Did you know that you aren’t limited to enjoying the dancing orange beauties with only sight and smell? The petals taste delicious as well! You can pull them off and toss them in salads whole or sliced. Or you can stuff them with whatever you think is tasty — flavored rice/quinoa/millet, chopped fruit or a slaw-ish salad. The greener end where the flower is attached to the stem is bitter, so you’ll want to leave it on your plate, but YUM! We ate most of the salad (a kale-cabbage-carrot slaw with a lemon tahini dressing) stuffed into all of the lilies in the picture as dinner one night.

Since borage and heartsease were also blooming in the garden, the kids picked them and tossed them into for good floral measure. I think there were some sliced rose petals in there as well. As you can see, the salad bordered on the garish, it was so colorful!  Currently, our gorgeously crimson bee balm is flowering — you can pull the petals off those and toss them into salads for some beautiful color and taste, and our nasturtiums, started from seed a little late, have also started to flower. Both leaves and flowers add a peppery bite to a green salad that needs no other adornment. When I started researching what flowers could be safely consumed a couple of years ago, I was astonished at how many I already had in my yard! I have bookmarked this list of edible flowers and use it to double check plants I’m not sure about.

Back to day lilies. One afternoon Dante announced that he had something special planned for dessert. Since raspberries and wild black raspberries were also in season, he and Lucia collected a basket of berries and some day lily blossoms and disappeared into the kitchen, forbidding me to follow. He chopped up some sorrel and berries, mashing this all together a bit with some finely diced apples and the juice of half a lemon. He stuffed this mixture into the blossoms, and lay them on a plate. He put the rest of the chopped fruit mixture into the Vita-Mix to make a sauce, which he drizzled over the blossoms. We devoured this treat and wished we had more.

One caution — eating too many day lily flowers in one sitting can cause digestive upset in some people. Proceed with care until you know how many you can handle, or plan to stay close to a bathroom the next day!

If you are lucky to have a thick patch of these nearby, you can also harvest and eat the shoots  raw or cooked in the early spring. Once leaves are 8-12 inches high, they will become too fibrous to enjoy. Unopened buds can be prepared much as you would green beans, and spent flowers that bloomed the previous day can be added to soups, stews, or stir-fry. The tubers at the tips of the rhizomes are also edible all year long, but the general consensus in our wild edibles books seems to be that unless you are in a survival situation, they are simply not worth the work.

Be sure to identify stands of them this summer. Otherwise, if you find a likely patch in the spring, dig up a clump and look at the root system. The underground stems (rhizomes) that end in  tubers distinguish them from poisonous lilies. As with all wild edibles, you must be sure that they are free from contamination — roadsides and farms or yards that use chemical pesticides and herbicides can taint nearby wild edibles with toxins.

Happy foraging!

Such a simple, ordinary smoothie begs an ostentatious name, n’est-ce pas? Something along the lines of those at Jera’s Juice, the smoothie shop I remember from our days living in Boston. My favorite was the Razzamatazz, which was basically frozen yogurt with some ice and raspberries in it. With 2 free “enhancers”, of course. These days, my preferred smoothies are more nutrient dense, and with the greens, darker and mauver in color. All those antioxidants and minerals give me the power to make up new words like mauver. What new word have you made up recently?

Without further ado, I give you my tribute to the ghost of smoothies past:

Bluebrazzle Dazzle (extra points if you can say that 10x fast!)

• 1 banana
• 1 cup frozen blueberries
• 1/2 cup frozen raspberries
• 1-2 Tbs chia seeds
• 1-2 Tbs flax seeds
• several handfuls of spinach
• less than 1 cup of water to thin

1. I tend to put the fruit cut into chunks on the bottom, then frozen fruit, then greens. All amounts are an approximation. I just pour into the blender til it looks right or the bag is empty.
2. Sometimes I add the seeds before the greens, sometimes I pour them in once everything has homogenized.
3. Once everything is in, I add enough water to nearly cover the fruit.
4. Blend, baby, blend.
5. We like to top our smoothies with buckwheat crunchies and goji berries, and eat them with a spoon.

I stopped drinking smoothies in early winter because, well, we keep our house relatively cold, and a nice frosty smoothie was often the LAST thing I wanted to drink. But I didn’t feel as well when I started eating things like sprouted toast or oatmeal and hot tea for breakfast as I have in years past.  So I’m back to smoothies, and I’ve found a couple of things to alleviate the situation: I put on my hat, coat and gloves before I sit at the table. Kidding. Well, almost. I do actually wrap up in my snuggly shawl sometimes when I’m particularly feeling the cold, but that’s only til the heat kicks in. Did I mention that I crank the heat to a balmy 65 when I start to make my smoothie? Yes indeedy, it’s a veritable sweat lodge in the kitchen by the time I start to slurp my frigid beverage. I turn it right back to 60 when I’m done, however, so those of you who wear your coats at my place can continue to plan accordingly. Unless you come for smoothie time.

I don’t usually “break the fast”  until I’ve been up for a while, so if I remember, I pour the frozen fruit into a bowl and let it defrost until I’m ready. This alters the texture of the smoothie slightly, but nothing horrible and the not-freezing smoothie is more appetizing for me in winter.  Lucky as I am to have a Vita-Mix, I also leave it running for a little bit. You can make warm soups in a Vita-Mix if you let it run for 5-7 minutes. I’m not looking for warm berry soup, but if I run it for 2-3 minutes it does seem to take a bit of the chill off.

I am still experimenting with adding warming spices to the smoothie — ginger, cayenne, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, etc — depending on the other ingredients. The carrot cake smoothie would be an excellent winter warmer since it lends itself to inclusion of lots of those spices, and I imagine chocolate-flavored nut milk drinks would also be delicious with those types of spices. Also, those same spices are credited with having a number of health benefits: cinnamon alone is known for its antiseptic, antibacterial and antifungal properties and has been widely used as a diaphoretic (promotes sweating), parasiticide, antispasmodic, aphrodisiac (hubba hubba!), analgesic (painkilling) and diuretic. Ginger has more than 12 types of antioxidants making it useful for many health issues, is anti-inflammatory and — you guessed it — reputed to be an aphrodisiac!  Love is all you need…

Thus, I focused on the more expensive fruits we consume — berries. High in antioxidants and vitamins, frozen organic berries are expensive. Our local Shaws carries 10oz bags of organic raspberries for $4.69.  Sometimes we can find them on sale, but even then they’re more expensive pound for pound than most other fruits we buy. In general, berry bushes are less susceptible to disease and easier to care for than fruit trees.

I was hoping to find a relatively local organic supplier but had no luck. If you know of one in the southern New England area, please let me know! I pored over the Stark Bro’s (fruit tree/bush supplier to Ballek’s Garden Center in East Haddam, a personal favorite) and Fedco Trees catalogs, but both are far enough away to face different climate challenges than mine. In the end, I chose a nursery in Western MA called Nourse Farms in Deerfield, MA. The kids have been asking to revisit Magic Wings and I’ve wanted to explore  Historic Deerfield, which are nearby so I saved the shipping and opted to pick up my order at the farm.  I opted to save an additional 10% and order the combination since I had all 3 varieties of blueberries in my cart already. I did the same with the raspberries, although I confess I had only planned on getting two varieties.

I also rediscovered a nursery I’d found last year while looking into edible landscaping and permaculture.  Tripple Brook Farm, located in Southampton, MA, has a large selection of unusual or native edible landscape plants that are hardy in our area, and am hoping to arrange a tour of their place this spring. Comment below if you’re interested. Like many nurseries, they give a discount if you buy more of a species, so if you aren’t interested in a visit to the farm but want something specific, I would be happy to coordinate a group buy of popular varieties as well, along the lines of the bulk seed buy we did last year.

I found it to be relatively difficult to find detailed information about growing fruits organically online outside of this diverse resource: the ATTRA National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service Master Publication List for organic growing guides. Lots to chew on there. Support for growing organically can be found in the Connecticut chapter of the Northeast Organic Farmer’s Association (CTNOFA) Resources for Gardeners.

Happy growing!