Foraging For Dandelions & Mint

This year we are making more of an effort to utilise all that the garden can provide. With the UK lockdown currently in place meaning more time at home and the beautiful weather we are experiencing it has been a great opportunity to collect some spring edibles. We have quite a collection of foraging and wild food books which have proved really useful.

• Food for Free - Richard Mabey

• Edible and Medicinal Wild Plants of Britain and Ireland - Robin Harford

• The Eat Weeds Cookbook - Robin Harford

• Homegrown Tea - Cassie Liversidge

First stop was dandelions as they are everywhere on the lawns in the garden and verges of the lanes nearby.  We had a lot of fun hunting and gathering to find enough and all parts of the dandelion are edible which makes harvesting less tricky! As well as using them fresh we set about separating the yellow petals from the green base of the flower. We found the easiest way to do this was to squeeze the green side and pull at all the petals squeezed together.

There are many claimed health benefits of dandelions and they also contain large amounts of the vitamins A and vitamin B2. As an aside the kids were very amused to find that the old folklore name for dandelion is piss-a-bed!

We didn't plan on collecting mint leaves, but we found a random patch of them growing that we were unaware of so we figured we may as well collect some and dry them out for tea too.

We laid them out along with the mint leaves in the greenhouse to dry for a couple of days and as the weather is hot right now, they didn't take long.

We have used the dried dandelions and mint to make a delicious tea infusion and have often added dried nettles into the mix.

Fresh dandelion leaves have been used in salads and on top of homemade pizzas and we have made some delicious vegan dandelion honey (made in a similar way to jam).

All in all its a good start to using things we had previously overlooked or classed as weeds and we are looking forward to learning lots more.