Welcome to our new shared blog of the food and plants of the Southwest.  We are a group of friends who for years,  have been learning from each other. Now we are going to extend our little community and share with you the knowledge and recipes we have been sharing with each other.  We all come to this subject with different personalities. Some of us are practical and straight-forward, others more philosophical. We’ll write in rotation.  But it won’t be just about us.  There are so many other people doing interesting work in local and wild foods, we hope to interview some of them along the way.  Occasionally we’ll ask someone to do a guest post.

We always invite your comments as we want to make this a community conversation.  Whenever I’m with a group of  Southwest foodies, I come away with something new, something that makes me go, “Wow, what a great idea. I never knew that.”  So share with us and the other readers your new ideas for edible wild plants or local animal foods.

Our first post that will arrive in a few days is about bees.

Here’s who we are:

Carolyn Niethamm

Carolyn Niethammer writes about Southwest cuisine and edible wild plants of the Southwest. She is happiest when working in her flower or vegetable gardens, out on the desert gathering wild foods, or devising new recipes for the plants she has gathered.  Her five cookbooks range from the way Native Americans cooked wild plants to a collection of recipes devised by the Southwest’s top restaurant and resort chefs for incorporating the area’s iconic ingredients in delicious dishes.

Tia Linda (design by Jennifer Parker Designs all rights reserved)

Tia Linda is both an urban and a rural food producer. She ranches in the Sierra Madres foothills in Northern Mexico. She also keeps honeybees and fosters native bee habitat in the urban Southwest. She enjoys raising poultry, with a special fondness for heirloom breeds. She sees herself as an extension of the hives, flocks, and herds that she lives among.

Martha Burgess

Mentored by Tohono O’odham Elders, Martha Ames Burgess came into ethnobotany from the inside out, learning how to harvest, prepare, store, and eat many Sonoran Desert edibles, and to make use of desert plant “first aid”.  With O’odham farmers and Native Seeds/SEARCH cofounders, she was taught desert gardening with native heirlooms.  Her mission is to pass along this wildcrafting and gardening knowledge so that new Baja Arizona dwellers may better appreciate and adapt to our desert home, especially in these times of climate change.  She uses on-site outdoor teaching, poetry and art for sharing the awareness.

Jacqueline Soule has been writing about plants in the Southwest since the 1980’s, and growing and using them since even before that.  An award-winning garden writer, she is delighted to be the instigator of this venture.  She welcomes you to her free lectures at the Pima County Libraries.