When I was a kid, I loved dandelions.  I loved how the cheerful yellow flowers looked popping up all over the backyard and I loved watching dandelion fluff float on the breeze when they went to seed.  Once I grew up and owned my own home, I lost my appreciation for these underrated plants.  Our neighbors all spent their springs fertilizing their grass and killing their dandelions so that they could have a perfectly manicured yard.  The dandelions never really bothered me…until the neighbors started complaining.  They told me my dandelions were seeding their yards, making their job harder, so we complied and killed our dandelions too.

In 2005 we got the opportunity to move to a small rural community in Northwest Montana.  I spent the first two years here fighting dandelions, like I had for so many years.  Then I realized, nobody here seemed to care that they had dandelions.  Every yard on my street was covered in mounds of yellow flowers, I was finally free!

Over the past several years we have enjoyed the benefits of living a more natural life here in Montana.  We planted a garden our very first summer here and have enlarged it nearly every year.  It has taken quite a bit of practice to get it right, having a garden in Montana is completely different from the garden we were used to in Missouri.  We now have an orchard with cherry, apple and plum trees.  This spring we also got bees in the hopes that they would improve both our garden and our orchard.

With bees comes the responsibility to be the best bee parent you can.  This means no weed killers around and supplying the bees with plenty of pollen.  Bees love dandelions, so we have learned to embrace the abundance of yellow flowers that seems to engulf our yard each spring.  

While the bees love the dandelions, I figure we have more than enough to share.  I had always heard about dandelion wine, but I had no clue how to make it.  While on a trip to the bookstore I found a very interesting book, The Homesteading Book by Abigail R. Gehring.  I highly recommend this book to anyone who would like to try gardening, canning, wine making, cheese making, goat raising.  I’m not kidding, just about everything you ever wanted to know, is in that book, including the recipe for dandelion wine, which I will share with you at the end of this article.  As soon as I saw the recipe I knew I was going to try it, so I stopped by the store on my way home from work to get the supplies I needed and I got to work plucking 4 quarts of dandelion flowers from the yard.

The whole process takes some time, but I will let you know how it turns out.  The recipe seems relatively easy, so if I ace this, I already have plans for my next winemaking adventure to be huckleberry wine, so stay tuned for that little adventure.  Here is the recipe for Dandelion wine by Abigail R. Gehring.

Dandelion Wine

Ingredients

4 quarts dandelion blossoms (the whole head, not just the petals)

4 quarts boiling water

2 oranges

2 lemons

4 lbs sugar

2 Tbsp yeast

Directions:

1. Wash dandelion blossoms and place them in a large pot.  Pour 4 quarts of water over them and let them stand for 24 hours

2. Strain through cheesecloth and add grated rind and juice of 2 oranges and 2 lemons, four pounds of sugar and two tablespoons of yeast.

3. Let stand one week, then strain again and fill bottles.

Guest blogger-Jean Marie Stanberry

jeanstanberry.com   @jeanstanberry