I foraged rose hips, and dried them in the dehydrator. This is a first for me, and I was very surprised how good they smelled in the dehydrator. Such a sweet fruity aroma.
I still think 20 lbs of apples is an absurd amount of work to equate to 1 lb of herbs, but I did it. It hadn't been attempted in 7 pages of bb submissions, and I wanted to try something new. I've dried mint before. I could collect and prepare 1 lb of mint in under an hour. 20 lbs of apples... took me 2 days.
I collected 50 lbs from what I think was once an orchard? It's public land now, a popular deer hunting location due to the many overgrown apple trees. I think I walked about 3 miles total? Carried the apples from a half mile in, 3 times. The largest bag had 20 lbs of apples, so I washed, cored, and arranged them in our old (at least 20 years, longer than I can remember) electric dehydrator. About 2-3 lbs would go in at a time, at least until they started to shrink, and then I squeezed them together and added more. I put them into a glass jar we use with this machine (the "sacred jerky jar!") and then a much less sacred leftover tub, and then the rest went into a bowl for immediate snacking. They're good! I would make more, except my hands are a little cut up right now and my quail are getting sick of apple cores, so maybe later. Or I might use them for something else, baking?
I foraged over 5 lbs of mushrooms and dried and stored them. It took three separate foraging expeditions because the Chanterelles were not super abundant, but luckily I found a giant Western Cauliflower that pushed me over the 5 lb goal!
Here are the weights (3.35 + 1.744 = 5.094 lb):
Chanterelle (0.748 + 0.952 + 1.65 = 3.35 lb)
Western Cauliflower (1.744 lb)
Oyster (forgot to weigh)
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Chanterelle in the wild.
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Chanterelle harvest #1.
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Chanterelle harvest #2.
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Chanterelle harvest #3.
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Chanterelle going into dehydrator.
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Western Cauliflower in the wild.
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Western Cauliflower harvest.
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Western Cauliflower going into dehydrator.
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Final dried mushrooms in sealed and labelled jars (1 gallon, half gallon, quart).
This past autumn, the patch of wild roses I made tea from had a bumper crop of rose hips, so I wandered down into the ditch and, with some difficulty, picked enough of them to dry for tea! The timing was good, as I was down to my last few dried hips from the last time I went out to harvest them a number of years back.
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Harvesting rose hips
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Weighing rose hips
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Drying & storing rose hips
He whai take kore noa anō te kupu mēnā mā nga mahi a te tangata ia e kōrero / His words are nothing if his works say otherwise