This cooling jewelweed spray helps soothe the itch of poison ivy, poison oak, bug bites, and bee stings. If you enjoy foraging or exploring the outdoors during late summer, you’ve likely stumbled upon a patch of jewelweed before. Jewelweed (Impatiens capensis) especially loves to grow on creek banks, or in areas where the soil is…
Learn how to pressure can fresh pinto beans picked right from your garden, or found seasonally at your local farmer’s market! A common way of canning pinto beans involves soaking and rehydrating store-bought dried beans. As a gardener who grows your own beans, you can just pick FRESH pinto beans out of your garden, shell…
Learn how to can fresh black beans, using a pressure canner and shell-out beans from your garden! Black beans are very easy to grow at home. In fact, we grow ours using nothing more than a bag of store bought dried black beans as seeds, and a few tilled rows in the garden. While you…
Learn how to can fresh kidney beans when they’re in the shelling stage! Homegrown canned beans have an amazing taste and texture. It’s easy to grow your own kidney beans in a home garden. They’re not fussy, and provide loads of beans for the small price of seed. (Yes, you can even plant inexpensive store-bought…
Learn how to forage, identify, and harvest black walnuts (Juglans nigra) plus how to dry and cure the nuts, and use the hulls and leaves for remedies! ID Tips for Black Walnuts (Photo Identification) Black walnut is a native tree, for those of us who live in Eastern North America. It’s a tall beautiful tree,…
It’s easy to save seeds from calendula flowers. Find out how to know when they’re ready & the best way to store your homegrown calendula seeds! Calendula is a wonderfully easy flower to save seeds from. If you’ve ever saved marigold seeds, it’s not any more difficult than that! However, note that calendula (Calendula officinalis)…
Learn how to collect and store seeds from marigold flowers! (Never buy marigold seeds again!) In this article, you’ll learn how to collect and store seeds from marigolds (Tagetes spp.) that may be growing in your garden. Be sure not to confuse marigolds with calendula (which is sometimes called pot marigold) – here’s an article…
Kohlrabi is a mild vegetable that makes a great potato substitute or side dish. Here it’s roasted with garlic powder, salt, pepper, parmesan, and other spices, and made similar to my favorite roasted potato recipe! It’s easy, delicious, and a great way to introduce this veggie to your family. Kohlrabi is an underused vegetable in…
This flavorful shiitake mushrooms recipe is super easy to make! Just chop, season, pop in your oven, stir once or twice while baking, and enjoy! We grow a ton of shiitake mushrooms so are always experimenting with ways to use them. This is one of our favorite side dishes made with shiitakes – it’s super…
Black trumpets are a choice edible mushroom, loved by many foragers! This article shares tips for finding and positively ID’ing them, lookalikes to know about, and how to store and dry your foraged finds. I get especially excited talking about black trumpet mushrooms (Craterellus fallax), because they were the very first mushroom I ever found…
This homemade peach ice cream recipe has been in our family for three generations. When my mom was a kid, her mom (my grandma) would always make it for church ice cream socials, where everyone would scrape the container clean! Besides using peaches to flavor the ice cream, you could instead use a bag of…
Learn how to find and forage chanterelle mushrooms, plus tips on harvesting, identifying lookalikes, and how to store and cook these prized wild mushrooms! Hot and humid summer weather + lots of rain = tons of chanterelles popping up in our woods! Because of their bright color, they’re fairly easy to spot, if you look…