Conifer Amusement and Syrup Experiments

Conifer Amusement and Syrup Experiments

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Douglas Fir male cones and female coneBrought home some very “fat” green fir cones from the barn last night! By “fat”, I mean literally dripping with sap, using the term the same way very sappy wood is known as “fat”. The tree that we got them from not only was very generous in popping them off when we’d grab them, but nearly got offended when we didn’t grab everything within reach! This tree stands on one side of our hay shelter and it now has a name, Sir Douglas Fir.  In the picture here, we’d taken a photo of the early spring male cones that pollinate the pink female cones that would eventually become the green cones we just harvested.

Miss Fir with her lower branches over the hayAnother tree found the whole scene quite amusing, even slightly turning up the tips of its branches. That one shelters the horse trailer, and really works hard to keep any hay we put under her branches, dry, whenever it rains. We named her Miss Fir going on 2 yrs ago, and she is known for dropping small sprigs on our heads at times. She likes to give, and we got our fir tips for our first fir stir fry and fir syrup from her. Both trees are quite tall, so we’d never gather all the cones if we tried.

Some variants of fir don’t have cones down where you can reach them easily, they have them further up the tree, but Sir Douglas had them right down in easy reach.

jars of fir mugolioI already have a jar of Fir cone Mugolio 2 weeks into it’s fermentation stage, and the jar looked like it could use topping up, so initially, all I was going to come home with was enough cones to top up the jar, add more sugar, and continue the process. Instead, we brought home enough to top up that mason quart jar, stuff two more, and stuff a smaller mason jar too. I think when those ones begin fermenting down, I’ll condense them, emptying the smaller jar into the other two and adding sugar as needed. But now I have 4 jars that need burping, and not just daily, but in this heat, several times a day! The C02 build up can almost throw the lid at you sometimes when you unscrew it. After 30 days, you take the jar, dump it’s contents into a pot, melt the sugar, strain and bottle. The chef that released this recipe says that different conifers have different flavours.

The smell of the sappy fir cones is pleasantly both conifer and citrus, so I’m looking forward to how the mugolio turns out in flavour.

mallow, broadleaf plantain, and dandelion leaf, the plantain and dandelion were crushed after taking this photo

In other foraging news, the weather here has been so hot, up around 36-39 Celsius on average, that we haven’t done much foraging recently.  This did however, let me finally wrap up the last harvest we did bring home, as well as forage in the front yard again this week, and visit the community gardens again, which I haven’t found time to do for awhile.  The staghorn sumac berries are almost ready, which is early!  Must be the heat!  The plantain over in the gardens is growing very well now, as is the common mallow.  Lots of burdock leaf if we needed it, but we have a fair bit already.  The catnip has gotten quite tall over there too, but is surrounded by flowering canada thistle.  I was harvesting in a sun dress, so that wasn’t the best idea gathering the catnip without wearing jeans, but I managed to get out of the patch with minimal scrapes.  While the grass is finally dying off in our lawn patch, the prickly lettuce and dandelion are going great guns!  A second harvest of horsetail came off the patch too.  Between the lawn patch and the weeds around the community gardens, the herb dryer is once again full.

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