of climate change on plants and animals in the United States. usanpn.org

Whether you’re a farmer wondering if early peach blossoms will be clobbered by a spring frost, a bird watcher waiting for the migration of your favorite species, or a fan of wildflowers, you want to know how the life cycle timing of plants and animals is changing. People all over the country are collecting data that let us see beyond our own backyard or today’s weather.

The National Phenology Database has accumulated over 30 million phenology records – that is, observations that track life-events in plants and animals. Now is a great time to start your own participation. Become a volunteer observer: Click Here Now.

Visit the website to learn more, and here’s a brief introduction.

PS: No, this is not phrenology, the pseudoscience about bumps on your head. I read it that way at first too!