Homesteading Summer Camp

Extracting honey

With our three interns and various visitors coming and going all through the summer, things have been very lively at the Red Wing for the past few months. "The 'terns," as they are affectionately known, are incredibly hard workers, smart as whips, and excited about all things garden- and homestead- related.

Because we don't want to exploit the 'terns and their youthful energy, we have tried to break up the hard work with fun and educational activities such as the Farm Tour, field trips, and kitchen projects.

Also, we've been hosting long- and short- term visitors, various friends and family who come to stay for days or weeks and sometimes help out with farm work or participate in Big Projects while they're here. Andriana is here from Manhattan, experiencing composting and chicken butchering for the first time, among other things. Fer was a "day camper" for two weeks while she was visiting from Mexico City, pulling weeds, spreading mulch, and generally jumping right into the fray.

Sometimes it feels like we are running a summer camp --the kind of summer camp I'd like to attend: one where the activities are shoveling manure, chopping vegetables, squishing bugs, extracting honey, discussing heirloom tomato varieties, saving seeds, identifying insects, and fermenting things.

Along those lines, we spent a day extracting honey and making mead with the 'terns and various visitors a few weeks ago. It was one of the stickiest and most delicious ways to spend a day you can possibly imagine. Here are a few shots of the process; you can view more photographs here: honey extraction and here: meadmaking.

Yesterday the campers (aka interns) convened in the kitchen and we made a big crock of sauerkraut and jarred up some brine-pickled (fermented) garlic scapes after a brief lesson on fermentation.

We followed up the festival of fermentation with a garlic tasting, sampling the ten heirloom varieties that we grew this year, cleansing our palates between rounds of baked garlic with a variety of homemade jams, baked brie, and sliced tomatoes from the garden.

Friends and family joined us to gorge on garlic and offer comments on the varieties to help us decide what to grow next year.

I was struck by how our collective work produced this incredibly delicious, nutritious, and beautiful food. Gathered around the table were people who had helped with all of the different pieces of the work of growing food: Shannon and Sharon helped dig and prepare beds, Ali and Nicole and Dau harvested and processed hundreds of heads of garlic this summer, Christopher and I chose varieties, saved seed garlic, and planted and mulched and cared for the plants. And we all savored the fruits of our labor together. It was lovely.

Best summer camp ever.

Making Herbal Meads

Fresh-picked feverfew, skullcap, and lemon balm for Migrane Medicine Mead.

I have been wanting to try fermenting herbal meads for a while now, and have been peppering my experienced mead-making friends with questions about making mead with herbs. This week I gave it a whirl.

A mead made with herbs is technically called by the very medieval-sounding name "metheglin" which derives from the two ancient Welch words--the word for medicine or healing (meddyg) and the word for mead or spirits (llyn). Metheglins can contain medicinal herbs, culinary herbs, and/or spices.

A lot of the metheglin recipes you will find online are for madrigal dinner or ren-fair types of spiced meads heavy on the cinnamon and spice. Those recipes don't generally appeal to me in terms of taste and also because they aren't made with herbs that grow easily here in the southern US. And although some of their components may be medicinal, the "Christmas spice" metheglins do not seem to be intended primarily for health and healing.

I love the idea of a tonic or healing cup of wine, and I relish the process of making medicine with simple ingredients picked fresh from the garden. So it was high time for me to make some medicinal mead.

I made two 1-gallon batches of herbal mead to start out with. With advice from some more experienced metheglin-making friends and herbs from our garden, it was a simple, quick, and easy process -- only a bit more complicated than brewing a cup of herbal tea.

My first batch was made with mostly lavender (stems, leaves, and flowers) and a small amount of rosemary (leaves and stems).

The second batch was an attempt at a migrane tonic mead for Christopher. I combined feverfew (leaves and flowers), two varieties of skullcap (leaves, flowers, and stems), and lemon balm (leaves and stems) for the Migrane Medicine Mead.

Here's a recipe for herbal mead as I made it:

1 gallon of herbal mead (metheglin)

Ingredients:

• 3 quarts water
• 3 cups honey dissolved
• Fresh herbs (amount will vary based on herbs used and desired strength)
• A pinch of yeast (I used champagne yeast)

Equipment:

• Gallon jug
• Rubber stopper & airlock

Instructions:

1. Make a tea from the herbs and 2 quarts of the water. Allow to steep, cool to room temperature and strain out the herbs.
2. Dissolve the honey in the other quart of water, heating until warm and whisking until the honey is completely dissolved. Add yeast and allow to activate for a few minutes.
3. Pour the tea and warm honey/yeast water into a 1-gallon jug (we use old apple cider bottles scavenged from the natural foods supermarket's dumpster).
4. Cork with a rubber stopper topped with an airlock. Allow to ferment for a few weeks until bubbling stops.
5. Rack after a few weeks. At this point you can either allow a second fermentation of a few more weeks in an airlocked jug and then bottle, or just bottle and age after the primary fermentation. We like to keep our mead-making moving, so we usually bottle after the first, most active fermentation period and allow the last bit of fermentation, aging and mellowing to happen in the bottle.

I'll post about how the meads turn out...they're bubbling away already!

Mead on Foodista:

Wild Blueberries fresh from the Commons

Blueberries, and a few blackberries picked yesterday on Black Balsam.

Yesterday, we took an afternoon trip up to Black Balsam on the Blue Ridge Parkway to look for wild blueberries.

You never know when the wild blueberries will be ripe -- it's usually sometime in August, but you have to hit the right place at just the right time to strike a rich ripe blueberry vein. We had tried Craggy Pinnacle a week ago, but the berries were still green. This week on the Ivestor Gap Trail, we were in luck!

Kelly in the blueberry thickets.

I love foraging on public lands - it feels like a way to reclaim the idea of the commons, places open to all for shared use, and collectively stewarded for future generations.

Stewardship means that while it's fine to fill a bucket or bag with blueberries, it's not OK to dig up a blueberry bush, removing the plant from the ecosystem and depriving others of future blueberries. It's important to make the distinction between foraging for things like berries and wild mushrooms on public lands, which is great, and removing plants or animals from wild lands, which is unethical and often illegal.

A bit more scenic than a trip to the super-market.

Wild blueberries are a native plant, valued in many native traditions as an important edible and medicinal.

Recent studies have confirmed the nutritional value and health-promoting qualities of blueberries, and in recent years blueberries have become a trendy health food. Blueberries are often referred to as a superfood, packed with antioxidants, good for your heart, your brain, your eyes, and your gastrointestinal system, and cancer-fighters extraordinaire.

Luckily, they are also incredibly tasty!

I find wild blueberries especially delicious, and I believe that nothing can beat the nutrition of food growing in the wild, picked fresh, and eaten as soon as

possible.

As we picked yesterday, I kept thinking of Blueberries for Sal, a beloved children's book which my mom must have read to me and my brother and sister hundreds of times throughout my childhood.

We loved the story of little Sal picking wild blueberries with her mother, and her surprise encounter with a mother bear and cub who are also foraging for berries.

I remember picking blackberries with my brother and sister in our neighbor's overgrown pasture (an informal commons) and bringing buckets of berries home to my mom, who would make a cobbler from them. Mouthwatering memories of those cobblers kept me picking yesterday, and bolstered my willpower to put at least some of the berries in my bag, rather than straight into my mouth (this was a difficult task for Sal, too).

Sal and her mother processing berries.

Me processing berries.

Sal and her mother canned their blueberries, to eat all winter long. We will use 3 quarts of yesterday's haul to make a batch of blueberry mead--another, more ancient way of preserving fruit. We'll pick more over the next few weeks to freeze, and the cobbler extravaganza has begun using the remaining quart of fruit we gathered yesterday.

In the spirit of childhood nostalgia, here's my mom's cobbler recipe, with a few tips in her inimitable style (my mom's tips in quotes):

My Mom's Summer Cobbler

(can be made with blueberries, blackberries, peaches, or any fresh fruit)

Dry Ingredients:

• 1 cup sugar
• 2 Tbs. baking powder "make them FULL tablespoons"
• 1 tsp. salt
• 3/4 cup flour

Stir or sift dry ingredients together.

Once they are mixed, melt a whole stick of butter in a baking dish in the oven as it preheats. "Make sure it gets good and hot and bubbly."

As the butter is melting, add 3/4 cup milk ("or rice milk or half and half or whatever") to the dry ingredients.

Pour the batter over the melted butter. Then pour on 3 cups fruit "or whatever you damn well please" (the exact amount of fruit is not important).

Bake at 325-350 for 40-50 minutes until golden brown and slightly crunchy on top.

More on The Commons:

• Here's a good starting point website on issues related to The Commons: onthecommons.org.

• Here's another interesting piece on tenets of The Commons, as established by legal precedent.

• Here's an interview with Vandana Shiva which includes a discussion of the commons. "The commons and the recovery of commons is vital to earth democracy. It's at the heart of sustainability of the earth and democratic functioning of society." -Vandana Shiva

• And here are a couple of excerpts from an article I wrote a few years ago for a local paper about the loss of the commons:

Originally, the term "commons" referred to lands and waters where anyone could forage, grow food or hunt. In ancient Rome and Britain, and in indigenous societies around the world, these shared inheritances were held in common rather than privately owned.

Among the generally accepted modern commons are public lands, the oceans and the atmosphere. But today, the concept of the commons has expanded to include commonly held systems, places and even ideas: community gardens, parks, public libraries, radio waves and herbal lore. Participants at the 1992 Earth Summit defined commons as "the social and political space where things get done and where people derive a sense of belonging and have an element of control over their lives."

. . .

Historically, conquering empires seized the commonly owned property of indigenous peoples for private profit. Here in Western North Carolina, the Cherokee Nation held most land in common until the U.S. government forced it to establish a system of private land ownership just 150 years ago.

Today, battles are being waged around the world over ownership of and access to water, land, energy, services and even genetic material. Ecologist Vandana Shiva points to a "series of enclosures" of commons in the Third World under colonialism, beginning with land and forests, then water and finally biodiversity and indigenous knowledge. Seeds saved for generations and medicinal plants growing in the wild can now be patented by private corporations and sold on the global market. As privatization is imposed, the values that sustain commons as the center of community life are eroded.

This loss has had devastating ecological and social consequences. With multinational corporations and financial institutions like the World Bank leading the charge, what was once stewarded as common property is now plundered for private gain -- a major factor in the deepening global environmental crisis. And the enclosure of commons often happens at the local level.

You can read the full text of my article, which centers on the loss of a particular commons in Asheville, NC here.

Elderberries Galore!

Elderberries!

Our friends Paul & Jude have a beautiful urban homestead in West Asheville with gardens you would not believe. Their little city lot is bursting with edible and beautiful plants -- including a superabundance of elderberries in their back yard.

Paul planted two elders a few years ago, and now there are more berries than one family could possibly use. Luckily for us.

Paul invited me to come pick elderberries earlier this week to help stem the elderberry tide, and we ended up with several gallons of elderberries piled in various vessels on our countertops. As the week has gone by, we have gradually preserved the elderberries in various ways, as I will detail below.

But first, a few words about the elder.

Paul's elders are English cultivars, varieties developed over hundreds (maybe thousands?) of years of cultivation of the plants that began as wild European elders. Elderberries are widely used in Europe, and have a long history there of medicinal and culinary use.

North America is home to wild native elders, including some growing wild in the valley where we live. The common American elder--the kind that grows on our land-- is a close cousin to the European elders, and like the European elders has a long history of being used for food and medicine. Native peoples of the Americas used various parts of the native elder to treat a variety of ailments, and also used the berry for food.

Elderberries are super-nutritious--high in vitamin C, potassium, beta carotene, and antioxidants. The berries of both European and American elders can be used in jams, pies, and other fruity concoctions, and of course to make elderberry wines. All of which are delightful ways to boost your vitamin C and antioxidant intake.

Among the medicinal uses of the various parts of the elder plant is the use of elderberries as a cold and flu fighter. According to Peterson's field guide to medicinal plants, studies have shown elderberry to be effective in the treatment of cold and flu.

Here's a link to a good summary of the nutritional content and medicinal properties of elderberries, as well as some info on the use of elderberries in folk medicine. And here's more on the elder from Wild Man Steve Brill.

Now, without further ado, here are some ways to make use of nutritious, delicious, medicinal elderberries.

~~~~~~

Elderberry mead in the first flush of fermentation

Elderberries are one of the most famous fruits for winemaking, and elderberry honey mead is an ancient brew. Here's how we made ours.

Elderberry Mead

Ingredients:

• 1/2 gallon of elderberries for every gallon of mead (we used 2.5 gallons for a 5 gallon carboy)
• 1 gallon honey per 5 or 6 gallons of mead
• water
• yeast (we used champagne yeast)

Equipment:

• Glass carboy
• Airlock

Instructions:

1. Do your best to de-stem the berries. This can be tedious if you are processing a large quantity of berries, and you don't have to get rid of every last tiny scrap of stem, but especially be sure to remove the large, woody stems, as they contain cyanide. We pretty much completely de-stemed ours, just by hand, despite various online reports that de-steming with a plastic fork may be an easier way.
2. Put the berries in a big pot or crock and squish with your hands until you've created a mushy, juicy mash.
3. Add honey to a gallon or two of water in another large pot and heat until the honey is dissolved.
4. Combine everything in a carboy or crock. You can let the mead ferment for a few days in a crock covered with a cloth (which will allow you to capture some wild yeast from the air) and then transfer to a carboy, or you can put it directly into the carboy, add storebought yeast (we used champagne yeast) and cap with an airlock. Either way, when it goes into the carboy, top off with water up to the shoulders and cap with an airlock.
5. Ferment! After the initial bubbling stops, siphon off the liquid and compost the fruit, an allow to ferment again; bottle, age, and enjoy!

~~~~~

I also wanted to preserve some elderberries for medicinal use. I dried some of the berries, an easy way of preserving for teas or poultices, but what I really got excited about was making cough syrup.

Here's a great post on the medicinal properties of elderberries and making elderberry syrup from Dandelion Revolution, and here's a good overview of making herbal cough syrups from Kami McBride.

Elderberry syrup is a beautiful deep purple color and has a sweet, medicinal flavor.

My recipe for elderberry cough syrup includes brandy for preservation purposes and taste, local honey for its immune-boosting properties and as a sweetener, and ginger because it is a warming herb and just plain tastes good.

Elderberry Syrup for Cough & Cold

Ingredients:

• 2 cup ripe elderberries, de-stemed and washed
• 2 cups non-chlorinated water
• 1/2 cup local honey
• 1/2 cup brandy
• 2-3 inches fresh ginger root, sliced

Instructions:

1. Combine the berries, ginger, and water in a medium saucepan and heat to a low boil.
2. Simmer over low heat for about 30 minutes until the berries are mushy and you have a beautiful purple liquid thoroughly infused with elderberry and ginger.
3. Strain with a fine mesh strainer and compost the berry/ginger mush.
4. Return the hot liquid to the pot, add honey and stir until dissolved and incorporated.
5. Remove from heat, add brandy, and stir.
6. After cooling, bottle in dark glass bottles. Keeps for several months, and even longer if refrigerated.

~~~~~

Between cough syrup, mead, and drying, we managed to preserve just over three and a half gallons of elderberries this week. There are purple stains from the berries throughout the house, and I keep finding purple patches of skin on my body, temporary elder tattoos from the week of elderberry overload.

You would think that after such a total elderberry immersion, I would be burnt out on the elder, but I actually found myself wishing for just a few more berries when my friend Sandi mentioned that she makes an elderberry liquor by soaking elderberries in brandy. Maybe next year!

Autumn Olive Mead

Dozens of small, shrubby autumn olive trees are speckled across our five acres of river bottom land. Autumn olive (Elaeagnus umbellata) is an invasive exotic. . .and an abundant, nutritious, wild fruit. Of all of the invasive species I've encountered, autumn olive is the hardest to hate.

Autumn olives are one of the first trees to leaf out here on our land, and one of the earliest plants to flower. Their silvery green leaves are beautiful, and their tiny yellow flowers are heavy with a sweet scent that makes me feel drunk with Spring. Honeybees and other pollinators love the flowers, which provide an early spring meal for many beneficial insects. Then, around the time that blackberries start to ripen, the trees bear fruit. Autumn olive trees in fruit are covered with tiny red berries, packed with fruit, bursting with fruit. The berries are pearly, almost opalescent in some light, and flecked in such a way that they almost seem to be dusted with glitter. Autumn olives are magical. A hard plant to hate.

Need more evidence? Autumn olive trees are nitrogen fixers. At Sugar Creek Farm, where we took a class last spring, farmer Joe Allawos has experimented with the benefits of the nitrogen fixing capacity of autumn olive trees by planting fruit and nut trees next to autumn olive trees, and at the same time planting the same variety of tree in a spot away from any autumn olive trees. The trees planted next to the autumn olives grew much faster and when we saw them were about 50% larger than the ones planted away from the autumn olives. Autumn olive trees planted or allowed to grow in a garden or orchard will accumulate nitrogen around their roots, which is then available as on-the-spot fertilizer for other nearby plants.

Finally, there is the nutritional value of the fruit: autumn olive berries contain vitamins A, C, E, essential fatty acids, flavanoids, and carotenoids. They are especially chock full of the antioxidant carotenoid lycopen, which is considered a powerful fighter of cancer and heart disease. Tomatoes, which are the most common source of lycopene, contain a fraction of the lycopene found in autumn olives. One study by the USDA's Agricultural Research Service showed that autumn olives can contain 17 times as much lycopene as a fresh tomato.

So there it is. Beautiful. Nitrogen fixing. Nutritious. And invasive.

We have cut dozens of autumn olive trees in clearing space for gardens, but we've left a smattering growing for the time being, and we harvest as much of the fruit as we can. The taste of the fruit is a tart burst of summer--I can stand at an autumn olive tree for a good long time picking and eating on a summer afternoon.

I can never eat an autumn olive without thinking of my friend Holly, who introduced me to autumn olives on a hike in the woods almost ten years ago now, when she was six years old. She knew far more about wild foods than I did, having spent a lot of time in the woods with her knowledgeable parents, and I am always thankful to her for helping me begin to appreciate the food that is available all around us for free!

All of this said, I feel compelled to offer at least a couple of links to information about the noxious, invasive nature of Elaeagnus umbellata, so here they are:

• Morris Arboretum invasive species fact sheet on Autumn Olive

• Nature Conservancy article on Autumn Olive (this article is written with a specific focus on autumn olive in one state, Indiana, but is more widely applicable, and is a good summary).

• Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center Threat Summary on Autumn Olives

What To Do With Autumn Olive Fruit

As long as these beautiful and edible invasives pepper our landscape, we might as well enjoy their delicious fruit.

We knew we wanted to try a batch of autumn olive mead, which we did (more on that below), but I took to the internet in search of other interesting things to do with autumn olives, since we have so many and they are so yummy.

Here's a blog with all kinds of autumn olive recipes, including a delicious-looking jam that I intend to try later this month: Dreams and Bones.

I also discovered on one of my perennial favorite blogs, Fast Grow the Weeds, a post with a recipe for an autumn olive chutney that looks divine. There will definitely be some chutney happening in my kitchen later this week -- thanks El!

In the meantime, here is the recipe for the mead we made last evening, which smells outlandishly delicious already and is a gorgeous deep, purple red color as it begins its fermentation.

Autumn Olive Mead

Ingredients:

• 1.5 gallons autumn olives
• 1 gallon of honey
• Water as needed

Equipment:

• 6 gallon carboy (glass jug for fermenting)
• Airlock (see photo)

Instructions:

1. Wash and mash the autumn olives. Use your hands and create a nice, mushy, juicy slurry!
2. Heat a large pot of water and dissolve the honey in it.
3. Add water to the fruit slurry to make it easier to pour. Combine the honey water and fruit slurry in the carboy and add water to fill the carboy up to its shoulders.
4. Cap with an airlock and wait!
5. The mixture should start to bubble and continue for several weeks. If the mead is not bubbling, or develops mold, you can add storebought yeast for winemaking (champagne yeast is good). If you're lucky, the wild yeast that is present on the skin of the fruit will suffice.
6. After the bubbling stops, siphon off the liquid into another carboy and compost the fruit dregs. Allow to ferment again until there is no more bubbling; transfer to bottles and enjoy right away as "young" mead or age for a mellower flavor.

Below: mashing the fruit to create a slurry. . .

. . . and the mead ready for fermentation!

Brewing Crabapples: Mead? Cyser? Scrumpy? Melomel?

Last week we harvested a bunch of crabapples from various trees on the campus of Warren Wilson College, and some from a tree on our land too.

The crabapples from the trees at the college are remarkably sweet, and the ones from the tree on our land have good flavor too. They are just so incredibly abundant and delicious that we wanted to put them to use somehow.


(Some of the crabapple haul is pictured above and below)

We decided to make a cider-ey fermented beverage from them.








We juiced the crabapples and used a basic mead recipe (see below).

I'm not sure what the resulting beverage should be called. There is apparently a lot of very highly specialized mead-making terminology. Meads made with fruit are known as melomel. But meads made with fruit juices are technically called metheglins. When the juice used in making a metheglin is from apples, the drink is called cyser. And scrumpy seems to be a catch-all term for strong and usually chunky fermented apple drinks. So who knows what to call this beverage that we are making. Do crabapples count as apples? Can it be simultaneously a mead, a melomel, a metheglin, and a cyser? All of those last three terms sound vaguely pharmaceutical to me, so I'm going with just plain Crabapple Mead, or maybe Scrumpy, which sounds sort of dirty and scrumptious at the same time.

Basic mead is very simple. Its ingredients are:

• Water
• Honey (we use 1 gallon for a 6 gallon carboy)
• Fruit (optional), juiced, smushed, or sauced. A lot, or a little.
• You can also add herbs and spices, and
• Wild or storebought yeast

As you can gather, it's pretty flexible.

We had a lot of crabapples to juice, which was the most time-consuming part. A cider press would have helped.

We added some pears from a tree in our friend Sharon's yard, and an heirloom local apple I had leftover from my recent adventures in birthday cake. The pears and apples went into the mix after being turned to sauce in the food processor.

After the seemingly endless juicing process, we heated some water to dissolve the honey, whisked the honey in, added the crabapple juice, and poured it all into a big carboy with enough water to fill the jug up to its shoulders (where it begins to taper in to the neck).

For this batch, we added a pack of yeast (Lalvin K1-V1116 saccharomyces cerevisiae, $1 at Hops and Vines in West Asheville), but you don't have to. Wild yeasts will do the job. Either way, just throw everything in a jug and let it sit for a while, and see what happens.

Here's our 6 gallons of mead in the making. In a few days it should be bubbling mightily. After it's done with it's most fervent fermenting, we'll top off the carboy with water and let it go a while longer until the flavor's just right, and then we'll bottle it up.

Over the summer we made our first meads --one with wild blackberries and another with pears, and we've since made a very strong batch of pear-ginger mead. It's so easy, and so good, and so cheap! This batch will have cost $24 to make ($23 for a gallon of local honey and $1 for a yeast packet), but if you have your own bees or access to honey and use wild yeast, it could easily be free. We estimate that it will end up costing about $1 for a wine bottle-sized bottlefull of this mead. Beats the heck out of the price of a bottle of wine. And it's organic, local, and homemade with very simple, nutritious ingredients.

While we were stirring everything together, I was reflecting on how these fruit fermenting traditions must have evolved - what a great way to take fruit and honey, which are hard to come by in the winter, and preserve their goodness in a warming drink for the cold months.

I have a good feeling about this one, because the flavor of the crabapple juice was so very fine, and the edge of tartness from the crabs goes so well with the honey flavor. But only time will tell...

Making Blackberry Mead

A bunch of people came over yesterday to pick blackberries, and to make some blackberry mead.

Sebastian, Janell, and Sandi have all been making honey wines for a while, so they schooled the rest of us.

We picked a ton of blackberries--some of which are pictured above with some edible flowers we threw in for good measure (borage, nasturtiums, anise hyssop, and calendula.

There was lots of gossip, laughter and singing as we picked, including some impressive renditions of Dolly Parton & Kenny Rogers hits.

We mashed the blackberries up by hand, and then mixed the mash with local honey and water and poured the whole mix into a 6-gallon carboy. If all the fermentation goes as plan, we'll drink this mead at winter solstice.

For more information on making mead and other "wild" ferments, see Sandor Ellix Katz's website: wildfermentation.com.

For mead recipes galore, see this link...






As you can see, things got increasingly sticky...