Edible Flowers

If there's anything I have learned from making food, it's that presentation changes the whole meal! Little embellishments can really change the appeal of your meal and also add rich texture and tastes. 

Flowers can be salty, spicy or sweet. Sometimes the taste is subtle, but the addition of color and beauty makes up for it. Have fun with your food and add some flowers!

Flowers for your salad:

• Anise Hyssop
• Basil
• Bachelor's Buttons/Cornflower
• Bee Balm
• Blueberry
• Borage
• Calendula
• Carnation
• Chamomile
• Chickweed
• Chives & Garlic Chives
• Citrus
• Dandelion
• Daylily
• Hibiscus
• Hollyhock
• Johnny Jump-Up
• Lilac
• Nasturtiums
• Ox-Eye Daisy
• Pansy
• Peas
• Radish
• Redbud
• Roses
• Squash (especially those males!)
• Sunflower
• Violets
• Zucchini

Black Walnut Dye Solution

The Black Walnut dye solution is one of my favorites. Yes, it is “another brown dye” AND it has the ability to dye various fibers various shades of brown. I’ve dyed buckskins, wool and cotton and have seen colors from a rich dark brown all the way to a brassy yellow. What more can you ask for?!

There are a few ways to make the dye solution. One way is to use the whole walnut (hull, shell and nut). Another way is to scrape the hull from the walnut shell (as mentioned here). And if you happen to scrape the hull off from the shell and nut (hopefully, saving the nut as a food source), you can either use the hulls fresh or dry them and use them at a later time. I will address making both fresh and dry dye solutions…

Fresh Hull Solution:

6 lbs. Walnuts PER 5 oz. of fiber**

Put the hulls or whole walnuts into a 5-gallong plastic bucket. Fill bucket with water until the hulls/walnuts begin to float. Cover the solution with a fitted lid and let soak for about 3 weeks. The solution will start to ferment, become dark brown and slightly sludgy. Once it gets to this point, pour the solution into a vat and bring to a boil for about one hour. Strain out the hulls/walnuts (keeping them for another dye solution), and return the liquid solution back to the heat. At this point you can add your fiber (that is washed but does NOT need a mordant) once the liquid dye is almost to a boil. Let the fiber soak in the solution on medium-low heat for 60-90 minutes. If you want a richer color, leave the fiber in the solution overnight.

After this first heating solution, you can return the strained hulls/walnuts to the liquid solution and let soak for a longer time and be re-used. When you want to dye more fiber, heat the mixture, strain, heat the liquid and dye again. This process can be repeated multiple times until you’ve exhausted the color.

**This ratio is recommended by Rebecca Burgess, author of "Harvesting Color; How to find plants and make natural dyes".

Photos by Rachael WItt

Dry Hull Solution:

This dye solution will equate to two times the size of your vat. For instance, our vat holds about 5 gallons of solution, so we are getting about 8-10 gallons of solution.

1.      Fill half of vat with dried hulls and cover with water until the vat is filled. 

2.     For the first round, bring mixture to a boil for about 30 minutes, then strain the solution (saving the hulls for another round of solution).

3.      Repeat steps 1 and 2, using the hulls from the first round.

4.     Squeeze the solution from the hulls when straining. Sometimes we will let the straining bag hang overnight and then do the second boil the following day. By letting the hulls sit and strain as well as squeezing the liquid out, we are getting a thick solution.

5.     If you are bark-tanning, you would do this process a third time. For a great article and break down on how to bark tan, click HERE (https://www.braintan.com/barktan/1basics.htm).

6.     If you are making a dye solution, you can combine the two rounds OR leave them separate and have two different color strengths of solution to dye with…

7.     Put your dye solution in a bin/container that will allow your fiber enough space to lie as flat as possible and minimize folds.

8.      Keep fiber in dye solution for a week (or more), stirring it multiple times daily.

9.     Take fiber out when color is to your liking (know that the color you are looking at will be darker because your fiber is wet.)

10.  Rinse the fiber with cold water until the water runs clear.

11.  Dry out and wear or make something!

Buckskin, before Black Walnut Dye.

Buckskin, after Black Walnut Dye.

The Black Walnut Harvest

Black Walnut, Juglans Nigra

It doesn’t take long to discover the dyeing qualities of Black Walnut…just pick up a few broken hulls after a Fall windstorm and you’ll find your hands immediately turning brown. Or some scour at the look of hulls breaking down underneath the trees. It’s true it appears like some fecal matter that exploded from an infant’s upset stomach, but that’s beside the point. Black walnuts have been used for centuries as a source or dye, bark tanning solution, food and medicine. It’s no wonder why they are such a hot trading commodity in the primitive skills community.

Before I get to writing about making a Dye or Bark Tan solution, I want to address the process of harvesting and processing these lovely nuts.

Identification:

Walnut is a deciduous tree that can grow up to 100 + ft tall. The bark is black to dark grey. The large tree has long, pinnately compound leaves with toothed margins. There are generally 9-11 leaflets that are nearly opposite and the terminal leaflet is often reduced or absent. I have commonly found walnut near old home sites in various parts of the Western U.S.

Harvest:

Come early to mid-October, you might want to be aware of which tree you are standing under (especially during high winds), leaves, branches, nuts and buds are falling from our deciduous friends and cones are falling from the conifers. It’s the time to harness your inner squirrel and start collecting.

Black Walnut trees can fool the untrained plant identifier’s eye. The large hulls* grow bright green before falling onto the ground. It isn’t until the hulls break down, that we can see the common image of a walnut shell. And it isn’t until the shell is broken that we can find the creamy nuts that we readily consume over the wintering months. But if you are harvesting for the Dyeing purposes, don’t let the hull break down too much…

*(some refer to this part of the walnut as a “husk”, I learned them to be called “hull”)

Black Walnut hulls can be collecting from the tree or the ground. In my experience, I wait to harvest nuts and buds when they have fallen to the ground. It is within that short window where I find the hulls to be more readily available to peel off the shell and if I were to eat the nut, the protein dense food source is also about ready to be eaten at this point.

*(Walnuts can be collected in some areas as early as late summer and throughout the fall)

(In a nutshell)

Ideal Hulls for Harvesting:

-Large, plump Hulls

-Slightly cracked Hulls

-Borderline “mushy” (a.k.a not super hard and smooth, bright green hulls)

What do I leave for the squirrels:

-Hard, solid green hulls

-Super mushy black hulls

-Hulls still attached to trees

When harvesting I wear gloves so I don’t stain my hands, but ideally the hulls won’t be opened to the point where they start turning brown (hence staining your hands). I harvest into a box or heavy duty bag. I only take enough walnuts to barely impact the density of nuts underneath the tree, this allows for the resident creatures that depend on the tree as a food source to get through the winter.

Processing:

Boy oh boy, do I process a lot when sitting with my freshly harvested walnuts! Like with processing most plants or animals, it becomes a meditative, spiritual practice. Well, you begin a deeper relationship with whatever you are working with. In this case, you are unfolding the layers of a walnut.

The Layers:

The outside skin of the Hull (Exocarp)               -The soft protective covering of the shell and nut

The fleshy inside of the Hull (Mesocarp)

The Shell (Endocarp)   -The hard part that protects the seed/edible nut

The Nut (Seed)   -The seed that is edible and also is the source of regeneration for the tree.

Processing is a messy task, so I tend to wear rubber gloves. I use a full knife or sharp stick and cut the hull’s circumference (circumcising the hull). I then twist both sides (as if I am twisting apart an Oreo) and pull them apart. This way I get two well intact halves of the hull. As soon as you break open the hull, it becomes exposed to oxygen and oxidizes, turning brown. Once I half the hulls I lay them face down on a massive window screen (or drying screen). I place this screen in a drying room or above my wood-fire stove).

You can also leave them outside for a productive squirrel to find and take the hulls off for you. And it might leave something a bit more messy like this...

To efficiently dry the hulls (to store and use for a later dyeing or bark tanning project), I take them off the drying screen and lay them onto a baking tray. I place the trays into my oven turned to 170 degrees Fahrenheit, leaving the door cracked. I flip the hulls every hour or so until they are crispy dry.

Photos by Rachael Witt

If you are going to make a fresh dye solution, go to our write-up on making a Black Walnut Dye or Bark-Tan solution. In this case, you do not have to dry the hulls out for storage :)