August 2016 – Marilynn Dawson's Musings

August 27, 2016February 4, 2017 Marilynn Dawson Saving Money - Groceries

Wild Adventures Part 6: Processing Continued. . .

I sit here tonight drinking a test cup of nettle, dandelion, chokecherry leaves, semi-crushed dried berries and stems, and homegrown mint leaves and stems. I mixed one part dandelion to two parts of everything else more or less, and one part mint roughly. The resulting tea had a very grassy taste with a decidedly nettle scent, but with a bit of honey, tastes very mellow. Not bad as it grows on you. That mix of tea is now in a little labelled container up in the tea cupboard. There’s enough chokecherry crushed to make tea for a long time this winter! Nettle has a decent amount in the cupboard too, but I only had enough dandelion root for the blend I put together this evening.

The first bottle of infused shampoo is in the shower now as well, along with infused facial scrub and leave-in conditioner. We also made more of the chokecherry vinegar as well, meaning I need to pay back the VISA for yet more buckets of salad mix and salad dressing. I also need to pay back the VISA for a second bottle of shampoo as shortly, all of us will be using the same shampoo instead of different bottles. I’m looking forward to updating that spreadsheet needless to say!

The flour attempt with dried rice pulp resulted in very fine almost salt-like granules coming out of the grain mill. Trying to crack dried chokecherries with the hand grain mill threatened to tear up the countertop, so we resorted to pounding in the mortar instead. Eventually I was able to use the mill to break the berries down further, but only got them so far. Using a metal strainer, we managed to get maybe half a cup or more of chokecherry flour to date.

The first batch along with the rice made about one cup that I threw into the breadmaker using the basic white loaf recipe. The resulting loaf proved dense, meaning I probably should have chosen the whole wheat bread recipe instead, but otherwise, the loaf did not taste much different than normal. I’ll be testing again soon. The second reason for denseness may be due to the fact the chokecherry flour has no gluten in it. We’ll see how the next loaf goes. We have lots of dried berries to crack and grind now! We’ll have to see how much flour we actually get out of it. Rumour has it this flour can be used in place of corn starch for thickening soups and sauces. I’ll have to try that out soon too.

Facial cleanser, shampoo, conditioner, tooth paste, window cleaner, bathroom cleaner, tea, salad dressing, salad greens. . . all a mix of foraging, vinegar, baking soda, and more liquid glycerin soap than I thought I’d end up making. . . eucalyptus oil thrown in here and there for good measure. . . eventually I’ll be able to clean both the house and myself using far fewer chemicals! The wild salads have more nutrition in them than what we were doing before as well. Add to that saving money on those aspects of grocery shopping, and it’s a win, win, win situation.

August 15, 2016February 4, 2017 Marilynn Dawson Saving Money - Groceries

Wild Adventures Part 5: Chokecherry Escapades!

The wild adventures continue! This past week, my daughter and I brought home quite a bit more chokecherry than we’d originally planned! The original plan was to get nettle, and it took several days even before THAT came home. But the day we intended to get nettle, we realized a huge stand of chokecherries in the same spot, were literally loaded with ripe, dark purple berries! We still had to finish picking the berries off the leaves and twigs in the bag from the past weekend, so we sat down to see exactly how much had come home!

The previous weekend’s haul was laid out on trays to dry. The second haul filled two medium mixing bowls, or one ice cream pail! The picture above shows a larger bowl on the left, which was laid out to dry on cookie sheets, and the two medium bowls that filled the ice cream pail later that night. Those bowls of leaves and twigs are being pounded down for use in loose-leaf tea. Not all the twigs can be used, but smaller ones are kept in the mix. Those bowls are still drying as we speak. I crushed some into the storage bag already, but most of it is still drying out.

I decided to try my hand at making grape-chokecherry jelly, following instructions for chokecherry jelly. I almost made candy instead! I have a jar of very solid jelly that nearly broke a butter knife when I tried to get some out of the jar after it cooled! I’m now thinking of warming it up to hopefully either “water it down” or add eucalyptus powder to it and drop it onto plastic wrap to make my own “soft” lozenges.

We did eventually get the nettle, bringing home a full grocery bag’s worth of leaves and stalks. Taking care to pick them clean of the stalks resulted in filling a salad spinner! The wet leaves didn’t take up much room, but as the leaves were spun dry, they fluffed out to fill the entire thing! I’m looking forward to making some infusions with the nettle, one of which I will try drinking as a way of assisting my adrenal health, hair, etc. We’ll see how it goes. I don’t know if we picked enough for the full experiment, or if it will be “as supplies allow”, but we’ll see.

This picture was after one of my cookie trays came available and I took some of the leaves to spread out to dry. I’ll spread out more as more of my sheets come available. I was reminded of a few trays I forgot I’d hidden in the laundry room, so need to pull those out and press them into action.

My attempt to soak a burdock tuber did NOT soften the bark. I had let it soak for at least two maybe three weeks, but all I succeeded in doing was drawing out the oils in the root, and infusing the water. So I threw out the root and poured the water into a jug for use in some of the other products we plan to make around the house. The other two roots as a result may end up going the same way.

We’re doing a lot of “play it by ear” right now. It seems as I’ve read various blogs on foraging and processing, that every single blogger out there has gone down the same path in some fashion. Figure out what you want, find what you need to make what you want, locate recipes or create your own, find out what works and what doesn’t, stick with what works and move on.

We are still quite near the beginning of this path. Some stuff has worked out already, some stuff still has to be created and tested. Some stuff has been tried and worked while others have failed. The jelly idea being one of the failures.

We will be entering fall soon. I’m not sure how much money will be saved over the winter months this year, but as the saying goes, the adventure continues. . .

August 3, 2016January 7, 2017 Marilynn Dawson Saving Money - Groceries

Wild Adventures Part 4: Ingredients and Preparation!

Going wild takes preparation. Ingredients necessary to make various things you’d normally buy at the store must first be prepared before the item can be created. In the last post, I shared a picture of drying greens, another of an oil infusion simmering away on the stove, etc. Yesterday, those steps continued.

Backing up to the previous night, I took a jar of old glycerin soaps my kids had made at camp as kids, chopped them up, and made liquid hand soap out of them. The recipe called for 6 cups of water to every half cup of chopped soap. I ended up with a full cup, resulting in 12 cups of water in a soup pot. The soaps had been coloured various shades of blue, green, yellow, clear, red, etc, so as they melted, the water began to take on an aqua-marine colour. Once everything had melted and the pot had come to a simmering boil, I was to remove the pot from the heat and allow it to sit for up to twelve hours, 24 if necessary, or longer if the soap needed more time to set.

Hardly four hours later, the hand soap had thickened up considerably, gone from translucent to opaque, and taken on a very light aqua-marine colouring. Yesterday morning I decided to pour it into a container as it was doing just fine. This step was necessary for various skincare recipes calling for a liquid glycerin or castille soap. Many such recipes call for the Castile, then also call for the glycerin, so I figure, just replace the castille with the liquid glycerin soap and be done with it. Whenever this almost 3 litres of liquid soap finally runs out, we’ll have to find more, but for now, this works great!

The shampoo and conditioner recipes call for water. One of them instructs you to add herbs to boiling water and let steep for over 4 hours. When I saw that the second recipe didn’t call for this step but still called for water, I went to a list of herbs that help hair in either shampoo or conditioner or both, and decided to make a water infusion for it as well. I now have two containers sitting on the counter, labelled for which recipe they’ll be going in once the first family member runs out of that item in the shower. I also have a vinegar infusion prepared that will take up to 6 weeks before it can be used in the shower as a hair rinse.

These infusions required dried, crushed herbs. The day’s temperatures here in the Okanagan were up in the high 20’s. Two dandelion plants that we dug up in the morning were thankfully fully dried by late afternoon, allowing me to crush what was needed for the above recipes.

The saddlebags my daughter was working on were fitted to her horse yesterday as well, and they do indeed fit. The mare also didn’t seem phased whenever Ashley demonstrated going into the bags to fetch or return full water bottles. This means that the two can now go trail riding and bring home food when they’re done.

The one product I did get made yesterday used some of the oil infusion from the night before to make a facial cleanser/scrub. It’s been put into a squeeze bottle, but it separates, so it will either need stirring with a tool to reach to the bottom, or flipping on it’s head every now and then to keep the oil filtering through the baking soda. We’ll see how it goes. But it was the first complete product to make using one of the prepared ingredients.

EDIT: The above had to receive minor editing because it is being posted a day AFTER it was written! As well, more math has been done, and a sheet in my wild greens comparison spreadsheet is now created to track expenses and recouped costs. So far, expenses involved in this little endeavor have totaled almost $94. The facial cleanser, wild salad greens, chokecherry salad dressing, and shortly the shampoo and conditioner will have totaled almost $26 in recouped costs so far. All expenses and recouped costs so far have been for the month of August. This means I should be paying my VISA that $26 as soon as I am able. Good to see these numbers so soon!

August 1, 2016January 7, 2017 Marilynn Dawson Saving Money - Groceries

Wild Adventures Part 3 – Getting Real, Seeing $avings!

The transition has begun! We are eating wild salad greens at dinner each day. We’re seeing roughly $4.69 in savings two or three times a month buying spinach. This is somewhat offset by the gas being spent to make three foraging runs so far. However, the gas being spent has already been paid for several times over. We are using chokecherry vinegar salad dressing instead of the applesauce, offering reasonable savings off the cost of toppings offering both Vitamin C and Iron. Vinegar still costs money, but nowhere near the cost of even no-name applesauce.

In addition, we have leaves and berries drying and a grain mill similar to the one pictured here, on order. Being newbies to all of this, we thought we found several antique grain mills at a local thrift store. Turns out they were antique meat grinders instead. All is not lost however on that discovery, because there are times when a tray of chuck or utility steak is cheaper than hamburger. In the past, I’d merely spend a fair bit of time chopping that steak into tiny cubes. The next time such a sale is on, I’ll try out one of these meat grinders.

I don’t need all three however, so if you want one, send me $30 via paypal and I’ll ship it off to you. Only two of you can take advantage of this deal. Most of that $30 will go into Canadian shipping costs, as these are heavy little units! If shipping ended up being more than $25, I’ll ask you to cover the rest via paypal again ASAP. $5 each is what I paid for them at the thrift store, although they look like they could sit in a museum case somewhere! The middle grinder is not for sale! That one is mine!

When our grain mill arrives, we’ll be grinding up a batch of rice flour I attempted to make and see how that turns out. We’ll be grinding up dried chokeberry into flour as well, and when a couple sprigs of plantain seeds dry, we’ll try grinding those into flour too. Grinding dandelion root turns it into a powder suitable for coffee substitutes or for use in baking and skincare or haircare products.

Speaking of which, we have leaves drying for use in a shampoo and for use in a water infusion that I’ll use when making the leave-in conditioner as well. Dried herbs are also useful in making an infused vinegar hair rinse.

I have an oil infusion gently boiling on the stove. The result will go into a facial cleanser/scrub. A pot of liquid glycerin soap is cooling on a back burner on the stove as well. It will be used in little amounts for shampoos, anti-bacterial hand soaps, and similar products.

Grinding the herbs required buying a mortar and pestal. We picked up one at Home Sense a bit larger and less flashy than the one pictured here. It wasn’t cheap, but hopefully the uses we’ve bought it for will have it paying for itself over time.

We didn’t have to buy the glycerin soaps, as those had been kicking around in the bathroom cupboard for years! Whenever we finally run out of the 2+liters of liquid soap I’ve just made, we’ll have to get more glycerin soap then. But for now, that step hasn’t cost us anything.

Once the necessary herbs for the water infusion are dried and crushed, I’ll be able to make the shampoo and vinegar rinse and leave-in conditioner. We are including Nettle in these infusions because of nettle’s reported hair strengthening, dandruff treating, and scalp healing properties, among others people have listed around the DIY hair care community.

Not buying shampoo, conditioner, facial cleanser/scrub and hand soap for awhile will see savings of at least $60 – $100 over the next year just on personal hygiene! That will definitely pay for the mortar and pestal and grain mill, just in our first year of making the switch to wild produce!

We brought home more burdock root, so we have enough now to soften and remove the bark, then cook to see what everyone thinks of them. The effort needed to dig up a root is worse than trying to dig up potatoes, I have to say. We bought a $20 folding shovel from Canadian Tire almost exactly like this one pictured here, to help with the task of getting roots, and was I ever glad we did! This shovel stores nicely in a backpack and it’s carrying case has a belt loop to attach it to camping gear or a utility belt.

If everyone likes burdock root as a vegetable (and there are well over 200 ways of cooking it apparently!), then hopefully the number of roots we find to dig up will pay for the shovel as well.

Lifestyle changes are rarely free of charge. We had to buy garden gloves, because to this point we had never owned any other than those my daughter took to work all the time. The garden gloves are to allow us to pick stinging nettle for use in our hygiene products. Apparently you can eat nettle, but when I was out with my daughter gathering the other night, this is how I came home!

The lesson??? Don’t go foraging for nettle unless your legs and arms are protected! My hands were fine, my arms were fine thanks to how I was reaching around plants, but my legs were rubbing on smaller ones near my feet!

So we’ve had to buy a grain mill, a folding shovel, a mortar and pestal, and garden gloves so far. Somehow between the two foraging runs this past week, I’ve lost my rose cutting sheers. I hope I find them before eventually having to buy those again. They’re handy for snipping stems and thick leaves off plants rather than try to snap or tear them off.

So salads, root vegetables, shampoo, conditioner, hand soap, facial cleanser, even recipes for skin toner and toothpaste (been making the toothpaste for awhile now already) will not only produce savings on our grocery bill, but through the removing of more chemicals and the adding of unprocessed nutrition, make us all healthier as well. We’re looking forward to seeing how this all turns out.