Backyard Wine

I’ve been staring at all these growing plants in our indoor shelves and asking myself, “What did I get myself into.” In a couple months we will be up to our ears in tomatoes, squash, and beans (just to name a few). I remembered a homebrewing wine class that we took at Riveredge Nature Center over the winter. At the end of the class we tried a sample of tomato wine and it was delicious!

Inspired by El and a favorite book of ours, The Backyard Homestead by Carleen Madigan, we decided to start a batch of homebrewed dandelion wine.

Making the wine wasn’t as easy as we thought it was going to be. While picking the blossoms is easy, removing all the green parts was time consuming. The green parts of the blossom will prevent the wine from fermenting. Some green parts of the dandelion inevitably made it into our concoction. We followed the recipe from the book. Many recipes exist and we won’t find out if we like this recipe until another 6-12 months.

And once we decide that we like making dandelion wine, we will move onto other wines…!

-Moriah