Not food, but definitely local!

Our little guy's elementary school class had an outing this week to help the local weed sheriff knock back a patch of invasive species plants. The plant they chose to cut down happened to be dyers woad, a natural dye plant I have been longing to work with for ages! It was apparently brought to this area many decades ago by pioneer families and has since spread all over the place to the point that it's considered quite an invasive menace. Here's a picture of one of the plants in the area they worked on. This one is about two feet tall, although some were shorter. Nearly all were in flower, which is why the weed sheriff wanted help knocking them down before they got much more mature - apparently one woad plant can produce thousands of seeds!



We brought home bags of the stuff, and last night I began to extract juices from the leaves for woad dye. It's a bit of a complicated process and I don't know how it will turn out, but I have high hopes. If it works I should know this afternoon. I have to stop at the store for some clear non-sudsing ammonia on the way home from work, then drain the steeped leaves from the water they've been in. I'm taking pictures of the process and will post them if it works out.

My first dye project will likely be some very special wool that my friend AtomicWombat was given while she was volunteering at the local zoo. It's some very fine, soft almost cashmere-like wool that was "blown" (shed naturally) off our local zoo's herd of Rocky Mountain Sheep. It was very dirty - so we've been pretty busy washing and drying it - and it still needs to be carded and spun, but it's a lovely ivory white and should take the woad dye extremely well. We're jazzed about the local wool and local woad project, and can't wait to drop-spindle handspin the results.

Woad, in case you aren't familiar with this plant as a dye source, makes the loveliest sky blue dye - if you can get the chemical reactions right. Here is a picture, and a link to a page with more information. Isn't that the most gorgeous color???



Here's a great page with more information on woad.

Random pictures from the Spring garden

First are the Aronia berry bushes in bloom. We planted these last year and got about five berries from three bushes. Well, actually, the pups got them! This year the Aronias are literally covered with blossoms. And they are all on the upper parts of the bushes, so unless the dogs can figure out how to get a footstool out there (mind you, I'm not discounting that possibility entirely - they can be very clever about getting things they want) then we should actually get to taste some Aronia berries this year.



This is a closeup picture of a strawberry blossom. If you look closely, you will see that I am probably going to have some competition for the ripe fruit later - more competition than usual, anyway. (The dogs have also developed a taste for our ripe strawberries.)



We have a medium size backyard pond that we put in ourselves over the past two years. This is a picture of some of the ground cover that's creeping around the rocks on the edges of the pond. The stuff on the right is a variegated sedum, and the stuff on the left is a variegated creeping thyme. The stuff in the middle, of course, is a rock. ;-)



This is a wider angle view of part of the pond. It has three "tiers" - each of which is a pond and which feeds into the next lower pond via a waterfall. The final waterfall into the largest of the three ponds is shown here, along with some of the irises we've planted alongside.



This is what we call our "Rose Tree." It's a lovely crabapple with the clearest double pink blossoms that just blooms like crazy every spring. The blossoms smell just like tea roses, and perfume the whole yard while they are in bloom. I just wish the hard little green crabapples could be used for something besides compost!



And, that's it for now. I'm so happy it is spring, aren't you?

Anything worth doing, is worth doing to excess - Growing Challenge

Well, we finally had to admit that our much-loved raspberry patch was out of control today. It was in the mint, it was in the oregano, it was in the pathway, it was in the veggie garden...so we bit the bullet, got out the loppers and started cutting it all back. I couldn't believe how much still needed to be taken down - and I even gave away at least 50 starter canes this spring to other gardeners!

I had planned to dry raspberry leaves to make raspberry leaf tea this year anyway, so we decided this was the perfect opportunity to get enough leaves to actually do something with. So while my sweetie cut the canes down, I sat out in the walkway and stripped the best of the early leaves off and put them into a bag. We ended up with probably four gallons of raspberry leaves. Maybe if we're lucky, that will give us a half gallon of dried tea - maybe a bit less. Here's what it looked like all spread out on the table after I ran it through the sink and the salad spinner.



While we were going through and taking out the overabundant raspberry canes, we also came across some rampant catnip. Some of our cats love catnip, and it's also supposed to make a nice calming herbal tea for people, so I picked up a couple of gallons of that while it was being weeded out and got it ready to be dried for tea.



We have a lot of other potential tea makings in the yard - calendula, marigold, blackberry leaves, various fruits, galangal leaves, lemongrass, rose petals, mints, currants, strawberry, lemon balm and lavender. I'm planning to dry tiny dices of some fruits to flavor some of the herbal teas - perhaps tiny dices of peach and apple and fig. Some dried strawberries and raspberries and currants would also likely make some tasty additions, as would dried lemon, lime and orange peel. I'm planning to just get everything we have out in the fall after the harvest is in and spend a few days trying a pinch of this and a pinch of that to see what we enjoy drinking. Should make an interesting winter project!