Weeds: If You Can't Beat 'Em, Eat 'Em!

Several years ago, I earned a Master Gardener certificate through an excellent, on-line class via a state university.  But deep down, I know that I am just a weed farmer.

Everything grows so fast in an Alaskan summer that my property is overwhelmed by prolific “native plants” (which is the politically correct way to refer to weeds). I live the expression, "watching the grass grow."   My vegetable and flower plots wage  losing battles against nettles and horsetail. Dandelions proliferate everywhere. Sweet grass grows to 6 or 7 feet and then smothers everything near by.  We can't even find the ducks' eggs anymore.

This state of affairs used to bother me more until I made a concerted effort to learn about these plants.  As a result, I will never look at my property the same way again.  I still weed and weedwhack like a maniac, but I now appreciate some of this opportunistic vegetation for food and hair/skin care.   If you can't beat 'em, eat 'em, or pour them all over yourself.

Am I  justifying my overgrown yard?  Absolutely!  But, truly,  I have also gained immense respect for  the abundant vitamins, minerals, and flavors that lie at my feet..  Nowadays my husband encounters a demon scientist in the kitchen, conjuring up various teas and treatments that I test on him.  If he is still walking and talking the next day, that concoction is a keeper.  

Left to right:  raspberry, horsetail, nettle, fireweed, dandelion
Horsetail for hair and insecticide (how is that for a combo) and the rest for tea

Kitchen Skin and Hair Care

The only thing that Laura Mercier and I have in common is our first name (although the lovely CEO was my next-door neighbor when I lived in a high rise in Houston,TX). I have never been one to purchase expensive cosmetics and have been appalled by the prices paid by friends and relatives for teeny, tiny tubes of La Mer creams and lotions.  So, with these disclosures, I promise never to offer cosmetic advice!  However, I love to have really clean hair and skin.  I revel in  the way my face feels after a professional facial.  So I am delighted to recreate that clean, smooth result with common kitchen ingredients (1- 3, that require less than 2 minutes to assemble and cost less than $12).  Below are 14 recipes.

Readers:  why NOT compare a home made application on one  side of your face and your favorite purchased item on the other, or alternate two procedures, for a week each? See what you think. 

Turning Alaskan Birch Sap into Syrup, Part 2

(This is Part 2, focusing on cooking the sap down to syrup.  To read about collecting the sap, please enjoy the prior article).

In our neck of the woods, the sap started running on April 2, 2016, more than 2 weeks earlier than in recent years and 6 weeks earlier than a particularly late spring several years ago.  Whenever Nature decides, we have to be ready.

Assembling the evaporator

Fortunately, we had strung the collection lines among two dozen trees in February and early March.  After that, Bryan started to assemble the "woodstove" he bought from Leader Evaporator (in Vermont), which consisted of a sheet metal exterior, about 600 pounds of heat resistant bricks (some of which he had to cut to fit), and a short, metal chimney.

Unfortunately, the masonry cannot be cemented together until the temperature rises above the mid-40s, which did not occur regularly until late March, and once that occurred, it started to rain!  Every day for a week!  So that set us back a bit.

The evaporator was finally finished and the first test fire ignited on April 1.
The very next day, we discerned drops of sap flowing down the plastic lines to the collection tank next to the wood  stove. Phew!  Perfect timing.

Collecting Birch Sap for Syrup, Part 1

In 2013, I wrote a blog article about collecting birch sap in the spring to make beer.  Since that topic has continued to attract hundreds of readers, particularly this time of year, I thought an update might be in order, especially now that we have “amped up” collection to hundreds of gallons and now enjoy the delicious syrup, too.

Whereas collecting a few gallons of sap from a few trees is very cheap and easy to do, and nutritionally/flavorfully worthwhile for residents of a boreal forest, collecting enough and cooking it down to syrup is a huge endeavor, perhaps better suited to a business or affinity group. Below is our experience over several years.

The previous collection method

In  2013, we picked four trees close together, tapped them, and let the sap drip into a vinegar bottle we bungee corded beneath each tap and thus collected an initial 2.5 gallons. Because we were so pleased with the flavor, nutritional value, and versatility of the sap, the next two years, we “uppped” our take to 15 gallons, collected by a length of food grade tubing connecting each tap to a five gallon bucket at the foot of each tree.  We collected our target amount in only 3 or 4 days. Easy in, easy out.

Five gallons were immediately deployed as the liquid (replacing water) in a batch of home brewed spring beer.  (Bryan reports that he could not discern a difference in flavor or texture from the 2013 batch of 1/2 water and 1/2 sap, but he enjoys the contrast to his chimay recipe made with 100% water.)  It  has an initial taste of wood and banana.  The banana flavor recedes, but a pleasingly light woodiness and sweetness remain.

Winter Ski Plane Challenges in Remote Alaska

Winter flying introduces a number of duties and challenges not encountered in warm weather, but there are some advantages, too. Below are a few anecdotes from our ski plane flights, as we fly to and from our remote home in the Alaska Bush.

PRE-FLIGHT:
Warm Up:  Like any car in cold climates, we have to warm up the plane, since we do not store it in a hangar.  The day before a flight, Bryan unravels a long blue electrical cord  stored behind a cedar loveseat on our front porch, and threads it from an electric plug on the outer wall, down through the snow to the frozen lake where we have tethered the plane to two boards frozen beneath four feet of lake ice.  With the cord, he charges the plane's battery, since its performance degrades in cold temperatures.

The next day, an hour before the flight, we pre-heat the plane. When we first bought the aged plane (a 1954 Piper PA-20), the owner gave us an ancient Red Dragon heater that he had not used often.  To utilize it, we drag it down to the plane in a little black plastic sled, along with a 20 lb propane tank, a board (as a flat, hard surface for the heater), a battery charger, and a five foot long heating tube (that you shove up into the engine compartment).  Unfortunately, the tube  was so perforated with tiny holes that it took us 45 minutes to pre-heat the engine.  Not a fun wait at freezing temperatures!  Once we figured out the problem, we bought a new one for $200 that cut the time down to 15 minutes.  Well worth it.   Until... one day, when the low temperatures and the low voltage battery charger conspired to cause a near emergency.  The charger was underpowered for the job on a particularly cold day.  It had enough power to generate a hot flame but not enough to push the heat through to the plane's engine.  The tube caught fire!  We lacked a handy fire extinguisher but Bryan yanked it out of the cowling and tossed it on the snow, where the fabric sheath disintegrated into fluffy, gray ash. We learned several lessons that day.  One is to keep a fire extingisher with the dragon heater.  Another is to make sure that the bungee cords of the cowl cover are totally detached from every single hook for a rapid whisk away from the nose cone.  A  third is to utilize my snowmachine instead of the modest battery charger for future power (and the added convenience of grooming the landing strip after he departs).