Early June is when we see our very first fruit of the year, and when the yard really comes to life with late spring blooms. The lilacs are just the beginning, an early start to the pollinator party, but early June is when things get serious.
Here’s what’s on my camera roll in early June:
Honeyberries (Lonicera caerulea) are the first fruits of spring, ripening several weeks before the first strawberries. They’re also one of the earliest pollen sources for native bees, and they bring all the bumbles to the yard. They taste a bit like a cross between a blueberry and a grape, and grow on perennial bushes like blueberries. Unlike blueberries, they’re not at all picky about soil, and they grow like weeds and produce buckets of fruit. We don’t net ours, and the cedar waxwings love them too. It’s kind of a bonus; we still get enough fruit, but the waxwings camp out nearby and harvest more mosquitos than berries…so growing these is the best early spring pest control, in my opinion. (And the berries are tasty too.)
A new one we’re trying this year, these are the flowers and developing fruits of Musk Strawberries (Fragaria moschata). They’re grown mostly in Europe, where they’re valued for their highly perfumed and intensely flavored fruit. The fruit doesn’t travel well, so they’re not generally available commercially, except at farmer’s markets near where they’re grown. They also reproduce a bit differently, with separate male and female plants. These beauties are about a week out from being ripe, and I can’t wait to try my first one.
Blackberry flowers being tended by a native bumble. It’s looking like a great year for berries of all kinds. Our heirloom apples and most other tree fruits are almost all biennial, which means they bear fruit on a two-year cycle. Somehow though, the berries and small fruits seem to pick up the slack every other year. Last year was an apple year, and this year, it’s a small fruit year for sure!
Someday, I’ll do an entire substack post that’s just pictures where my cat’s photo-bomb my recipe shoots. They dove into this year’s dandelion salve, climbed onto my back while I was shooting the musk strawberries, and I planned ahead and locked them all out when I was shooting pictures of home-canned salmon. This one is a recipe from this week, which is a traditional colonial-era spruce beer, and I thought it appropriate to bring it outside and shoot it in front of our blue spruce. This little fluff bucket didn’t think a tree should be getting all the attention. The spruce beer recipe (minus the cat) is now on the blog (and linked at the end of this email).
I’ve always heard that butterflies can’t fly when their wings get damaged…but this little guy proved me wrong. Flew in for a quick visit on my finger, and then fluttered back over the treetops. Nice to meet you, not-so-little Canadian Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio canadensis). The pupae overwinter, so these beauties emerge earlier than most butterflies.
Last week, a bunch of you asked how I clean dandelions for jelly, wine, and other tastiness, since it’s essential to just get the petals with no green stuff so you don’t have a bitter flavor. Well, it’s pretty simple once you get a bit of practice. Use your thumbnail to break the flower in half from the top down through the stem, and then pinch out the petals. The greens stay on the outside, and you have lovely honey-flavored petals for use in anything you like.
For example, this dandelion jelly =)
Violet jelly was such a big hit last year, my littles combed the yard for enough flowers to make another small batch this year. The berries are having a great year, but the violets are mostly taking the year off. There was just enough for two jars, but if the littles wanna put in the time finding them, I’ll never say no to making this. It tastes like fresh spring berries, with a hint of blueberry/strawberry, and some floral notes. (Berries get a lot of their flavor from the same color compounds that are in violets, so the berry flavor makes sense, believe it or not!)
We finally got around to cracking some of last year’s wild hazelnuts. Hazelnuts are a long storing nut, and they’ll be perfectly good for 2-3 years if left in their shells. They’re small, but tasty. My daughter actually almost cried when she caught me carrying the bowl of them and a hammer, thinking I was going to crack them without her. No worries my baby, these are all yours. It’s one of her favorite chores, and it does take a good bit of skill to play whack a mole on hazelnuts, hitting them just hard enough to crack them in half…but not so hard that they’re obliterated. She’s got it down perfectly. Maybe because she knows that if she cracks them, she gets to choose how we use them. When I harvested these, I was hoping to turn them into pesto, but baby girl had her eye on homemade Nutella, of course.
Last year I was writing/photographing an article about garden weeds, and I left a little patch of Common yellow woodsorrel (Oxalis stricta) to go to seed in one of my garden beds so I could photograph it at all stages. Well, this year, that sorrel came in like a lawn, and it seemed a shame to waste it when I pulled up several gallons of it. It’s delightfully lemony and makes wonderful salads (not to mention quick garden snacks).
We had so much wood sorrel that I turned it into two quarts of pesto for the freezer, and it’s delicious! With a hint of lemony brightness and a lot of savory green, it’s going to be great with both seafood and pasta. I’m planning a salmon pasta with it for this coming week. It’s simple to make, like any pesto, just toss about 2 cups greens in a food processor with 1 cup mid nuts (like pine nuts), 1/2 to 1 cup olive oil, 1 cup grated parmesan or romano, and salt to taste.
These beauties have been long in the making…this is the first year our quince tree has flowered, and I’m really hoping it sets fruit. Quince are self-fertile and grow just fine in shade, so this one’s been slowly plodding along in a shady patch in the woods for the past decade, and now I’m hoping for our first fruit.
Autumn olive flowers are unbelievably fragrant. I’d been looking for this wild edible for years without luck, as the berries are small and the bushes are pretty non-descript. The flowers, though…you can smell them at 100+ feet away, even at highway speeds. I was driving last spring with the windows down, and I was completely transfixed by the smell. I had no idea what it was, but I had to pull over to find out…and there, along the roadside in a ditch was a line of autumn olive bushes perfuming the backroad. Now that I know the smell, I’ve found a dozen other lush patches, foraging by smell with the windows down on a sunny spring day.
Crimson clover (Trifolium incarnatum) is red and white clover’s less common cousin. Unlike the other common lawn clovers, it’s an annual, but it vigorously self seeds and produces quite the show this time of year. We had a chance seedling pop up on the lawn last year, and my daughter loved it so much she created a baracade around the single crimson flower. She literally drove in stakes and pulled out flagging tape so that no one stepped on her special flower. So this year, as a surprise, we seeded all the garden paths with it…and it’s even more lovely en-masse.
Now that we have a trifecta of clover in the yard, I made a batch of clover jelly from each flower. Since flavor compounds are also often color compounds, it’s no surprise that the crimson clover tastes an awful lot like red currant jelly. I haven’t popped the lids on the red and white clover yet to taste them, but I’ll let y’all know how they come out soon!
What are you working on, harvesting, or just plain excited about as spring turns to summer?
Love, love, love all your posts! Thank you so much for your inspiring work.
So many beautiful pictures! My personal favorite is the crimson clover. Thanks!