Wholesome Wednesdays: Wildflowers

Watch out, Texas.... wildflower season is coming! Watch out for those wild super-corgis, too!

I like a bit of silliness now and then.
Wildflowers really are essential to our native ecosystem. They nourish bees and beneficial insects with their nectar and pollen, as well as birds and small critters when they go to seed. Many of the wild 'flowers' are also healthful herbs. Echinacea (or purple cone flower), chickweed, cleavers and more are all weedy, flowering herbs with powerful health benefits. Not to mention honey: my husband is especially partial to wildflower honey, i prefer clover honey. Honey is full of nutrients and is nature's anti-allergy tonic: the bees do the work of gathering all those pesky allergens together and processing them into a delicious elixer that will boost your immune system and help you cope with the pollen that floats through the air.

This website can get you started with identifying the useful wildflowers from the pretty, but best left alone varieties. In this day and age of bottled, packaged, pilled, and sprayed medicines we often forget that most of those medications are just man made variations on nature's  remedies. Take a few moments to ponder those 'weeds' before you pull them and toss them into the compost. They may have some wonderful and nurturing quality. Some common weeds and wildflowers with the best bang for their bloom are:

• Dandelion greens: digestive and liver tonic
• Chickweed: too many benefits to list! High in fatty acids, healing, weight loss. Can be eaten or used as a poultice
• St. Johns Wort: mood leveller and more
• Echinacea: Harvest that precious root of the purple coneflower to reap the benefits of this miraculous herb. All around immune system booster

There are too many beneficial herbs and flowers to list. Wildflowers are beautiful and delight us every Spring with their miraculous colors, they hold the dry late Winter soil down during Spring rains, they nourish wild creatures and our an essential component to our ecosystem. Wildflowers aren't all necessarily native. We can thank Lady Bird Johnson for contributing to the beautification of Texas' roadsides and the eventual spread of so many wildflowers across our state. They certainly fit nicely into our vast landscape.

What's your favorite wildflower? (I'm partial to these little coreopsis). 

Lovely Afternoon, Preparing Beds and Weeding Around the Wildflowers

What a beautiful day! Normally I might not be so thrilled for a 70 degree, slightly humid, breezy almost stormy but sunny day in January - but heck, even if it's SUPPOSED to feel like Winter, that kind of day is perfect! Now if only we got more of those days in the middle of Summer when i'm hiding in my studio under 7 fans and misters.

The husband brought home a dolly yesterday and we moved some old planters to the front yard - i think they make a nice fence like border along the sidewalk, though i wish we had one more to make a nice odd number. Although it is a little early to plant most things, and theoretically too early to prune (i don't buy it: my rosemary has already put on 3 inches of spring growth and the pecan tree is budding) i took the beautiful afternoon off to get my hands dirty.

 

I weeded. Every last square inch. I weeded around the broccolis, lettuces, and herbs in the veggie garden, i weeded around all the little sprouting wildflowers in the 'strip', and i weeded any other weeds that i saw and fed them to delighted chickens left behind in the back yard. Belina and Soot laid this morning so they had the privilege of joining me in the front yard to snack on Elbon Rye. Lots of clearing as well as weeding helped to open up areas around the xeric bed and big herbs - the compost doubled in size!

 

I prepared the planters to receive onion sets: tilled, pulled the fava beans to compost, mixed in molasses and rock phosphate and a few handfuls of more compost. The raised bed that usually houses basil will be used for mustard this year: i am excited to make pickled mustard leaves and let the plants flower to make mustard from my very own mustard seeds.

It was a bit tricky weeding around the wildflowers, as they are essentially weeds themselves. But i was careful, and i was delighted to see little flowers here and there already blooming! I reckon This year is going to be a great wildflower year for me.

 

During my weeding and thinning i harvested a few radishes, overgrown but still perfect for soup, some kale and some sorrel and dill. I've never added dill to chicken soup before, and i don't think i will again - it added another dimension to the soup, but i'm not sure i'm a big fan of that dimension. The sorrel and radishes, on the other hand, were delicious and cooked to a perfect firm but not crunchy in about 1 hour in the soup stock. We enjoyed our soup while watching The Natural History of the Chicken, which is a completely ridiculous movie - especially enjoyable to those of us with chickens. Hilarious, and insightful. We caught part of this film when the chickens were wee chicks in a box beside us, and it was very neat to watch it now with older chickens and recognize in our hens the traits those in the film also recognized - they are such interesting critters!

 

Next on my list is a trip to the nursery to buy mustard seed, onion sets, borage seed, corn seed, and cucumber seed. My step mama is bringing me some green beans - not sure if they'll translate from Eugene OR to Austin TX, but i'm happy to receive. I would order my seeds from the many catalogues i receive, but my limited space requires limited seeds and my local organic nursery has a pretty nice selection of plants that do well in this specific area.

All in all, a wonderful 2-3 hours spent with my girls and my garden: some of my very favorite things!

Have you gotten your hands dirty yet this Spring?