 This is Chico. Welcome to my channel and welcome to my patio. Now what we're gonna do today, this morning, is harvest some grape leaves that we're gonna wash and put in the freezer and when we're ready, we're gonna use to make some dolmas, grape leaves dolmas. Now, this is something that I haven't done in the past. I've seen my grandmother and my mother and the rest of the elders in the family do it for a number of decades, but I've never actually harvested the grape leaves myself and I called up my mom and I asked her what I'm supposed to do and I knew basically, but I wanted to know if there's any little tricks that they had that I had to keep in mind that I hadn't noticed, right? But basically, she told me just to cut the grape leaves and I got a bowl of water here, so I'm just gonna put them in this, okay, and after we get a few, what I'm gonna do is add a little bit of salt onto the water and just give them a wash and when they're wet, I'm gonna dry them a little bit and then I'm gonna you can either do it two ways. You can roll them up. That's what my grandma does. I'm not sure why she rolls it up, but she rolls it up and puts them in the freezer, right? But my mom basically told me I can harvest them and just wash them. Okay, let them dry a little bit or let them dry and then just put them flat on top of each other and put it in the freezer and then when I'm ready to make the dolmas, what I'm gonna do is basically take the grape leaves out and put them in hot water and what that does, it loosens up the grape leaves and then you can take the grape leaves one at a time and make your dolmas and that's probably something what we're gonna do during a cooking stream. Okay, aside from that, I'm gonna go and get our grape leaves and I got a my trusted kitchen scissors here. Okay, so I'm gonna bring them over and just put them in here. I'm not sure how much we're gonna harvest. We're gonna see but what you want to do is harvest the grape leaves in the spring because in the spring the grape leaves are fresh. They're coming out and we're in end of May right now. So I'm getting we're getting close into summer but I was waiting until the grape leaves were big enough, right? So you don't want to grab them, grab the grape leaves towards the end of summer or mid-summer. You want to grab them towards, you know mid-spring, late-spring, early-spring if they're coming out early because they're thinner, right? So you want the grape leaves to be thin. You don't want them to be too thick because it just becomes heavier dolma unless you want heavy dolma, right? But thinner dolma is what the grape leaves is, is really nice thick enough that it doesn't break down when you cook them, okay? So we're gonna harvest some grape leaves. Let's see how long this thing takes us. Cut them right at the stem thing, right? What I'm gonna do is just gonna throw them into the water. We got lots of birds singing and stuff. It's really nice outside. Fantastic grape leaves. Look at this. Awesome. So we got five so far at this rate, it was not gonna take us long at all and these grape leaves are from or the grapes they're from. Take a look at this. Sometimes you get these little bugs on the grapes and there's some that do and I go through and I try to find the leaves that have these little bugs and they burl in there, right? So you see them when you know, there's the grape leaves are puncturing out. You see these little deformities in the grape leaves. So you don't want these ones. So I'm gonna throw this one over the balcony or just become compost slowly, right? But basically these are the ones that you don't want. They got little deformities and even there's little bugs in there, right? Unless you want a little extra protein. Nice leaves. Little bit of yellow in here, but that's okay. Beautiful leaves, beautiful grape leaves. We're gonna make ourselves some duelma later, probably in the summer. And this is a grape vines that are coming over from our neighbor. The main grapes are from the neighbor that I came over, the fencing that they have. And I built that contraption there, this sort of wall about when we came here, when we noticed the grape leaves, I was like, oh wow, there's grape leaves coming. I'm gonna start directing. I'm coming up the patio. And I built that wall about three years ago and it took two years approximately for it to reach up to here. And last year we had it canopy over us, right? So we got shade when we're sitting down here and this year is just growing. I might start directing some of the leaves to come in this direction as well. Right? So we get a nice little canopy and we're gonna have an area where we get lots of sun, right? Fantastic. Look, they're giving off little shoots at the end of these two. Some of them have it. This one's okay too. We use this. That's beautiful. It's amazing having your own plants and stuff that you can harvest. It's in your backyards, right? Let me submerge these. And then what I'm gonna do, I'm just gonna fill up the bowl with water and put salt in it and just give them a nice wash. Okay, let's grab these where they're all bunched up together, right? My grandma would love this. Wow, wow, wow. If I get the opportunity, I'll bring her here for the summer to be facing the same way, right? Lots of tulmah, lots of tulmah. The bug's eating a little bit, so we're not gonna use this one. We just throw it for the compost. Look at this one. This one's beautiful. These ones too. Look at this. Nice and round. Look at this one. What a beautiful leaf. Where is it going? Probably two, two batches of tulmah, which is good for a first try. Fantastic morning.