Dandelion Wine (updated)

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Dandelion Wine

Photo A Brown

My first attempt at wine-making will be dandelion wine.

There are scores of different recipes for making use of these unloved weeds.

But many of them seem to make things very complicated - or rely on grapes and other additions.

(If I'm going to use grapes, why not just make grape wine, I wonder?)

I adapted one of the simplest that I could find 

(from a place called the Twin Eagles School) 

-- dandelions, citrus, sugar and yeast:

•              1 gallon dandelion flowers

•              Juice and thinly sliced peels of 4 oranges

•              Juice and thinly sliced peels of a lemon

•              Small (approximately one inch) piece of ginger root

•              3 pounds sugar (6.25 cups)

•              One packet of yeast

"On a spring or summer day when it is sunny, go out and gather a gallon of dandelion flowers. Separate the yellow flower petals from the green sepals (the small green leaves under the flowers). The reason for this is because the green sepals are bitter in flavor and you don't want to put that flavor into your wine.

Put flower petals in a 3 gallon crock and pour a gallon of boiling water over them. Make sure that the dandelion flowers are fully covered and soaking in the boiling water. Cover and steep for three days.

After three days strain the flowers from the liquid and squeeze flowers to get all the juice from them. Pour into a cooking pot. At this stage in this dandelion wine recipe, add the ginger root, lemon and orange juice and peels to the liquid. Next add in sugar and gradually boil for 20 minutes.

Pour liquid back into crock and let cool. Now add the yeast. Pour into a fermenting jug snugly fitted with an airlock.

This will ferment anywhere from six days to three weeks while your liquid begins its' process of magically transforming into wine.

When the fermentation stops, transfer to sterilized bottles with caps or tightly fitted corks. Let stand for six months. During this process your wine is going to season. This is when the true alchemy of this dandelion wine recipe comes to completion."

 The only adjustments I made were to forgo the ginger, since I had none on hand - and I topped off my gallon fermenting jar with a couple of cups of honey water, since the recipe as written didn't quite make up a full gallon.  

This recipe calls for a lot of dandelion petals, but by the end - once I'd learned to pluck only the biggest, plumpest blossoms - and gotten down the proper petal-removing twist - I could harvest a quart of dandelion in 20 minutes.

It put not a dent in our supply.

The rule of thumb is that after you've bottled the wine, you can try it out at the winter solstice, but not before.  I'll have to post an update then!

UPDATE: June 19

It kept bubbling for quite a bit longer than 3 weeks, more like 5, but I finally bottled it a few days ago.  It's a pretty yellow color - though cloudy.  So now we wait.

UPDATE: December 29
One of the bottles blew it's cork at some point in the autumn, but the rest survived.  We opened one on mid-winter night.  It was cloudy (since I hadn't learned to rack wine properly on this, my first try) and sweet -- more port-like than wine like.  A decent sipping desert wine, maybe, but I'm going to give it to the spring equinox before I open another of the bottles.  It was far inferior to the rhubarb wine that I also opened that night.

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Spring Images

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Beech leaves unfurl

Peach tree in blossom

One of the newly planted cherry trees didn't survive the spring's drought.  But the little peach tree has been in full pink blossom for two weeks.

A morel among the violets

The black currant bushes are abuzz with bees.

If we put in a sun porch, I hope to move them successfully from their place.

Black currant in full plethora

Sassafras flowers

My father remembered his grandparents drinking sassafras tea as a spring tonic, so in the last April days before the sap fully rises and they flower and leaf, he had me dig up a couple of saplings for their aromatic taproots.  I cleaned them off, boiled them in well water, mixed in some of the backyard honey, and we had a refreshing tea.  To me it was like an earthy sasparilla, to Dad it was nostalgia, but a skeptical Porter thought it tasted too much like medicine.

Porter vs dandelions with a trowel

photos by A Brown

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Phenological notes . . . 

The soil is as dry as dust and I was watering flowers that I had transplanted out of the herb garden. A hummingbird, first of the year, came to flit along the spray and drink from a stray purple blossom, but whether he wanted nectar or a drink of water I couldn't tell.  And two of the little plum trees that I planted began to blossom.

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Banning neonicotinoids

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Good news for the bees!  Europe has banned the use of neonicotinoid pesticides for two years until scientists can show that they are not the culprit behind the collapse of the bee population.  In the US, of course, research into pesticides has been mostly out-sourced to the companies themselves, and although they are obligated to do actual science, they have little incentive to be aggressive or thorough about it. 

Worldwide sales of the pesticides total in the billions of dollars. Two companies that make them in Europe, the German giant Bayer CropScience and Syngenta, a Swiss biochemical company, have said they were willing to finance additional research, but that the current data do not justify a ban.

In the US the EPA was willing to sit on its hands and wait to see if any scientific insights spontaneously developed or whether bees would recover or go extinct.  I have a feeling a ban in Europe will tend to stimulate a greater sense of urgency for the chemical companies and their agricultural clients.  If they think their product is truly safe, then I think they'll want to settle the question sooner rather than later.  If they suspect their product is an epic environmental disaster and they were hoping to kick the day of reckoning down the road, then I expect nothing but lobbying and complaining from them.

Europe’s struggle with the question of neonicotinoids and bee health is being closely watched in the United States, where the pesticides are in wide use, and where a bee die-off over the past winter appears to have been one of the worst ever. Beekeepers and environmentalists are suing the Environmental Protection Agency over its approval of the products, which they claim were allowed on the market with inadequate review.

Bees are in short supply.  The Rhode Island Beekeepers Association couldn't fill the orders of everyone who wanted to purchase queens this spring.   I was fortunate to order early and eventually got the three colonies that I ordered.  Two seem to be successfully installed, and the third I'll check on in a few days to see if the queen has been accepted yet.

Now I just have to figure out how to keep them alive until the EPA stirs itself to life.

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Phenological notes:

In this morning's dawn chorus I heard the towhee's drink-your-tea for the first time this spring.  No frost this morning of the 23rd, but frost struck the two nights before - hard enough to kill a couple of tomato plants I'd set out.  Maybe this will be the last one.

And the peach sapling is in bloom.

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The herb garden bird bath is frozen this morning.

Wage-earning declines

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At work we've been engaged in a lot of advocacy on low-wage work, which is becoming the economic model for more and more of the US economy.  The progressive in me finds it outrageous and heartbreaking the way that wealthy corporations and billionaires, in collusion with a co-opted media and corrupt political class, have systematically destroyed first the working class and then the middle class of this country.  It's all fairly straightforward, however they may try to dress it up with economic theory, political theater, media doublespeak, and individual rationalization: an exercise in raw power to steal more and more away from the lives of average Americans in order to draw more toward themselves.  

(From a personal standpoint, at least, my outrage is made less corrosive by a lack of envy.  The amount of self-delusion and anti-humanity necessary to be a CEO or billionaire in this world seems a kind of pitiful little hell - even though they remain oblivious to it.)  Still, the pain they cause is very real, and people do suffer and die because of it.

But the non-progressive in me sees hope in the destruction of an unsustainably consumerist middle class (if only it would be quickly followed by the destruction of an unsustainably rapacious upper class).  There is no doubt that the lack of jobs is creating havoc in people's lives, but there is another way to read a chart like this one:

On the one hand, the plunge from the year 2000 to today represents tens of millions of people ejected from the workforce against their will, and a crash in what workers can insist on in a "weak labor market."  This has been devastating to families and local economies.  On the other hand, it also represents a statistical return to the mid-eighties.  The mid-eighties weren't a time of economic distress - in fact times were pretty good.  But the percentage of people earning wages was lower. Not all teens were declaring taxable income (though many of them might have been mowing lawns or shoveling snow, and the old Mom and Pop businesses made use of their family members); there were more women who were occupied in the domestic economy rather than earning a wage and outsourcing that work (to food companies, etc.); more elders were retired, being grandparents, serving as unpaid caregivers, and so on.

There are better economies that can be built that don't entail half the US population trading their hours for wages.  And there are better lives that can be built when more people disengage from these wage-payers, who increasingly are heartless mega-corporations who mean none of us well.  A service economy of low-wage workers is a rat eating its own tail.  If the downward trend on this chart can mean we stop slaving for them and start working for each other again -- then I have to say, I'm all for it.

It's going to be painful, but as the doomers say, "collapse now and avoid the rush."

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The violets have been out for a few days.  Last night I made a couple of little salads for Monica and I with violet flowers, dandelion, wild sorrel, and some young dock leaves.  It satisfied a craving for green.  

Though some non-native plants have come into flower (forsythia, daffodils, a couple of dandelions, and chickweed) the only native bloom other than violets I've seen is one of the bleeding hearts under the black maple which is just in process of opening a bud.

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In Georgia last week it was cold where they raise the bees and so the virgin queens stayed home and didn't take their mating flights - (they call them virgin queens rather than princesses).  And what you are buying when you buy a "package" is a mated queen with enough random worker bees to help her raise her first wave of brood.  But the cold weather meant a shortage, and although I'd ordered three packages, I could only pick up the two.

On Saturday I installed the bees in the waiting hives -- each queen in a tiny cage with a few attendants.  If you let her out too soon the confused worker bees will kill her.  So the entry to the cage is plugged with a candy paste.  By the time the bees eat through it, a matter of a few days, they've adopted the young queen as their own, and she sets about laying her eggs in the new comb.

I checked on the hives today, and shook the bees off the cage in the first hive.   The queen was not yet freed, so I undid the cork and let her out to disappear into the swarm.  She has a bright red spot of paint upon her.  In a few days I'll look for her or at least look for signs of eggs.  That will mean we are launched.

In the other hive the queen and her attendant were dead, still inside the cage.  No idea why she failed, though it happens.  I may be able replace her if I can secure a mated queen in the next few days.  It becomes a race against time.  The bees, queenless, may drift next door to the other hive.  Even if they stay put, the clock is ticking on these worker bees.  They only live for six weeks, and already it is nearly a week since they were packaged in Georgia.  Another few days to get a replacement; another few days in the cage before they will accept her; and only then will she begin to lay eggs for a replacement generation.  How many of the workers will survive over the following weeks to nurture the larvae to be nurses for the expanding brood chamber?  Even when things go well, the population reaches a nadir in the transition from the dying original workers to the queen's new offspring.  This delay makes that nadir all the deeper and more precarious.

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The bees arrive on Saturday.  

The maple trees have been making pollen.

I took a little brown tree frog away from the cats.

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They say that the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago.  But since I didn't, I planted some today.  The only fruit trees that came with our property were a few quince thickets and a sun-starved crabapple.  (Though we continue to benefit from Vernon and Edith's asparagus bed, raspberry patch and rhubarb.)  A few years ago I planted a Saturn peach and Jonathan apple.  Then a Macoun apple, a couple of cherry trees (one since badly trimmed by the deer), a black walnut, and I've nurtured a volunteer mulberry tree.  Today I planted a stand of hybrid plum (seven saplings planted so their branches will intermingle), a Dolgo crabapple, and a witch hazel.  Still waiting for their place are another crabapple, three elderberries and a shagbark hickory.  If the hickory survives the deer and rabbits, it should produce nuts around 2053, well before my ninetieth birthday.  So there's that.

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In today's phenology, our resident phoebes are back.  In the fall they had lingered long, but eventually gone south.  Now enough insects are in flight for them.  I wonder if they will tolerate the bluebird.

I spent much of the weekend outdoors puttering, cutting up the winter's ample deadfall and burning a good deal of it.  Previous years I'd just made brush piles, but although our plot is only an acre and a third, there is just too much wood - especially as I'm clearing out some of the invasives like burning bush and oriental honeysuckle, and replacing the lilacs and forsythia with fruit trees and native plants.

The branches from the pines alone take a long time.  They burn with terrifying intensity and so I do them gradually.  A few years ago we set the peat on fire beneath our campfire.  Unbeknownst to us it smoldered for about ten days, turning the ground to ash, until it reached the woodpile ten feet away - which leapt into flame.  I'm trying not to do that again.

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Since I've so far failed to create any sort of consistent phenological journal, I'll make use of the blog for it.

As yet I've seen nothing in bloom here but the crocuses and the snowdrops.  But I saw the year's first mourning cloak butterfly.  I think it was drinking where sapsuckers have been tapping the black maple.  The bluebird and the nuthatches are still contesting the bird house. 

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One morning in Florida, while Monica and the boys went to Disney's Hollywood Studios theme park, I went birdwatching.  I navigated the bus system to the landing at "Fort Wilderness," a campground that sprawls along Bay Lake.  As I walked east away from the complex with its stores and dining halls, and golf carts, I was alone on a sandy shore.  A turkey eyed me warily, but calmly.  Winter warblers were active in the shoreline shrubs, and grackles and red-winged blackbirds were contesting noisily in the reeds.  As I walked along, the reed mats were undulating calmly - or more violently if a boat had passed.  Coots swam and moorhens stalked.  A little blue heron stood motionless.  I came to a canal where a large red-bellied turtle sunned itself.  A bald eagle soared overhead among the vultures and ospreys.

I notice a Louisiana heron in the reeds -- called a tri-colored heron nowadays -- who suddenly hunkered down.  A commotion was working its way down the shoreline.  There were two dozen double breasted cormorants diving among a half dozen brown pelicans.  But it was the accompanying flock of herons that was making the ruckus.  A half dozen croaking great blue herons, two dozen white egrets, a handful of snowy egrets were flapping and fishing as they came.  I saw a white egret trying to fly with a large sunfish and find a stable spot to swallow the thrashing thing.  The blackbirds and grackles and belted kingfishers raised more noise.  The flocks passed by me to the swampy eastern end of the lake, where they rose up to the cypress or disappeared down into the reedy marshes.

I crossed the canal and passed a locked and abandoned cabin.  A hazy network of footpaths mazed through the undergrowth into a woods of cypress.  Swallowtail and zebra longwing butterflies searched for flowers.  I made my way along the shoreline.  Red bellied woodpeckers were pounding on the trees.  A cardinal came to check me out.  I pushed through the shrubs to the marshy shoreline, stepping back when I began to sink.   On a dead stump an anhinga spread her wings to dry.  An alligator hunted among the coots and pied billed grebes, but the birds didn't seem fooled by the gator's log-like demeanor.  A grebe swam alongside, a few feet away, until they both passed out of sight.  A barred owl was calling from somewhere behind me, "who cooks for you?  who cooks for you?" 

I retraced my path back out of the cypress and the butterflies and walked up along the canal.  Men were fishing there.  I made my way out to meet Monica and the boys for lunch.

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It's been a tough year for bees.  Colony collapse.  None of my three hives made it through the winter.  Two of them were abandoned before winter even set in.  The third was gone by the time I checked in February.    

The hive was three stories. The lower two were mostly cleared of honey, as you'd expect in a colony that is gradually consuming its winter stores.  The top story was full of capped honey.

I found the remains of the cluster -- a few dozen dead bees all gathered around the body of the queen.  (She's the one in the center marked with a dab of yellow paint.)

I can only guess that as the cluster dwindled, the bees couldn't maintain their heat and so they failed, freezing and starving where they were, just inches away from full combs.

A handful of bees were actually up in the honey comb, but just as dead.

There's a white mildew on them, but I think that came after.

I think this year's project on the beekeeping front will have to be learning how best to treat for mites and the other maladies that can weaken and kill a hive. 

The left-over honey I saved to feed to the new colonies that will be arriving in a few weeks.

Hope springs eternal.

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Rhubarb is emerging, bruised by the frost.

Choke cherry

A bluebird is vying with nuthatches for a weather-beaten old birdhouse.  

As the bluebird peers into the house, the nuthatches noisily complain from the nearest limbs.  They spread their wings and flare their tails and make quivering pirouettes.  

This enrages the bluebird, and he flies at them angrily. 

The chickadees, titmice, juncos and woodpeckers make up the raucous mob of bystanders egging them on.

Shoots are coming up in the frame of mixed greens I planted.  

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I've just returned from 4 days in Orlando in the belly of the Disney Beast.  Monica, who grew up in California, has an affection for Disneyland and its Florida sistren.  She spared me the details, but she got some sort of a deal on a full package, and was taking the boys to Orlando for four days during their spring break.  Being of a more cynical bent when it comes to the Disney empire, I was meant to be excused, but when Jose had to return to Mexico unexpectedly, I was suddenly on my way south.  (Monica not only preyed on my frugality - the tickets were after all paid for and would go to waste - but I was promised some birdwatching and allotted a small quota of anthropological critique.)

I once tried to describe the magic of the Taj Mahal as the perfection of an aesthetic.  I don't think Disneyworld is quite perfected yet,  but if totalitarian capitalism is an aesthetic they are achieving something near.  30,000 acres of central Florida is given over to the Republic of Disney - the half dozen theme parks, two dozen themed resort hotels, (Polynesia! Wild West! Boardwalk Beach!), the shopping centers, golf courses, the vast parking lots, and the sprawling utilitarian infrastructure that is tucked away behind pines, palmetto and cypress.

I was teasing Nico that what Walt Disney meant by "magic" - was the control of human beings.  After all, he built a media empire based on the manipulation of fundamental myths and narratives, and harnessed it to a tidy, aspirational story of technophilic Enlightenment-lite.  He built in Orlando a landscape of human control: a geography of buses, monorails, ferry boats, cattle-shute queues, ramps, tracked rides and smiling employees waving the human currents into their proper sluices and eddies. He established a rigid caste system - employees are called "cast members"(!) - between those who are paid to be there, and those who pay to be there, with everyone assigned their costumes and roles.  

And with this he created a vast filtration system where every year 50 million "guests" and their money cascade in, and 50 million people without their money pour back out.

But you have to respect the level of detail and creativity and expertise that goes into this filter, this perfection of consumerism.  Our hotel (safari themed, with elands and cranes and wild asses grazing and disputing outside the balcony) was beautiful in its aesthetics and efficient in its design.  Monica and the boys (and me, I admit) thoroughly enjoyed most of the thrill rides and some of the shows.  We were encompassed in themes and "lands".  The food was very good and when it wasn't, it was always delivered with showmanship and flair.  And so we were passed happily through the filter.  And Wednesday night we passed back out of Disneyworld to return to the tawdry regular world of half-assed capitalism -- which is too clumsy and importunate and indifferent to hide its empty promises.

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Sigmund Freud said some wacky things, but long ago I adopted his aphorism that, love and work are the cornerstones to our humanness.  Most of us understand that love is more than the hormone-addled romance of courtship.  It's all the ways that we step outside of our normal egoism to feel the value of others.  It's the unstable, passionate, dyadic connection of a lover and life partner; its the solid foundation of parents and siblings and bedrock friends; it's the terrifying dismembering of self that one's child enforces; it's the casual conversation that makes you give a person that second look in surprise or admiration; it's the spiritual transcendence that exposes the ego as a thin, vibrating note among the crowd or the forest or the cosmos . . . 

The more we love - the more we exist as a sound, true, richly experienced self enmeshed in a webwork of connectedness to things beyond our self, the more fully human we are.  That's a piece of cultural knowledge and experience that is available to people who haven't been warped in some way by their world or their brain's chemistry.

I think what is less familiar to people (or at least to me) is the second part, what Freud called "work," by which he means the whole gamut of things we strive to create in the material world.  Certainly it is more than whatever it is that we do to pay the bills and earn our wages, and which puts a roof over our heads.  It's more than just objects you can hold, and words like these that echo beyond my own mind.  It's reaching out from the realm of the disembodied will and making a change to the world.  I try to map this idea onto that vast, expansive landscape of love, and it seems superficially more finite, more limited -- because it is anchored in real things and hemmed in by the hours of the day.  Yet too, there's something vast about mastering a craft, something infinite about inscribing one's will on the atoms of the world.

I don't pretend to understand it fully, but I accept that there are three cornerstones to the construction of our humanness, an expanding love, a solid self, and good work.

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It was a warm and sunny Sunday, and though it's not officially spring yet, in one of my cold frames I planted seeds -- spinach, mustard and greens.  It's foolishly optimistic, but there's no gardening without optimism.  Mostly it was a day for puttering around the property preparing for when spring really does arrive.  Gathering up the winter's deadfall and piling it up for my future hugelkultur; rooting the invasives out of the raspberry patch before it becomes impenetrable; cutting down sassafras and lilac to make room for a little orchard of plums; pulling out the endless supplies of burning bush shoots; digging out some mossy rocks for Monica's shade garden.

Inspired by this post on the blog, Of The Hands, (which I just came across) I walked back into the woods with Nico.  The last eighteen months, from Hurricane Irene through last week's nor-easter have torn at these woods.  Dozens of ninety-year old oaks have come down, either snapped off at the trunk or toppled over -- roots and all.  I wanted to pay a visit the old white pine three walls back to see how she'd fared.  Judging by the age of the oaks, these pastures were abandoned to the forest some time after World War One, but I think the white pine stood when sheep still grazed these fields.  Today there was a great wreath of limbs surrounding her, torn off and thrown down in the storms.  But she towers there still -- in a wood green with her smaller descendants.  Standing on opposite sides, Nico and I reached around the trunk, and by pressing our bodies into the bark we could just touch each other's fingertips.

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Rusty at Honey Bee Suite puts up a valuable post on the problems of genetics for honey bees.  The species is under severe environmental stresses, including the invasion of varroa mites (since 1987) and the introduction of a new class of pesticides, neonicotinoids, that science shows contaminate destroy colonies wholesale.  Unfortunately, as with so many other domesticated species, industrial agriculture has ruthlessly pared the gene pool down by disregarding all but one or two money-making traits -- in this case, honey production.  Rusty notes:

The lethal combination of mites and viruses quickly killed off most of the feral colonies in North America, removing a critical part of the honey bee gene pool. No longer able to find sufficient wild bees, beekeepers were forced to import bees from elsewhere. As a result, most of our managed colonies have been raised from production queens that, by definition, have a limited supply of genes.

. . . To meet the demand for replacement colonies, queens are produced in large quantities in the south and shipped all over the country . . . [But] there just aren’t that many genes to pick from anymore. As a result, the exhausted gene pool was spread from sea to shining sea.

And it gets worse. You and fifty other beekeepers in your county have bees with nearly identical genetics simply because everyone in your local bee club bought bees from the same producer. They all arrived in one truck, so in addition to having the same genes, they have the same diseases. It means the drones hanging out in your local drone congregation area have the same genes as well. So if you are trying to raise your own queens to overcome a shallow gene pool, the odds are stacked against you from the start. It’s one heck of a mess.

Genetic diversity is the key to any populations ability to adapt biologically,  and bees are teetering.  Ideally, I would find colonies that were survivors and breed my own queens to local conditions, but that is easier said than done -- especially for someone who is only beginning to learn the craft.  I'm 0 for 4 when it comes to over-wintering colonies, and this year again I will have to purchase bees from the breeders in the south.  If I can manage to establish colonies I will re-queen them with Purvis Gold or some other non-standard genotype, if only to break out of this vicious cycle of decline. 

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