A Walk in the Woods

For the past week, I've been working every day stripping the old wax and varnish off our floors.  Ron has been sick, so I've been puttering.  However, I did find one more power tool that an obsessive compulsive person should never be allowed to own:  a belt sander. It's every bit as bad as a power washer, and I probably could have sanded every day for the rest of my life and not been satisfied if my body didn't complain so much.  With the gloomy cool rainy days, redoing the floors was a perfect project.  When they are finally finished (hopefully tomorrow) I'll post some pictures.  However, with the sanding done and a fresh coat of Danish oil on about half of the floor, the sun came out and I finally got outside.

I found several new iris are in bloom.  I love this fragrant blue,

and this fragrant lavender.

My friend, Karen, told me that stinging nettles make delicious greens, so I set out through the trails to look for nettles.

I found ripe salmon berries, 

Thimble berry bushes,

and blackberry bushes in bloom,

fiddlehead ferns ready to pick, and finally at the end of my walk,

nettles.  I found that they can sting through surgical gloves, but I picked them anyway.

Not sure how to cook them, I cut each leaf, washed them, and then added a little salt and poured boiling water over them.  I cooked them for about 5 minutes.

They turned a beautiful forest green.  I added a little butter and ate them all by myself.  Ron won't touch greens of any kind, so nettles would be an impossible sell.  They didn't have too much flavor - kind of nutty - not like any greens I have ever eaten.  Good though, and after two hours, no side effects, so I proclaim them edible.