Plants!!!!
Ok - so I'm pretty sure I planted two of my tomatoes and my eggplant too early. My rhubarb may be in the ground too early too - it doesn't look happy - we'll see how all these guys are doing in a week. If they recover from the chill - great! If not - they get yanked and new ones get tried...though I may try longer to keep the rhubarb going.
In other plant news: we went stinging nettle hunting. So easy to find, so much fun to pick. Matt got stung once on purpose - to ID the plants. Only nettles sting like nettles. And then once or twice more while picking. We picked two big Ikea bags full. May have been a little over zealous!
We got the nettles home along with a dozen spiders and various other bugs. The first project was making Nettle beer. We have two batches brewing in our closet right now! That used about 200 of our nettle tops. (you only harvest the top 6 leaves or so) Then we made a batch of nettle pesto with 50 more nettle tops. Then I made nettle soup with 1.5 lbs of nettle tops. Next up we froze three bags of nettles - not sure if they'll do OK frozen...we'll just have to wait and see. Finally we steamed nettles an worked them into pizza dough and used the rest of the brewer's yeast that we had from the beer as the leavening agent in the dough. Oh, somewhere in there we also brewed up a batch of nettle-ginger-lemon tea for having cold. Very refreshing.
Nettles are high in iron and vitamin A. They are a great green. Used like spinach once they are cooked (raw they still sting), they have both an earthy and an airy taste to them. Nettles are one of several spring time plants that can be harvested for free and used liberally as long as you pick away from roads and move a bit of walking paths to collect them - just so you stay away from dog 'markings' in your nettles. The truth is thought - most mammals are susceptible to the sting - and it is unlikely that a dog would expose sensitive bits to a nettle more than once in his or her life.
In other plant news: we went stinging nettle hunting. So easy to find, so much fun to pick. Matt got stung once on purpose - to ID the plants. Only nettles sting like nettles. And then once or twice more while picking. We picked two big Ikea bags full. May have been a little over zealous!
We got the nettles home along with a dozen spiders and various other bugs. The first project was making Nettle beer. We have two batches brewing in our closet right now! That used about 200 of our nettle tops. (you only harvest the top 6 leaves or so) Then we made a batch of nettle pesto with 50 more nettle tops. Then I made nettle soup with 1.5 lbs of nettle tops. Next up we froze three bags of nettles - not sure if they'll do OK frozen...we'll just have to wait and see. Finally we steamed nettles an worked them into pizza dough and used the rest of the brewer's yeast that we had from the beer as the leavening agent in the dough. Oh, somewhere in there we also brewed up a batch of nettle-ginger-lemon tea for having cold. Very refreshing.
Nettles are high in iron and vitamin A. They are a great green. Used like spinach once they are cooked (raw they still sting), they have both an earthy and an airy taste to them. Nettles are one of several spring time plants that can be harvested for free and used liberally as long as you pick away from roads and move a bit of walking paths to collect them - just so you stay away from dog 'markings' in your nettles. The truth is thought - most mammals are susceptible to the sting - and it is unlikely that a dog would expose sensitive bits to a nettle more than once in his or her life.