Harvesting rose petals

Learning about all the things we can do with rose petals. Everything from making a tea for medicinal purposes to making your own facial cream. Now we just have to figure out what to do first.

Coming up Roses

Roses are coming in. I'm looking forward to making rose hip tea and all kinds of other things we have been reading about. Last year we saw the hips (never even knew if you cut the roses another would grow) but had no idea what they were or how to use them. This is the year! I'm excited about drying them and tasting them fresh. Its frustrating how everything we want to use we have to wait until autumn to harvest. Another lesson in patience I suppose, something I'm still trying to learn.

Western Salsafy (salsify)

---Synonyms---Purple Goat's Beard. Vegetable Oyster.
(French) Salsifis des prés.


Salsify is called oyster plant due to its faint oyster-like flavor. It is grown for its edible root which is white, long and slender often reaching a length of 10 to 12 inches. The young shoots or leaves are often called "chards" and are field blanched and eaten in salads. Salsify is planted from seed in the early spring and harvested after the first hard freeze in the fall. Adequate moisture and fertility during the growing season is necessary if high quality roots are to be produced.   source

This is a plant that has been popping up all over the place. Its in with the comfrey, its growing with the spearmint, its even growing in the middle of the yard. I liked this plant from the first time I saw it because when it goes to seed it looks like a giant dandelion. No chance of me eating this though - Once I found out it tastes like oysters it was over. Maybe if I was starving...then again I'd probably go for bugs instead.

Soapwort growing in

I'm looking forward to summer when we can start drying the leaves and stems. We can't take the root to dry until autumn. This will be the first year (it's only our second summer at this house) we will utilize the soapwort.  Kay has been reading and getting recipes. My job is the drying so I'm learning about that. As you can see, we certainly have enough to play around and experiment with.

From Garden to Table

  

This is the first year we harvested rhubarb from the yard. We are renting and the owner told us its been growing here for years. She had never used it. A few weeks ago we separated a giant clump of them and all three sections we pulled off the main one have taken root. It doesn't look like we will get fruit from them this year but they have definitely survived the separation.

Drying Comfrey

Here is a bit of our comfrey patch. You can see some is going to flower. We are a bit unsure about drying. For us, the easiest way to dry is in our dehydrator but we haven't seen a lot of information on the web specifically about drying comfrey this way. We keep the temp as low as our machine will go -  below 95, but we don't have a "just air" feature.

Comfrey Leaf infusion

The left jar is an infusion Kay made last night. She used dried comfrey leaves and boiling water. It sat all night and then she strained the plant matter out of it. We had about a 1/2 cup this morning. It tasted pretty bad. She added some fresh chocolate mint leaves and sugar - that helped, but its no Crystal Light.

* Does anyone know if it is okay that we also used the stems of the comfrey for this? 

The jar on the right is some catnip tea she made. She picked fresh catnip leaves (and a few chocolate mint leaves) and put them in our teapot. Then poured water that had boiled on top and let it sit for 20 minutes. It didn't taste much better than the comfrey but sugar helped a lot. I think I like the teas better cold.

First time with Comfrey Salve

I want to say first off: We do NOT know what we are doing! We are trying to learn about different herbs that are growing in the place we are renting. Once Kay discovered that we had a ton of comfrey she set out to learn about things we could use it for.

Here is a few photos of us making salve for the first time. It turned out pretty well - given the fact that we don't know what its supposed to turn out like (other than photos from the web and books). We've both used it on general aches and pains but so far its been more out of novelty than necessity.