Category Archives: Micro Homesteading

Rain barrels

Gardening, Intentional Spending

About a month ago I bought our first rain barrel for $50 from someone who had only used it twice, a heavy duty vinyl model that holds 100 gallons of water.  (A rain barrel, in case any one isn’t familiar with the term, is a large barrel that is set up to harvest the rain water runoff from your home’s gutters.) I got it with the intent to be more self sufficient with garden’s water needs.  It’s a shame to pay to water the garden when I can use the rain that falls for free!  This model collapses and can be stored compactly in the winter months, which I liked.  It’s also easily accessible to my darling toddler sons, one of whom turned it on this morning without us seeing him, and totally drained out all 100 gallons of water.  yikes2.gif  At least it wasn’t water we had to pay for. 

A couple of weeks ago, I bought three more rain barrels, this time the standard 55 gallon size.  They’re recycled drums made of heavy duty plastic, much better for a family with active kids since they wouldn’t be easily damaged.  I think I’ll resell the vinyl rain barrel before one of my children figures out how to make a hole in it. 🙂   I bought them from someone who made them himself.  They were $50 each but I asked for a discount since I was getting three, so I paid $125 for all of them.  I researched how to make rain barrels quite a while ago because I wanted to make one, so I know it’s not a hard thing to do.  But while theoretically we could have made some ourselves, I knew that there was no way that the barrels would get done in a timely way because we had just started the patio project.  I also knew (since I’ve been looking for months for cheap barrels to make my own rain barrels and every single time the $10 ones were sold before I could get them) that I’d have to pay $25 for the barrel, and after buying the parts, I’d hardly come out more cheaply than buying them ready made.  My time and labor is worth the $5 or less I would have saved, don’t you think?

I’d like to connect at least two of them, so when one is full the water is automatically diverted into the next one.  My ds10 connected a garden hose to the spigot at the bottom of it so we can water directly from the barrel, but it seems that hose has a blockage so I have to attach a different hose. 

We got a little rain last week and it filled a six of one barrel.  Then we got a good rain, and it was incredible to watch how quickly the barrel filled up!  Since we don’t yet have the barrels connected to receive the overflow, we manually redirected the flexible downspout over the empty barrel.  It’s amazing to note the difference between that one, which is receiving the directed run off from the gutter, and the one next to it, that only collected the rain that fell directly.  The one that wasn’t hooked up got only a few cups of water in it after a good sized rain, while we easily could have filled all three barrels in the same amount of time. 

It might not seem so frugal to buy rain barrels, since we pay about $160 every three months for our total water usage, and it will take a lot of collected water until we break even.  But that’s how a lot of money saving things are – you have to make the initial investment and it can take some time until you start to see the payoff.   If you look at the short term, it seems like a waste of money, but I look at it as a long term investment; since watering the garden would take a lot of water on a regular basis (and it’s something I plan to have each summer), I’m happy to have a way to cut the costs. 

Avivah

Strawberry plants

Gardening

Well, we’ve gotten probably 15 – 25 strawberries from our 25 strawberry plants this year, and the strawberry season has come to an end!  Looked at from the perspective of just this season, the plants weren’t a very frugal purchase.  However, I planted them with the long term in mind, and hope that these plants will produce for us for years to come!  (And my two littles enjoyed picking them and popping them right into their mouths!)

Strawberry plants send out long spidery looking tentacles that are called runners.  To expand your strawberry patch for free, it’s easy to replant these and they will grow into new plants.  You take the stem part of the runner, and halfway along the runner cover it with soil (if there’s room in your garden bed you can do this near the mother plant, if not, you can put it in a small potting container).  After about a week, the plant will have established itself and then you cut the runner that attaches it to the mother plant.  Voila – a new plant!

Since this is the first year I’ve had these plants, I chose to cut off the runners off most of the plants.  The reason for this is then the plant will use it’s energy to make more berries in the year to come, instead of spreading it’s growing energy more thinly along new plants. Next year when they are better established, I’ll plant all the runners to make new plants; this year I only did it with a few. 

Avivah

Getting free bricks for patio

Gardening, Homeschooling, Intentional Spending

It’s not unusual for me to be tired at the end of the day, but for all of my kids to be so worn out they can hardly walk, is!  Since my six week old baby has been crying for over 5 hours, periodically stopping long enough to fall asleep for several minutes before waking up to cry again, I’m not feeling like sharing any meaningful thoughts 🙂 (he’s in the wrap while I write), so I’ll share what we’ve been doing today to wear us all out.

Today we lucked into a large number of free bricks from someone who took down a brick wall.  It’s amazing how many bricks it takes to make a patio the size we want (about 350 sf)- we hauled one load, got home and realized we needed more.  We took out the second bench seat of the van, so we’d have room to bring even more bricks home with us.  We now have over 1000 very large bricks (not the standard size) – there’s now a huge pile in my yard –  and ds16 has informed me after doing the math that we need another 700.  Do you have any idea how many bricks this is, and how much work it is?   You’d probably have to spend an hour loading bricks to appreciate how much energy is involved. 🙂

The downside of the free bricks is that many of them have mortar on them that will have to be chipped off, but it’s pretty soft.  So while it’s a big job because of the number of bricks, it’s not laborious like chipping off hard cement.  While making a patio isn’t complicated, there are a several aspects to the job and it’s been hard to decide where to start first (dh doesn’t think it’s hard to decide – he’s very clear that I shouldn’t do it at all!).

I need to take apart the platform deck since it’s covering the area where the patio will be. But because the chain link fencing that has yet to be put up is taking up all the extra space in the garage, I don’t have anywhere to keep the deck boards we remove.  (I have a neighbor directly across the alley who is hyper vigilant about piles of wood and calls the zoning/environmental office to report people which results in fines, or I’d leave it neatly stacked against the back part of the yard for a couple of weeks.)  Without digging, there’s nowhere to put the gravel, and eventually, the bricks.

You might now be thinking, didn’t I say that I brought home gravel yesterday and bricks today?  Yes, and I’d have liked to have prepared the ground before bringing anything home, but didn’t know how long it would take until I found the supplies I wanted for free and didn’t want to dig up my yard and leave an ugly hole for an openended period of time.  I’m doing everything opposite how I think it would be most efficient to do it, but that’s the reality of working within the time frame of when the free supplies you want to get actualize.

I’m amazed by what hard workers my kids are – loading and then unloading the bricks is a hugely exhausting job.  But they just keep going and going and going, without complaining even a tiny bit.  They’ve actually been enjoying all of this work, and told me a few times we should do this kind of thing every day!  But that was before they finally ran down tonight, and were all happy to drag themselves into bed.

I was also really tired, so dinner was watermelon served in the back yard.  The littles played in their wading pool in the new swim suits that arrived today, and then ran over to the pea plants and helped themselves to fresh organic snow peas and garden peas.  Some of the older kids have complained about this practice, saying that the littles are snacking away our harvest. But I’m happy to have it and it’s a pleasure to watch them happily picking them.

Tomorrow afternoon dh wants to take the van to the mechanic for a check up and oil change, so whatever bricks or gravel I want to get will have to be gotten in the early afternoon. I need to summon up some enough energy to get more bricks, since I won’t be able to match them with what’s being sold at Home Depot if I need more, and if I don’t get these, then the patio will be smaller than planned.  Hopefully tonight I’ll get to bed before midnight so I have the necessary enthusiasm when I wake up! 🙂

Avivah

Natural weed killer

Gardening, Intentional Spending

I’ve gotten weary of pulling the same weeds, over and over – it’s the morning glory vines that climb my fence that I’m just fed up with.  No matter how many I pull out, it seems like they reproduce overnight and I have this sense that I’m never going to eradicate them just by pulling them.

So today I decided on a new strategy – to use weed killer!  I don’t use any kind of chemicals in my yard, but figured there had to be a natural solution, and found this suggested on a gardening forum:

Natural Weed Killer

  • 1 gallon white vinegar
  • 1 lb. table salt
  • 1/2 t. dish soap

Heat the vinegar and dissolve the salt.  Add 1/2 t. dishsoap (the soap is to help the solution adhere to the plants).  Put it all in a spray bottle, and spray the plants you want to get rid of.  Be very careful not to get any of it on plants you want to keep!

This is very affordable – about $2 total, and makes over a gallon of weed killer.  I can’t yet say how this has worked for us long term, but many gardeners said it was very effective.  Ds sprayed a lot of our weeds along the fence, and the poison ivy wilted immediately.  I’m looking forward to seeing all the weeds disappear!

Avivah

Carpet for the garden

Gardening, Intentional Spending

I mentioned that I got some used carpeting a few weeks ago for the garden, right?   But I didn’t have enough for what I wanted it for.  So I put a ‘wanted’ ad on Craig’s List, and someone emailed me to say they had some carpet they had just pulled up that I was welcome to.

Yesterday I went with ds10 and dd12 to pick it up.  The couple I got it from was curious what I would do with it, and when I told them it was for my garden, we got to discussing gardening.  (They want me to email them when I make jam and sell them some – I don’t think that I’ll do that, though.)  And then they offered to give us a tour of their garden, something they said they never did before except for friends.  They had a beautiful bamboo garden and it was really lovely.  There were six kinds of bamboo (it never occurred to me that there was even more than one kind of bamboo) with lots of other plants – he told us about each one as we walked through (call that science for the afternoon).   (And on the way home, we listened to an audio recording of Sign of the Beaver – history for the day.)

I found it especially interesting since he had a yard that was almost entirely grass free, something I’ve been wondering how to do.  It was very tastefully designed – they did all the work themselves on it – and it was amazing to me how they created a feeling of expansiveness and privacy on such a small lot.  However, nothing was edible, and my goal in planting is to use my ground space for growing food.  It’s more challenging to landscape with edibles.  I’m not giving up, though – I have to be patient and accept that a beautiful garden takes time, particularly when done the frugal way.  For now, I have to be satisfied with having a productive garden, because honestly it’s not very beautiful (and with the mower recently having broken, my grass is quickly getting shaggy – it isn’t adding anything charming to the look of things).  

What did I want the carpet for?  Two things.  The first was to use to create paths between the lasagna beds; particularly with little children, I wanted to clearly define the space where they should walk so they don’t trample the plants. But more than that, I don’t have the desire to constantly be weeding the pathways – it’s bad enough to have to weed the actual garden beds.  This eliminated the expense of mulching the paths.  The second thing I wanted them for was to use as a mulch layer for some of my plants, cutting out a hole where the plant could grow from.  But my kids dissuaded me from doing this with our raspberry and blackberry bushes, saying that it would keep the shoots from being able to spread.  I had to agree with their logic, so the carpet is now just on the paths. 

A couple of the kids used a razor blade kind of knife to cut the carpet into the size strips I needed, but the blade disappeared before they could cut the final piece.  When I went inside I discovered what happened to it.  Ds3 apparently found it, figured out how to unlock it, and slashed the kitchen screen while we were busy with the yard work.  Sigh.  This is part of why there’s always something to fix around here.  🙂 

Avivah

Today’s plant exchange

Gardening

A neighbor mentioned to me that our neighborhood association was once again hosting a plant exchange (last year was the first one), so I headed over today.  Last year was really nice – 5 free plants per family (4 annuals, 1 perennial), with free window boxes and potting soil.  When I went today, I expected it to be a similar set up, but I found out once I was there that they had changed the way it ran. 

First of all, there were no free plants, because funding was significantly lower this year.  You could only get plants by paying with a ticket.  How did you get tickets?  They couldn’t tell me in a straightforward way, but after paying $10 for dues to the neighborhood association, they told me I was entitled to 2 tickets as a member of the association (wouldn’t tell me before that).  I later found out that for every plant you brought to exchange, you could get a ticket, too.

I decided I would use my tickets to get perennials, since I’d rather have plants that will continue to come back year after year, than to get ones which will need to be replanted.  There were several to choose from, but as soon as they told me one of the choices was purple coneflower, I told them I’d like two of them.  I don’t know what made them ask – maybe because I answered them so quickly – but they asked what made me choose that.  I told them that it was a medicinal plant, echinacea.  But then one of the women told me I wasn’t able to use my tickets for any perennials because I wasn’t a member of the association. When I told them that I was, they agreed that I could have one plant, but only one.

So I went over to see if they had any vegetable or herb plants.  There was one tiny pepper plant and one chamomile start that someone had brought, and when I asked the woman in charge if each of those were a ticket, she said yes, but then reconsidered and told me to take one for free, that they were going to have plants left over and the plants were so tiny she didn’t want to ‘charge’ me for it.  I took the pepper plant – none of the pepper seeds I started were successful. 

Then I got a beautiful purple coleus plant with my remaining ticket.  When I got home, I seperated the echinacea plant into seven individual rootings, and planted each one individually.  I did this with the hope that they’ll spread.  Echinacea is a wonderful herb that is a powerful germ fighter, and I’ll be glad to be able to harvest my own instead of ordering it.  It’s nice to have a flower that looks nice and is so useful, too.  This joins sage, fennel, and red raspberry as medicinal herbs that I’m now growing and will be able to harvest. 

Especially in increasingly difficult economic times, with so many people becoming interested in gardening (for food), I think it’s a shame that they didn’t have vegetable plants or herbs available.  It’s almost as people in charge only wanted decorative plants that have no other purpose.  They did have day lilies available, which have edible bulbs, but I don’t think most people know that, and I don’t really care for how they look.  And anyway, someone there told me that if I want some, I’m welcome to come to her house and dig them up for free. 

There were also two free trees available from the city, willow and (I think) hawthorne.  I asked why those two trees were selected – in my opinion, fruit trees would be more useful – they told me because they are hardy.  I don’t have a large yard and wasn’t interested in filling up valuable space with trees that didn’t have much of a purpose, so I passed on those.

When I got home, I asked the girls to dig up some tomato starts from our garden and take them to the exchange.  Two women volunteering told me that lots of people had been asking about vegetable plants and specifically wanted tomatoes, but no one had brought any.  When I mentioned that I had plenty, they asked me to bring some.  The girls went for me and took ten tomato plants to the exchange, but an unhelpful woman in charge gave them a hard time, acting as if they were trying to deceive her in some way.  (Another volunteer tried to explain to her that they were just bringing plants to exchange, but wasn’t successful.)  She would only give them 5 tickets for the ten plants, instead of ten.  After they told her they thought they were supposed to get a ticket for each plant, she begrudgingly gave them another two tickets, and the girls were left with the unpleasant feeling that she was trying to cheat them because they weren’t adults.  I told them she was probably operating from a mindset of expecting people to be dishonest and try to get more than they were entitled to, and therefore was being protective of the exchange, not that she had anything against them specifically. 

They brought home another coleus, two marigolds, and four begonias.  I don’t especially like begonias, but one of the girls did, so it’s fine with me.  We did some planting earlier before leaving to the exchange, and put in a row of marigold seeds in front of the tomato plants, since they are a bug repellent.  I’ll put the new marigold plants next to some other garden plants that will benefit from them.  The begonias went into the window box, and I have to figure out where to plant the coleus – I love how coleus look! 

We also planted seeds for eggplant, cucumber, yellow summer squash, and green beans (bush).  I wanted to get some acorn and pattypan squash seeds in (we already put in butternut), but we didn’t have enough time.  Maybe later tonight when it’s cooler we can plant them.  We noticed some plants started growing in the compost pile (not the tumbler, which heats everything so that seeds are killed), so we transferred them to the garden – it looks like they are watermelon.  I’m really astounded by how many, many tomato plants I have that seeded themselves, either from the compost pile or from last year’s plants.  I’d guess that I have at least 50, probably more.  We’ll see if it’s possible for us to grow more tomatoes than we can eat! 

The rest of the garden is so far BH looking good – we picked the first three strawberries this morning, the snap pea plants are zooming up, the beets are coming up nicely, and we should be able to harvest some lettuce very soon.  The weather we’ve been having has been great for the garden, I think – lots of rain and thunderstorms in the evenings, with warm and dry days.  I haven’t had to worry much about doing watering!

It’s really gratifying to watch the plants coming up.  I’ve said it before, but there’s something about planting things yourself that warms your heart and is so satisfying.  I don’t know if whatever the garden will yield will justify the time involved (not much expense this year), but gardening is a valuable skill to learn and I find the time outside working in the yard relaxing. 

Avivah

Harvesting plantain leaves

Gardening, home remedies

About a week and a half ago my dd8 got a splinter in her finger, and she didn’t want me to pry around with a needle because it was too sore.  I’ve heard that putting a banana peel on it is a great way to draw out the splinter, but naturally, though I usually have bananas around, right then I didn’t have any.

I considered if I had any other options, and this is what I did.  I told her to soak her finger in warm water, and then to go outside and pick some plantain.  Do you know what plantain looks like?  It’s a common weed that grows all over the place here, maybe all over the US, I don’t know.  The Native Americans used to call it white man’s foot, or broad foot, because wherever the white man travelled, plantain would grow. 

I don’t know much about identifying weeds or wild plants, but a few years ago I was on a nature hike with the kids and the guide pointed it out.  He pointed out other things, too, that I didn’t remember.  But this one was memorable because he had said it was good for a number of things, including bee stings.  A little later on that hike, a little girl got a bee sting and he immediately picked some, smashed it to a pulp with a rock, and applied it to her sting.  She calmed down very quickly.

Not long after that, I was attending my then sixth grade son’s baseball game.  At that age, most of the parents don’t attend the game, but I went to every game.  One of his fifth grade teamates was stung by a wasp on his hand, and it was so painful that he couldn’t hold a ball or bat.  There was no other adult to help him and even though he was trying to act like it wasn’t a big deal, I could tell it really was hurting.  So I picked some plantain, told him it needed to be chewed or smashed with a rock before applying it, and he willingly chewed it and put it on his sting.  I thought I must have seemed like a weirdo to him and wondered if it would really help, but I needn’t have worried.  He told me after a minute that his hand felt normal and was very appreciative – and he thought it was cool, not weird.

Plantain is good for lots of things, and I thought it might draw out the splinter, too.  So I told dd to wrap it around her finger and put a bandaid on top to hold it on.  We couldn’t find the splinter the next day when we took it off, so I guess it worked. 

Today I asked ds10 to pick some to make a salve with (I’ll share details of that with you tomorrow when it’s finished and I see how it works), and asked dd8to pick a bunch of it to dehydrate it for future use – it’s good for a lot of things, it’s free and easily available, so I figure, why not take advantage of it and stock my home grown medicine cabinet supplies? 🙂

Avivah

Transplanting tomatoes

Gardening, Homeschooling

I can’t believe it’s already the season to start planting warm weather crops!  When I went out to look at the raised garden beds that we built last year, I was surprised to see that they’re almost all full!  I didn’t feel like we planted too much earlier in the season, but I guess it’s more than I thought.  Coming up we have strawberries, garlic, leeks, onions, lettuce, peas, and beets.  We also have oregano and sage that self sowed from last year, as well as several tomato plants that self sowed.  (I found it very ironic that with all my efforts at starting seeds inside, so many didn’t grow, but these took care of themselves outside in the unhospitable cold.)  The mint in a separate garden box on the deck is also coming up from last year on its own.  We also noticed a few squash plants that started growing in the lasagna beds (after I pulled a couple up, thinking they were weeds) – they must have been in compost that wasn’t fully composted; we came to the realization it wasn’t a weed in time to leave one where it was growing. 

This morning I was up nice and early, so after preparing Amish oatmeal for breakfast and popping it into the oven, I thought it would be a good time to transplant the tomato plants we started from seed into the garden.  Yesterday my father in law brought over some extra starts he had that he didn’t need, which was perfect because we started two batches of tomato seeds, and of the second batch only one sprouted.  I wanted more plants than I had, and as if he read my mind, my wish was granted!  (He’s never offered me plant starts before.)

A couple of my girls joined me in the yard after they finished davening, and a short time later the three youngest boys came out, too.  I know that people say that gardening with very young children is wonderful, but honestly, that’s only if you’re not trying to get something done.  🙂  My ds20 months promptly trampled two of the plants we had just put in – he needed someone to be with him all the time to keep him out of where he wasn’t supposed to be.  For it to be fun for both of us, I’d have to be involved with him the whole time and actively directing him.  But my ds3 was a good age to be helpful – he helped me pull weeds and then water some plants.   And ds6 also did a lot of watering. 

The tomato seeds that I started were heirloom and open pollinated – I chose the varieties that I did because I liked their names.  I know, very unscientific.  They are:

  • king pineapple
  • watermelon beefsteak
  • black cherry
  • Japanese golden pear

Can you tell I was vicariously satisfying my desire to grow fruit by ordering these tomato seeds?  So far, we have 23 transplants in, 8 left to go.  A bit less than half are from my father in law, and I assume his are hybrid seeds.  Now I need to get squash, melon, and cucumber seeds in.  Last year our most successful plant was butternut squash, from a seed taken from a squash we bought at the store and ate.  It was a surprise that it came up at all! 

When it was time to go in for breakfast over an hour later, we discovered that I had turned on the fleishig oven instead of the milchig oven so breakfast wasn’t ready on time after all.  If I had been inside I would have realized that pretty quickly, but I wasn’t and I didn’t, so breakfast happened late.  Very late.   But I used the time to do some reading earlier in the day rather than later with my ds6 and dd8 – the newest readaloud we’re doing in the mornings for ds is Doctor Dolittle.  We recently finished Dominic, by William Steig (author of Sylvester and the Magic Pebble), which had suprisingly challenging vocabulary, but it was so fun that there was no intimidation factor.  Even though they each get their own read aloud time with me, they like listening to the other’s books.  We also finished dd’s book at the same time we finished Dominic – now we’re starting the next book in the Little House series, The Long Winter.  I love that book. 

While we were outside, we cut up the scavenged carpeting that a neighbor was discarding a couple of days ago to use on the path between the lasagna beds.  I read that suggestion somewhere, to keep the weeds down.  Though there was loads of carpet being given away, I didn’t want to get too much and have to deal with the extra.  And it turns out that I should have gotten four rolls instead of one, because I really don’t have enough – this covered 2/3 of one row.  Unfortunately, garbage pick up was the next day so I can’t get any more from them.  Oh, well.  But at least it’s done and not taking up space in the garage, and will help for the path that it’s on!

All in all, a nice way to start the day!

Avivah

Planting blueberry bushes

Gardening

At long last, my blueberry bushes arrived a couple of days ago.  I ended up calling the company to change my initial order several days after I posted about it, so I only got three varieties instead of six.  The reason I changed the order is they have special pricing for ordering a prepackaged group of 15 plants (just $50 for two year plants).  When I ordered 30, it was because I wanted to take advantage of the pricing and get two sets.  But it turns out that you need to specify that you want the sets of 15, and if you don’t, you get charged a higher price.  It was worth making the call and checking, since it saved me $40.

If you order the sets like this, they send you whatever they decide to send on that day, and can’t tell you ahead of time what it will be.  But whatever they send will be suitable for your climate.  The three varieties that I received were Jersey, Elliot, and Blue Ray.

 >>Where did you buy your blueberry bushes from?<< 

 A while back I posted about an opportunity to get $20 off of a plant order, and that I ordered blackberry canes and strawberry plants from that company.  But I wouldn’t say that company has super prices – once you start doing research, you see what a wide variety of prices you’ll find, and how many plants or seeds you’re able to buy will depend on finding affordable sources for what you want.

I found a great company for seeds and fruit trees/bushes (Fedco), but they’re located in Maine and so I couldn’t order berry bushes from them because they have plants that are appropriate for colder climates than mine.  After doing a lot of research, I settled on a company in a gardening zone similar to mine, that has what seems to me pretty good prices for blueberry bushes – www.danfinch.com. 

Yesterday we put most of them in the yard – they need to planted in an acidic soil, so I went out with my ds to Home Depot to get some peat moss to plant them in.  We’ve put a row between us and the neighbors on each side – on one side we have a fence between us, but on the other we don’t, and I really hope that they don’t get trampled by visiting grandchildren.  🙁   They are only about 24 inches high. 

After putting most of them in, we still have a few more to plant, but I don’t know where to put them!  I’m considering lining the back of my yard with them, but the partial fence there is overgrown with weeds that are like small trees and my dh is going to take care of that.  The only problem is, he probably won’t have a chance to get to it for another few weeks, and the plants need to go in as soon as possible, so they don’t die!  

Avivah

Dandelions for your health

Gardening, nutrition

Until last June, I never knew that dandelions were edible.  Did you?  Not only are they edible, they’re an incredible source of nutrition.  Read here if you want more details of how wonderful they are for you: http://www.leaflady.org/health_benefits_of_dandelions.htm

Different parts of the dandelion are good for eating at different times.  The best time to eat the leaves is before they flower, when they start to get bitter.  You can deal with the bitterness by boiling them, rinsing them, and then boiling them again, which is what I did last year.  But it’s better to just pick them when they are young and tasty.

This morning I sent the kids out to pick dandelion flowers.  I have a neighbor who has tons of them in her yard, so they got quite a few. It didn’t look like so many at first, since they are so small and compact, but it was a lot.  I have several experiments I want to try with them, only one of which we made today.  One is dandelion flower fritters – that was part of today’s lunch – another is dandelion bread and dandelion quiche.  For the bread, you need to separate the petals, so dd8 and ds10 spent quite a while doing the petals. 

I’d like to tell you how amazingly delicious the fritters were, but they honestly weren’t such a big hit.  It’s not a hard thing to make – you basically dip the flower in the batter, drop it in hot oil, and quickly fry it.  I think the lack of success had more to do with the fact that the batter for the fritters was too heavy than anything else (if we make it again we’ll use less flour), and the heaviness of the batter also meant that they took much longer to cook than they should have and it was labor and time intensive.  I left dd14 to make them while I went with dd12 to the thrift store to do some emergency clothing shopping.  (Do you remember me mentioning a child I have who rips pants within the first time or two wearing them?  Well, he has a unique gift and I can’t figure out how it’s possible for a child to so quickly destroy clothing, but he does this with all of his clothing – socks have holes within a couple of wearings, he came home from a friend last Shabbos with a borrowed shirt because as he walked by a door it got caught and literally ripped every button off his new shirt, and now he has worn holes through the bottom of his shoes – not one other child of mine has ever accomplished this, and since the first I knew of it was when he showed me how he could poke his toes through, I needed to buy replacements right away.  🙂 Anyway.)  If I had been here I might have realized in time that the batter was too thick and avoided the problem, but in any event, I wasn’t and I didn’t.  I think the fritters could be very tasty and maybe we’ll try again.  I love the idea of being able to forage for high quality nutritious food right outside of our doors. 

Tonight I told a friend I could send over my two oldest daughters to help her tomorrow with the cooking for Shabbos meals for all of her visiting family (she’s making a bar mitzva this weekend), so I won’t have them around much to help here for Shabbos.  I was thinking of making the dandelion bread for Shabbos breakfast, but now I’ll see if I’ll have the time.  The basic idea for that is to use the flower petals the way you would add banana or zucchini to a quick loaf recipe.  For the quiche, I think it would work nicely to use the petals and or the greens, sauteed with garlic, and add it to a typical quiche filling. 

One of my kids asked if we could dehydrate the flowers and them blend them into a flour.  I thought that was a good idea, and maybe we’ll try that.  It would make it very easy to cook with, adding a sprinkle of some here and there.  Dandelions are such a good source of vitamins, free and easily available, that it seems worth a little time to play around with how to best use them. 

Avivah