This guide to mid-season harvesting, summer wild food foraging, homesteading, and food preservation will help you take advantage of July’s “Swimming Moon.”
Just beyond the threshold of the summer solstice, the Appalachian Mountains burst forth with life, with abundant wild foods, sweet berries and meadow medicinals. The seedlings we planted in the spring are now giants in their garden beds, offering their fruits beneath broad and fanning leaves. This is truly the season of abundance and a potent time for wild-food foraging and food preservation. As we stand in the season of sun, however, we must also prepare ourselves for the seasons of cold to come.
Below is a guide and “to-do” list to help you make the most of this robust season. This field and homestead guide comes from the life experiences of Natalie Bogwalker, founder of Wild Abundance and the Firefly Gathering, with contributions by Chloe Lieberman and Zev Friedman.
Wild Food Foraging Beneath the Swimming Moon
- Harvest milkweed blossoms. These broccoli-like flowers can be sautéed, steamed, boiled or stirred into casseroles for a magnificent and nutritious meal. Make sure to inhale their intoxicating aroma before harvesting. Make sure to correctly identify edible varieties (there are poisonous lookalikes, like dogbane), and cook them before eating, as milkweed is toxic unless fully cooked.
Annual Garden Preparations for July
- Eat of the bounty! Enjoy fresh tomatoes, summer squash, peppers, green beans, chard, kale.
- Choose a few healthy summer squash plants that make particularly tasty squashes, and allow a few fruits to mature to produce seeds. These seeds will be saved for next year’s garden, and for generations to come.
- Harvest and cure onions.
- Harvest garlic! (If you haven’t already.)
- Start seeds for fall crops, like kale, broccoli, cauliflower, and winter spinach.
- Cultivate and weed, weed, weed!
In the Orchard
- Harvest saucing apples.
- Harvest more wineberries, raspberries, blueberries, and ever-bearing strawberries.
Food Preservation
- Two words: pickle and ferment! Green beans, carrots, beets, zucchinis, cucumbers, milkweed buds. Make sauce with yellow mealy apples (aka, “sauce apples”) that start ripening at the end of month.
- Make jam, dry herbs and flowers for tea (mint, red clover, yarrow blossoms, elder blossoms and lavender).
Don’t forget to swim, to nap in the shade of a oak tree, and eat fresh berries by the fistful!
For more information about Wild Abundance,or to check out upcoming weekend workshops including a Tiny House and Natural Building Intensive, Permaculture Design Certification, or Hide Tanning.
Aiyanna Sezak-Blatt is a writer, beekeeper, and student with Wild Abundance.
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