We Drink Nettle Tea

Dairy Free Foraging Gluten Free Health Paleo Recipes Remedies

We Drink Nettle Tea

Mellow December 24, 2011 45 Comments

Nettles have so many health benefits, they should be one of our most valued plants. They are a powerful anti-inflammatory, high in Omega 3's, and great for cleansing and detoxing. We're lucky they grow like weeds in the semi-wild places around our town. Nettles can be used in so many beneficial ways it's totally worth it to learn about this plant, and find ways to use it on a regular basis. Here is one of our favorite uses.

When they're in season, in very early spring, nettles can be harvested in semi-urban wilderness areas. Check your local parks and forests for this plant, and wear gloves! The dried herbs are safe to touch, but fresh nettles will leave you with a painful, temporary rash.  If not available in the wild, you can buy dry nettles by the pound from Mountain Rose Herbs.

I drink an infusion of the leaves every day, and have felt the health effects since we started drinking them. As an anti-inflammatory, nettles encourage the immune system to not overreact to every little thing. I used to easily get rashes from the slightest scratch; I just thought I had "sensitive skin", but it seems like my inflammatory response was a little off-kilter. Nettles have definitely helped.

Instructions:
Add boiling water to 1/2 c dried nettles (or a big handful of dried leaves) in a 4c French press or mason jar for 4-8 hours.
After steeping for a few hours, it's dark green and lovely. You can steep it for less time if you're in a hurry, but it gets stronger with time.
I like it hot, some like it cold, and my 6 year old likes it warm with honey.

I recently gave some to Loki for the first time when he was getting an earache. He had never really given it a chance before, thinking that teas are for grown-ups or something, but he will do anything to avoid getting an earache. So, he drank it, and liked it enough to continue drinking it every day since then (as long as I put honey in it...) That earache went away quickly without any other treatment.

I find that I can use the same nettles for two batches of tea, as long as the second batch steeps overnight or all day. Then, after straining out the infusion, the old tea leaves can be fed to the chickens! I usually mix them with whatever bowl of scraps I've got for them that day. I love that nothing is wasted. If you don't have chickens, you could put them in the garden as a nutritious mulch, or just add them to the compost.

For info on using fresh, wild harvested nettles, check out my article on raw nettle smoothies.

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How To Make Raw Berry Jam

Dairy Free DIY Gluten Free Health Preservation Raw Recipes Treats Urban Farming

How To Make Raw Berry Jam

Mellow December 24, 2011 56 Comments

This jam is so easy, so fresh and healthy, I don't know why anyone makes jam any other way. Well, it's true that this fresh version doesn't have the keeping power of canned jams, but I think that's a small price to pay for maintaining the nutrition and flavor of those delicious berries.

Fresh raspberry jam!

During summer, I freeze any surplus berries from the garden so I can still make this jam in the winter, when we really appreciate farm fresh food. My son was so excited when I told him this batch of jam, which we ate on Christmas eve, was made with our own raspberries from the garden. Frozen berries from the grocery store absolutely work too! 

I used to make jam with just berries and a little sweetener, which is fine but you end up with more of a berry syrup. The natural mucilaginous effect of the ground flax or chia seeds thickens it and gives it the perfect gelled texture so you can spread it like traditional jam. 

Ingredients:
2 c fresh or thawed berries
1 tb flax or chia seeds, finely ground in coffee mill
1 tb - 1/4 c sugar, sucanat, or honey, to taste

Instructions:
Blend or process all ingredients, and place in jars.
Easiest jam ever.

It should be used or frozen within 4 days, so it's good to make in small batches. This recipe makes about a pint. The sugar helps it to keep longer, but it would be fine without any sugar (depending on the flavor of the berries) if you're eating it up quickly. I toss any jam that we don't use within a few days into a smoothie.

Try this jam with some fresh roasted homemade creamy peanut butter!

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Never Waste a Shrunken Sweater: How to Make Arm Warmers

Crafts DIY Holiday Parenting

Never Waste a Shrunken Sweater: How to Make Arm Warmers

Mellow December 23, 2011 38 Comments

Loki models his new "armies", along with what remains of the shrunken red sweater after making three pairs of armies from it.

Over the years, I have somehow shrunken more sweaters than I can count. It might have something to do with my refusal to take anything to a dry-cleaner. I normally try to wash them in a sweater bag, in cool water, and hang dry, but still some come out of the wash much smaller than they went in. This is not, however, the end of their usable life!

One favorite easy sewing project of mine is to make "armies", arm warmers, or whatever you want to call them. I've been making them for years from busted shirts. It's always nice to have a pair around for when your wrists get cold ;) Actually they make a lot of difference if they're wool, and as you can see in the photo of my son, they make you feel a lot tougher.

They can make excellent presents as well, for those who like to do handmade holiday gifts.

I used to make them a lot shorter, so they were basically fingerless gloves, but these days I like them to be more like sleeves, up to my elbows. Then I can get away with tank tops in December.

There isn't much of a trick to them. They can be as simple and rustic or finished and embellished as you want. I tend to go for the quick & rustic look. I like the things that I make to look handmade, but I also like them to last, so I do a whip stitch around the cut edges to reduce fraying. I have heard that if you wash (read: felt) them after stitching around the edges, the stitches will just shrink up and the edges will be nice and clean.

I'm kind of ethically opposed to taking a perfectly good sweater and turning it into a project, when there are enough shrunken or stained sweaters out there to make arm bands for the world. You probably have a sweater right now that's past its prime, not really wearable but perhaps was once a favorite? Give it a new life!

These were made from scraps of a wool scarf.

Below I'm linking to some relevant Amazon ads. Any purchases made through them helps support our family. Thanks in advance!

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How To Keep Natural Chickens

DIY Health Urban Farming

How To Keep Natural Chickens

Mellow December 23, 2011 47 Comments

Raising chickens is an easy "gateway" into farming. Since getting chickens, we balk at the idea of buying factory eggs. We no longer have to pay $5 for a dozen eggs that we hope are raised in better conditions than the standard conventional variety. The kids love running out to the coop every day to check the eggs, and we all love guessing which hen was responsible for each unique egg. We bought a large variety of chicks (we currently have 7 different breeds) that lay different sizes and colors of eggs; none have white shells. We've gotten some remarkable eggs, the kind that are no doubt tossed before making it to any retailer when factory farmed. Double yolks (twins!), huge, oblong eggs, even a tiny one that held only a yolk, no room inside for the egg white. Loki, my six year old, considers it his responsibility to make sure the hens get their greens every day. Some days he forgets, but I love that he knows how important these vegetables are to healthy chickens and nutritious eggs.

I think my kids learned the importance of greens in our diet from feeding our chickens grass and dandelion leaves.

There is nothing so sweet and tender as a child holding a baby chicken! It's worth raising them from chicks for this moment alone.

Just feathering out, our chicks safely explore the outside for the first time.

Now that they are grown, the chickens get significantly less lap time. Though we still name each one, they are more farm animal than pet. They usually stop laying during the winter months when they don't receive enough daylight, but this year we took the plunge ($8 for the timer) and set up a compact fluorescent lamp in the coop that extends their "daylight" enough that we get an average of 2 eggs/day. Plenty enough to keep us from needing to buy any, so we maintain control of at least this aspect of our food supply!

A beautiful variety. The blue one is from our Easter Egger, a cross between an Ameraucana and an Araucana, which can lay a variety of different colored eggs. One of our favorite breeds, they're very beautiful birds as well!

I'm not big on cooking eggs on their own, so I usually make a huge batch of french toast, and recently I've been making egg nogs and ice creams with fresh eggs. Check out my ice cream recipe here, a great use of farm fresh eggs.

By the way, we ordered our day-old "sexed" chicks from mypetchicken.com, but check if there's a farm co-op in your area, where you may be able to go in on a group purchase from a local farmer, which is a way more sustainable way to obtain chicks... Well, anything, really, is better straight from the farmer. There are also local farmers who raise chicks to the "pullet" stage and sell them to people who don't want the hassle of brooding chicks.

For my articles on how we feed our hens, check out Sprouted Grains for Chickens, and Making the Most of Veggie Scraps for Your Hens. 

Bulk grains and chicken feed can be purchased from Azure Standard, a natural foods distributor. Below I'm linking to some relevant Amazon ads. Any purchases made through them helps support our family. Thanks in advance!

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How to Make the Most of Veggie Scraps for Your Hens

DIY Health Raw Recipes Urban Farming

How to Make the Most of Veggie Scraps for Your Hens

Mellow December 23, 2011 38 Comments

You can easily turn your veggies scraps into something your chickens will actually eat!

When I first got chickens I assumed they would devour anything. I figured we'd buy a bit of supplemental feed for them, but that the bulk of their died would come from kitchen scraps. I was a little worried I would have nothing left to put in the worm bin... but it turned out chickens are a bit more picky than that. I guess we'll need to get pigs if I really want an animal that can eat any scraps.

I had heard of people chopping up greens for their hens, and that just seemed tedious to me. Greens are a huge part of a healthy chicken's diet. In fact, I believe they should be mostly eating greens & insects, with grains mostly for "scratch" in the winter. I'm sure there are almost as many opinions on the proper diet for a chicken as there are for the proper human diet, but I have heard that what makes a healthy egg yolk bright orange is lots of beta carotene, which the chickens get from having a diet high in fresh foods. Also, eggs from chickens eating more greens are higher in Omega 3 fatty acids. Let's face it, we all could use more greens in our diets.

My chickens ended up on a high-feed, high input diet for a while as it took me a few months to figure this trick out. Now, I quickly turn my fruit & veggie scraps into bite size nibbles that the chickens can easily eat.

Bag o' fruit & veggie scraps

First, every time I use fruits & vegetables, I save anything the chickens could eat if it were smaller in a gallon size ziplock bag. Things I don't save include: banana and orange peels, onion skins, hot pepper bits, basil, mint, or other aromatic herb scraps. They seem to shy away from strong smells, though every flock is different. For a long time my chickens wouldn't eat raspberries, until we introduced some new pullets and they tried them, and got all the other hens interested. Now they scramble when I toss them an overripe raspberry. It just takes one brave chicken...

This batch includes carrot greens, cantaloupe rinds, kale and chard stems, and part of a butternut squash

Once you have your bag of scraps, pulverize it in batches in a food processor until it is in pretty uniformly small pieces:

Et voila!

They will eat this as is, but I'll often mix it with some old popcorn or some store bought feed. I usually crunch up a few eggshells in there as well so they get the grit and calcium they need.

With a quick scrub and a rinse, the food processor is clean and you have veggies for a few days for your hens, at no extra cost.

Also, check out my articles here on sprouting grains for your chickens, and keeping natural chickens. 

Below I'm linking to some relevant Amazon ads. Any purchases made through them helps support our family. Thanks in advance!

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