Urban Foraging

Today I explored an undeveloped hillside by my house, and found that it was absolutely overgrown with blackberries and tansy. Double score!

The blackberries will become more jam. More jam! All the jam! I will dye yarn with the tasty.

I left plenty of berries for the birds, and lots of flowers for the bees. Even in the city, the land bears wonderful treasures. I will harvest these with gratitude, using the gifts of the earth to feed my body and soul.

Summer Doings

I have neglecting this blog! Bad blogger! I had committed to myself to update it at least once a week, but I have been doing many wonderful summer things and it got away from me. Summer things that weren't really within the scope of this blog and also I'm terrible about pausing in the middle of adventures to take pictures. So. No photographic evidence. You'll just have to take my word for it.

This morning I was walking to the train and I saw some plantain growing in a neighbor's yard. Not the kind that looks like a big banana - the kind that's a weed that grows in your lawn. For some reason I don't have any growing in my lawn so I took some seeds from the plant in my neighbor's yard and sprinkled them on the edge of my back garden. Hopefully they will sprout and soon they will look like this:

If you live anyplace where dandelions grow, you are probably familiar with these guys. They are everywhere where I live. Except my lawn, mysteriously.

Plantains are a great edible plant, and you can also make a healing salve from the leaves. To make a salve, simply fill a jar 3/4 full of plantain leaf and then pour in olive oil to cover. Let it sit for 4 weeks, then strain the oil and mix with melted bee's wax. The salve will help stanch bleeding and reduce healing time. You can also put mashed up leaves on bug bites to speed healing and relieve itch.

Plantain leaves are edible, though they can be bitter and stringy once the plant is older. Younger leaves can be eaten in a salad. Mature leaves can be used for tea, or you could toss them in a green smoothie. Plantain is nutrient dense and really great for the liver and for digestion.

I love useful weeds!

Gray Ivy

Sunday I spent the day dyeing, preserving herbs from my garden, and working on a sweater. I also watched American Hustle, which was very good.

I dyed yarn with Ivy berries that I picked throughout the neighborhood, with an iron mordant solution added directly to the dyebath. It turned out a nice medium warm gray. Mordants are so magic to me. Adding a mineral to plant matter can shift and in some cases (like ivy berries, which yields yellow without the addition of iron) change the color altogether.

If you're interested in learning more about the iron solution, I got the recipe from the wonderful We Will Tell You All Of Our Secrets blog.

Making potions with poison berries and rust seemed like something Snow White's evil stepmother might have done, which I liked.

As I was dyeing, I was overcome with an intense feeling of gratitude for the women who preserved the knowledge of natural dyeing - the women who, when the world said "this knowledge is obsolete" answered "no, this knowledge is valuable." The women who kept their legacy, and passed it down to those who were willing to receive it.

Day of lovely things

Today my sister Owl and I took a mini road trip to Tolt Yarn and Wool. What a wonderful shop! I want to stay there all the time. They have such a great selection of hand dyed and small-producer yarns! The staff are also really great - so friendly and really exited to talk about yarn. It's really a very special place.

I got 3 skeins of Yoth - two big sister and one little brother,  a skein of Twirl Petals, a skein of Madelinetosh Pashmina, and a skein of Hazel Knits lively dk.

I can't wait to get these babies on some needles! Wheeeee!

After our trip to Tolt we explored some woods and foraged some scotch broom, horsetail and nettles. The scotch broom and horsetail are destined for my dye pots, and the nettles went home with Owl for her soup pot. There were carpets and carpets of horsetail that weren't quite ready to harvest, but I guess that's a good excuse to head back out to Carnation before too long!