Late May 2022 | Practical Self Reliance
Dandelion & Rhubarb, Canning Meals in Jars, Winter is Coming...
Spring is in full swing here in Vermont, apples blooming, strawberries setting fruit and more frog species than I can count leading a serenade from the pond.
We’re experimenting with new rhubarb recipes, like this rhubarb cordial, and we’re already starting to fill our pantry with homegrown goodness. There’s always plenty of rhubarb canning recipes too, which preserve without alcohol.
For those of you that have ripe strawberries already, I wrote up a tutorial on canning strawberry pie filling. It makes a delicious pie, of course, but it also makes an excellent topping for bars, cheesecake and more.
It’s another delicious way to preserve strawberries right on the pantry shelf, alongside canned whole strawberries, strawberry Jam and strawberry jelly.
Late May is when gardening gets started in earnest here in Vermont. We always devote a full week to getting the garden in, right around Memorial Day.
Usually it’s the week after Memorial Day weekend, but it’s been so darn warm that my husband took this week off so we can get the garden in early. We’ve been hard at work all week, not only getting the garden in, but also foraging and getting ready for next winter (already).
For paid subscribers, the rest of this newsletter is a sneak peak behind the scenes at what we’ve been up to this week, including:
Spring Foraged Recipes & Remedies
Meal in a Jar Canning Recipes (for when it’s too hot to cook, soon…)
Prepping for Next Winter (Already)
Traditional Tanning for Fur and Leather
It’s been 13 years since our last big batch of dandelion mead, which is an old fashioned dandelion wine made with honey instead of sugar. Believe it or not, my now husband and I made a batch on our very first date all those years ago.
Harvesting the dandelions is easy, and you can easily fill a 5 gallon bucket with blossoms in 20 to 30 minutes. The hard part is separating the sweet, flavorful petals from the bitter green sepals that will ruin a batch.
For a one gallon batch you only need about a quart of petals, fluffy and not packed. for a big 5 gallon batch, you’ll want a gallon of tightly packed petals…which is quite the undertaking. That’s how we got to know each other, a full afternoon talking with our hands busied plucking dandelion petals from blossoms at the kitchen table.
I had no idea how long it takes, as that time flew by in the company of someone who turned out to be my life partner. This time, we plucked them in the afternoon shade while the littles played in our new stock tank pool, after a long morning working in the garden.
It took about 3 hours of solid work for both of us, so 6 “man hours” total to clean a full packed gallon of petals. That’ll make about 24-ish bottles of dandelion mead, and enough to take us through another 13 years of anniversaries and special celebrations.
It’s just one of those things that gets sweeter with time =)
Beyond that, we’re also cooking up lots of dandelion roots and greens to bust out last bits of winter sluggishness in our bodies. Lots of long walks help too, getting back in the swing of the active season.
This time of year we make whole plant dandelion tincture to preserve the medicinal benefits of these spring bitter greens for later, when we’re burried in show and that kind of thing is in short supply.
Temperatures cooled down quite a bit this week, so I got just a wee bit more “winter” meal prep canning done before it’s just way too hot. We’ve been really focusing on meal in a jar canning recipes that can be taken off the pantry shelf and warmed for a quick meal.
These are great in the summertime when it’s just too hot to cook, and they’re also a lifesaver when you’ve been working outside all day growing food…and you barely have the energy left eat (let along cook).
This week I made several recipes from Angi Schneider’s Pressure canning cookbook, including this white bean and chard soup. It’s delicious, and an easy way to take a home canned jar of soup off the shelf when on a busy weeknight.
This time of year, it can also be made with dandelion greens and stored dry beans from last year. Chard and beet greens are winter hardy, so they’re already up most places though.
We’re already got quite a bit growing in the garden, along with our other early greens like arugula and tatsoi.
A bowl of white bean soup is absolutely delicious on those last few chilly spring nights. Just a bit of hard cheese grated on top, and a piece of buttered crusty bread on the side finishes the meal nicely.
This summer, I have more than a dozen soup canning and “meal in a jar” canning recipes for you planned, mostly using garden produce and local (or home raised) meat.
The only thing you really need to buy to get these meals on the table is canning lids, and we buy them by the flat and always have a couple thousand of those around (you know, in case of shortages…like we’ve had the last few years).
As soon as spring is here, the past winter is still fresh on our minds…and though we’re enjoying the warmer weather and beautiful blooms, we’re also ever conscious that WINTER IS COMING again in just a few short months.
We spend a lot of time harvesting firewood in the winter and early spring, so it can dry in the sun all summer long and be ready for the next winter’s heating season. Yesterday we split and moved about a cord of wood, and we have perhaps 5 more to go still.
We burn around 4 to 6 cords of wood in a winter, more if it’s all softwood (pine and hemlock) and less if it’s hardwood. We’re heating our 1200 sq foot house, and 2000 square foot workshop/office, so that’s really not bad at all. Everything’s super insulated, so that saves on labor for sure.
We tend to opt for softwood whenever possible, because we can burn it just fine in out outdoor boiler. The problem is, it only has about half as many BTU’s per cord as good hard wood like maple.
I’d rather save the maple for tapping, so that means we move (and split) a lot of softwood instead.
Working together, one of us will coarsely split the logs into halves or quarters using the hydraulic splitter on the back of our tractor. It’s strong and can split anything, but it’s slow going. Belive it or not, hand splitting is much faster…at least it is once the logs are cracked open once.
Once pine and hemlock are split open the first time, it only takes one swing of the axe to split them down further. No bashing on a piece forever, just whack/split/whack/split.
One of us will operate the hydraulic splitter to get them started, then the other picks up the halves and knocks them down into 10 smaller pieces with an axe. We switch off, so we both get quite a workout and the woodshed gets filled in no time.
I always have something interesting on my bedside table, and this week it’s a spectacular new book on Traditional Tanning from an author in Finland that’s incredible work on the topic.
(It’s only available directly through her website, and she packs and ships each one by hand…so it’s not easy to find via regular book retailers.)
Full of detailed tutorials and traditional techniques using natural materials, this has everything you could ever want to know about turning hides into luxurious pieces of art (and warmth).
We have quite a few hides saved up at this point from our own hunting, so I’m hoping to experiment with natural tanning this summer as time allows. I’ll have more to share with you soon on that, hopefully.
Until next week,
Ashley at PracticalSelfReliance.com
It is such a joy to read your writings. I love that the whole family is involved and don’t know how you find the time for it all.
Looking forward to learning more and the soup sounds tasty. I must try it.
Thank you again ♥️♥️♥️