Cutting Calendula.

I believe I counted 96 calendula seedlings planted this summer?  A couple of them are still blooming, under two snows, in the garden.  Many of them are valiantly surviving the cold in their pots on the porch steps.  I was afraid I would loose them all at the first sign of frost.  I didn’t'.

Most of the ones from the garden I pulled up last week, and out of time, let sit on the kitchen counter – a giant pile of plants.  Between the freeze and the undignified heap they sat in for a few days, I lost a bunch of the leaves...  but I still managed to dry a quart Ziploc bagful from them.  I grow calendula for the flowers, because they are beautiful and because they are healing.  Bonus: they attract aphids away from other things you are growing.  But I also harvest the leaves.  They're edible, did you know?  Calendula is the classic "potherb."  My leaves though, are dried and sent with instructions on poulticing and plastering to my father – he with the varicose veins the size of golf balls in his legs.  They're good for that, the leaves.  I hope he actually uses them.

I think I must have a love affiare going on with my herbs.  Affaires are mutual things, you see.  I love them.  And I think that efficacious herbs, the healing ones, must have a truly deep love for humanity.  They could have evolved in so many other ways.  The amount of phyto-chemicals and trace nutrients and good energy that healing herbs put into their herbal parts is astounding.  When you think that all of that energy could have evolved to have been directed towards something else... or towards the same plant parts, without creating the effective herbal medicines...  There is so much love right there.  Calendula has been giving me flowers ALL SUMMER LONG.  Now she gives me her leaves.  And in exchange, I save her seeds.  I've got some collected already, from seedheads accidentally collected before their time.  From some recent seed heads, fully mature.  The seed head its self will appear dried and ready to harvest long before it really is.  It is not until the vital energy has withdrawn from the stem, leaving it brittle and brown, rather than strong and lush and green, that the seeds have absorbed all the procreative energy they can hold. 

I'm leaving the seed heads on the plant, on the porch, out in the cold, even after harvesting another giant basket of leaves.  I want to see if next years plants will remember the cold.  Will they grow more fiercely in the early season?  More vibrantly?  Be even less susceptible to frost in the fall?  How does evolution happen anyway?  There is an intelligence in seeds.  In plants.  I feel we all too often vastly underrate that intelligence.  If I contemplate the possibility that our human DNA carries with it some load of karma from our ancestors, why should I not entertain the possibility that the prana (life force) at work in seeds can remember the cold, and tell next year's plant to prepare for it?  How else do we get cold-hardy varietals??

Harvest Update

This summer has felt a bit wonky for me.  The weather, the timing, the whole thing.  I know rationally that it is mostly because I was gone for 5 weeks of it.  Missing the month of June wasn't just the shock and weirdness of going from one climate to another 4000 miles away, and then back again, missing out on the gradual and dramatic shifts of light and plant growth.  It wasn't just missing the roses and the irises.  It was also, albeit a conscious one, a choice to skip out on my usual early- summer activites.  The hauling garden dirt and top soil, planting, weeding, watering, harvesting.  Add that to a realization that my job is not truly serving my highest purpose, is draining my energy, and causing me to occasionally shut down and be unavailable for my loved ones; and the subsequent so-far-unsuccessful job search and really its no surprise my summer feels a bit wonky.  That and there's already frost in low lying areas in Fairbanks.  And one of the birch on my drive home has started sporting a golden bough...  I'm not quite ready to welcome fall, just yet....

But even with all of that, there has been some summer harvest and preserving going on.

I've been wildcrafting like crazy: yarrow, horsetail, plaintain, clover, and coltsfoot are all drying in my kitchen.  I've been drying continuous batches of (feral) red raspberry leaves in my mother's dehydrator I borrowed last year and have yet to return. ahem.  The calendula I grew from seed is far more prolific, flower wise, than the starts I've gotten from Calypso in the past.   So I've got lots of calendula being dried.  Bachelor buttons too.  Did you know they taste like nutmeg?  I have plans for teas and medicines and facial steams all winter!

Note to self: Next year, do lots of starting from seed!

A massive amount of canned nectarines and peaches await pies this winter, along with the cherries from an earlier post (I got nine quarts, by the way.  So that comes out to more like a $3 quart, which means it is half as expensive - and so much better - than buying canned peaches at the store.  Did you know Fairbanks has food prices comprable to Manhattan?). 

I've eaten so many and many raspberries off the feral canes all over the yard.  There's a quart or two in the freezer.  Next year, the raspberries will be re-tamed and cultivated in their own patch.

I went berry picking near my house, and got a few quarts that are in the freezer awaiting pies.  Can you tell I"m a fan of pies?  Our picking spot is all picked out by now (unfortunately other people know of it!) but there's a few later-fruiting spots that hopefully we'll get to too.

As far as updates go:  That birch gruit ale we bottled?  Turns out I'm real good at making vinegar.  Fortunately I have a friend who likes to drink vinegar for health purposes.  More power to him!  I know what he's getting this year for Yule.
The saurkraut I tried again?  Turns out I'm real good at making mold be really happy. 
The only thing I've been sucessfull with fermenting this season is Kefir.  But it is awesome.

Sugaring : part 1

Sunday, the Darlin'Man put in 19 taps, bought used at Alaska Feed.  There is a section of birch forest at one end of our property that wants to be a pasture.  We need a few cords of wood for this winter, and the next.  And the next.  Beautiful, that.  How needs intersect and mirror eachother.  Create abundance. 
So we decided that we'd tap the trees, harvest the gift of their lifeblood before chopping down and harvesting the gift of their bodies for fuel.  This serves a two-fold purpose:  we get sap to sugar down, and it also keeps the wood drier.  Apparently Russian peasants decimated huge swathes of birch forest across northern Eurasia by over-zealously tapping the trees, taking more sap than the tree could spare.  We are trying to do just this, intentionally.  This way, there'll be less moisture needing to be cured out of the firewood.  So some trees have two taps, and one even has three.

Our running tally so far:
Sunday: 8 gallons
Monday: 12 gallons
Tuesday 12 gallons
Today?

Come to find out, it takes 80-100 gallons of sap for a gallon of syrup, compared to a mere 40 gallons of sap from the maple trees I grew up with in Maine.
I did boil down a couple pot-fuls and got about a cup of syrup.  I wasn't too careful though, and it scorched, turning dark brown.  You can taste the hint of burn, but it is intensely sweet goodness.
I found on HeyWhat'sForDinnerMom's blog, that she had the brilliant idea of evaporating down the sap into syrup with a crockpot.  So wer're trying that.  The stovetop method took WAY too much propane, it was worth it just to try and to see, but is certainly in no way sustainable.  The brilliance of the crockpot method (for me) is that, due to my magic house the energy to run the crockpot during the day while we're gone is literally falling out of the sky.  We'll see how that experiment turns out.


We've got plans laid, in various stages of completion, for birch wine and a couple of birch and birch based ales.  I'll tell you all about it.

We're also drinking sap.  Alot.
Since Sunday, I think I must have drunk a gallon of sap.  Birch sap is suppoed to be an amazing spring tonic, full of micro-nutrients and minerals that are just what the body needs after a long winter.  It tastes like faintly sweet water, and feels so good and so healthful to my body.  It is a constant intention of mine to drink more water, and these past few days I have succeeded in doing so.  It really does make a difference in how my body feels, and how it functions.  


Birch Sap Resources:

HeyWhat'sForDinnerMom  (She's also linked at PunkDomestics)

Taste of the Wild :Recipes!

FrontierFreedom

and The Birch Boy