The long days of summer are here and with them come an abundance of opportunities for foraging right in my yard. I have been monitoring the blackberries that grow all along the hedgerow and are now beginning to bear fruit. In the garden calendula, sunflower, and yarrow are in bloom and there are a whole host of culinary herbs that I wish to conserve for later months.
Despite all the excitement outdoors I have found myself being a little home-body, staying indoors until the afternoon - working on my computer task or tackling a sewing project - and missing the best time to be outdoors.
Mid morning is the ideal moment to collect herbs as their essential oils are most potent before the sun is high in the sky. Once my round of foraging is over that gives me all of the mid-day hours for housework and typing up these posts. So, I have challenged myself to what I am calling ...
A Basket a Day ~
Every morning I plan to go out with my basket and scissors and harvest herbs, fruit, and other gifts from the land and garden. Some days I will harvest just for our homestead and other days for my small herbal business. Either way I plan to do this every day and hope to share a weekly (or bi-weekly) post of some of these outings here in the Homesteading Community!
I call myself a Homesteader though some may say I don't deserve the title. We don't have livestock anymore, all of our animals are pets, and I am a pretty terrible vegetable gardener. We don't own this land, rather my partner and I are the live-in caretakers, trading work for free rent and electricity. With those expenses covered both my guy and are able to dedicate our time to art, cooking, and expanding our knowledge. I have had many gardens over the years here and elsewhere but, came to realize that growing vegetables is not my thing and instead of continuing to fail at more conventional gardening I focus on my strengths; cultivating herbs, growing micro-greens, and wildcrafting fruits and wild plants. We may not be a traditional homesteading family, we are Herbal Homesteaders.
The Blackberry Harvest Begins ~
Did you know that the word "Herb" is not limited to just rosemary, sage, and other annual or biannual plants? Flowers and leaves from certain trees can be herbs, and even some fruits are considered medicinal herbs. Blackberries are one of those surprisingly fruity herbs!
All parts of the blackberry bush can be used in medicine, the leaves, roots, flowers, and of course the fruit are medicinal or edible. Mostly the vegetable parts of the plant are used to treat diarrhea as they are astringent which helps the body retain water instead of dispelling it.
The season is just starting and I have a lot of competition amongst the birds and our mare, so for now a bowl a day is all I will get and it will be cherished in a fruit smoothie later on in the afternoon.
Processing Herbs and Flowers ~
In the super humid climate of summer I make much use of our small passive dryer. It has netting at either end and can also be a solar dryer if left in the sun. Most herbs, however, shouldn't be exposed to much sunshine after their harvest so I usually keep this contraption in a shady but breezy spot and then store it inside during the night when tends to rain.
Before adding anything new to the dryer I first stored all the thoroughly dried plant material from previous days. The dried sunflower petals, which I mostly use for spiritual reasons (they are edible though), I put into a jar. The yarrow leaves and flowers, fresh sunflower petals, calendula flower heads, sage, rosemary and oregano I spread out evenly in the dryer so that they neither get mixed up with each other nor are too piled up which could lead to mold.
The dryer full of herbs is a lovely sight to my eyes. Most of these will be used in our kitchen as condiments and medicine and the top layer of calendula flowers are for my herbal business. Another day I will share more about that aspect of my work. For now I hope you enjoyed sharing this collecting and processing of my basket of the day!
Happy Homesteading <3