Violet Snow's Blog
Posted by Violet Snow
When you harvest above-ground plant parts for making tea, make sure they are free from rain and dew, since moisture will encourage mold formation mold during drying. The ideal time to harvest is late morning, when the dew has dried, and the sun has not yet baked out nutrients. (However, later in the day is better than not harvesting at all!)
Collect your plants in a paper bag or basket and then find a place out of the sun to dry them. If the plant has long stems, you can assemble a bunch and tie the stems together near the base, using string or a rubber band. Make sure the bunch is loose enough to allow circulation of air through the leaves, and hang it from a hook or nail.
Individual leaves or flowers may be placed on a paper towel or in a basket. Some people build screens with frames and place them on boards or bricks. My favorite set-up is a basket on top of the refrigerator, where the rising heat accelerates drying. I stir the plants once a day to make sure air gets at all the parts. Drying time will vary with humidity.
Check your plants daily by bending several leaves to see if they crack, the indication that they are dry. Once they are dry, store them immediately in a paper bag or jar. The stems may take longer to dry, in which case it’s best to strip off the leaves when they are dry. The stems may also be used for tea.
Roots should be brushed free of dirt, sliced, and given two weeks to dry. It’s best to finish off roots in an oven on very low heat for half an hour with the oven door left open.
Posted by Violet Snow
Shaped like miniature fleurs-de-lis, these scales come from the conelike “fruits” or seed heads of any of the various species of birches, such as paper, sweet, silver, river, gray. Each scale has a miniscule seed attached. However, by the time you find the scale, the seed may have been eaten by a squirrel, which may also have been responsible for scattering the scales.
Birches have both male and female flowers in spring. The female flowers are tiny and greenish, in short, upright “catkins”, or narrow, dense chains. The male flowers are tiny and yellowish, hanging in longer catkins near the ends of the twigs. The catkins, fluffy with flowering, make a graceful sight among the birch branches for just a few weeks.
After the female flowers are pollinated, they develop into seeds, and the upright catkins turn into the little conelike clusters of scales that remain on the trees through the winter. Like leaf buds, male catkins form in summer and also stay on the trees in the winter, in a partially developed form, awaiting the next spring’s flowering.
Alders are closely related to birches and also have male catkins and female cones that can be found in winter. The cones are slightly different, with hard, woody scales, not so easily plucked and scattered as those of birches. The catkins are tight, shiny, and reddish-brown.
Knowing the catkins and cones of birches and alders can be a great help in learning to identify these species. They are also aesthetically beautiful and add pleasure to a winter hike in the woods.
See also Identifying Trees in Winter and Birches White, Sweet, and Silver.
Posted by Violet Snow
Occasionally we list a number of items found in the wild and discussed in recent Botany columns, for you to go out and find for yourself. You are invited to post a description of something you observed or learned on your hunt – see the Scavenger Hunt Discussion.
For the December 2007 scavenger hunt, go outdoors and seek the following items:
- Three plant skeletons
The dried-out seed-bearing stalks of plants are many and various in winter. Look around the base of each skeleton and see if there are any green leaves. A few plants stay green in winter, and some of them are actually edible. See Edible Green Plants of Winter.
- A tree with seed pods hanging from the branches
Some trees form seeds late in the year and keep them throughout the winter, such as catalpa, sycamore, witch hazel, tulip tree, black locust, and others. See Identifying Trees in Winter for details.
- A tree with opposite twigs and buds
You can either look at low branches or look up into the canopy to study the twigs. Find one with pairs of twigs or buds that are situated on opposite sides of the branch or twig, at the same level, an important clue for identification. Check a field guide or the article Opposite Tree Identification and try to identify your tree.
- A tree with aromatic inner bark
As you’re studying the twigs, scratch away a bit of the outer bark and sniff the green inner layer. Trees with strong-smelling bark include sweet birch, sassafras, black walnut, wild cherry, ailanthus. See Aromatic Tree Identification for more details.
Posted by Violet Snow
Vinegar is an excellent solvent of calcium, so it is an ideal way to consume calcium-rich greens such as dandelion, nettle, chickweed. The acid in the vinegar also helps the body absorb the calcium, according to herbalist Susun Weed.
Onion grass and garlic mustard make great additions to vinegar because they also add flavor to the final product.
To make a vinegar infusion, wash and chop the greens. Put them in a wide-mouthed jar, stuffing them down until the jar is full. Then fill the jar with apple cider vinegar and cap tightly. Use a plastic lid or put a piece of plastic wrap under a metal lid to prevent corrosion of the metal. Store the jar in a dark cabinet, labeled with the date and contents. Strain out the plant matter after six weeks of steeping (if you can wait that long), and you have a healthful vinegar for homemade salad dressing and other condiments.
My favorite salad dressing is also incredibly easy to make. Just fill a jar halfway with extra virgin cold-pressed olive oil, fill the remaining space halfway with tamari or other soy sauce, and fill the final space halfway with plant-infused vinegar. An optional addition is a clove of minced garlic, but I’m usually to lazy to bother. Shake well and pour over greens or rice and beans.
For more on onion grass and garlic mustard, see Edible Green Plants of Winter.
Posted by Violet Snow
When I go onto the mountain behind my house, I study each tree, trying to see what makes it different from the other trees. I notice not just the big, majestic ones or the ones with gnarly trunks--I look at every one.
For instance, it’s surprising how many small trees grow a mere foot or two away from huge trees. You would think the competition would destroy the smaller tree. But instead the two trees embrace, their trunks sometimes meeting halfway up, their branches intersecting.
There’s a clearing on the plateau, a waterlogged section that is not hospitable to the forest trees. The trees around the edge of the clearing thrust their branches into the sunlight. One red maple trunk makes an arc toward the space, its highest branches contorting and mixing with the branches of an ash whose base is forty feet away. Even enormous pines list toward the sunlight.
The trees all wear skirts of moss from the moisture, just around the bottom twenty inches or so of trunk—I never noticed that before, in my years of walking here.
But these trees are all unusual, molded by the clearing. I want to appreciate every tree. I look around for an ordinary tree. How about this little beech? It’s quite typical, still wearing its brown, curled leaves. But how elegantly beautiful! No, it’s not ordinary. What about the pines, so many of them, so similar—but this one has an oddly shaped knot at eye level, and that one has a sheaf of bark separating just over a root.
The more I hunt for ordinariness, the more extraordinary things I find.
