Front-Yard Foraging for Fun But Not Profit

This is only kind of about making violet syrup

Behold my flask of violet syrup. No, I didn’t use lilacs, although that’s another project! The syrup photographed better against the lilacs than the actual violets. I tried both. (Photo by Michelle Teheux)

It’s violet season where I live, and that means spending hours I don’t really have picking tiny purple flowers from my front yard and then making treats I don’t really need.

Maybe this is a character flaw. We all have them. There are worse things than leaving vital things undone in order to screw around making homemade treats from the weeds in your yard.

Or maybe it’s a good thing to stop trying to be a productivity machine all the time.

The world is full of advice for turning yourself into an efficient producer. You can do that if you want. I suggest you sometimes screw around for a few hours instead.

You and your lawn can both have personalities

Every spring, my lawn produces thousands of pretty violets. It’s normal for your lawn to include things like violets and dandelions and broadleaf plantain, and these are all things I occasionally harvest and use. Nothing would induce me to spray poison on my grass in order to force it into a toxic monoculture.

Some people will devote time, effort and money into forcing their lawns to become uniform, empty and personality-free spaces that meet an arbitrary aesthetic ideal; you can do the same thing to yourself if you want. Maybe you feel pressured to do so.

But you don’t have to. You can choose to appreciate things for their true nature. Come on! Beautiful violet bursts of color in the spring, pretty yellow splotches of dandelion all summer — how are unrelenting blades of grass superior? Give a thought to what your true nature might be if you let yourself grow wild.

I see violets as a welcome sign of spring

Maybe that’s why I like to use them in some way every year. Sometimes I candy them and use them to decorate cakes.

This violet cake, which we made a couple of years ago, was delicious. The grandkids (cropped for privacy) decorated it themselves using my candied violets. They were 5 and 9 at the time. I highly recommend the Perfect Swiss Meringue Buttercream from Sally’s Baking that I used. (Photo by Michelle Teheux)

One spring, I tried to make violet liqueur by soaking the blossoms in vodka, but I wasn’t happy with the results. Violet syrup and candied violets worked better for me.

We held off on the first mow of the season — I think that’s good for the health of the lawn anyway — so I could pick the violets first. I have many more violets in the backyard, but I have two dogs who run around freely there, so I’m not ingesting any of those violets. I limit myself to front-yard foraging only.

It will take longer than you think

There is no fast, efficient method of picking violets, and you will need several cups to make syrup. But you’ll be doing this in the early spring, when sitting in grass under warm morning sunshine feels almost like a religious experience after the horrors of winter — I don’t like cold weather.

I used a colander as a collection basket, making it easier to give the blossoms a rinse afterward.

Then comes the hard part — plucking petals! It’s easy enough to remove the stems, but I didn’t want the astringency of the green parts in my syrup. The proper term for the green bits that hold the petals is calyx. I know this only because I just looked it up. I’m not going to remember that after today and will probably keep thinking of it as “green bits.”

I stumbled onto a very good tip

This is the closest thing to a productivity hack as there is for making the process of plucking petals from the calyx much faster, and I’ll pass it onto you — talk someone else into helping you.

Get your partner to help pluck petals. (Photo by Michelle Teheux)

I somehow convinced my husband — who has a demanding job plus a recording studio plus lots of pressing fixer-upper house projects that desperately need to be done — that the best use of his time on a particular Sunday morning was plucking petals.

He found it surprisingly meditative. I’ve noticed the same thing when doing things like hand-sewing. It’s true of many kitchen tasks, like making homemade egg noodles. Not everything needs to be done in peak productivity mode, people. Sometimes doing some quiet, mindless things with your own actual hands is good for you.

I ended up doing most of it, but my husband didn’t hate helping me with the project.

You can buy all the flavored syrups you want. Some are mass-produced and full of additives but you can spend the money for the real hand-crafted deal if you want. I once paid a fortune to a farmer for a bottle of maple syrup he made by hand, and it was worth it.

You could do that and then pay someone else for a meditation course, I suppose. I cut out the middleman and made a flask of violet syrup instead.

It was not that I had a pressing need for violet syrup

At no time have I beat my breast in dismay: “I simply must have violet syrup, but alas, there is none at Walmart! Whatever shall I do?”

I had to invent a need for it, and that meant inviting people over and cooking for them. I asked two friends to come to my house for violet tea on the deck. I incorporated violets into the menu as much as I could.

I laid down the law when they arrived: They would be responsible for ingesting as much violet syrup as possible. The champagne was for violet mimosas. The lemonade was a great vehicle for violet syrup. The pot of tea was to be sweetened by — I’ll let you guess.

It’s pretty, right? (Photo by Michelle Teheux)

I served individual pavlovas filled with whipped cream sweetened with violet syrup — I hoped they’d turn out a bit more lavender than they did. I’d planned to candy some more violets to decorate them, but ran out of time and used berries instead. You can’t do everything.

If you make pavlovas from egg whites, you may as well make lemon curd from the yolks, so I did — that was a big hit, maybe because I didn’t force any violet syrup into it. I wish now I’d thought of it!

Another missed opportunity I just now thought of was the possibility of open-faced cream-cheese violet sandwiches. My sandwich fillings were things like cucumbers, sprouts, avocado and cheese. Pressing a few fresh blossoms or a sprinkling of petals into cream cheese would have been quite pretty. I probably could have also gotten artistic with some other herbs and made some designs.

Here’s part of the spread — the violet syrup is in the glass flask toward the back. The pavlovas are filled with violet whipped cream, but they’re not as colorful as I’d hoped. The teapot is under the house-shaped tea cozy. (Photo by Michelle Teheux)

Next time, perhaps.

Violets and books go well together

I pressed a couple of my favorite books onto each friend as they left, because no matter what you come to my house for, there will probably be a conversation about books and if you show even the slightest interest, you will walk off with a book under your arm.

One of my friends mentioned T.H. White’s The Once and Future King as possibly her favorite book ever. It’s a favorite of mine, as well — I have two raggedy copies, so I forced one on the friend who hadn’t read it. She promised to read it after she finishes reading my own book. I approved of that order.

The other friend unwisely asked about the copy of Allie Brosh’s Solutions and Other Problems that was sitting on my coffee table. I thought by now all my friends knew better than to show an interest in a book in my house. I’m essentially a public library, except nobody in your public library will force you to read things or attempt to stuff you full of homemade treats.

This friend was just getting over a nasty respiratory illness.

So I prescribed the Brosh book, which is so hysterical it would make anybody feel better. She had no choice but to take it with her. It turns out violet syrup is a traditional remedy for coughs and sore throats, too. I may not be a doctor, but I feel my prescription of a funny book and some violet syrup was an appropriate treatment.

The violet tea was a nice celebration of spring that probably wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t need to manufacture a reason to use violet syrup, and this year I’ll probably do it again but with more people. And I’ll find time to get some violets candied. That’s still my favorite thing to do with violets.

How to make violet syrup:

While thinking about how your life is going so far, pick as many violets as you have patience for. Try to get at least a couple of cups. Rinse them and pluck the petals, then measure what you’ve got.

Consider moving abroad.

Boil half as many cups of water as you have violets and pour it over the petals. Read a book or listen to music as you allow the mixture to steep for 12–24 hours, depending on what other stuff you have going on and what you feel like doing. Drain. Measure the resulting violet tea. Add two cups of white sugar for every cup of tea.

Think about the Westworld quote about “violent delights” and rewrite it to be about “violet delights.”

Heat slowly until you have syrup. Do not let the mixture boil or you’ll lose the delicate color. It will seem to take forever, but if you turn up the heat you’ll ruin it so don’t. A double-boiler is a good idea if, like me, you tend to be impatient. This is not a process for impatient people.

Wonder why you’re so impatient. Is this a nature or nurture thing in your case? Was your mother impatient?

Once it seems thick enough, refrigerate the syrup. Spend the next couple of weeks figuring out creative ways to use it.

The last and most important step: Force some of it onto your friends.

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here and on Medium. I also have a new Substack aimed at authors who want to self-publish books, called The Indie Author. My most recent book is Strapped: Fighting for the soul of the American working class. My most recent novel is The Trailer Park Rules. If you prefer to give a one-time tip, I accept Ko-fi.

All wealthy families are alike; each poor family is poor in its own way.
— Leo Tolstoy, if he had written about a trailer park

For residents of the Loire Mobile Home Park, surviving means understanding which rules to follow and which to break. Each has landed in the trailer park for wildly different reasons.

Jonesy is a failed journalist with one dream left. Angel is the kind of irresponsible single mother society just shakes its head about, and her daughter Maya is the kid everybody overlooks. Jimmy and Janiece Jackson wanted to be the first in their families to achieve the American dream, but all the positive attitude in the world can’t solve their predicament. Darren is a disabled man trying to enjoy his life despite a dark past. Kaitlin is a former stripper with a sugar daddy, while Shirley is an older lady who has come down in the world and lives in denial. Nancy runs the park like a tyrant but finds out when a larger corporation takes over that she’s not different from the residents.

When the new owners jack up the lot rent, the lives of everyone in the park shift dramatically and in some cases tragically.

Welcome to the Loire Mobile Home Park! Please observe all rules.