Woodland Fruit Wander

After seeing baby beaked hazelnuts along the roadside this week, I ventured into our woods to see if we were lucky enough to have hazelnuts as well. What I found was so much more!! Here’s a roundup of some old friends and some new discoveries.

Nannyberries starting to form. They have a very large seed, but the flesh is delicious, like the related wild raisin tree’s name suggests.

Red elderberry — a beautiful, but poisonous elderberry. Note how the berry bunch is conical. The medicinal black elderberry (NOT SHOWN HERE) has flowers and berries that form on a flat bunch and ripen to a deep purple.

Wild gooseberries growing in the understory. The wildlife love this fruit, and I rarely see any ripen at all.

La piece de resistance: beaked hazelnuts!! The modern northern woodlands lack many of the edible nut trees that sustained generations on this land before the colonists cut down the forest and brought insects and disease that continue to attack some of our most valued trees. I was thrilled to find a few beaked hazelnut trees on our woods today and will keep an eye on the nuts to grab a few ripe ones before the squirrels can hide them all away.

The wild apples are struggling this year, but no doubt they will still feed many.

Our half wild hops are going strong, as usual. These hops grow deep in the woods and are leftover from beer making in centuries past. Judging by how fruity and delicious these hops are, our ancestors had some very good beer!

Strawberry Shrub Recipe

Fruit shrubs (AKA drinking vinegars) are a great way to reduce or eliminate your soda habit and make sure your fruit scraps don't go to waste.

It is the end of strawberry season here in New Hampshire, and I picked 15lbs of berries this week. Those were cut and frozen yesterday. Today, I used the trimmed strawberry tops and overripe fruit to start strawberry shrub. This recipe can be repeated with any fruit that you have on hand, and the amount of fruit can be reduced to half the amount of vinegar (e.g., 2 cups fruit to 1 quart vinegar). I have a lot of strawberry tops and not much fridge space left, so this recipe makes a super-concentrated shrub!

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INGREDIENTS
2 quarts strawberry tops
1 quart apple cider vinegar

INSTRUCTIONS
1. Save the tops that you cut off of your strawberries and add them to a clean half gallon jar.
2. Pour 1 quart of apple cider vinegar over the fruit. 
3. Cover with a non-metallic lid and store in fridge for 2-6 weeks.
4. Strain fruit and store shrub in fridge indefinitely. Shrub stored at room temperature will continue to ferment into fruit vinegar, which is not as tasty in drinks.

TO USE
Mix 1 Tablespoon shrub in 8oz of water or seltzer. Add alcohol and up to 1 Tablespoon of sweetener, if desired.

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Trimmed strawberry tops make great shrub!

Add tops to a clean jar.

Pour apple cider vinegar over the strawberry tops.

Cover jar and store in fridge for 2-6 weeks before straining.

Garden Wander After the Heatwave

After a long heatwave, the air is finally cool and dry. Many of the annual plants are looking worse for wear, but the perennial herbs and flowers are chugging right along!

Purple spiderworts have such rich, exciting color — too bad they are really invasive! Two garden beds were completely taken over by pink spiderwort after I left them alone for three years “because they’re so pretty.” Now, I treat spiderwort like a weed and rip them out. They still come back, and we can enjoy the blooms, but it helps to prevent them from taking over.

An oasis in the far garden. This bird bath cracked in the cold one winter, so it leaks. Instead of replacing it, I filled it with pea stone and native moss, so it holds some water for the bees.

The elderflowers were plentiful this year, and now they are going by. Looking forward to the medicinal berries in the late summer. I may net the bushes this year because the birds tend to eat them just before they are ripe enough for human consumption.

My beloved yarrow is such a ally for skin health, and it is in full bloom right now. Harvest is tomorrow! Yarrow is the star of both Green Wonder Salve and Half Wild Herbal Bug Spray.

One of the few flowers that I have yet to identify in the perennial garden. Any ideas?

This lovely lily surprises me every year with its multicolors.

The creeping thyme is blooming in the lawn. If I had my way, it would replace all the grass — grow, thyme, grow!! Thyme is a key ingredient in Half Wild Herbal Bug Spray.

The St. John’s wort is ready for harvest tomorrow morning, too. Although the lore says that the flowers are ready around the summer solstice, this far north they are a few weeks delayed. Look for St. John’s wort in new Half Wild products coming later this year: Apres Ski and Apres Sport salves.

The year’s first raspberry is almost ripe!

It’s a butternut year…if we can snag a few ripe ones before the squirrels squirrel them away for the winter.

The black caps are almost ripe!

The milkweeds are blooming, and the smell is heavenly, like an expensive perfume. A few years ago, I decided to encourage the milkweed to grow, and it has really taken off. We had quite a few monarch caterpillars last year.

The hydrangea experiment. The right side was left to regrow without being cut back this year. The left side was pruned back to the ground in early spring. So far, the blooms are smaller than previous years, but I think they might be more beautiful. There is not difference between the two sides except how early they bloom.

One lovely lily.