Crouching to spot the milkweed on the top of a bluff at Bubbling Springs in Wisconsin. Photo by Chris Bohnhoff
Early last winter, my friend, pro photographer and video producer Chris Bohnhoff put a bug in my ear about planning a hunt we would turn into a video the following Spring. Chris and I started working together on videos after we met on a shoot we both did at Heartland a few years ago.
Our collaboration is a creative outlet for both of us, Chris has his day job, shooting food and lifestyle based photos and video, and I have my gig running the Salt Cellar. If you’ve ever known anyone with artistic tendencies though, you know that just one project is never enough.
Our ongoing video series has taught us plenty of things, like how uncooperative the weather and woods can be. People seem to always pick my mushrooms, and the birds eat up my berries. Even so, it’s been a great, relaxed way to collaborate with another artistic mind and see what sort of things we can come up with.
For the Spring video, we took a different approach from the previous one (see a link to that here) in that there is no actual cooking. The video focuses on the beauty of the land at Bubbling Spring Farm in Wisconsin-one of my favorite places to gather ingredients.
It’s a lot different than most food related videos I’ve seen that fall into the realm of the played out “talking head-food network style”. We have a couple more videos in the pipeline we’ve shot lately, and hope to have a fun series put together in the near future to share with you. Enjoy.
No no no no no!!!
Please don’t harvest milkweed in a field where it is so scarce! Milkweed is essential for the health of native pollinators, including every variety of bee. It’s also the only plant where baby monarchs can grow–when you denude a field you prevent the next generation of butterflies, if the parent’s can’t get to another location before they pass. Milkweed populations are plummeting across the country, and we need to make sure that we preserve as much as we can. I only take milkweed where it’s very very abundant, and never from the same area 2 years in a row.
No need to freak out. There’s no danger of over harvesting on the top of the hill in the video. It was difficult to see them because it was so early in the season-they are abundant there. For the restaurant, I source my milkweed shoots, flowers, pods and buds from Wisconsin Amish pickers, who rotate patches yearly.
From my experience too, common milkweed, when cut early in the season, will continue to fruit and flower as normal, it just won’t be as tall.