Summer bounty in full swing

This happens every year in July: the food bounty comes on so hard and fast, we get overwhelmed.  It's an incredible berry and fruit year, and we need more hours in the day to pick them all: 

There's red and blue huckleberries in our forests, and salmon berries, thimble berries and Oso berries beckoning us on our walks.  I wrote an essay in the Llewellyn's 2018 Herbal Almanac about wild berries and why they are so good for you to eat (order it here <---).

Then there are cherries in our orchard that we have to pick before the birds get them, and fortunately our kids are very motivated to beat the winged creatures to these sweet treasures.

Some mornings, little Eva is out there climbing on the ladder to grab cherries from the tree before I even had my coffee.

We also grow a bunch of Goumi berries in our yard, because they are famous for their high nutritional, anti-oxident content, especially a high lycopene content (cancer prevention and heart health).  You can order a plant here <---.

They taste okay to me, a little tart, with a big seed inside, but the kids ADORE them.  Spitting seeds at each other while picking berries is a plus, of course.

And finally, to add to the picking-the-abundance-overwhelm, raspberry and strawberry you-pick at Cascadian Farm opened.  This famous farm is only 15 minutes away from our homestead, which is dangerous because they have excellent berries, ice cream and coffee.

You can imagine that our garden is going nuts.  The potatoes bloomed already, and I bet if I stuck my hand in the soil right now, I could steal some new potatoes already.

We've had a bunch of rain in June, so it's a jungle out there.  All the plants are happy, including the honeysuckle that has taken over one side of our house and keeps climbing higher every year.

My potted herbs on the porch and free-ranging herbs in the garden are thriving as well, and I already dried a decent amount of majoram, oregano, sage, basil, thyme and peppermint.

The past few weeks have brought a flurry of celebrations: my birthday first, then our wedding anniversary, and a couple of days later Steve's birthday.  Oh, and Father's Day, which we spent camping in the Methow Valley!

Our son Luke, who has taken over cake-baking-duties in our household, has been feverishly cranking out goodies.  He's better at cakes than I am, which is saying a lot because I'm a pretty good baker.

It's a good thing we have many bottles of homemade blackberry wine with all these celebrations!

Our cabin is coming along nicely.  Steve and the boys are working on it, while Steve is teaching them how to build from the ground up.  And our friend came over for a few hours as well, so progress is happening!

Eva and I help, too, when time comes to raise a wall.  You can watch the action happen in our "Homesteading in Paradise June Highlights" movie here <---.

Luke, mountain biker extraordinaire, takes advantage of the height of the floor platform, hurling himself into the abyss on his bike, while I watch with my heart in my throat.

Other news of the month: Our oldest kid is driving.  Kai is going to driver's ed and is getting lots of practice driving, since driver's ed is one hour away (one way).  So he's driving two hours every time we drive to town, with me on the passenger seat knitting, contemplating how fast these kids are growing up, and compulsively watching out for any lurking dangers on the road...

Is this crazy, or what???

I have to spend lots of time on our homestead in the wilderness to decompress from the stress of my son driving, I tell ya.

Today, I'll leave you with images of my daughter making natural cleaners with lemon-infused vinegar, Borax and baking soda...

Steve enjoying his morning coffee...

And our dog Raka, whose jaw was paralyzed for over a week, but who's fine again...

And you?  How are you doing?  Are you getting hit by harvesting-the-bounty overwhelm?

Wild berries and one berry bush you should plant in your yard

On my morning walks with the puppy, we see big piles of bear poop.  What I find fascinating is not so much the fact that bears walk the same path as I do, but that we also love the same food: Their poop is full of cherry pits.  Sometimes we see a bear up in a cherry tree, breaking limbs as it climbs up and down and stuffing its face with cherries.

The bears and us love this time of year because it's like a giant candy store in the woods.  Cherries, salmonberries, thimbleberries, red and blue huckleberries, wild strawberries and blackberries - they all entice us to slow down our steps and pick them.  And so we do.  

Going for a walk with Eva can't be called walking this time of year.  She takes a few steps, picks berries straight from the bush into her mouth for half a minute, takes some more steps, picks berries for another half minute, and so on and so on.  

It makes me happy to watch my kids and their friends enjoying this wild food so much.  I can't imagine how much good nutrition these berries are packed with!  

It helps that the picking location is so gorgeous: our local forest, filled with giant cedars, wild creeks, wildflowers and yes, bears.

Red Huckleberries

At some point the boys' friend (the pink-haired dude) found a garter snake and held it up in the air, which freaked Eva out.  Her 13-year old brother Kai decided now was a good time to tell her the snake would come chase her, which resulted in loud, panicky wails from Eva and a stern talking-to from me to my eldest son.

He's usually very kind, but he must have felt like showing off in front of his friend.  In our family, I don't tolerate unkindness (even though I understand the role of bigger brothers usually involves some teasing of younger ones), so when Eva and I caught up with the boys ten minutes later, Kai was waiting for her with a hand full of huckleberries that he had picked for her as a peace offering.  Now that's better, dude!

Yep, that's tears.  You know, because snakes are chasing her.

These lessons learned out in the woods are priceless, and observing my children interact with their world warms my heart unless it doesn't when one of them is being a pain.  Most of the time, I feel blissed out when we're out here.  I mean, look at this: we are picking berries and are probably getting one million times the antioxidants and vitamins we need, the scenery is gorgeous, the puppy happily frolics, and I deeply breathe air that smells like moss, ferns and cedars (and bear poop).

By the way, I am not worried about the bears, not at all.  We don't have grizzly bears here but rather shy, more elusive black bears.  They are more scared of us than we of them, and wouldn't you be terrified to hear loud humans shrieking about berries and snakes?

What else are we picking?  Check it out.  Here are my favorites - thimbleberries (Rubus parviflorus). They have such an unique taste, almost like apricots.

Salmon berries!  There are red ones and golden ones, and they are the first berries of the season, so we have to race the birds to get them, since our feathered friends love them as much as we do.

Wild strawberries!  They are tiny but incredibly flavorful.

Here are little native trailing blackberries, which are not black yet but are working on it.  We'll be ready for them.

And here's the thing: we are not only stuffing ourselves with wild berries, but also berries we planted in our garden.  When we first bought our property 14 years ago, we planted several varieties of less common hardy superfood berries.

While many people only plant blueberries, strawberries, and raspberries, we wanted to take it a step further and planted Goumiberries (Elaeagnus multiflora), Seaberries or Sea Buckthorn (Hippophae rhamnoides), Honeyberries (Lonicera caerulea), and Aronia berries (Aronia melanocarpa).  

Granted, these berries are not as sweet and delicious as the more common ones, but they are even more superior in nutrition.  For example, Aronia berries have the highest concentration of antioxidants than any other fruit.  Goumi berries have the highest lycopene content of ANY fruit, which means they are a powerhouse and anti-cancer food.

If you can plant only one of these, I would recommend to make it a Goumi!  We eat as many as we can fresh and freeze the rest.

Sometimes, I can't find the kids anywhere, and when I yell their names, they answer me from under the Goumi berry bush, picking and eating berries by the handful.

What's your favorite berry?

Honey, blueberries, raspberries and more sweet abundance

So we are thinking about getting into honey bees. Both Steve and I have always been fascinated by them, and we know how important bees are for our survival, since they pollinate our food. Have you ever thought about that? If there are no bees to pollinate your food, there won't be any food. Period. And the honeybees are perishing at an alarming rate. I won't go into all the reasons and politics of all this right now, but I do want to show you some images from our friends' recent honey extraction. We watched (and sampled) as our new bee keeper friend Jerry prepared his top-bar hives for honey harvest. What a fascinating process, and what an incredible, golden end result!

My hope is that bees are so much less maintenance than, say, goats. We could do this!

Talking about sweetness: our lives are filled with blueberries and raspberries at the moment. We are blessed to have Cascadian Farm nearby, with acres and acres of these addictive morsels of flavor (certified organic!). We are taking full advantage of that! It helps to have kids that are old enough to help fill the picking buckets, so picking doesn't take hours and hours. I took the kids picking in the evening the other day, and since we've been suffering through a heat wave and it was still hot even later in the day, I bribed them with ice cream (also sold at Cascadian Farm). They picked well.

The next day we went after raspberries. We gathered a bunch of friends, both adult and kid size, and headed for the field, where we picked, chatted, and caught up with each other.

In the meantime, Steve has been cranking on the addition to our house. He starts early in the morning and ends in the evening. Within five days, he got it all framed with a roof on. What a guy! This will be an amazing addition to our lives, and I am especially excited about the extra bathroom and bathtub with a killer view!

The garden is, of course, blooming and growing and feeding us royally. It not only feeds our bodies, but also our senses with all the gorgeous smells, textures, and sights. Eva loves wandering through the rows of vegetables, snacking on kale that's higher than her. I've been making a lot of carrot salad with our crunchy, sweet carrots. And there's cauliflower cheese soup, naturally, since I have lots of pounds of cheese stored away in my cheese cave.

The week ended with a cheese making class I taught. Eight people attended, and five of them were kids or teenagers. What a joy to teach these young people how to make cheese! They were really into it, and I captured a moment of cutting cheese on my camera. This was one of only two classes I will teach this year, so if you are interested in attending my last class in September (September 20th), please let me know so I can put you on my list! You will get to sample a lot of cheese I make.  More info here.