rosella – Pollywog's Place Blog

We love Rosella here… it is known as the Florida Cranberry, and I love Cranberries, so this was a must for our garden. Rosella is a very pretty plant, and we use the leaves in some recipes, like Butternut Squash Medley, as well. We have been trying to use as many plants as we can from the garden, and this one gets used in so many ways. Mr. Awesome also wants to try some in our favorite cream cheese cookie recipe. I’m also going to try this in our Christmas Bread this year!

Last year, we made a bunch of Rosella Jam, and we still have plenty left, so this year we did something a little different. We have frozen several gallon bags of Rosella, dehydrated some of it for teas, and made some Rosella Sauce… it is so good! We served this at Thanksgiving, in place of the traditional cranberry sauce. I do want to try boiling some of our lemon grass to make a tea to try in place of the plain water for this recipe, but I keep forgetting.

This would probably also freeze really well and make a great gift! It can be used as a jelly or jam as well as an alternative to cranberry sauce.

Continue reading →

Hey guys! It seems like it’s been forever since I’ve sat down to write a post and so much has happened… the most exciting thing is that I’m a GRANDMA! I was able to spend a bit of time with the new parents and I got quite a few snuggles in with the little one before I had to come home. Mr. Awesome and the kids did a great job holding down the fort although the goats did get out and they ate my blackberry bushes. When I asked my husband about it he looked to where I was pointing and said ‘What blackberries?’… they have had quite a hard pruning but I’m hoping they’ll come back better than ever.

We’ve been busy before and after this little ‘vacation’ trying to get our winter gardens in place… the chickens had eaten some of our plants and then someone forgot to water them for a few days so we had a little bit of triage to do and we did have to replace s few things. While planting we are also harvesting what we can from what plants are remaining. I know we really enjoyed the Rosella greens last year so we definitely wanted to give them a go again. I also wanted to try to use some sweet potato leaves as a spinach alternative. I had read something the other day about how it wasn’t always hard to grow different foods but we need to learn to eat what we grow… I really want everything we put our time and energy into to provide us with something whether it’s just nice to look at, to smell, or to eat.

Continue reading →