Dandelion tea and other stories

Dandelion juice is ready to pour 
through a piece of screen

Last year, I made dandelion jelly. This year, I'm making dandelion tea... not for myself, but for my garden.

But before I get into those details, I'll tell you a very sad gardener's story, very very sad. See, this gardener I know started about 75 tomato plants and at least a dozen pepper plants from seed. They grew quite happily in her greenhouse until they became root bound in their little pots, and started to lose their beautiful deep green colour because they were running out of soil nutrients.

The gardener refuses to use chemical fertilizers, so she looked at the long-range weather forecast, which showed that evening lows for the foreseeable future were between 5 and 13 degrees. So she ignored the conventional wisdom that one should never plant before the May long weekend and spent an afternoon putting all her tomato plants in their garden boxes, where they had several happy days and nights and started greening up again quite beautifully thanks to warm sun and good soil.

What the gardener forgot was that long-range forecasts are never to be trusted.

5 days later, the weather turned and a heavy snow began to cover the ground. The gardener and her husband went out into the blizzard armed with tarps and blankets and covered all the tender plants, protecting them from the worst of the storm. And they survived... until the temperature really dropped two nights later. I don't know how low it got, but when I, the very very sad gardener of this story, uncovered my plants on Friday morning, I nearly cried. Then I thought, Palestine and Israel are where real tears are being shed, and how silly is it to cry over frozen potential tomatoes and peppers when people are dying? So I pulled out my 35 frozen and drooped tomato plants and 8 peppers and vowed not to make the same mistake EVER again. 

Fortunately for me, I had not given away all the other 40 tomato plants I had grown -- still have 14 left. And my husband, sweet man that he is, took me to Canadian Tire before breakfast on Saturday morning and bought me 8 more tomato plants and 8 little peppers (wow, do I save us some money by growing my own every year!) And our eldest has a friend who has a few leftover heirloom plants, and my neighbour brought me two lovely little cherry tomatoes as a birthday gift yesterday. I may just end up with as many tomato plants as I started with at the rate things are going.

Which brings me back to dandelion tea, an accidental discovery on my part. Well, rediscovery, I guess.

Dandelion compost tea
and compostable dandelions

With the weather as cool as it has been, I haven't been rushing to replant all those survivor tomatoes, but rather, am turning my attention to the multitude of dandelions in my perennial beds. I've pretty much given up on the ones appearing in the lawn -- the bees need some dandelion nectar! -- and I have more than enough little yellow flowers to gather from among the delphinia and daisies. Mindful that organic matter should never be wasted, I've adopted the "drown-a-weed-before-composting" approach, and once I have a pail of dandies, I weigh them down with bricks and cover them with water until they start to rot (3 days or so), then transfer the whole mess into the middle of my compost pile.

But this weekend, my two sole survivor hanging tomato plants (who had weathered the cold in our greenhouse) looked thirsty, and rather than drag out a hose to water them, I grabbed a small pail and shipped some water off the top of the drowning dandelion bucket to water the tomato baskets with it. A few hours later when I checked on the plants, I was surprised by how much greener they had become. 

The next day I was telling my parents about the greening of my plants, and my mom looked it up. Sure enough, I had stumbled across one of the oldest fertilizers in the book, and there's all sorts of internet info about how to make weed or herbal teas for the garden. For example, click here for an article from the Farmer's Almanac folks. Of course, it's really no different than making compost tea, which is also great for plants... not sure why I never thought of it sooner! If I had, I might have fed those 35 tomato plants dandelion tea instead of planting them too soon!

So now that I've remembered this trick, you can bet all the dandelions I pull out of my perennial bed will not only enrich my compost, but will also fertilize my plants. Weeds have so many gifts for us -- but we tend to see them as problems rather than as resources! All the dandelion juice in my composting buckets has gone into the compost bin until now, but I finally know better!

Of course, I'll never mistake the smelly tea in my garden pails for dandelion root coffee substitute, though in my reading I've learned that dandelion flowers not only make a nice jelly, they can also be steeped for a decent, high in vitamin C tea for human consumption. I'll check into it, and if you come visit once the pandemic restrictions are lifted, maybe we could have a cup of yellow flower tea together sometime! Not of the compost variety, no worries!