Chive blossom vinegar 🌿 Easy, delicious and beautiful

hey everyone aaron from the impatient gardener so i'm not sure if you can see behind me but this is the circle garden it's a little blown out right now but about half of the circle garden chives are blooming right now so when i did that video earlier this year about how i made my chive hedge i talked a little bit about one of my favorite things to do is to make chai vinegar a lot of you expressed interest in that so i thought i'd show you how i'm making some chai vinegar today it's truly the easiest thing you could possibly make only about half of the chive hedge is blooming right now which is unusual usually it blooms all at the same time i think it's probably because we've been in such a drought and the sunnier side the side that's sunnier in the morning seems to not be blooming yet so i think maybe it's a little stressed so here you can see this whole side of chives uh is in bloom i'm going to try to keep you in the shade now some of these i'm a little late on some of these some of these flowers are a little crispy you want to get them when the flowers are sort of nice and full before they start drying down but you can even use the dried ones if you want and the process of doing this is so easy harvesting chai flowers is as simple as just grasping underneath them and pulling if you get a little bit of stem that's fine you just go through there pop them all off it couldn't be any easier i'm putting these straight into the spinner part of a salad spinner which i use all the time during the growing season because i just don't know how you get vegetables clean and dry effectively without it just want to quickly show you the climbing hydrangea going up the former ash tree just starting to come into flower and despite the dry weather it is looking really really good and my peonies are finally blooming these are i think the only plants original to the house that are still here in fact some of them have flopped i should have cut those but so pretty no idea this is just some old-fashioned variety no idea what it is looking quite fetching with the wine and roses why gila which is blooming i would say i'd say the wine and roses why gila looks better bloom wise than it ever has just looks amazing this year looks so nice with that peony which is a very light pink behind it okay back to chai vinegar okay so now we have all our chai flowers you know the really nice thing about this you guys is that when some people think that chives are very weedy one of the problems they might have is that they're letting them go to seed and if you let them go to seed you will have chives everywhere so it's important to get rid of your flowers either by just deadheading your plants or by doing something with those flowers before they get to the part where they're setting seed okay so now i'm just gonna do super cold water and what i like to do is actually fill up the the bowl on the salad spinner and then float everything in there because if you put water right on these you can really kind of destroy the blooms so because they are a little bit delicate so i like to just sort of gently float them in there and then we'll swish them around if the flowers break apart it's not that big of a deal because you're going to strain this before you actually get to the part where you use this but sort of nicer when they stay intact okay oh pretty clean do you guys do that too when you're washing off food from your garden and wondering what sort of bug has emerged okay let those soak for a little bit just to make sure that anything that might be in there just sort of floats out of them okay so this is where it gets actually super easy the recipe is basically one part chai flowers to one part white wine vinegar you could probably make this with regular white vinegar too i like the white wine vinegar better my grocery store sells two brands i bought this one now you're going to put this into like mason jars or some sort of like storage by the way well i guess i will measure for the purposes of doesn't matter if there's a little bit of stem left on it because this all is going to get strained okay so i just sort of like gently pack them in there and then try to get them in to the jar i'm going to start with about two cups of chai flowers in each one i mean once again this is my favorite kind of recipe you could absolutely just eyeball this was that two yes that's two all right now let's do two cups of each one of these is a cup and a half so i should be able to do three bottles and if you want it a little more chivey put in more and i probably will save these bottles about half the bottle then lids give them just a little bit of a shake if i pick up by the way if i pick up more white white vinegar i will fill that one to the top i like to have everything in it covered which i didn't quite manage to do sort of like when you make pickles okay so that's what it looks like right now basically what you do now is you let these put these in your pantry let them sit somewhere for a couple of weeks the color of the vinegar will turn a beautiful pink color and i have used this within days i have used it you know after a couple of weeks the flavor does obviously get better if you wait a little bit longer but if i'm in a pinch i'll use it right away so anyways put this put this away don't think about it you don't have to do anything else to it and then after two weeks or so take a strainer and strain this out you don't want any of those pieces of flour in there and then you put it back into your bottles or if you have a prettier bottle that you want to put it in that's fine too but then you just stick it right back in those same bottles and maybe take the label off whatever you want and it is a delicious vinegar i love it on salads it's actually particularly good if you put a little bit of vinegar in your potato salad but we eat a salad almost every night especially this time of year when things are coming out of the garden and this flavor is so good it's not sharp oniony it's just a hint of onion so good okay that's chai vinegar for you i hope you guys will try this this year in your garden um or give it a shot let me know if you have tried it already and what you think about it i love it i think it's one of my very favorite things um to come out of my garden to be honest i don't do a lot of preserving or canning or nearly as much of it as i should so when i'm able to do something along those lines i really get a kick out of it all right hope you guys are having a great day in your garden we'll see you soon i'm gonna have to hide these bottles way in the back corner of the pantry because otherwise mr much more patient will put them in the recycling

Channel: The Impatient Gardener

Views: 6,137

Rating: 4.977778 out of 5

Keywords: chives, chive border, chive vinegar, chive blossom, chive blossom vinegar, garden, preserving, vinegar, gardening, herbs

Id: V865IYDcgaA

Length: 8min 36sec (516 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 18 2021