Dandelion Beer

My husband checked out from the library The Homebrewer’s Garden: How to Easily Grow, Prepare, and Use Your Own Hops, Malts, Brewing Herbs by Joe Fisher and Dennis Fisher. He got all excited when he realized there was a recipe in that book for a Dandelion Bitter Ale, which he attempted to make this last weekend.

I find it ironic that a plant that is almost 100% edible and puts off flowers is considered a weed and undesirable, while grass has no economic or resource value in suburbia, and even costs me money to mow which causes pollution. It is a little upside down in my thinking. I have an aunt who says it is because the dandelion propagates a little too easily that it is a weed. She might be right – if it was less common, people would actually recognize it for its valve.

So this book had a recipe to make dandelion bitter ale, which my husband decided to make only a 3 gallon batch of. He went outside and picked a bunch of dandelions, roots and all, and then cleaned them up for this beer. The recipe called for the leaves, blossoms, and roots, thought he found the roots to be a bit too bitter and eased up on them. I had been reading about making dandelion wine, which just uses the blossom. Most people who did this said not to use the stem, and since my husband’s recipe said roots, leaves, and blossoms, I talked him into removing the stems to make his beer.

He decided to do this batch using an all-grain beer brewing technique, so since he picked the dandelions first, they were left out on the counter while waiting for the beer wort to be ready for them, which was several hours, and not all of it required his attention. There would have been plenty of time for him to start it and then go pick the dandelions and prepare them to allow him to have maximum freshness.

Sadly, due to issues with the all-grain technique, this batch will only have about 3% alcohol, but I’m trying to get him to make it again because the second time around, when you know what you are doing, is bound to be better.

Sometime soon, I’ll go ahead and try making a dandelion wine.

Haha! One of my local newspapers did an article talking about harvesting dandelions today.

My Herb Garden

I’ve been gardening a lot recently, trying to get our property in tip top shape to grow a garden and plant my apple trees. This is all so that I have things to ferment.

There was a small flower bed in front of the window of our office that I thought would make a nice little herb garden. I measured it as being about teen feet long, and the space between the down spouts and being flush with the patio concrete was 18 inches wide.

I talked to my father about making a raised plant bed for that space. We found some scrap wood and made it 10 feet long by 18 inches wide on the outside, so the inside was actually smaller. We put in two cross braces to prevent the dirt from bowing the longer sides and to give more stability. The whole thing was screwed together.

In the meanwhile, I had to go remove all the weeds and a few flowers from the location, along with picking out the river rock that the previous owners used as trim that got buried. The soil was all clay.

So I put the new frame down in the space, and it fit perfectly. I then spent about $35 on two bags of dirt and some herbs. I got herbs that I cook with, such as oregano, thyme, chives, tarragon, fennel, curry, sage, and cilantro. Of all of those, I believe the cilantro is the only one that dies every year, but I should be able to plant it every year. I thought about transplanting my rosemary bush into this spot, but it was too big. Also, I did not plant any mint or lemon balm since I have both of those in other parts of the yard, and they do have a spreading tendency, so they would take over the entire bed. I thought about getting lavender, but I decided my use for it would be small. Also, I thought about basil, but it does not like wind and dies back every year, so the ability to maintain it would require some work compared to the other plants.

I also decided to take some of the smaller river rock we had been picking out of our property and make a “river” running though my herb garden to give it a design element. As a last thought, I also put down a little bit of lettuce seed.

I’m quite pleased with how it turned out. Now I will have more fresh herbs for cooking, seasoning, and brewing.

Book Review: Apples for the Twenty-First Century

When I was researching for what apples to grow, one of the books I came across was Apples for the Twenty-First Century by Warren Manhart written in 1995.

Manhart grew up in the colder climates of Minnesota before coming to the Willamette Valley in Oregon, where he had a large orchard established. He talks about 50 different apples that he likes to grow, discussing the usual things like pollination, soil, disease, preferred climates etc, but also adding in history and his own personal experience growing the tree. Since I live just a tad bit north of where the Willamette River empties into the Columbia River, I’m on the northern edge of his climate zone, so his advice is local for me, which I love. However, for others outside of this area, he also talks about other climate recommendations.

Remember though, that this is a list of his 50 favorite apple trees to grow, eat, and cook with, so there are many missing off of this list, and he does not talk about cider making at all and which apples would be suited for that.

Another flaw with the book is that they printed all the pictures of the apples as plates, so when you are reading about the apple, you have to flip to the plates to see what it looks like.

This book also contains a section on how to care for the trees, along with lists in the back regarding bloom times for pollinating and other very useful information that is easy to flip to and find.

All in all, I really like this book and someday I will purchase it. It is quite large, and is most suited as a coffee table book.

Apple Tree Size vs. Cider Yield

“How many trees do you need [to make cider]?” Annie Proulx and Lew Nichols ask in their book Cider: Making, Using, and Enjoying Sweet & Hard Cider on page 128. Giving caution to the weather and breed of apples, both affecting crop size, they give the following approximations:

1 bushel of apples = 45 lbs of apples
1 dwarf tree = 1 bushel of apples
1 semidwarf tree = 4-5 bushels
1 bushel of apples = 2-3 gallons of cider
Therefore, it would take 25 dwarf trees to make 50-75 gallons of cider.

Due to tree spacing and size vs. crop size, I put the question to the Cider Workshop of what size tree yielded the most fruit per land unit. The group did not feel comfortable answering my question head on, but there was a general consensus that they liked working with smaller trees.

Going back to the “small” orchard of Gene Yale in Chicago, IL, who had 97 mini-dwarf apple trees growing on a small 2500 square foot lot. Yale estimates that each tree produces one quarter to one third of a bushel small 2500 square foot lot in Chicago but has 97 apple trees.

1 mini-dwarf tree = 1/4 to 1/3 bushel of apples
97 trees, assuming annual production, would then yield about 25 bushels
25 bushels of apples = 50-75 gallons of cider
This is the same amount as 25 dwarf trees but in less space!

Too read more on apple tree size and crop yield, read Oregon State University’s free paper on Growing Tree Fruits and Nuts in Your Home Orchard.

A "Small" Apple Orchard

Yesterday, I mentioned how rootstock can be used to control the height and the amount of space a apple tree requires. Nothing can sum that up better than Gene Yale's orchard. Take a look!

Yale lives on a small 2500 square foot lot in Chicago but has 97 apple trees! Yale uses Dwarf M27/M111 rootstock and then uses pruning methods to keep them at 5 or six feet tall. Between how he planted them and their size, Yale’s yard looks a lot like a rose garden.

My front yard is quite small, and sometimes I think about turning it into an English cottage garden rather than a lawn, but I think that this technique would look really nice, plus I would have the benefit of apples to eat!

Rootstock

Most fruit trees, if left to their own devices, will grow to be quite large. For instance, pear and apple trees grow to be about 40 feet tall, and require an additional 40 feet of space around them. They take up a lot of space, and they require a ladder to prune or harvest them.

The way that apple and pear trees are made to grow smaller is by using different rootstocks. Since apples and pear seeds are not like their parents, sticks called scions from a parent tree are grafted onto different rootstock to control their size. Some rootstocks will dwarf a tree down to only 6 feet tall! Apple rootstock sizes are usually classified as standard (taller than 15 ft), semidwarf (up to 14 feet), and dwarf (less than 9 ft).

In addition to not getting so tall, the trees do not get as wide and require as much space. Therefore, in an area required for a 40 ft tree, one could plant nine dwarf trees or five semi dwarf trees.

Besides looking at how tall a tree might get when planning on buying a tree on rootstock, take into account the rootstock needs. Some rootstock prefer one kind of soil over another, prefer a specific range of pH soils, require more water, or thrive better at different temperatures. Some rootstock are even more disease resistant than others.

Other benefits to size controlling rootstock also take less time to mature than standard root stock. Since they are smaller, they require less equipment such as tall ladders and pole trimmers. Their small size also means that the care of one tree can be done in less time. And, since apples and pears are not self pollinating, other trees that can pollinate to bear fruit are closer, making pollination more likely to happen.

My two custom grafted apple trees were done onto M9. Out of what the Home Orchard Society offered when I ordered these trees, I felt this would reach the most ideal height for what I wanted. For an actual orchard, they would probably be too tall, but we wanted a little bit of shade on our house, so we opted for something a bit bigger.

For more information regarding size controlling rootstock, including other kinds of fruit, please read the Washington State University’s free paper titled Fruit Handbook for Western Washington.

Today is a day of taking stock of what I have made.

I have made:

1. an apple wine
2. sweet still apple cider
3. another apple wine
4. an apple cranberry cinnamon cider

They are all bottled and aging now

I still have in bulk storage:

1. a bell pepper peach wine
2. cherry mead
3. blackberry mead
4. strawberry wine
5. dry apple cider that needs to be bottled.
6. 5 gallons apfelwein
7. and most recently a carrot apple ginger wine

That is a lot of jugs, bungs, and airlocks! I keep running out of airlocks and bungs.

Yesterday, I started two half gallons of a cranberry whey wine using two different kinds of whey, one from an acid based cheese and one from a rennet based cheese. I did them up as small batches because I’m not sure they will work.

What do I have waiting to be made?

• I found some frozen raspberry puree, and I was given 5 lemons which I juiced and froze, so I’m pondering a raspberry lemonade wine of sorts.
• I have a few cans of Bartlett pears that could be fermented.
• People have been recently getting rid of candy canes, which I have been taking because I know can be made into a wine.

However, none of these things are fresh and therefore need me to start fermenting right away. I’ve been pondering what to do next, but since wines can take a year, I keep phrasing the question, “What kind of wine would I want to be drinking this time next year?” My list is really a summer or winter list, and nothing pops into my head of something spring like. Mind you, I do have ideas of things I definitely want to ferment this summer. For instance, our yard has a lot of mint, and I think that would make a lovely wine, especially if a splash of lime was added. I just have to wait for the mint to grow!