Jewels at your feet

common wood violet

What beauty is all around us, we just need to take the time to see it.  Last night we had a wonderful salad made from chickweed, onion grass, kale, tomatoes, and black walnuts.  It was sprinkled with violets and the yellow petals from dandelions.  I have found that if the food you eat is colorful it is more enjoyable to eat and to be at our healthiest there is a saying that you should try and "eat the rainbow" everyday.

Violets are so versatile.  You can snack on them as you are hiking about, have them in your salad, and even preserve them in different ways.  My sister Debra sent me a recipe years ago for violet jelly.  I currently have ice cubes in the freezer that have one violet in each which I will use this summer when I make peppermint tea. I also pick the flowers, rinse them, spread them on a cookie sheet and place them in the freezer.  After a few hours I have frozen flowers that are beautiful and delicate and can be used in drinks or salads later on.  This year I have tried drying them also.  They end up not looking nearly as pretty as the frozen ones but they still give a dash of color that will certainly be welcome on a cold winter day.

Don't forget to get outside and today try and see something up close that you might have overlooked before.  Enjoy!

Snacking on a sunny day.

What a beautiful day today.  I have been out since early this morning cleaning up my wineberry patches and this is what I have been seeing.  This is garlic mustard.  It is an invasive plant so what better way to control it than to eat it!! The leaves are great mixed with other greens in a salad.  Spring is the best time for the leaves as they taste more bitter as they get older.  The flowers are edible also.  If you find an extra large plant late in the fall you can pull it up, clean the roots and slice them very thin for a horseradish type treat.  Enjoy.

Be cautious

Poison ivy growing up a tree and branching out from it.

Notice the fine poison ivy root hairs making it look fuzzy.

A tree nearly covered with poison ivy vines.

 At this time of year the roots and stems of poison ivy are very obvious.  Please be careful as some people react quickly and severely to poison ivy.  My husband seems to have a reaction by just looking at it.

The oils that cause an allergic reaction are not just on the leaves.  They are on the vines and roots and even leave a residue on a tree after the vine has been pulled down.  When Kevin (my husband) was putting up a swing from the tree branches for our children (all grown up now) he had a reaction because the limb he was hanging the swing from had been overgrown with poison ivy a few years earlier.

A student teacher was teaching art in a nearby school and she wanted the students to make a winter collage.  So, on the weekend she went out to gather materials and she brought in many twigs for her students to use in their creations.  Most of her students ended up with rashes and swelling from the oils left on the poison ivy stems.  She had no idea she was exposing them to something harmful.  I wonder what grade the student teacher got.

My point is that you should learn to identify poison ivy even before the leaves come out.

This is called onion grass or wild garlic. We had it on top of grilled vegies that we grilled on our outside grill last week. Make sure it smells like onion when you pick it or you have the wrong plant.

Hello,
I am very excited to let you know about Wineberry Walnut Acres.  This is a peaceful 3.4 acres in the Oley Valley where we try and educate people on a way to stay healthy and connected to nature.  One thing we do is forage which is just another way of saying eating what God put in front of you or as my sister Carla and I used to say when we were growing up - living off the land.  Since spring has sprung I have been harvesting greens nearly every day.  I just had a lunch of chickweed and walnuts - both of which came from our property. This summer we will be starting kids camps to help children get comfortable in nature, learn how to identify plants, see how much fun they can have outside, do arts and crafts using items from nature and even learn how to find a salad from their surroundings.  Thanks for spending time with me.
I will end this first post with something I used to tell my students when I was a science teacher, "Your homework for today:  Go outside!"
Clare