A little foraging
It's funny what you can completely overlook. We have lived here over six years now and have looked at this tree every summer.
As you can see, it is a very large tree, but it is also surrounded by apple trees on one side and some rather decrepit peach trees on the other. All that recognizable fruit growing in our backyard was all we really paid attention to. This tree did have fruit, but we didn't recognize it, so we ignored it. The fruit is even really pretty.
Until today. For some reason I took a good look at it and stopped to wonder if the little berries that were covering it we're good for anything. So I took out my phone and opened my handy plant identification app to see. (Technology does have its uses.) It turns out that this is a black cherry tree which is related to the choke cherry. After doing due diligence (did all the parts in our tree match the description, were there any poisonous look-alikes, etc.), I popped a cherry in my mouth. It wasn't as sweet as the description made it sound, but a little sugar can take care of that. The biggest downside was the large pit. These are small cherries, so the ratio of fruit to put was fairly large. This was definitely a jelly candidate. I then did some searching to see what others use it for. Jelly is nice and all, but what were my other options?
Cordial. Black cherry cordial was another option. How can you make jelly when cordial is a possibility? Well, you can't! (And anyone who is an Anne of Green Gables fan understands perfectly why cordial wins every time.) So I picked some.
It turns out that to ferment the cordial, you need gallon canning jars. I have gallon canning jars from my stint making kombucha. The only trouble was, my jars that I made kombucha in still had some terrifying dried scobys in them that I have been diligently ignoring for at least a year. (Probably two or three years if I'm honest.) I needed to figure out how to clean the jars in order to start another fermenting experiment.
It seems if you soak three year old dried out scobys, they rehydrate and you can pull them out. The pulling out part was not the highlight of my day. So, with cleaned jars, I was able to get the black cherries started. I have hopes that I can manage this as they will only take a week or so. (I still have water kefir hiding in a cupboard that I need to deal with. Maybe I can get to it before year three. I don't seem to be able to manage caring for fermented products long term.) I have to stir the cordial every twelve hours until it tastes like I want. Y. is going to help me to remember, so there's hope.
But wait! That's not all the foraging I did. I also collected dock seeds, which we have in abundance at the moment.
(The dock seeds are the dark spikes in the center.)
And why did I want to collect them, you ask? Because they are a dyer, meaning they give color, yellows in this instance with some shades of green if you do the right things. Plus, because they are already dried, I can keep them until I have a need for them, unlike the Queen Anne's Lace, which we have a lifetime supply of. So I cut a bunch.
As I was stripping them off, I began to wonder if they were edible, so I did a little research. Yes, dock is a member of the buckwheat family and you can grind the seeds into a flour. I don't know about you, but little facts like this fill my inner prepped with great joy.
But... I think someone would need to be fairly hungry to try this. An unexpected part of taking off the seeds was dealing with the spiders that had come along for the ride. I'm just not sure how you would be able to efficiently separate the spiders from the seeds. I helped some of the larger ones out of the bowl and took them and the leftover twigs back out to the manure pile to compost. I figured the spiders didn't ask to be brought inside the house. But after I had all the seeds in the bag, I did pop it in the freezer to take care of any that I missed.
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