Late June 2023 | Practical Self Reliance

Baby Geese, Tasty Flowers and Garlic Scapes

Summer has officially arrived and that’s when gardening season truly kicks off here in the north. We’re harvesting honeyberries, serviceberries and strawberries, filling our freezer and pantry with the first sweetness of the season.

But this year, our hearts are also full of sweetness, in the form of snuggles from a gaggle of fluffy baby geese.

I had hand raised geese years ago, and with lots of love early on they become as gentle and snuggly as kittens. Full sized geese will come running across the yard when they see you, and nuzzle your leg like a cat.

Sit on the grass and they’ll crawl into your lap, and nuzzle their heads up under your chin, begging for pets (and treats too, of course).

But snuggly adult geese means a lot of work in the baby stage, tending, snuggling and training the little ones until they think of you as mamma (and the leader of their flock).

In the end, it’s well worth the effort, as geese can live for up to 20 years (though 10 to 12 is more common). They’ll lay 30 to 60 eggs a year, which doesn’t seem like a lot…but each one is massive, equivalent to 3-4 chicken eggs.

It works out to be 90 to 240 chicken egg equivalents per year, depending on the breed. Plus, snuggles, if you raise them right.

My last batch of snuggle geese were about 5 years old when a bear tore the coop door right off it’s in the middle of the night.

It was two lady geese and their consorts, along with a batch of 7 babies they’d raised that season. The bear took the parents, my hand raised ones, and I can only imagine they ran to to the door honking and hissing to take the brunt of the bear’s attack protecting their littles.

All of the babies survived, but the parent’s, which were my babies, were gone. I was heartbroken.

My original flock of geese and some of their young ones grazing in the yard, earlier that summer.

I found new homes for each of their babies, where they’d have mates and make families of their own and integrate into existing goose flocks. They were goose raised, not hand raised, so not snuggle geese…but they went to flocks where they’d have families of their own someday.

And now, years later, I sat with my daughter petting our snuggly cats and telling her stories of my snuggle goose, that I loved before she was born, who would sit in my lap just like these fluffy felines. And she said, “Why don’t we try again? Can I raise a snuggle goose, mama?”

And how could I say no?

Our coop was strongly built before, with thick walls and real doors…but not bear proof clearly. This time, it’s on a bed of stone and gravel, with buried heavy gauge fencing under the floor to prevent diggers (weasels, fox, etc) and it’s surrounded on all sides by a couple of strands of electric wire (both on their fenced yard, and the walls of the coop).

It’s basically goose-y Fort Knox…but still, no coop is absolutely predator proof. There’s always a risk of loss, and that’s as true as much in the coop as it is in life. It doesn’t mean there cant be love in the meantime.

So now we have a gaggle of 5 little fluffballs to tend and love, hand feed and train. We spend time sitting cross legged with them each day, and they snuggle into our laps as they would under their mother’s fluffy feathers. We lead them around the yard, training them to follow our calls.

And now that they’re starting to grow a bit, they’ve started swim lessons too.

Geese are natural swimmers and their mothers lead them out to water when they’re only a few days old. The little fluffballs don’t have their full feather’s yet, and they’re not all the way waterproof, so they can become waterlogged and drown if they’re left too long. Their mother’s know that, and keep swim lessons short early on.

But for 5 minute training sessions, they gladly dive into the water seeking out tasty snacks, and then climb back up onto a makeshift raft to preen their feathers and dry out.

My son driving the goose raft as our little fluffs dry off between swims. (And yes Dad, I can hear your dad jokes in the works already, it is in fact named the Duck Boat…even though they are geese.)

Snuggling our baby geese has kept us busy, and torrential rain for most of the last two weeks has brought most of our garden projects to a halt. When little bits of sun come through the clouds, I’ll sneak out to harvest baskets full of our spring flowers.

Yes, I know it’s technically summer now, but everything’s always a month of two behind up here. Late June is when the pansies come into the peak, a few months after everyone else’s in more reasonable climates.

This year, my daughter had her heart set on whole beds of pansies. She loves growing flowers, I love growing food…so we compromise on bed after bed of edible flowers and we’re both happy. With pansies galore, we ended up trying out half a dozen pansy recipes, from salads, to pressed flowers, candied flowers and even pickled flowers.

Pansy jelly is her favorite, made using my wild violet jelly recipe. It tastes like fresh spring berries with a gentle floral note, as the flowers have the same blue/pink/purple antioxidant compounds that give blueberries their color (and flavor).

Even the yellow blossoms yield a pink/purple jelly as those compounds and berry flavors are extracted into the mixture.

It’s also chive blossom season, and we grow huge beds of chives, both for the bees, and for chopping their fresh green flavor onto new potatoes in the summer months.

Chive blossoms have amazing flavor, and they work well in all manner of savory recipes.

Last year I made a savory chive blossom jelly, mostly because I was trying to make just about every flower jelly under the sun, savory and sweet.

This year, I’ve gone a bit more conventional with simple chive blossom salt, compound butter and infused vinegar. Those aren’t really recipes…just blend chive blossoms into salt, or butter. Or put them in a jar and pour raw cider vinegar over the top, then wait.

Aside from bright edible flowers, a lot of people have asked me about zero waste recipes, ways to use things that you’d otherwise throw away or compost, things like eggshells, orange peels, sawdust, whey and strawberry tops.

So I’m starting with strawberry tops, and developing recipes to put these beauties to use. When you’re making a huge batch of homemade strawberry jam, you often end up with quite a few tops that have plenty of flavor left.

If you’re working with heirloom strawberries, the fruits are very soft and the stems will just pull out, hull and all. You don’t need a knife to cut the top off, and for the most part you just end up with leaves. These are still useful, and make a really tasty tea.

(Strawberry leaves are edible, after all.)

Pulling tops off of Heirloom Jewel Strawberries, no knife required. You won’t find them in the grocery store because they’re too soft for shipping, but they’re a staple of farmer’s markets and PYO operations.

But when you’re working with modern grocery store berries, the tops are tougher and you really do need to slice off the top to get the hull out so you don’t end up with tough stem bits in your jam.

There’s a lot of strawberry lost to each top, and it seems like such a waste, but there are literally dozens of things you can make with those. Really, anything that involves cooking them quickly and straining out the tasty strawberry flavored liquid works easily. Things like strawberry jelly, syrup, ice tea or lemonade.

You can also ferment them into strawberry top vinegar, wine or mead.

Strawberry tops culturing in a jar with a silicone fermentation lid. They start out as a quick soda/wine, but they’ll end up as strawberry top vinegar later when I add some raw vinegar mother for the 2nd stage of the culture.

But actually, in the end, after testing a dozen different recipes, the most surprising was strawberry top muffins. I used the this amazing strawberry muffin recipe, which is perfect with or without the crumb topping, and my kids (and husband) couldn’t tell the difference in a blind taste test.

You can use strawberry tops in place of chopped strawberries, and they’re just as amazing. Greens and all, believe it or not.

June is also Garlic Scape Season, and I’m working on new garlic scape recipes. We grow a lot of hardneck garlic, around 300 bulbs or so most years, and always make big batches of pickled garlic scapes and garlic scape pesto. We use them fresh in cooking too, and they’re perfect in an omelet.

This year, I’m trying out some really unique garlic scape recipes, like a garlic scape jam recipe that I found from Bernardin (for canning no less). It’s great on grilled cheese sandwiches, hamburgers or just a cracker with cheese.

Their recipe had a pretty absurd amount of sugar in it, and I like mine much more savory, with more vinegar and white wine, and around 1/4 their quantity of sugar (but still safe for canning). I’ll have that recipe completely dialed in and posted for you for next garlic scape season.

What are you harvesting, growing, building or learning during these long early summer days?

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