Edible Idaho is a Public Radio show on food and agriculture that airs throughout the Northwest.
Say the word “goat” and most Americans picture a horned cartoon with a taste for tin cans. It started back in 1928, when a distasteful little goat ate Minnie Mouse’s ukulele in Steamboat Willie, the first animated cartoon to guarantee the goat its place in cartoon infamy. In 1943, a swastika-wearing Nazi goat did...
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In his book, A Garlic Testament, Stanley Crawford writes, “If you grow good garlic, people will love you for it.” That’s surely true, but here in Southern Idaho, the space between the garlic growing and the love is littered with complexity. Let’s say you’re a home gardener: It’s late fall–perfect garlic-planting season–but you haven’t...
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I simply wasn’t prepared for what I saw when Fred Colby, co-owner of Laughing Dog Brewery in Ponderay, pulled open the heavy door to his walk-in cooler. Instead of setting eyes on cases of craft beer, I caught the cold gaze of six very pink pig carcasses. “Pig beer!” I blurted out reflexively, in order to...
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As we roared downstream through the River of No Return Wilderness via jet boat, skipping off rapids and dodging just-submerged boulders, I decided my imaginary movie version of this adventure should be titled Indiana Appleseed in the Canyon of Lost Treasure. Naturally it would be packed with whitewater action, pioneer spirit, hungry black bears...
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It’s harvest time on the Palouse, and North Idaho wheat farmer Wayne Jensen has invited me into the air-conditioned cab of his massive combine. A color-coded computer screen shows us exactly how many bushels of grain he’s harvesting moment-to-moment, while an automatic leveling system keeps the cab true to the horizon even as the...
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Jan Huskey, a big man with a kind smile and soft voice, greeted me in his Meridian yard, garden hose in hand. Behind him stood an unruly forest of fruit trees. “I’m just a common home gardener that happened to run into a friend that knew about pawpaws,” Huskey said by way of introduction....
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Mike Pearson had heard the stories but wanted to find out for himself. Last fall he did a little detective work, poking through an abandoned vineyard some 30 miles east of Lewiston. “We were looking for grapes, trying to identify them by the cluster,” he said of century-old vines rumored to have been, at...
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