Your Practical Guide To Self Reliant Living
Rhubarb has a sweet-tart flavor that comes through beautifully in homemade rhubarb mead. Though it’s technically a vegetable, the stalks contain both sugar and acid, which gives them a fruit-like flavor. That acidic sweetness makes them a good candidate for brewing.
Not everyone has space available for a huge garden, and it can be hard to produce a meaningful amount of food in small containers. With some plants, the trick to a bigger harvest is just a bigger container. Trash cans may not a glamours way to garden, but they’ll get the job done in a…
You don’t often think of grandma’s hosta patch as the best place to harvest lunch, but perhaps it’s time to open your eyes to all the wonderful edibles lurking in your very own yard. Foraging doesn’t have to mean traveling to a wilderness area. There are dozens of edibles lurking in the average suburban yard. …
A friend of mine spends her summer weekend trying to wipe knotweed off the face of the earth. She comes back from trips exhausted, having used everything (including fire) to try to eradicate a patch of knotweed, only to find it in the very same spot the next year. It’s an exotic invasive, but it…
Dandelions are exciting to backyard foragers because they’re one of the very first flowers of spring. They’re super easy to identify, and every part of a dandelion is edible. There are literally dozens of things you can make to eat with dandelions, from root to flower. Dandelions are also great as spring medicine, and they…
Fiddleheads have a very short season, just a week or two and those cute little curls unfurl and the moment has passed. How do you enjoy fiddleheads all year long? Quick and easy fiddlehead pickles are the answer!
Capers are a staple of our home cooking, and we eat them enough that I decided to learn how to grow them myself. I was disappointed to learn that they need a long growing season and lots of heat to thrive, so no luck in Vermont. Traditional capers are the pickled flower buds of a heat-loving…
If dandelion wine captures the essence of summer for adults, then dandelion ice cream sums it up for kids. This flower infused treat is sweetened with honey. All you need is one cup of dandelion petals, which should be available on any respectable pesticide-free lawn.
Dandelion wine captures the essence of summer. Sweet, floral and with subtle notes of honey, dandelion wine is tasty enough to bring out the forager in anyone. It takes quite a few dandelions to make wine, so it’s best to enlist the help of as many small children as possible.
Mango wine has a reputation for capturing the very essence of mango in a light and sweet summer wine. I’ll ferment just about anything that’ll fit in a carboy, but somehow I’ve never gotten around to making it. After 10 years of home brewing, adding yeast to anything with even a hint of promise, we…
Burdock tincture and I have a special relationship. It’s one of the first tinctures I tried where I actually saw the difference within hours of taking it. The results were dramatic, and I’d never before seen herbal medicine have such a dramatic impact so quickly. I was pretty sick, with a vicious sore throat. The lymph nodes…
