Sumac-ade Break
still taking time to think
In the meantime I collected some sumac berries and am steeping them in cold water to make some naturally tart Sumac-ade.
Lots of information and recipes at Staghorn Sumac: The Wild Lemonade Berry. This plant grows wild in the woods at the back of our yard. However, thanks to the birds we have a small patch starting to grow inside our yard now. Two years ago we collected several batches of berries after reading about this refreshing natural drink. The sumac berries are high in vitamin C. Heavy rain washes all the tart flavor (the vitamin C) out of the berries and they don’t make a good drink. There was very heavy rain just when the berries were turning red last summer, so we didn’t get to make any sumac-ade last year.
An interesting thing about about collecting wild foods and eating mostly food that you grow yourself is that everything has a season. When it’s time to harvest, you eat a lot of whatever’s ripe and when it’s gone, you have to wait until the next crop comes in. This week my husband has been checking the sumac everyday and watching the weather reports for rain. It’s mostly luck if you can get the ripe berries off the plant before the rains come.
We’ve got a little elderberry growing in the woods also, and some stinging nettles. We’re thinking about turning a section of the yard into a “wild” food garden and moving the elderberry and nettles inside our fence. It’s kind of cheating on the finding wild food adventure but it will ensure that we have some of these foods we enjoy more frequently. The other thing we’re considering for our wild food garden is pigweed. It’s a great tasting green leafy plant — steamed it’s better than spinach.
My uncle is a great gardener. He is very modest and says that anyone can be a great gardener as long as they learn what plants they can’t kill and then only plant those! We are following this advice by selecting plants that thrive in the wild here and transplanting them into our yard.
I love the wild flowers that grow in the ditches beside the highways. These are also considered weeds by most people. However, they seem to grow abundantly in places that get only rain water, no fertilizer and they survive the Kansas winds and highway department mowing program. I’m on a mission to collect seeds from these plants to put in my yard. Wild bursts of color that will return year after year, require little in the way of ground preparation, and can be mowed down when their blooming phase is over — sounds perfect to me.
