One of my gardening clients and also neighbour has a paddock, pictured below, full of the things, and what's even better is it's private so no dog wee, or car fumes.....
I am armed with my dads original recipe, a few books: Booze for free, The curious gardener's Almanac, The hedgerow handbook and of course C.J.J.Berry First steps in winemaking.
So I headed out this morning just gone 11am with a drug, picked dandelions for almost an hour, and head home with 3 1/2 Kg of dandelion heads, yellow hands and back ache!
(Ziggy did come and help, but being a teenager was more interested in his phone).
Saw several different species of bees and Ziggy was amazed at how the bee carries pollen on their hind legs in what is called a "pollen basket".
NOTE: you can also eat young dandelion leaves, like you would salad leaf.
And how many bags of sugar does one need and how many litres make a gallon? So here is my handy notes:
For 1 demijohn of wine, you will first need:
Dandelions heads, no stalks: use a measuring jug, 3 Litres or 6 pints or 3 quarts or if using scales it's 225g.
- Boiling water: 4.5 litres or 1 gallon
- optional x1 Camden Tablet.. I have decided to use a crushed Camden tablet in both of my recipes
- Pick and put your dandelion flower heads into a large, clean bucket with a lid.
- Add boiling water and a crushed camden tablet, give it a stir, put the lid on and leave for x2 days. (Stir each day)
DAY TWO - Start the Yeast
This would have actually been better if I had started this on day one... I need two batches because I am making two recipes. But basically you boil a handful of raisons (sugar). Boil some brown rice with lots of water and add some of the water to the raisins, (starch and vitamin B) then add the desired amount of yeast. 1tsp per gallon. Leave in a container to ferment.
DAY THREE - Start the Batch
I am making 2 gallons of each recipe.
Recipe One: (x6 litres of flower heads and 9 litres of water)
- Strain the Dandelion heads and add the liquid to a large saucepan, I had two large saucepans for each batch that held a gallon of liquid each and I halved the ingredients between the two.
- the peel (remove pith) of x3 lemons and x2 oranges.
- 500g of raisins
- x2 inches of ginger (1" in each pan)
- x3 kilos (x3 bags) sugar....
- the peel (remove pith) 2 lemons and x4 oranges and the juice of one of the oranges
- 4kg sugar
Add the ingredients and slowly bring to the boil, and then let it boil for 10 minutes.
Empty back into the (cleaned) plastic buckets and wait for the liquid to cool... This took most of the day. When cooled, add the yeast starter that was made the day before.
Now leave for up to 10 days or until the fermentation slows.
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