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!
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!
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.
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!
At the top, we found scrub everywhere and very little of the items we’d come to find. Eventually, we spotted a small burdock specimen and decided to pull out our plastic gardening spade to see if we could get at the root. When documentation you read says it looks carrot-like, they aren’t kidding! When they say the root could go down 2 to 3 feet, they aren’t kidding! What many sources fail to say however, is that the first almost foot’s worth is quite fat! My daughter dug down just below this tuber then used our tiny rose sheers to snip her way through the inch-thick root (the part the Japanese harvest to sell and cook) to remove the tuber. This took a bit of time when we realized we should head back before they close the parking lot gate where we left the van.
We got back down to our marker when Ashley discovered a whole stand of chokecherry! She began picking a number of sprigs as quickly as she could. As we speed-walked back to the van, I told her that anything she spotted ahead that she could grab before I got there, would go in the bag. So off she went! You might wonder why this article was started as if beginning a quest in a video game. Ashley kept remarking as we speedwalked back to the van, that she felt as if she was doing in real life what her characters did in her MMO’s (short for MMPORG or Massive Multiplayer Role Playing Game). 
Apparently in her games, characters can be given quests where they need to gather materials before they can make things. Some games call these recipes, others call them schematics, etc. The character has to run around (and they literally run around, not walk) and when the player sees an item they need, they use in-game commands to tell the character to pick up the item. For some games, you select the item, for others, you choose a tool, then click on the item, for others, you merely come into range and the character picks up the item. So there was my daughter, running ahead of me, picking up what she could along the path, snapping up this and that on our list. Before we knew it, we saw the parking lot up ahead! Somehow, we made the trek back to the van in less than 25 minutes!
We had a good handful of narrow-leaf plantain, dandelion leaves and a couple roots, chokecherry, a burdock root, a couple burdock leaves and a couple small burdock heads. Ashley had grabbed a few clover heads along the way as well. We didn’t spot any chickweed or purslane, and cattails don’t grow along that trail either it seems. So we drove home with what we had.
Upon arrival at home, it was time to clean the greens, clean the roots, and learn what to do with the chokecherries. They literally look like tiny cherries WITH pits! I did some research and bookmarked a couple sites that shared recipes for chokecherry juice, jams, jellies, bread, muffins, etc. I need to get my hands on a hand mill of some type because dried chokecherry flour can be added to baking! I learned that you don’t eat this berry raw due to cayonogenic properties. You need to sun-dry or boil them to kill these properties. Our first foray into chokecherry processing then, became an infused vinegar salad dressing. The chokecherries ended up boiled twice as a result, first to mash them, second to make the salad dressing as the vinegar needed boiling. The leaves and bark make a nice tea according to some sources, so we kept the leaves and twigs to dry for that purpose.
Plants we haven’t taste-tested yet, but that sound both promising and grow in our area, are burdock and cattail. So far we’ve only had a small burdock in the house when we were preparing the oil infusion for my daughter’s horse. I didn’t realize at the time, that I unceremoniously tossed food out the window when I was done!
The fact that many recipes for skincare products have you grinding this and that till it’s very small has me on the lookout now for a hand-grinding flour mill. It appears there are several designs for sale in ample quantity on eBay and Amazon. Some users have figured out how to remove a particular bolt on some of them in order to attach a regular hand-drill to speed up the process. This would mean that if we gather seeds from these various plants, we could add their flour to the mix as well! It also means that some of the seeds which research revealed have been used by various cultures for spices and flavourings, could be used for that in our house as well. Just need a grinder!
It all started innocently enough. . . my daughter’s horse comes down with rain-rot on occasion and unless we want to pump her full of dewormer constantly, we had to come up with alternative methods to kill the fungal infection. Last year we had some success directly applying in alternating turns, tea tree oil and lavendar oil. This year, while walking through the “Made in Canada” bazaar downtown on Canada Day, we found a 
He suggested obtaining chickweed, plantain, burdock and optionally, violet and make a double-boiled oil infusion. We were to use the leaves of three of the plants and the root of the burdock. No turtle tongues were harmed in the making of this infusion. Promise!
Well, now it was time to see what we all thought of these plants. My daughter took the plunge first, trying out both broad-leaf and narrow-leaf plantain, and a succulent we discovered in a blog article the night before. She quickly made an additional discovery that many travelers face when eating foreign foods for the first time. Her stomach wasn’t used to the wild food and initially didn’t know what to do with it. A few hours later, it stopped feeling strange and she was fine. During her system’s recovery, I went next and made a tiny salad of dandelion heads, a couple dandelion leaves, and a few narrow-leaf plantain leaves (as that’s all that grows in our yard). I added a few rasberries and a bit of canned salmon, then used a vinegrette salad dressing. I LOVED IT! But then I had to remind myself that as a child, I used to nibble on clover tops, pine needles (which are also on one blogger’s edible plants infographic), and grass fronds. Back then I didn’t know pine needles were edible, so I chewed them for the flavour and spit them out. But my stomach was not anywhere near as upset as my daughter’s, and recovered faster from what little upset it did have. Clearly eating such things as a child had done something to prep my system that never left. Next came my son and our boarder. I made similar tiny salads for them and let them use the salad dressing of their choice. I was so excited to hear “not bad, it would taste better if it also had. . . /this needs. . . “. To me, that was a resounding success!