Late May means the end of spring frosts, and our first wildflowers in the yard. It’s when the bulk of the garden gets planted, and when my kids take their first of the season in the pond.
The air is literally sweet with nectar, and it’s just still cool enough to enjoy the garden mid-day.
Here’s what’s on my camera roll in late May:
The south side of the house has a dozen or so raised beds interspersed with fruit trees and perennials. These beds have garlic, potatoes, and edible flowers because deer don’t bother them. The fenced garden houses more of the deer favorites. The plums (white blooms) are wild and planted by the squirrels that rob our plum orchard. No matter, we mark them when they come up all over the yard, and then in a few years, we have more!
It’s been a great year for Dryad’s Saddle, which is one of the first edible mushrooms of spring here in the North. The big ones (like this one) are impressive, and you can see them from quite a distance, but they’re tough. But where there’s a big one, there are often dozens of tender small ones nearby. I pulled a bucketload from the branches around this one, most of which went into the freeze-dryer to make mushroom umami powder.
Since I was already running mushrooms in the freeze dryer, I figured why not add in a tray of Morels? They came out really well, held their shape, and rehydrated back perfectly!
This is flowering lawn seed from American Meadows (a Vermont Company). We actually have most of these species in our “lawn” already, lawn being used loosely here. Really, anywhere we mow occasionally to keep it below knee height so we can harvest fruit and other perennials nearby. When these flowering lawn species take over, they out-compete grass and then keep it low naturally (around 6 to 8’’). We’re putting more seed in those places, and I’d like to have to beat back less often, and the bees will appreciate the gesture, I’m sure.
Some spring canning recipes I’m developing. Asparagus can be tricky to preserve, so I’m always looking for new ways to put it up. Here I have asparagus soup base that you puree into cream of Asparagus soup on serving, and a potato leek soup base served the same way. I’ve got plain asparagus too, along with a asparagus potato leek that’s a combo of the other two soups.
More often I show you finished projects, but this one’s a work in progress. These rocks were pulled out of new gardens over the last year or two, and we’ve been collecting them until we had enough to build a perennial bed. Flat rocks are a lot easier to work with, but my beautiful and talented husband is making me a spectacular bed on challange mode.
Sea Buckthorn Honey Wine. The fruit have an incredible pineapple/orange tropical flavor, but they’re very tart. Mixed with honey I think they’ll make an exceptional mead, but time will tell.
While the little played in the stock tank pool, I harvested and cleaned edible flowers for some of our spring recipes. Here, we have lilac, dandelion petals, wild violet, and grape hyacinth.
Every year we try to make a new edible flower jelly, as my daughter absolutely loves them. There’s something magical about eating flowers on toast. This year, we added tulip jelly to the mix. Tulips are edible flowers, but like anything, some people have reactions to them, so be careful there. For some reason, more people seem to react to tulips than other garden flowers, and I’m thinking it’s because they’re often sprayed…and people are reacting to that instead (but I don’t know one way or the other). Still, make sure you get unsprayed blooms. Every color and variety has a different flavor, ranging from fresh spring peas with a hint of spice to delicate berries, so you never know what you’re going to get.
Infusing dandelion oil for salves. It’s supposed to be good for cramps and muscle pain, we’ll see!
Because dandelion flowers don’t dry well, and they contain a lot of moisture, it works best to do a quick infused oil where you put a jar in a double boiler to speed the process along. Just setting the jar in a crock pot on “keep warm” with a bit of water in it (and a towel under the jars to act as a diffuser) will give you an infused oil in 48 to 72 hours. If you try to slow infuse these blooms for salves, they’ll mold.
Some other herbal salves we’ve been playing around with this season. Once you have the infused oil, it’s easy to make a salve. Some are old staples in our house, like plantain, St. John’s Wort, Calendula, and yarrow. Others are new to me, and I haven’t used them (yet). Salves like cayenne, turmeric, and black drawing salve. I’ll let you know how it goes!
We’re putting in a new patch of sunchokes (Jerusalem Artichokes) in a sunny clearing in the woods. They thrive without care, and are more or less impossible to kill (except for floods and full shade). They’re also an incredible source of calories (like potatoes), and they make beautiful sunflower-like blooms. They never really caught on commercially because they’re full of inulin, which is a pre-biotic that’s great for digestive health…but really kicks your intestinal flora into high gear. If you’re eating a standard American diet, it can be a bit distressing. On a more natural, high-fiber, fiber, probiotic-rich diet, it’s not really noticeable. Long cooking helps, as does harvesting them in the spring (or after autumn frosts) breaks down most of the inulin, so that’s a good way to start with them. Pickling also breaks down the inulin.
A planting drill attachment is INCREDIBLY useful, and works well even in clay soils. When I took this picture, we were using this one to put in the Jerusalem Artichokes above, but we’ve also used it this spring to plant hundreds of serviceberries, lilacs, willows and cedar. Last fall, we planted more than 500 bulbs with it. Truly an amazing labor saver.
Some of the willows we planted this spring. They make their own rooting hormone naturally, so all you need is a 8 to 10’’ cutting planted in a moist location to make a new plant. We use them for medicine, but also as a spring salad green and edible flower. The leaves and flowers have low levels of pain-relieving salicin, not like the bark, and it’s just enough to give them an interesting flavor when balanced with milder spring greens. And, let's be real, my low back can use a pain-relieving salad after a long day in the garden. I also make a floral-infused honey with willow blossoms, for winter teas. (Every part of willow is edible.)
Spring chokecherry blooms are really stunning, and you can see them from a distance even at highway speeds in a big patch. They tend to form big colonies along roadsides where raccoons and bears drop the seeds. These ones are in a colony at the edge of our woods that I planted a few years ago (or, more accurately, left out so the animals would plant them). Usually, I devote half my foraging harvest to gifts, leaving a pile of them in the yard for our local fauna to plant. We have black walnuts, highbush cranberry, cherry, and a dozen other plants here on our land simply because I’ve left a portion of my forest harvest out in the yard as a gift to wildlife. Give a little, and in a few years, you’ll have things to forage closer to home.
What are you working on, harvesting, or just plain excited about this spring?
I found this site not too long ago, and I love reading thru everything. A while back, you listed a lot of flowers that could be made into jelly, and I made lilac jelly. It was beautiful and SO easy! I missed out on some others like dandelions, but they'll come back. I also missed out on the forsythia. By the time I read I could make the jelly from them, they had passed. Yesterday I discovered a large patch of comfrey right across the street in a wooded patch that I'll be able to pick from soon. I have intentions of making a salve to see if it will help my arthritis, and there are enough leaves to use for poulticing. I just put in a small garden with a few things, but I am hoping to have a medicinal and tea garden along with a late summer planting in another part of the yard. I've been doing a lot of container gardening due to being partially disabled, so everything is on sawhorses and plywood now. Your site is a real inspiration.
Would thank you for a specific piece of inspiration and information from this post, but there were almost too many to count. Appreciated it all very much, thank you. (So morels can be freeze-dried, good to know. And thank you for telling us about the planting drill attachment, never knew such a thing existed.)
I found this site not too long ago, and I love reading thru everything. A while back, you listed a lot of flowers that could be made into jelly, and I made lilac jelly. It was beautiful and SO easy! I missed out on some others like dandelions, but they'll come back. I also missed out on the forsythia. By the time I read I could make the jelly from them, they had passed. Yesterday I discovered a large patch of comfrey right across the street in a wooded patch that I'll be able to pick from soon. I have intentions of making a salve to see if it will help my arthritis, and there are enough leaves to use for poulticing. I just put in a small garden with a few things, but I am hoping to have a medicinal and tea garden along with a late summer planting in another part of the yard. I've been doing a lot of container gardening due to being partially disabled, so everything is on sawhorses and plywood now. Your site is a real inspiration.
Would thank you for a specific piece of inspiration and information from this post, but there were almost too many to count. Appreciated it all very much, thank you. (So morels can be freeze-dried, good to know. And thank you for telling us about the planting drill attachment, never knew such a thing existed.)