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Today I made a start on getting rid of the insane amount of brambles that had taken over the garden. It looked like a big job but I didn’t bother digging them out as they run deep and I have no intention of breaking my back in the process. So I used secateurs to cut them at the base. I had bought some gardening gloves from Home Bargains, the black ones are thinner but still reinforced and the pink ones are a bit bigger and reinforced again so I could wear them together, to try and prevent the thorns coming through.

The start as you can see is completely over run around the edges of the garden!

It took some time but I go through most of them. The gloves worked quite well doubled up with only a few thorns breaking through.

As you can see from the video we just need to burn the brambles and then get on to the raised beds.

Dandelion and Orange Syrup

At the same time as doing the brambles I collected some dandelions to make the Dandelion Syrup. I haven’t made any for a couple of years but I wanted to get back in to the foraging side of things. With dandelions being so readily available, especially in our back garden, this seemed to be the best thing to make. This was also requested by my Step daughter (Tony’s daughter), as she enjoyed it so much when we made it last time (written up in the post Dastardly Dandelions).

Ingredients

• 350g dandelion heads (or in my case around 2 thirds of the pan) – remove green parts if really keen
• 1  lemon or a table spoon of lemon juice
• 1 Orange
• 1 litre water
• 400g light Brown sugar
• 400g Granulated Sugar
• Vanilla pod (or flavouring if you’re me)

Method

• Add dandelion heads, water and lemon cut in 2 and squeezed in the pan then thrown in or juice added. Orange cut in 2 and squeezed in the pan and thrown in. Then add the vanilla pod (or flavouring) to the water and simmer for 20 minutes in a covered pan. Leave to steep overnight.

-Pour through a sieve extracting the liquid by pressing down with a spoon to make around about about 750ml.
-Discard the flowers and oranges (onto the compost pile) and simmer the liquid in an uncovered pan with the sugar for about 45 minutes or until the mixture becomes syrupy and drips slowly off a spoon. I cooked for a little longer as I wanted a thicker syrup. I checked this by putting drops of the liquid on to a cold plate to gauge the consistency.

-Pour into sterilised glass jars and leave to cool.

This was delicious! I can’t recommend this enough, adding the orange and using brown sugar as well as white, made all the difference to the recipe.

Thanks for taking a look at our post. See you again soon!

Kiera & Tony