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. . .
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!