In praise of dandelions!

Why would I be praising dandelions?  Aren't they the bane of every homeowner with a lawn?  Yes, if you want to maintain a total monoculture in your yard.  But nature abhors monocultures, and will do everything she can to diversify them. Perhaps it is time for us to rethink the way we use the land around our homes.

Early-blooming flowers like dandelions are a major source of spring food for bees, butterflies, and other pollenators.  With the current bee shortage in many parts of the world, these insects need all the help they can get.  So I let the dandelions alone until they are done blooming, then mow them down. Sure, that spreads the seeds around -- but since I want dandelions, that's no problem for me.  After all, a "weed" is by definition simply a plant growing where you don't want it.

Our street number in spring

Granted, I live out in the country, where the philosophy pretty much is "if it's green, its a lawn."  In more controlled suburban neighborhoods you might have a hard time convincing your neighbors to let you have a lawn full of dandelions -- but then again, that's why I don't live there.  Nature is more important to me than social status.  If you visit me in the spring, you will likely be greeted with hundreds of these bright yellow flowers dotting the landscape.

Dandelions are also nutritious. In fact, they were brought to the USA as a vegetable by the French. ("Dandelion" comes from the French dent de leon, "Lion's Tooth," named or the jagged edges of the leaves.)  Old herbals prescribe them as a cure for scurvy, and recommend eating as many leaves as you can find in the spring.  Good advice at a time when people didn't understand about Vitamin C deficiency.  But they did know that the plants leafed out very early and the cure worked.

You need to pick dandelion greens before the plants flower, however.  Once the blooms appear, the whole plant gets very bitter -- so bitter, in fact, that I've known nature-oriented Jews to use them for the "bitter herbs" at the Passover Seder instead of the usual horseradish. (Which is perfectly kosher -- the Torah says "bitter herbs" but does not name a species.)

My chickens and geese also know the value of dandelions as food, and will choose them over other greens. Here you see two geese gobbling down fresh dandelion leaves, while ignoring the grain feed they've been eating all winter.  They know good nutrition when they see it!

Dandelions can also be used to make dandelion wine.  There are a lot of good recipes online, but one thing they may not tell you is to use the yellow petals only!!! The first time I tried it, I used whole dandelion heads and ended up with a bitter brew that only a masochist would care to drink.  That's because the green base of the flower (called the calyx) has the same bitter taste as the stems.  Having learned my lesson, I now use only petals.  The easiest way to prepare these is to hold the flower head in one hand and cut off the yellow ends of the petals with a scissors. A bit tedious, but you'll have a far better wine.

If nothing else, I find dandelions to be a welcome, happy greeting in spring after a long Minnesota winter.  Like little yellow smiley faces, telling me to come out of hibernation -- spring is here!

Harvesting Wild Plums (Prunus americana)

One good thing about the unusually warm spring we had this year: we got a great crop of wild plums.  This far north, the plum crop is rather iffy, because a late frost often kills the blossoms.  But not in 2012.  I just finished making jam, fruit leather, and wine from the fruit of our plum thicket.

Wild plums gathered on our land.

The window of opportunity for harvesting these delicious little plums is very narrow.  No sooner do they ripen, than the wind knocks them to the ground, where they are relished by various forms of wildlife.  In fact, it was my chickens who alerted me to the fact that the plums were ripe.  When the roosters find something especially good to eat, they call the hens with a very specific cackle and they all come running.  (This, by the way, is why the Talmud, Eruvin 100b, says we should learn "courtesy from the rooster" -- he lets his hens eat first.)   When I heard my chickens calling and scratching back there in the plum thicket, I knew something was up!  Chipmunks and wild birds were also enjoying the feast.

Wild plums don't keep very well, which is why you will never see them for sale in the store.  If you want to preserve them, you have to process them right away.  We usually make jam, and this year I decided to make fruit leather as well.  The normal way to extract the pulp and juice is to boil the plums and strain out the pits and skins, but this kills the seeds.  I wanted viable seeds to sell in my eBay store, The Happy Rooster, so I pitted them by hand.  A messy job! 

For fruit leather, I loaded the pitted plums, skins and all, into the food processor, set it on puree, then dried the resulting mess in my food dehydrator (which has special inserts for making leathers.  I suppose you could also do it on waxed paper in a low oven.  I'm told the Indians used to dry the pitted plums in the sun, and I've heard of people making solar food dryers.)  These plums are pretty tart, so we tried both a sweetened and non-sweetened version.  Both are delicious!

Getting a clear jelly from these plums is next to impossible, but they make a pretty good jam if you strain out the skins and most of the yellowish pulp.  I use a colander for this, since it is too thick to go through cheesecloth.  This leaves me with a pink slurry.  Following an old traditional recipe, I add one cup of sugar per cup of juice, then boil until it "seals the tines of a fork," or jells when you cool a spoonful.  (I suppose there is a proper temperature if you use a candy thermometer, but I've always done it seat-of-the-pants.)   I find there is enough pectin in the plums to jell on their own, but if you have some apple juice to add, it makes a nice combination.  If for some reason your jelly doesn't jell, you can still use it as a delicious syrup on pancakes or ice cream.

The last product I made is (or soon will be) a gallon of plum wine.  I started making my own wines when we moved to rural Minnesota, because the only kosher wine we could find here was Manischewitz grape, which is cheap and sweet for the local winos but not a vintage that I enjoy.  Over the years I've experimented with making all kinds of wines, some better than others.  Just be sure to use wine yeast, which you can order online, not baking yeast.  My last batch of plum wine was pretty good.  I'll let you know in a few months how this vintage turns out.  L'chaim!

(To add wild plums to your wildlife landscaping, either buy trees from garden catalogues or, if you have the patience to grow trees from seed, you can get seeds from my eBay store, The Happy Rooster  while supplies last.  This is a native species that grows in zones 3-7.)

Wild plum blossoms in spring.  In addition to fruit,
these trees form a thorny thicket that birds like to nest in