Edible Landscape Clean-up: Run for the Roses

Edible Landscaping

I don’t recall when I started to search out edible landscaping as a primary source of beauty.  It might have been when I saw how pretty my purple eggplants looked, tucked between some bushes because I did not have any more room in the REAL garden.  Or maybe it was the color of Swiss Chard under my cherry trees in the summer.  Well, for whatever reason, I am an avid edible landscaper.

I have been slowly trimming my rose bushes every other day.  They are not hard to manage but you do need to cut them back if you don’t want to live in Sleeping Beauty’s rose covered castle. Or was that Snow White and Rose Red?  Anyway, I never worry about trimming the roses too much because every bit of them are used.  In the Fall I use the rose hips for syrup.  In the Winter I give the trimmed branches to our goat, Lucy.  She eats them like candy.  The roof of her mouth must be made of titanium because these branches have thorns that really hurt.  The chickens clean up anything that Lucy drops and any spider cases, etc.

So, Lucy gets a special treat and I feel like I have cleaned up without adding anything to the landfill.  It’s a win-win.

Edible landscaping benefits not only the human critters but the birds, goats, and chickens.  Try it this year!

Peppers

We were over run with peppers at the end of the season.  Seems to happen every year, but this year we were prepared.  We had three new ways to process them for later use.  Out of the small spicy ones we made pickles for use on pizza and in salads.  The bulk of them (pictured above) got turned into pepper butter.  The combination of spicy and sweet makes pepper butter one of the best things I have ever had on a sandwich.  The buckets of spicy Serrano Peppers got made into fermented chili pepper sauce.  Here's how we did it.

First we gathered in all the ripe serrano peppers.  We ended up with about 12 lbs.

We washed them, trimmed away any blemishes, and pulled the stems off.   When they were cleaned and ready we loaded them into the food processor with a couple cloves of garlic and some sea salt. 






















We ground everything up, added some kefir starter, and loaded it into half gallon jars.  These we left sitting in the kitchen for a week to ferment.









After fermenting we were supposed to mash it in a sieve to get the juice.  We had a lot of fermented peppers and I didn't want to waste any of it, so we used our Squeezo instead.  It worked great.

It worked GREAT.  We ended up with about one gallon of serrano pepper sauce and a bunch of pulp.

The sauce will be bottled in smaller bottles and should last us a few months.

The pulp we dehydrated and will use as pepper flakes or we may grind it fine for powder. 






The inspiration for the fermented chili sauce came from the Nourished Kitchen blog.  If you have a lot of hot peppers you don't know what to do with, you should try this.