The ragweed allergy season is upon us! One way to reduce the allergies is to reduce the allergen. This plant in the middle is ragweed. (Pink flowers are knapweed.)
Here is a good look at the leaves with small flower buds on top.
This is a look at other flowers of a plant.
And here is the whole plant by the roadside with pink flower (knapweed) and blue flower (chicory) in the background.
Here is a stand of goldenrod starting to flower. You can see hints of yellow on the top of the green.
Goldenrod leaves are more pointed as seen in this pic.
And the flowers start out more yellow.
As these plants mature and the flowers flesh out more, we will add pics, at least of the goldenrod. The ragweed probably will be cut as we have several that are allergic to it in our home.
This is a recipe in progress. You use large zucchinis cut into circles and lightly cooked; next top with sauce, cheese and other toppings; then bake until soft and cheese is melted; finally eat and enjoy!
Ever wonder what to do with those large zucchinis? We recently turned them into mini-pizzas. Here is how we did it:
We cut the zucchini into rounds (a large zucchini gave us about 20 slices) and drizzled them with olive oil, placing them on an oiled sheet. We cooked these at 400F for 9 minutes. Probably they should have been cooked longer, so that they could soften. OR they could have been steamed for 4-8 minutes to also soften them. They will cook more in the next step, but before adding toppings they need to be no longer raw.
Then we flipped them over, covered with a tomato sauce (whatever you use for pizza sauce), and put thinly sliced mozzarella and cheddar cheese on top. (Shredded cheese or other pizza topping would work as well.) We cooked this until the cheese melted and the zucchini was soft.
While looking through the brush where the goats are clearing we found this tree. It has some wild grapes on it. Looking closer we saw that it was some sort of fruit tree. Inside the fruit we found plum pits. So we have a wild plum tree!
We have some brushy areas that we would like to reclaim. Goats are perfect for helping us in this venture. Goats like to eat grass and hay. They especially enjoy supplementing it with browse – leaves, twigs, other plant matter. So we have moved the goats and their houses into this brushy section.
The goats live in this overgrown area nibbling here and there over several weeks. In time we hope the area will get eaten down making it easier for us to get a brush hog in and finish the process of reclaiming this area.
This time of year we have a lot of this yellow flower. It is wild parsnip. In the ground is a root that we could harvest in the fall and eat. It might be smaller than domesticated parsnip, but it is still parsnip. And the yellow flower is pretty, sort of resembling a white Queen Anne’s lace.
The part to be careful of is the sap. When the square stem is broken, it lets out a sap that will burn or blister the skin when exposed to sunlight. The skin gets clear fluid blisters that are itchy. The fluid from the blisters doesn’t spread the blisters. And repeat exposure year after year doesn’t increase the blistering, like it does with poison ivy. To treat the blisters, we find it best to avoid itching them and to dry them with witch hazel.
Wild parsnip plant
Wild parsnip leaf
Wild parsnip flower
We commonly get the blisters on our feet and ankles. Why? Well, we are mostly always in our bare feet. After wild parsnip patches are mowed or weed wacked, the sap is still wet. When we walk through these areas, we get the blisters on our feet. It takes a while for the blisters to heal. After the skin is healed there is still a discoloration left behind that takes several months to go away. If we were to break and weed these with our bare hands, then we would have the blisters on our hands. That would be really painful!
Several years ago I was talking to a native friend who remembered harvesting these in her teen years with her aunt. When they harvested them, one of the instructions was to be careful of the stems and the sap from the stems. My friend didn’t remember any other explanation – Just be careful!
Wild parsnip patch in the middle of the pic along the fence row
The bees are going in and out of the hive, supporting their colony and making honey that we will harvest.
The Bros recently reclaimed a junkie area:
Junkie area – before
Junkie area – after
Remember the serviceberry bush? The fruit came and it was delicious! The berries are blueberry size, cherry consistency, with a serviceberry flavor, obviously! It is sort of apricot-ish. We had enough for us and the birds to all have a taste.
The Bros have been doing this recently. What does that literally look like? First, you look for a 3-4 day stretch of dry, warm, sunny, windy weather.
Dry – the less rain you have falling the better your hay will cure. You can have some rain at certain points in the process and still get decent hay. No rain is best.
The warmer the weather is the faster the hay will dry.
Sun helps the hay to dry.
Wind helps to pull the moisture out and to dry the hay.
Next, fresh grasses (orchardgrass, timothy) and legumes (alfalfa, clover) of the hay field are cut usually with a sicklebar mower or a disk or haybine after the dew has dried. We use a sicklebar mower attached to an Allis Chalmers B. The grass is laid out and can dry. [A disk or haybine would put it more in a row. It might also have a crimper on it. Crimping cracks the stems so that they can dry faster. After a day, it would be tedded, which is spreading and fluffing it, to help it dry out. We don’t have a crimper or a tedder, so it can take longer for our hay to dry out.]
Cutting hay
Close up of cut clover
Cut field
After a day or two of drying, we use a rake
attached to the John Deere Model M to turn the grasses so that the
underside gets dry. We usually turn it after the dew has dried
on the top. Then we rake the hay into rows so that the hay is
all together for the baler to bale.
The baler, driven this year by a farmer
friend/neighbor, comes through, picks up the hay, cuts
it and packs it into slabs, strings
them, and throws the resulting bale out the back into the hay wagon.
Finally we pull the wagon into the barn and stack the hay from the
wagon onto pallets.
