Elderflower season: our first Foraging walk is today!

June is the month for Elderflowers and lovely walks.

Today starts sunny and bright with not a cloud in the sky. We are expecting 29C so it might be too hot to go for a walk in open fields, luckily enough Alexandra park is around the corner and has lots of tree cover, and  a beautiful elder flower bush to give us the main ingredient for our Cordial.

We made some elderflower thee

It is a very versatile plant and worth reading more about here

Country file had an article with more elder recipes

Medicinal information

Every year I make more and more recipes with it.

First I made the cordial, (always adding the sugar at the second stage to prevent a sticky mess when squeezing out the flowers)

Then I tend to put in the fridge the left over lemons (and slice them very thinly) and the cordial that did not fit into the bottles.  So that with the next batch I can make Elderflower Marmalade

What a lovely way to spend a bank holiday morning

Our first outing of the newly founded group: From Spade to Plate was a wonderful one.
As it was a bank holiday we had some families come and the children seem to enjoy it as much as the grown ups did.

Yesterday I picked one batch of elderflowers (from the Riverside) and added the lemons and juice in order to have a starter to finish off today.

11am sharp the friends arrived. armed with baskets and scissors, one group went to Alexandra park to pick the flowers, whilst June and 3 teenage girls made the scones.

When we came back, it became a hive of activity. The flowers were rinsed (there was a little black fly) lemons finely cut so tomorrow I can make a batch of Elderflower marmalade to have with the scones.

We bottled the juice, labelled it and went on our way bottles in hand.

This blog was first published 29/5/2017