A small foraging surprise

Last week we discovered edible wild garlic in our yard.  After researching extensively to make sure we didn't have one of the toxic copycats, and then letting my husband try some (it didn't make him sick!) we set to pulling shoots.

The neighbors were giving us funny looks, but hey, it's free food!  The almost-4 and 5 year old had a hard time stopping, and it's true - once you get started, you want to pull one more.  Especially in a yard filled with them!  In fact, since then, the four year old has made a habit of bringing me more every day, and I'm so up to my ears in wild garlic that her offerings are being thrown in an overgrown flower bed.

Maybe that's not a good idea.  It will be horrible trying to get the baby wild garlic out of that bed when I redo it next summer...

As an aside, I wouldn't recommend eating anything growing in a treated lawn. We grow our lawn with minimal care, mostly because it grows fine on its own (with the exception of a couple places) and I never really enjoyed the level of work and chemicals it takes to make a yard have only one kind of plant in it.  I am willing to put up with dandelions and clover (which are beautiful flowers to my 4 year old) if it means I have more time to do other things I enjoy more.

So I washed the wild garlic really well; it looks almost exactly like a green onion, except the bulb tends to be bumpier.

After a good washing, I started chopping.  The stalks on wild garlic are tougher than green onions; even my sharp butcher knife had some problems slicing through parts of it.  If you do indeed have wild garlic, harvesting and chopping brings about a strong onion smell.  I can always tell when someone has mowed in my area for this reason - no freshly cut grass scent here!  Just onion!  If you don't smell onion, don't eat it!  It's probably not edible.  The daffodil bulb and shoots look a lot like wild onion but are deadly.  They also don't have that strong onion smell.

Once I chopped them, I decided that I wanted to dry half of them and make them into a wild garlic powder to replace my onion powder.  So I placed them on a cookie sheet in my oven, set it at 170 degrees, and propped it open about 3/4" with a clothespin (hey, I guess the clothespin means I'm resourceful?)

Unfortunately, as some of you in the middle south may remember, we had torrential rain a good part of last week, including tornadoes and all sorts of awful stuff.  Our humidity level was 99% here in Middle Tennessee.  After four hours the smallest part of the stalks were dry.  The next day, I put them in for six more hours.  This is starting to get not as thrifty as I would have liked!   At the end of the six hours, all but the largest bulbs were dry.  I am going to spend this weekend grinding up everything, laying it out again, and trying once more.

As an aside, check out this blog post about wild garlic for more information and recipes.  He does a great job of explaining his process in depth.

Pollen everywhere!

So it's just that time of year when everyone gets sick because of the pollen, thick in the air, and in a thick layer on every surface.  Amid viruses that attack while we are already down (smarmy things that they are!) we have been doing lots of breathing treatments on the nebulizer for my husband and myself and my youngest.  It always makes me feel more empathy for those people who can't breathe as the norm - I suppose you learn to live with it since you can't live without breathing, but it must be terribly hard.

Despite that, I managed to finish the first sample of a pattern I'm working on for a girl's worsted weight tunic. This was done in my handspun, a superwash merino combed top from Mosaic Moon.

The handspun:

It's not quite right - the sizing seems to be off despite getting gauge and the math, so I'll need to check that.  And I'd like to make some changes to the seed stitch panel and how it expands at the bottom (which you probably can't see anyway, for the patterning in the yarn.)  Then testing of the pattern with actual other people!  Hopefully I'll have this in my Ravelry pattern shop by early summer, so there will be plenty of time to make a cute little tunic for a little girl before winter comes again.

A First Post

Needing an outlet to share my crafty thrifty side and catalog my journey through life, I decided the best way to do that was, of course, a blog!

About Me:

I am a mid-30s mother of 4 and wife to a computer/music geek.  I am also pretty geeky and occasionally a literary nerd - I tend to spend way too much time in handarts like knitting, spinning, and sewing while watching (or listening to) classics or Doctor Who.  I also like spy-shows like Alias and Chuck. :D

My four kids are young - my oldest just turned 8 and my youngest is 15 months, and I use my creativity as an outlet to stay sane.  After a day of chaos, there is something about the rhythm and predictability of stitches that soothes me!  I have two boys, and then two girls.  Good playmates.

I own my own business, making reusable household products, both soap and bath products as well as sewn cloth products like reusable menstrual pads.  I also dye fiber and yarn, so I have a second little etsy shop for that, though it's only occasionally stocked.

My history: 

Mid-way through childhood, my mom taught me to cross-stitch.  This lead almost immediately into me constructing and handsewing my own doll, complete with yarn hair and clothing, though poorly done.  For a 8 year old, I suppose it was excellently done!  By 13 I was a proficient cross-stitcher, a decent sewer, and I had started to construct dollhouses from kits - I liked to choose the biggest, most complicated one.  I made accessories and furniture for the dollhouse using bits of trash and fabrics.  I feel I was pretty clever as a child!

I learned to knit as a 19 year old, working reception at a music store.  The other receptionist, an older woman, taught me everything I wasn't able to teach myself, which was most of it.  I quickly gave up on that for crochet, which stuck better.  But when I moved to Ohio in 2007, at the age of 27, I picked up knitting again, and the next year, spinning yarn.

Those were the years I was introduced to more frugal, renewable ways of living.  We were "house poor" and I learned to coupon and shop thrift stores in earnest, to reuse what I have, and to garden.  I was also introduced to cloth diapers for my 18 month old son, and shortly after, I learned about cloth menstrual pads and other reusable products.  I started making my own soap, and laundry detergent, and using the clothesline outside.

I can't say I've always been consistent.  We moved to Nashville, TN in 2009, and I haven't had a clothesline since (though I do have a very energy efficient drier, which is nice, because I also have three more children!)  I still try to compost, and we have a garden, but no recycling.  (I need to work on that!)  I still use cloth pads and usually use cloth diapers, and we are most definitely frugal with consignment sales, garage sales, and couponing keeping costs down so we can pay off our debts and make a nice life for ourselves!

So what is this blog about?

I suppose I just want to share.  I'm not sure I have anything important to say, but maybe my journey in learning to live the way my ancestors did will affect you, too.  I am tired of the commercialism of this world, the constant struggle to have more, do more, be more than is humanly possible.  I am concerned for my children and the barrage of advertising that tells them they are not good enough.  I want to get back to a place where it is okay to have work and play clothing with patches, and where it's not an embarrassment that the muffler in my van is cracked and a bit noisy, because, hey, it's paid off!  I want to relish the accomplishment of making something beautiful in it's own right - not because it's perfect, but because it is. 

Voluntary Simplicity.  I suppose that's what this blog is about.

Hopefully the rest of my blog posts will be a bit more lighthearted, but there you go.   That's me in a very small nutshell. :D