June 2023 | Practical Self Reliance
Foraging, Gardening, Preserving and Off Grid Living
Summer is right around the corner, and just about every square inch of our yard is awash with late spring flowers and bees hard at work.
The garden’s planted, and in theory, that means we’re in calm season, before the real work harvesting and preserving kicks in mid summer.
In reality, it’s just another time to get started on many of the major projects we had planned for this year, including updating our off grid solar and battery backup system, rebuilding part of the driveway, completely re-doing the garden, preserving projects, brewing adventures and, of course, countless late spring foraging projects.
Without further adieu…here’s what’s on my camera roll this month!
Blossom season means the yard is filled with an incredible perfume at every turn, and this time of year is one of the best for finding wild fruit.
Not that the fruit is ready to eat, but many wild plants have bright white blossoms that are easy to spot as they coat the shrub…even at highway speeds. Mark the spot and later in the season, you’ll know right where to pick buckets of fruit.
Some of the easiest to spot by their blossoms include chokecherry, pin cherry, black cherry, highbush cranberry, barberry and autumn olive. (If you drive with the windows down, you can actually smell barberry and autumn olive from 100+ yards away, their scent is that wonderfully intense. Just pull over, and follow your nose.)
We also just passed peak apple blossom season, and it looks like it’s going to be a great year for just about everything, at least on our homestead. Trees we planted 10 years ago are blooming for the first time this year and that’s so exciting!
We have around 50 fruiting trees and shrubs, apples, pears, plums and the like…along with more obscure things like honeyberries, serviceberries and cornelian cherry.
Vermont had a hard freeze in mid May, dropping down to around 20 F (-7 C) right when most the trees were in peak bloom. That killed off most the blossoms (and the apple crop) and most of the orchards aren’t even going to open this fall. No crop at all.
We’re in a cold pocket, so we mostly plant late blooming varieties…and this year it paid off. They had buds for the hard freeze, but not full flowers, and the yard exploded with color a few days after…saving our crop, thank goodness.
I’ve been meaning to make apple blossom jelly for years, but I always manage to miss the season. This year, we had more flowers than ever before and I was able to make a few batches from different trees to try out (and for gifts).
Each one tastes a bit different, just as each one smells a bit different, and they all have their own color. You can make a flower jelly with just about any edible flower, including apple blossoms, peach blossoms, cherry blossoms and more.
Our gardens are planted, but we’ve decided to re-do some of them this year, or at least the paths (not the beds themselves).
I talked last month about how are gardens are basically weed free, and I should clarify…our garden beds are weed free. Lots of people asked about the wood chips in the paths, and how it was going…
The garden paths are always an unholy mess, and while I though wood chips and foot traffic would be enough…it actually just encourages some of the most noxious weeds.
Our paths are full of thistles, toxic buttercup, and a dozen other things that we just can’t keep at bay. I’m all about eating garden weeds…but all of these happen to be invasive, spiky and toxic…and though I’m creative, there’s just not a lot of uses for these in particular. I spend what seems like forever weeding the paths, which is silly, when we worked so hard to make weed free garden beds.
But if not weeded, they set seed which does get in the garden beds, or spike with thistles as you walk by. Each year I give up mid summer and take a mower to them. It’d be so much easier if they were just grass.
So, here we are, shoveling up the wood chips and piling them to make mushroom compost with winecap mushrooms, and spreading grass seed instead.
Not everything goes according to plan, and honestly, in the past 10 years, it’s rare that we got it right the first time. Especially early on. We’re learning though, and each year more things fall into place.
Some things, however, work out perfectly, like our plant to cut chicken feed costs by planting chicken feed in and around their yard. Think about anything that the wild birds “steal” from your yard, and then plant some in your chicken yard.
Summer apples like yellow transparent that produce huge crops of soft, peck-able apples are perfect for feeding the ladies in the summer months.
Prolific wild edibles like mulberry are perfect too, especially since they’re low maintenance.
The picture below is Siberian pea shrub, which we planted in the chicken yard years ago and it’s flowering for the first time this year. It’s a nitrogen fixing shrub that produces edible pods that are high protein, and supposedly chickens love them. We’ll see, what the ladies think of their new menu item.
Weird foraging projects are some of my favorite things…and in this case, each of these are applicable just about everywhere in the world.
I’m working on a series of articles on eating dandelions, root to blossom, and believe it or not, that includes processing and eating the seeds. Yes, dandelion seeds are indeed edible.
No, not the fluffy white part, that’s a great fire starter. The edible part is the actual seed itself.
Not only are they edible, but lots of seed catalogs are selling them in bulk these days, mostly for farmers growing dandelion greens in the field, or selling fancy dandelion microgreens at market.
A pound of dandelion seeds in bulk goes for around $650…or you can collect the same amount it in an hour or two with a friend. See…we really are dandelion farmers…we’re rich!
I know what you’re thinking…it must be impossible to separate the seed from the fluff, and even if you could, how on earth would you gather enough to make it worth your while.
Well, in reality, it took me just about 20 minutes to collect enough fluffy seed heads to yield a pint of cleaned seeds, and then just another 5 minutes to remove the chaff. So for one person, you can easily get a quart (or more) of edible dandelion seeds in under an hour, with easy casual labor, just grabbing up fluffy puff balls on a leisurely walk in the yard.
There are two good ways to remove the chaff.
First, you can just put all the fluffy seed heads in a bag and then scrub back and forth on the outside with your hands (imagine you’re trying to make a play dough snake between your palms, but there’s a bag of dandelions seed in there instead). In a few minutes, the chaff is at the top of the bag, and the seed is at the bottom.
The second way is with fire. Dandelion fluff is incredibly flammable, and it’ll catch a spark and ignite in no time flat.
Drop a hot coal into a bowl of fluffy dandelion seeds and give it a stir with a stick, like you’re making kettle corn, and you’re about 30 seconds away from clean dandelion seeds.
Chaff burning is a method that’s used with edible grains all over the world, and there are still some cultivated grains in a few remote parts of the world that you cannot thresh without fire. This method is hardly new, but it’s incredibly effective.
We actually saved the fluff from dandelions to make fire starters for the wood stove in the winter, and you can use it along with a bit or oil or tallow to make a dandelion fluff lamp too.
Anyhow, I now have around $1000 in dandelion seed from a casual afternoon in the sun…and it’s time to play. I hope to have a bunch of fun dandelion seed recipes for you by next spring.
My recipes are modern and not exactly survival recipes, things like dandelion seed muffins, nut milk with dandelion seeds, along with microgreens and sprouts, of course. They’re not exactly inspired by our hunter gather ancestors.
That said, since the yields are crazy high, and they’re abundant just about everywhere during the lean times each spring, you can’t tell me our ancestors weren’t using these as a food source (and tinder source).
Beyond dandelions, I’m working with Pine Candles, which are the new growing tips on pine trees. They’re basically “spruce tips” but from pine trees.
They have a incredibly rich, warm, resinous flavor that makes an unbelievable syrup. Just fill a jar with them, add a splash of whisky (or not) and then fill the rest of the jar with sugar. Shake every day for a week or two and the sugar will draw out the flavor (and medicinal benefits) into a syrup.
It’s delicious just to eat, on meat…or just on biscuits. But it’s also medicinal if taken by the spoonful, and great for cough, colds and respiratory congestion.
We spent a lot of the late spring working on our family camp site in the woods, and we’ve now cooked countless meals over the fire already this year. It’s amazing what a little investment in an outdoor space can bring in terms of both quality family time and memories.
I’m working on a bunch of campfire pie iron recipes for y’all, and my kids are happily cooking each one up in their pie cookers.
I already have recipes for making a full sized pie in a dutch oven while camping, and campfire dutch oven banana bread…but that’s kind of involved. We do a lot of outdoor cooking, but it’s outdoors in the yard not too far from our kitchen. We’re prepping the banana bread batter in a fully stocked kitchen, and then just doing the cooking with coals so we don’t heat up the kitchen.
When most people think of camping recipes, their minds go to quick and easy no mess recipes literally cooked on a stick. And if you’re actually camping, rather than just cooking food in your yard so you don’t run the oven on a 90+ degree day, that makes a lot more sense.
Many different pie iron and grill style recipes will be in the works this year, and fewer full on outdoor baking recipes.
And, of course, there’s always the maintenance of everything that never ends.
Summer means intense thunder storms in this part of the country, and we’ll see 1-2 inches of rain in an hour…and then nothing for a week. So much for gentle rains.
Anyhow, rain patterns like that are brutal on driveways, walkways and culverts…and though we really work to slow water movement over the land and encourage it to soak in deeply instead of running off…some degree of washout is inevitable.
Thus, this is the season of gravel mountains for the kids to climb, and for us to spread.
Back in the day, when we were living in a one room school house on a small lot, we got a dump truck full of gravel delivered and then spent the entire day raking it out by hand. In our early 20’s, it seemed like a great way to stay in shape.
Our old Vermonter neighbor just laughed and laughed.
When the second dump truck pulled up the next day to finish the job, he pulled up with his tractor, waved us out of the way and leveled it in less than 2 minutes. Amazing what a little machinery can do.
Now that we’re a lot older (and wiser, I hope), we know that spreading several tons of gravel by hand is a great way to wreck your back for the whole season. There are plenty of ways to stay in shape, and spreading gravel is a pretty unfortunate method as they go.
Work smarter, not harder…and pull out the tractor.
And, of course, there’s always the old, half finished projects still handing around from past seasons. There’s a lot of wine and mead in the basement, waiting for bottling.
This bright pink plum mead has been in glass since late last summer…and really should have been bottled by now. Oops.
So it goes. Some things are better with age anyway.
And beyond finishing projects from last season, we’re also cleaning out our freezers. That means canning meat for quick summer meals, but also dealing with the odd bits I didn’t get to over the winter.
The summer heat’s not here yet, so I’m rendering tallow to clear out freezer space for summer berries later this year.
Soon, I’ll have tallow soap and candle recipes to share with y’all as well.
And as always, we’re focusing on eating well, and enjoying what the season has to offer. The light summer fare isn’t really here yet, but I don’t mind all that much.
A grass fed ribeye with a bit of ramp butter and a side of morels is the perfect way to enjoy spring. (So much for the green smoothies and cleanses that are all the rage these days.)
What are you working on as spring transitions into summer?
Let me know in the comments.
(Comments only, please. Emails tend to get lost in my inbox, and as much as I’d love to get back to each and every one, my screen time is very limited…and things fall through the cracks, and emails get buried in my inbox. If you comment here, they’re all in one place, and it’s much easier to get back to every single one.)
Until Next Time,
Ashley at Practical Self Reliance
Dear Ashley: Thank you so much for saving us so much grief! I was just getting ready to install our raised bed garden. The plan was to use bark for the walkways. Your tale of bark and weeds convinced me to do it the right way. Lay down a nice grass for the pathways and keep it mowed! Also, we had planned another area with gravel. My plan was I (79 year old woman) would be able to spread it around. Now I see that it does require something mechanical to spread it about! Lucky me two winners from your one post today! Thank you!
We've added chickens to our orchard to add fertility and help with insect control recently. My garden is in and growing nicely now that we're getting rain. The blooms are promising squash, tomatoes, and beans soon. I love when the work I put in starts to give back!