Yes, finally! We now have Oregon grape gracing our wild salads and it has been SO missed! This week, we began bringing home chokecherry, a month later than it’s supposed to show up. In fact, many trees still haven’t ripened yet. We have two strains of chokecherry in the valley, picked one strain for the first time this week and it makes a very dark-coloured juice after boiling. At first, I thought I’d boiled it way too long, but all that did was concentrate the flavour. The second batch from that picking got boiled last night for the proper 5 minutes, and it was still that colour.
I like to use chokecherry in making vinegar for salads, pancake syrop, and using the leaves, dried crushed berries, and bark in teas and hot cocoa. Chokecherry really adds to the richness of cocoa! We don’t drink coffee, but when my daughter added some of the concentrate to a friend’s cup of coffee, supposedly it tasted really good.
While I was boiling the chokecherry last night, I paid a trip to the baking soda box as well, saving myself roughly $10 off grocery store pricing for toothpaste and facial scrub. I also made another batch of anti-bacterial hand soap. I have a jar of herbal infused vinegar in a corner of the counter for my next batch of vinegar hair rinse. That will save another $3 roughly. So all totaled, I’ve saved an estimated $15-$17 because of last night’s efforts.
We have half a turkey roaster filled with dried purslane to pound up, as well as more dried nettle to crush as well. My daughter brought in more Mountain Sage to dry and we finally crushed our first round of dried narrow plantain leaf this week. Broadleaf plantain is growing well finally! Looking forward to gathering their seeds later this fall. Gathering salsify roots to do more test boils. See how the stringiness changes as the plants die. Got three more on a hike a few days ago. So foraging is slowly picking up steam. Not a good year so far, but we’ll see what we can lay aside for the winter this year. If the roots soften up decently, we’ll have a root veggie this winter, and if the false Solomon’s Seal berries thaw out nicely, we’ll have wild peas for dinners as well. I need to test that theory now that we have a decent handful in the freezer.
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!
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.
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.
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.