How To Make Your Own Nutritional Green Powder

Nutritional Green herbal powders can be a great way to add a boost of extra vitamins and antioxidants to promote beautiful healthy skin from the inside out. At Blooming Wild many of our skincare ingredients come from the garden. We believe that healthy, glowing skin comes from the products you use, but how you fuel your body.

One of the ways that we add a boost of nutrients to our daily diet is through green powders. I like to toss a few spoons of green powder into my smoothie.  I quite enjoyed the convenience of this powder, especially in the winter. Before we had the farm I used to purchase nutritional powders but now we make our own and I’d love to share our method with you. It’s super easy and very inexpensive.

When I look around the garden, there is always an abundance of greens, and some of this goes to waste because we simply can’t eat it all. We’ve started a new tradition where we work on filling jars of green powder over the summer so we have jars of nutrition in our pantry to use in the winter.  To make a green powder all you need is a combination of leafy greens, herbs and other nutritional food ingredients that can be dried and ground up into a powder.

We like to use wild greens such as dandelions and chickweed, cultivated leafy greens like chard and kale, and the leafy tops AND stems of root vegetables such as carrots, turnips, and beets. We have all sorts of herbs and other edible and nutritious greens that go into the mix as well.

Root Vegetable Peels and Tops – Really?

As a food revolution side note, yes we use our root vegetable leaves and stems (and even peels)!  We’ve been conditioned to toss away nutrition such as leafy stems and peels without a thought even though they are nutritious. Carrot skin contains concentrated vitamin C, beta-carotene, and niacin and the carrot tops provide vitamins A, B6, C and K, folate, manganese, niacin, potassium and thiamin, just like the carrot root itself. We work SO HARD to grow our own food, so we are opening our minds and perceptions on how to utilize all parts of the food we grow. It takes a bit of inventiveness because carrot stems aren’t that fun to eat fresh but when you powder them you create a jar of concentrated super food! 

We love to preserve food in a variety of ways and raw nutrition through dehydration is one of my favorites.

We’ve come up with an easy way to pack loads of nutrition into jars by powdering some of the greens that we dehydrate. We start the process in the spring and by late autumn we have full jars of green goodness. Once the jar is full we make sure to stir it up really well to combine all the different ingredients we’ve added to the jar over the summer. With just a bit of effort throughout the summer months we end up with a versatile, nutrient-dense green powder!

• This powder keeps for a long time when stores in an airtight jar
• Green powders are a great survival/emergency food
• They are an easy way to sneak more nutrients into picky family members plates

How to use green powder

Admittedly, not everyone is a fan of green powders. They taste really …. green. There’s a lot of different “subtle ways you can incorporate it into your diet that won’t make you feel like you are sipping on lawn clippings. You can use the green powder in smoothies, tropical fruits and ingredients with loads of flavor work really well.

You can try sprinkling your green powder on salads and as a light seasoning. Sprinkling some green powder into your energy balls is also a great way to use this powder.

You can also add green powder to soups, stews, pasta sauces or as a seasoning for hot foods but heat will destroy some of the nutritional value so try to add at the last moment to maintain as much of the nutritional value as you can.

Start with a small amount and increase as everyone’s culinary palette’s adjusts to the flavor!

How to Dry Greens

If you have a food dehydrator this is your best option when drying greens to perfection. It saves a lot of time and ensures that thicker wetter leaves dry without getting moldy.
The general rule is to dehydrate at 115-125 C degrees depending on what you are drying.

If you don’t have a dehydrator you can try air drying your greens on mesh racks. You will need to keep a good eye on them to ensure the thicker leaves don’t mold. If you live in a humid location, this can be tricky.

Although it is possible to do so, I don’t recommend using the oven. If you accidentally heat the greens higher than 145F, many of the nutrients and necessary enzymes in the plants will be destroyed.There are some tutorials on doing this online.

What’s going into our green powder?

Our green powder is a work in progress and some of the greens we’ll include in this year’s jar include:

kale (leaf and stem)
carrot tops
swiss chard (leaf and stem)
tarragon
dandelion leaf
chick weed
basil
thyme
oregano
celery leaves

You can store the individual greens in separate jars if you don’t want to mix them all together. This can help you formulate a seasoning or powder that you enjoy the flavor of and be more creative with your recipes. I simply toss all of the greens into one jar and enjoy the surprise.

Dandelion Greens Superfood For The Skin

Of course we also make super greens powders for the Blooming Wild skincare collection as well.  Our Woodland soap contains a generous amount of dandelion leaf powder which is wonderful for the skin!

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