Honeysuckle is one of those handy creepers you can find in the woods, from making lovely Hazel twisty sticks to simple cordage it has quite a few uses
A potential twisty walking stick !
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And he saith unto them, be not affrighted, ye seek Jesus of Nazareth which was crucified, he is risen, he is not here, behold the place where they laid him.
Mark 16 v 6
And behold he lives for ever more.
We've been doing a little experimentation with different lichen species, mostly ramalina and xanthoria varieties, to see what dyes we can come up with. Some of these we know will be photosensitive so that's exciting. The preparation times for these is normally around 16 weeks and we are nearly at the end of that now so stay tuned and hopefully we'll have some nice colourful swatches to show you in the not too distant future.
If you mange to catch a salmon this is a nice way of preparing it that doesn't require cooking. Fillet the fish making sure you remove the ribs and pin bones.
First prepare your mix, a half cup of salt, a quarter cup of brown sugar and a quarter cup of white sugar. Tradition has it that you add fresh dill also but I actually prefer fresh fennel, so a few sprigs from the garden and we are ready to proceed.
Place your salmon skin side down on a layer of your mix then pour the rest over the fish making sure its well covered.
Place in the fridge for 12 hours, the thicker the fillet the longer you may need to leave it for.
12 hours later you can see how much moisture had been drawn out of the fish.
Rinse it in cold water and pat dry quickly to stop it reabsorbing any moisture
It's ready to go, cut thin slivers off the meat and eat as is or on wheaten bread with a home made mustard sauce.. delicious.
Though salmon is traditional it also works well with trout or char.
I'm obviously a glutton for punishment, making all these weird coffees when there's perfectly good teas out there! Anyway, Dandelion root coffee is made in pretty much the same way as most other coffees..
The root is cleaned and chopped and ready to be roasted
Again I pan roast rather than oven roast as it gives me more control over the roasting process and I can get the root to the exact condition I need it to be in to make the coffee.
This is a handy wee contraption, it's a spice grinder and it's a handy thing to take into the woods where you might have difficulty in finding a socket to plug your coffee grinder into! Small, simple to use and one fill of it makes about 2 cups of coffee.
Into the strainer and let it infuse for about 3 minutes.
Very dark, quite a coffee like smell and a sort of coffee taste but highly bitter, something that might be better with milk and sugar. As for me, I'll stick with a mint, linden and balsam fir tea.
Now as you know I'm not a coffee drinker but it is useful to experiment with foraged plants to see what uses they have, chicory is one of them, we all know its a coffee substitute but is wild chicory different than shop bought?
