GardenFork – Eclectic DIY

Tag: urbanhomesteading

  • Foraging For Wild Garlic : GF Video

    Foraging For Wild Garlic : GF Video

    Foraging for edible plants in the spring includes looking for edible wild greens like wild garlic, also called spring garlic. This edible wild food is one of the first plants to start growing after the long winter, and is ready for your dinner plate. Wild Garlic looks like a young scallion plant or chives, and is edible. The taste has a slight garlic aroma, but its definitely in the onion taste family. You can find this edible plant growing in lawns and forest edges. Many consider it a weed, however we think it a great addition to salads or meals.

    Be Safe In Your Foraging!

    Double check with a good plant identification book! At the end of the post are some books we suggest. Always be sure with your plant identification before adding this to your soup.

    According to Wikipedia, when cattle eat wild garlic, it can give a garlic-like taste to the milk and beef, interesting. It is native to Europe and considered an invasive here in North America.

    foraging-for-wild-garlic-2

    I see this edible plant growing in yards a lot. I’m sure the homeowners don’t realize they have food growing in their yard! To harvest the wild garlic, its best to use one of those 3 pronged garden fork hand tools. You have to dig down a bit to get out the bulbs, or you can snip off the green stems and they will grow back. As the plant matures, unfortunately the stems get woody and aren’t good eating. If you pull this plant out of a park or someone’s yard, make sure it hasn’t been sprayed with an herbicide. Not a good thing to be eating that stuff.

    Foraging Videos

    Let us know what you know about this plant or any questions below:

  • Nettles Plant Identification & Foraging

    Nettles Plant Identification & Foraging

    Nettles, aka Stinging Nettles are a wild food that is edible. Here is video about how to cook nettles for a pesto recipe we made. Foraging for nettles is easy, they grow like the weeds they are considered, and are easy to harvest. Nettles have hairs along the stem that will sting you if you grab the plant, so wear gloves. The key to eating nettles is to blanch the leaves and stems in boiling water for 5 minutes, then drain. Nettles taste like spinach, and have been used to treat numerous ailments.

    For some reason I associate Nettles with medieval times, not sure why, it just seems like the people of that age would use Stinging Nettles to treat ailments in addition to harvesting nettles to eat.

    The nettles that grow in our area are perennial, and have squarish stems, like mint does. It grows up to about 3 feet high in summer, and spreads by rhizomes. Stinging Nettles are native to North America, but I don’t think harvesting them for personal use will put a dent in the number of them in our world. To harvest nettles you can cut the stem or pull out whole plants with the roots. You can transplant young nettle plants into your edible medicinal plant garden if you like. The plants will spread, so you might want to keep the roots contained.

    Here is picture of edible stinging nettles:

  • Winter Bee Check & Sugar Feeding – Beekeeping 101 Video

    Winter Bee Check & Sugar Feeding – Beekeeping 101 Video

    Getting your honeybees through winter is a challenge. We feed our bees sugar in the form of a sugar cake, (sugar cake recipe below video) and show you in this video how to feed your bees sugar in the winter.

    Note: I know use the Mountain Camp method of winter sugar feeding, but the video below is a good visual on checking your bees in winter.


    Another benefit of sugar cakes on top of the hive is that they sugar absorbs moisture, reducing the chance of condensation forming on top of the hive and raining down on your bees, killing them.

    winter beek check list watchWe use these insulated inner covers in the winter, which help greatly in reducing condensation. So the combination of a winter cover and sugar cakes, I believe, really helps with moisture buildup in the hive.

    Many books talk bout using fondant in winter, but I’ve found it is hard to make, and I’m not sure what the exact benefits it has over just plain sugar cakes, which are super simple to make with re-useable foil pans you buy at the store. We add a homemade essential oil mix to the cakes.

    Read more of our beekeeping posts here and watch beekeeping videos here. Thx!

    beekeeping-sugarcake-vid-thumb

    Do you use sugar in your hives in winter? let us know below:

  • Hurricane Irene & Plywood Boats : GardenFork Radio

    Hurricane Irene & Plywood Boats : GardenFork Radio

    Mike and Eric talk about hurricane Irene, being a weather geek, the Allison House Weather Station that GardenFork uses, and Eric’s new plywood boat video

    hurricane irene talk

     

     

    WMR968 Weather Station is available from AmbientWeather.com

  • Puffballs & Mushroom Identification

    Puffballs & Mushroom Identification

    How to identify mushrooms. I get a lot of requests for more information mushroom identification, so i’ve started with this post to show GardenFork readers different mushrooms I run across in the woods and in the city.
    The Giant Puffball can be a common site in urban areas. You might see these large white balls that look like they are from another planet appearing on your lawn, or in a park or meadow. Puffballs like this are common on the East Coast, I’ve also seen them in the Midwest.
    The Puffball Mushroom in the photo here is one I found in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York. It was growing on the edge of a meadow near some trees.

    Puffballs such as this are generally edible, though double check with several references and experts before getting out your knife and fork. I have found them to taste underwhelming, kinda like tofu. So maybe you can use them in a stir fry or saute with other vegetables, or in a soup.

    Homesteaders, Urban Homesteaders, Foragers: Let me know how you cook puffballs.

    how to identify mushrooms
    Giant Puffball Mushroom part of the GardenFork Mushroom Identification series
  • Dutch Oven Banana Bread Recipe – Campfire Cooking – GF Video

    Dutch Oven Banana Bread Recipe – Campfire Cooking – GF Video

    Dutch oven banana bread recipe baked in a campfire or using charcoal, nice right?. Either way it tastes like the instant comfort food that it is. Watch the video and then read the recipe below.

    Head up: I now have 4 dutch ovens, and all are well seasoned at this point. You can see our  how to season cast iron video here. But I’ve never used a dutch oven for what they were probably originally designed for, cooking over a campfire. So today we use the cast iron dutch oven for what it is for, cooking outdoors. Watch and learn how to bake with fire.

    How to make the dutch oven banana bread recipe

    Whether for campfire cooking or backyard cooking, the dutch oven comes thru as a great pot for baking. Today we are going to learn how to use the dutch oven you have to bake or cook food outdoors, using charcoal or firewood. There are a couple of tricks here we learned from Gary of Cooking-Outdoors.com, like how to stack coals on the lid of a dutch oven, and how to use a dutch oven to bake breads and cakes.

    Update: Reading some of the great comments, I’ve learned that when fully fired up, each charcoal briquette puts out about 40-50F of heat. I will use this info as I experiment more with dutch oven cooking with charcoal and campfires. What fun.

    If you don’t already have them here are links to buy a cast iron dutch oven, a charcoal chimney, and heat resistant oven mitts.

    Some takeaways from this video and recipe, which was really fun to do.

    • Its not perfect. Is baking outdoors ever perfect
    • Use good pot holders and silicon oven gloves.
    • Charcoal is hot!
    • You will love baking outdoors.

    [tasty-recipe id=”13323″]

    Toad In A Hole Recipe
    Check out our Toad In The Hole Recipe, also made outdoors in a dutch oven.

  • Urban Homesteading (revised), Megan Paska, The Brooklyn Homesteader

    Urban Homesteading (revised), Megan Paska, The Brooklyn Homesteader

    I met Megan at a beekeeping meetup, and knew we had to have her on GardenFork Radio, so here we are at her place in GreenPoint Brooklyn to talk about urban homesteading. Megan’s sites are www.brooklynhomesteader.com and www.brooklynhoney.com

    Megan Paska
  • Is Dandelion edible? Dandelion Salad Recipe : GF Video

    Is Dandelion edible? Dandelion Salad Recipe : GF Video

    You can eat what most people call a weed. Dandelion.

    Here is another foraging video we did on how to harvest and cook dandelion.

    Wikipedia has some good info on dandelion, though I don’t agree you have to always cook it down before eating. There are plenty of us who like it raw. If you like mustard greens, you’ll like dandelion.

    You can grow it in your garden, it will last longer into the summer than most any other green. I think the horticultural version is milder, and I prefer the wild version. I was walking around the barn this weekend looking for dandelion, there is still a bunch of it around depsite the record heat wave. Dandelion starts growing early in the spring, flowers and quickly goes to seed. Dandelion then pops up again in the fall, so keep an eye out for it all through the growing season. You can even grow it in a cold frame or hoop house. Click these to see our how to build a hoop house and cold frame videos

    Don’t harvest it from roadside areas or where your dogs like to hang out. 10-4?

    if you want to learn more about foraging, here is a how-to book to get you started. I like this book, and learned a bunch about acorns, which you can make a flour with. who knew?


    Order From An Indie Bookstore Here

    Buy From Amazon Here