Edible Flowers (updated 6/24/2010)

By Claudia (The TP Gardener)

As you stroll around the Tyler Place you will pass many areas of flowerbeds and cross many grassy patches. Did you know that some of the plants are edible? Here is a list of the edible flowers you could find right here at The Tyler Place (or even in your own backyard).

1. Nasturtium: Leaves and petals have a distinct peppery taste and are a great asset to any salad. Leaves are best picked and eaten when still quite small and young.

2.Daisies: the petals are edible and look lovely scattered over a salad. These flowers are perfect for a wonderful flower soup.

3. Roses: the petals are edible, though the white base of the petal tends to be bitter, so is best removed. Rose petals are really lovely when iced and used as decoration on top of birthday cakes or summer flans. Red rose petals are the tastier ones.

5. Sunflower: we all knew that the seeds were edible and delicious, but the buds are also edible, as are the petals which have an interesting taste somewhere between bitter and sweet.

6. Dandelion: Leaves, roots, flowers and buds are all edible. The leaves can be used in salads or brewed into a tea, the flowers and petals used for garnish and in salads. Pick as fresh and young as possible, as they taste more bitter with age.

7. Violas and Pansies: the flowers and petals are pretty when sprinkled on top of salads - or even as decoration on top of fairy cakes.

8. Clover: The whole flower is actually edible and a high source of protein - though better digested when boiled lightly for 5 - 10 minutes. Rabbits and guinea pigs love to eat clover it too.

9. Lavender: really an herb so it is not surprising that the flowers are edible as well as the leaves. The flowers can be used in a similar way to the leaves (needles) and are especially recommended for adding to lamb before cooking. Flowers look beautiful and taste good too in a glass of champagne. But another great thing about lavender is that insects and slugs don't like the scent, so spreading a stem or a few flowers around the deck or picnic area can help to keep annoying gnats away!

11. Peony: In China the fallen petals are parboiled and sweetened as a tea-time delicacy. Peony water was used for drinking in the middle ages. Add peony petals to your summer salad or try floating in punches and lemonades.

12. Impatiens: The flowers have a sweet flavor. They can be used as a garnish in salads or floated in drinks.

13. Geraniums (not the lemon-scented variety), carnations, and the blossoms from apple, cherry and pear trees are also edible

Warning: Before eating any flowers be sure that you can identify what the flower is and that it is indeed safe to eat. People with allergies such as asthma or hay fever are better off avoiding eating edible flowers as it can set off a reaction.

Pre-Season

By Sam Tyler
(one of the third generation)

(Sam is from Boulder, Colorado and will be a Senior at St. Lawrence University majoring in Philosophy and Outdoor Studies. He’s Cam and Karen’s Tyler oldest son, and this will be his second year as one of the Adult Entertainment & Sports staff, another is Becky, JD's sister.)

The lawns are glowing green up here at the Tyler Place, and the pre-season 2010 staff are arriving to take our place next to the 30 year-round staff and family members who’ve been renovating, roofing, decorating, purchasing, program and menu planning, planting, pruning (you get the idea) since last fall.

There is something definitively special about being here to open up the resort before everyone else arrives, a bond that is built between you and your fellow pre-season staff that lingers through the rest of the summer. This past week we groomed the bike trails. “Groom” does not quite cover the clearing of 40 major tree falls, the 11 shin-deep puddles, 2 broken bridges, innumerable mats of matted leaves and sticks, 1 broken pair of clippers, and 15 miles of hauling a chainsaw, 5 gallons of gas, a backpack blower, signs, nails, hammers, and rakes that have pretty successfully put us in our place next to Mother Nature.

But hey, nothing like some good old manual labor to bring in a little team bonding right? Every black eye from taking a branch to the face (thanks Becky…) makes our team a little tighter. Every bruise and pulled muscle hauling the docks into place, or sunburn earned assembling the climbing wall adds a certain measure of pride at our part in prepping and polishing the myriad of details that prepares The Tyler Place for our opening Memorial Day Weekend.

This weekend the rest of our pre-season staff arrives and the buzz around the resort will quickly turn into a dull roar. Staff members have begun to roll in from all over the United States—and the world. You can’t help but feel the energy building. This year we will have the largest number of returning staff the TP has ever seen so prepare yourselves for a lot of familiar faces along with some good new ones. We’ve all been in contact throughout the off-season and have some great new ideas and activities planned for you along with all the old favorites (don’t tell anyone I told you this, but karaoke’s going to be back and bigger than ever). But for now, we’ll enjoy the quiet, the hard work, and the smell of Brett’s BBQ wafting up Old Dock Road. And man, if I could get a dollar for every time Becky Dean said “I freaking love pre-season!” I’ll be a wealthy man by the time you begin to arrive in two weeks. Can’t wait to see you all then!

Spring & Summer Vegetables

MORE REFLECTIONS FROM A T.P. CHILDHOOD By Ted Tyler

Claudia’s new raised beds garden (west side of the clay tennis courts) brings back memories of the late 1930’s and early ‘40’s when the T.P. was still Missisquoi Farm. (It’s been that long since we’ve had a real vegetable garden contributing seasonal herbs and produce to the table.) In those days a large garden occupied the area between the barn with its out-buildings and Old Dock and Shipyard Bay roads, subsequently displaced by a horse/pony riding ring and now by the soccer field southeast of the Pool Complex.


No one born since World War II can fully appreciate the mouth-watering succulence of each crop of vegetables as it matured in a rural area. In those days Boston, New York and other cities received some produce as vegetables ripened in more southerly states, but these didn’t percolate to the “sticks”. Vermonters’ tomatoes, properly tended, provided the real thing into October, but for all intents and purposes the only fresh vegetables after that month until the following June were root vegetables kept in sand or otherwise in the cellar. Of course everyone “canned” in mason jars, but preserved green beans (or pretty much anything else) versus the real thing, freshly picked, offered no comparison at all.


The earliest spring “vegetable” was horseradish. As far as kids were concerned, this was not considered a plus. An earlier entry for those who knew to dig when the ground had just begun to thaw, but not too late, was parsnips, amazingly sweeter than if they had been harvested and consumed in the fall. However, the first real green vegetable was asparagus – hugely delicious and available in early May, a good month before anything but the salad vegetables (chives, lettuce, radishes and the like). And then that marvelous feast: the peas had come in! Plate after lip-smacking plate, unadorned except with salt, pepper and plenty of butter.


By late June and for the rest of the summer, life was good. Green and yellow beans (limas took the whole summer to mature) picked young and seedless. Summer squash. Beet greens with young beets attached. I smack my lips in recollection. The two best came midsummer and were the subject of substantial competition: who could bring in the first sweet corn or ripe tomato before August 1st? To this day at any price I’ve never found a tomato in the off-season that tastes like a tomato. And in those days (unlike today) corn-on-the-cob was overripe (or absent) with the exception of two months – August and September. August had meals with just one entrée – corn (plus butter and salt) - and finishing off eight to ten ears at a meal was no major feat.


I’ve excluded from this exposition the produce of the land – which was a major supplement in the decades referred to. Fiddleheads (yum!), cattails, young dandelions all were part of the spring larder, as were strawberries, cherries, red raspberries, black raspberries and blackberries in the summer, and puffballs and butternuts in the fall.


So getting back to 2010 I hate to give away Claudia’s secrets, but here are some of what you may find in her new garden: asparagus, beans, beets, cherry tomatoes, carrots, celery, cucumbers, eggplant, garlic, herbs (many varieties) flowers (for dining room), lettuce, onions, peas, peppers (a variety), potatoes, radishes, summer squash, tomatoes, zucchini. How sweet it is!

Do you know the Ropes?

If you've ever tried the TP Low Ropes Course you know it takes focus, teamwork and some trusty sidekicks. To keep the activity fresh, Children's Program Director Gen Morley, along with Chad Tyler, enjoyed a Low Ropes training class a few weeks ago at the Petra Cliffs Group site in Burlington. The program featured acclaimed presenters Mike Anderson, M.Ed, Jim Cain, Ph.D., and Jen Stanchfield, M.S., who’s years of experience in teamwork and teamplay taught our TP twosome a few new tricks of the trade!

Gen & Chad participated in twelve activities. "Everything they did was new to us," says Gen who gained a few fresh strategies for the kids program. From detangling ropes to carry cans on their feet, the class offered strategies for how to promote problem solving exercises and fun positive play, with something for everybody. So check out the newest features of the Low Ropes course this summer. “It’s so fun,” says Gen, “The biggest danger is that you might pee your pants laughing!”

Fung Shui Anyone? By Chad Tyler

It looks like our housekeeping staff are keeping their towel origami skills sharp by creating an Andy Goldsworthy sculpture using the books in the sunroom. We have just touched up the lobby and lounge and this is what I found after Lori (our head of housekeeping) came through to clean. Who knew most book spines came in six basic colors? What would be really interesting is to see if the content is similar as well. Maybe some enterprising couch potato amongst our guests can do the research.

You too can be the Big Kahuna! by Quintin

Last summer, Sean “Captain Sand” Hutchinson (one of our waterfront instructors from South Africa) took a dinged adult kayak paddle and cut one of the blades off. He proceeded to spear on a tennis ball as a handle and started using this newly crafted, extra-long devise in a strange way. Sean would hop on a big windsurfing board without the sail, stand up and paddle all around the resort’s shoreline. We would look at each other, scratch our heads and say: “What is he thinking?” Well we now know. He was doing what has become increasingly popular back home and around the world, stand-up paddleboarding.

Here at the Tyler Place Family Resort, Kingfisher Bay may soon be nicknamed Waikiki Bay. The stand-up paddleboarding craze has hit our shores! Sean, who is coming back this summer, will be glad to know the Tyler Place has purchased a couple of new Liquid Shredder paddle boards. These are large and soft and have a no-slip surface. You can go alone or take your kid along for a ride. A child can even get his or her own small paddle.

Get the feeling of walking on water (and a great work out) as you explore about. Be one with the turtles and ducks as you glide across the surface. The stand-up stance gives you a unique perspective, with a good view of the landscape above, as well as the schools of minnows (and perhaps a northern pike) lurking below in the shallows. On a windy or big wave day, see if you can catch a ride. Being swamped by a huge Mastercraft wake will never be so much fun. Yes, you too can be the Big Kahuna!

Sardines

More Tales of a Tyler Place Youth
By Ted Tyler

Sardines are not to be found among the eighty-odd fish species in Lake Champlain. Nonetheless they, or more accurately “it”, was a frequent nighttime presence (and pleasure) from my early childhood on.

Sardines is a game – played inside and after it is quite dark. Like many games, it started with a deck of cards. Highest card drawn had the privilege of being the first hider.

The approved venue was a large house, the more floors and rooms and closets and nooks and beds to crawl under, the better. One with two sets of stairways and a fireplace with a smidgeon of light – perfect. In those days Farmhouse Up and Down were one unit occupied by the Wristons – and that was often the locus, Farmhouse West being included in later years. When the Old Inn (the Franklin House) was purchased near the end of World War II – four stories including the huge attic, staircases at either end – it was baptized with a (completely terrifying) game of Sardines.

Getting back to the rules of the game, almost all light in the building was extinguished. Everyone but the hider would retreat into a bathroom and stay there, giving the hider (who after all, had to navigate in the dark) sufficient time to secrete herself. After three minutes or so, the group would stumble forth.

Now as you have surmised, this game was like hide and seek in the dark, but there was more to it than that. True enough, whoever found the hider first got to be the hider for the next round – so it was quite competitive. But when the hider was found, you didn’t announce it. Quite the contrary, you ever-so-quietly slid under the bed (or wherever) next to the hider and waited for the next searcher to find the two of you, and so on and so on until one poor soul might be left wandering around the house wondering where everyone had disappeared to. Actually this last happened rarely, because by the time six or seven people were crammed together under the bed, the giggling got sufficiently intense so only the stone deaf couldn’t find you.

Three short anecdotes of “Sardines games I especially remember” – in chronological order:

1. Like many of our games, Sardines was “family” and for all ages. Once when I was five years old or so, I was the hider. My six foot plus uncle, Deke Wriston, assisted me in hiding and placed me seven feet up on top of a large wardrobe. No one ever found me.

2. At law school age we played a game in the old Inn where the rooms had twelve foot ceilings. I dreamed up a perfect place to hide – on top of a door in one of the guest rooms where there was enough space to crouch and (because the door was in a corner of the room) I could balance myself with a hand on each of two walls. Searchers could enter and leave the room (as long as they didn’t close the door completely shut) and I could simply swing with the door. It worked great – but (there must have been some connection) an hour or so later I was being driven to a Burlington hospital at 70 miles per hour (that was fast then) with my first and only kidney stone.

3. Fast forward to just twenty years ago and the stone house in Swanton. Cathy and I had recently begun our relationship. My niece Pixita’s connection with Luke was new as well, or at least we didn’t know each other well. It was Christmas time and a game of Sardines had been underway, from which Cathy and I snuck out and went to bed. A short while later Luke opened the door, felt around a bit and got in bed with us. We chatted a bit (quietly of course). Luke became silent for a moment and then said, “You aren’t playing this game, are you?”