Traditional Food Security - Fireweed Harvesting

So I'm picking the flowers or the blossoms of the fireweeds. They're starting to come out right on time. The flowers are what people make honey with, fireweed honey, fireweed jelly. You can make vinegar. You can also dry them for tea or like put them on your salad.

But I'm going to make jelly with these. And they make a really, really pretty pink, bright pink jelly. Some people say like a third is a good rule, or just take some, don't take them all. Just take what you need and spread it out. So if you're going to get a lot, like you might go to a couple different spots depending on how much is in the area that you're picking.

Whenever I go out to harvest, I try to make sure I learn the name for the plant in the language of the land that I'm on. So here in Heidelberg, or Hikta'kandlai, the Xadkil word for fireweed is Tli'ath. So I'm saying thank you, haw'at Tli'ath, for providing food and medicine, or in Yeah, in Xadkil it's "plee-ohf" and in Tlingit it's "shoosh," which is also the same word for pink in Tlingit. Barley is one of my favorites because the entire plant is edible. In the springtime you can eat the shoots and they are kind of similar to asparagus.

They'll be like a dark, a darker kind of maroon color, and they're really short, and the leaves are still tight up around the stalk. And so people like to pick the shoots for a good springtime green. You can pickle them or put them in salads or like a sauté or stir-fry. So all parts of the plant are edible. So I just rinsed the blossoms in some cold water.

And I'm gonna lay them out to dry a little bit and just look for bugs because they love the flowers. They're gonna get covered in some boiling water in a jar and steep overnight. And so this is just to clean them a little bit, pick out the bugs. So it's about 2 cups of packed blossoms and then 2.5 cups of boiling water.

This will steep overnight.

Today we are making fireweed jelly with the blossoms, and we're adding some rose petals as well. So it'll be a fireweed rose petal jelly. So we had about a cup of each of the blossoms or petals, and then a quarter cup of water in each jar. And I like to use cheesecloth in the strainer just in case any little critters didn't make it out of the cleaning. So I'm going to press them into the colander.

These are the fireweed blossoms that we picked and then steeped overnight. So we just poured a little boiling water over them and put them in the jar and then put them in the fridge once it cooled down. So, pour that in here.

Just to make sure we get all the good juices out of the blossoms, we can use our pestle. And then we'll do the same thing for the rose petals. Just want to get as much of that good smelling, tasting rose flavor out, so we'll squish them down. So we have our fireweed juice and our rose petal juice. We're going to add that to our pot, and then we'll add a teaspoon of lemon juice.

I squeezed out a lemon earlier. Teaspoon of lemon juice. We have 3 tablespoons of pectin. After just a few days, I got rid of the— And then— I hear a half a teaspoon of butter, so I'm just gonna eyeball it. There was a guy who— And then we're gonna bring it to a boil, uh, hard boil for a minute, stirring constantly.

So now we're gonna add 3 cups of sugar.

Just to dissolve and then boil it again for 1 more minute. So— Okay, I'm gonna turn the heat off and we're gonna do the drip test. So I'm just gonna take a little bit and put it on a plate.

And we'll stick it in the freezer for 5 minutes so it's not dripping, which is good. And you can just kind of check that it has that jelly texture. So it's gelatinous, it's not dripping down the plate, it's set, it's ready to go. So Kaylee and Jasmine here, our YES interns, are gonna ladle it into jars and then we'll do a water bath. Now you can see that pretty pink color.

I like to open up a jar of fireweed jelly in the middle of winter because it reminds me of summer. Perfect, exactly 12 jars. Okay, and then you're gonna wipe the rims, and we wipe the rims to make sure that there's nothing in between the seal, the lid, and the rim so that it gets a proper seal in the water bath. Put the jars in a hot water bath and then cover them with about an inch of water. So you can just put the jars right into the pot.

[FOREIGN LANGUAGE] And I put some foil in the bottom just to give the jars a little bit of protection so they don't break. Bring it up to a boil, and at sea level it's 5 minutes. As soon as they're done in the hot water bath, we'll take them out. I like to flip them upside down to try and help ensure that the lid seals 'cause the liquid is hot on the bottom. And then we'll let them sit for like 24 hours.

But you want to make sure that you can hear the lids popping. And we'll do a little test with a spoon, or you can just use your fingernail. But you can always tell when the lid is not sealed because it sounds a little more hollow and there's like a bubble to it. Nice to open up a jar in the winter and have a little pop of summer, a little taste of summer. Summer sunshine.