Recently in Wild edible plants Category

Heads up, blog readers, especially those of you interested in wild edible plants--I have an exciting announcement to make!

New Wild Food Girl site:

Etmarciniec.com is now the proud parent of a new baby bloglet dedicated solely to the topic of wild edible and medicinal plants as well as other wild food. Please oh please visit wildfoodgirl.com. (And if you want, you can join the RSS feed in the upper right corner.) I've posted two new articles already, one related to goosefoot and the other to cow parsnip. I do not intent to post any new wild food articles here at etmarciniec.com, so please make the move with me if wild edible plants is your reason for visiting this site.

What happens to the old content?

After much thought, I decided to leave most of the old articles up here at etmarciniec.com for ease of browsing, although I may set up a 303 redirect on a few of the most highly-searched pages if I can figure out how on earth to do that without screwing things up, heh.

In the meantime, thanks so much for reading and I hope to hear from you over at wildfoodgirl.com.

-Erica 

Gregg and I have found yet another tasty wild green to supplement our store-bought diet: fireweed!

Not to be confused with other plants referred to by the same common name (I found reference to one in an older wild edible plants guide), the plant of which I write is Epilobium angustifolium.

I first read about it in Gregory L. Tilford's Edible and Medicinal Plants of the West. In fact, the book's cover is adorned with a montage of fireweed flowers atop a blown-up image of a fireweed leaf, so Tilford must think highly of the plant.

So many people have told me that the "bluebell" is edible, and yet, despite my growing collection of wild edible plants literature, I have found only one reference to it as a food source. Thus, much of my evidence for the plant's edibility is circumstantial.

"The leaves are awesome," said my friend Rachel Sowers, a gardener by trade, as we rode up the chairlift late season at Arapahoe Basin. "If you're camping in the backcountry you can add the leaves to a salad. They're super tasty," she said.

And Gregg's sister Wendy has a friend who supposedly "goes gaga for bluebells," but who has, on occasion, eaten enough of the small blue bell-shaped flowers to become sick.

Plants do seem to grow slowly when you scrutinize them every day, and that's exactly what I've been doing to the few wild plants that endure the firm, rocky soil and high elevation of our backyard. I wonder if they appreciate the attention? (Probably not if they realized that I am diabolically hashing up plans to cook them for dinner...)

As a whole, the wild foods literature speaks highly of shoots and young leaves. The difficulty is that the young plants are often more difficult to identify than mature plants.

I hope I'm not boring you too much with my recent dandelion obsession, but we enjoyed yesterday's dandelion green salad so much that I figured I'd post it now and give the other wild plants a little more time to grow before I start messing with them.  

Since I'm referring to dandelions as "wild plants" here, it's probably a good time to mention an interesting bit I read yesterday in Samuel Thayer's book, The Forager's Harvest: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, & Preparing Edible Wild Plants (2006) in a section about "The History of Foraging and Wild Food Literature." Thayer explains the way in which much of the Native American knowledge about edible wild plants was lost in the early days of European settlement, in part due to the fact that to eat wild plants was stigmatized as "savage" among European settlers. The few plants that were acceptable to eat in times of food shortage, he explains, were "dandelion, chicory, plantain, stinging nettle, curly dock, sow thistle" (and the list continues)--plants that the settlers brought with them. Thayer makes a distinction between these "quasi-wild, human-dependent agricultural tag-alongs that came from Europe" (which he says dominate the wild plants literature), and true, native wild plants.

Potage Parmentier, or potato leek soup, is the first recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It is also the first recipe that Julia Powell prepares after stealing her mother's 1967 edition of the book and embarking upon a year-long cooking project to prepare every recipe in MtAoFC, a project that became first a blog, then a book, and then a movie.

For my third book of the spring, then, I picked up Powell's Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, and of course it probably goes without saying that I am finding the story inspiring, at the very least, because of my own recent forays into blogdom. Aside from that, however, I also find myself wanting to cook some of the recipes over which Julie sweats (except maybe the aspics, which require the boiling of calves' hooves).

Last night I prepared "Dandelion Saute," a recipe from my recently acquired Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places by "Wildman" Steve Brill (the man who, incidentally, was arrested for eating dandelions in New York City's Central Park before being invited to do a stint as a naturalist leading tours there for the city). "This is one of the best ways to learn how to appreciate the flavor of dandelions," Brill comments next to the recipe, so I figured it was a good place to start.

Dandelion greens seem to be a logical first choice for would-be wild edible plant aficionados--and yet for some reason, I didn't try them until yesterday. (I tasted a lot of wild plants when I was growing up on the east coast, but usually late in the season after they had matured and were easiest to identify.) This spring, however, I am dedicating myself to the search for edible young shoots and leaves. The environs, of course, are somewhat limiting. Here in the Rockies above 11,000 feet the snow is just melting away now, and the few plants that grow at this altitude are barely starting to appear. 

There's a pot of mullein and juniper berry tea simmering on my stove right now--the mullein because I've grown to love the taste, and the juniper berries as part of a far-fetched effort to curb the (ahem) gas problem I have been suffering of late. You see, in their out-of-print book, Common Edible and Medicinal Plants of Colorado (1979), Kathryn G. and Andrew L. March explain that among other medicinal uses, juniper berries can be used to reduce intestinal gas. So I figure if I can get them to work for that purpose, surely Gregg will appreciate it.

It's probably more than a little ironic that in my search for Colorado gold, the more fool's gold I find poking through the tailings piles, the more I conclude that I'm on the right path. Hopefully this is not a metaphor for my life.

Some consider the goal of writing for a living (particularly fiction) to be similarly misguided. And I won't deny that to date it's still fool's gold for me too--but shiny, wonderful fool's gold nonetheless...

The blog is a good outlet and I have neglected it recently in pursuit of that other gold, but I wanted to take a minute to explain myself. Last month, 75% of my traffic to the blog came from direct addresses--so, many thanks to those of you who bookmarked me and keep coming back for more of this rambling. I'm down 10% in that category now, probably because I dropped the blog like a hot potato 10 days ago and haven't posted a new entry since. There are a couple of reasons for this, and you can expect the pattern to continue for a little while--possibly for a long while until the wild edible plants start poking up their spring shoots.

The season for wild edible greens is winding down now, at least here at the house above 11,000 feet in the Colorado Rockies. This fact posed a challenge when Cattail Bob Seebeck invited Gregg and I to attend a potluck at his house, since I was determined to bring a dish featuring wild edible plants in his honor. Thankfully, we had nearly a mason jar full of pennycress seeds on hand. Hoping to include a wild green as well, I took a walk around the house--and that's when the peppergrass occurred to me.

I speak here of Lepidium spp., as presented in Cattail Bob's book, Best-Tasting Wild Plants of Colorado and the Rockies (1998). Peppergrass appears to be a hardy plant, as the plants in the back yard have survived several frosts and snowfalls to date. The seeds and leaves have a spicy, peppery flavor that work well raw in salads or cooked in soups and stir fries, although the peppery flavor diminishes with cooking. As Cattail Bob explains, peppergrass will often produce a second crop of small plants in August and September, which explains why we still have some growing in the yard.

As my collection of wild edible plant identification guides grows, I have been able to likewise grow my knowledge of the resources available to the would-be forager.

This review has been a long time coming, but the Peterson Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants: Eastern/Central North America by Lee Allen Peterson (1977, 33rd printing) is by far the most comprehensive field identification guide I have examined, in keeping with the Peterson guide series made famous by Lee Allen's father, Roger Tory Peterson.

[Edit 6/1/10: Since writing this entry, I have acquired Steve Brill's Identifying & Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants, which is also quite comprehensive, and Samuel Thayer's The Forager's Harvest, in which he calls into question the edibility of at least two of the plants recommended by Peterson (certain water lily tubers, which Thayer says are actuallly poisonous.) As you can imagine, that put the fear of god in me--and so now, in an effort to make this review as honest as possible in light of new information, I will pass that concern along to you. As for me--I have the book and find it quite useful. However, knowing at the very least that there is some controversy, I will continue to cross-reference and use careful judgment about plants that are not widely corroborated in print and online references. Just so you know, Thayer asserts that a number of other wild edible plant books out there also have errors, likely caused by some instances of an author copying another author's accounts of a plant without testing it him or herself. So, do with that what you will. And now, on to the rest of the original entry and what I did and still do like about the Peterson guide...] 

If we hadn't promised to come down to Denver and watch the kitties, then we wouldn't have stopped in the foothills and discovered our very first wild plums. Likewise, if we hadn't found the wild plums, Cody would not have enjoyed so many hours of distraction with the fun roly poly little things.

At first, Cody tried to pick them up with his paw, ultimately batting them out of the bowl and staring bemusedly after them. Later, he progressed to picking them up with his teeth, and not without some munching success before Gregg worriedly extracted them one by one from his mouth, washed them off, and put them back in the bowl for the humans.

"I think he must like the smell of the plums," Gregg said, which might explain why the cherry tomatoes, similar in size and shape, remain untouched.

One of the definitions of a civilized people, in contrast to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, is the advent of and reliance on agriculture as a food source. Arguably, the discovery came about naturally as people brought back seed-bearing food plants to their campsites and processed them, only to return the next year and find the same food plants growing nearby.

The late author Euell Gibbons reflects on this idea in Stalking the Faraway Places (1973), when he, his niece and nephew, and a team from National Geographic magazine pitch camp near some cliff dwellings in the Utah desert as a part of a foraging expedition. "I found the immediate neighborhood of these ruins very interesting, botanically," Gibbons states. "The rhubarb dock, Mormon tea, prickly pear, and the thistle we had been gathering grew more plentifully near the ruins than elsewhere. Just below the ruins was almost a thicket of serviceberry in full bloom. ....Did these semi-agricultural primitives have anything to do with the fact that these plants grew here?"

The more I read, the more medicinal uses I find for mullein--that tall, fuzzy, pale green plant with the big leaves that you see all over the place, especially on roadsides, from New England to the Rocky Mountains and everywhere in between. 

Mullein is not a native species. It's another one of a long list of plants that was brought over by European settlers, but far from being considered an invader, it quickly demonstrated its value. Native American tribes adopted mullein for its medicinal qualities (Brill, 1994 ). Today, it is appreciated for being a good soil-regenerator and is common to waste areas, disturbed soil, and roadsides, particularly areas with dry, sandy soil and a high alkali content.

I first read about mullein's medicinal uses in Common Edible and Medicinal Plants of Colorado (1979) by Kathryn G. and Andrew L. March. "A cold can't be cured till it has run its course, but to help one along and relieve sore throat and cough nothing is superior to this gentle herb," they state. "An ounce of the dried leaves or the equivalent of fresh (a handful) can be infused in a pint of water, or better yet, boiled for ten minutes in a pint of milk, strained through a close-woven white cloth napkin to remove fine hairs, and taken with a little honey a half-cup at a time." The March's promise "a mild sedative effect" and that "a decoction or infusion also helps diarrhea."

It's September 21st and there's "happy snow" falling outside my window, a fact which tickles me giddy with glee. There's a fire going in the wood stove too and I'm cozy as I can possibly be, sitting here with a cup of hot steaming mullein tea in hand. (I harvested this mullein from the wilds myself, and it has many medicinal uses--a topic which you can bet I will get back to in a subsequent entry). But right now, let's talk about the snow.

Owing to the fact that we live above 11,000 feet in the Rocky Mountains, this is not the first early season snow we've had. Several times now we have awoken early morning to see Mount Silverheels in the distance covered in a light dusting of snow all the way down to treeline. We've also hiked up on Pennsylvania Mountain in mixed weather conditions. Occasionally, there has even been snow--or graupel--falling at the house, but each time it's stopped and started melting shortly thereafter.

I'm posting this entry as "Part II" because I wrote an earlier piece on the first half of the book after it rode away from me, along with a backpack full of our belongings, in a New York City cab last month. When I returned to Colorado, however, Gregg gifted me a paperback copy of the book, which he acquired second-hand at the newly-opened Printed Page bookshop in Denver.

By way of review, Michael Pollan uses the first part of In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, to critique what he calls "nutritionism," the tendency of food science and national policy over the last several decades to look at food and healthy eating in terms of individual nutrients, an approach that has allowed the producers of "food-like substances" to make outrageous nutritional claims and in effect wrested the expertise of eating from both mom and the American populace and handed it over to the "experts." As a result, Pollan argues, we have actually become more confused about what we should eat and less healthy as a people.

To clarify the title of this entry, we gathered the red currants from the shoulder of Pennsylvania Mountain, which is in "my backyard" in the figurative rather than the literal sense.

This was the day after our visit to Cattail Bob's Seebeck's wild plant identification class in Drake, Colorado, where he introduced us to red currants, golden currants, and black currants among myriad other wild edible plants. We had to deal with some inclement weather driving home from the class in Drake, but the next day we awoke and looked out the window to find a clear blue sky and Mount Silverheels covered with snow all the way down to treeline. So, after a little work and a few coffees we headed up to our usual hiking spot--which starts at treeline and then comes out above it--in the hopes of happening upon some snow.

This entry about our visit to Cattail Bob Seebeck's mountain property to learn nearly 100 wild edible plants is much overdue; it's just that I experienced information overload there on the mountaintop in the rain that day, and I didn't know how to begin or what to include afterwards.

By way of review, renowned wild edible plants author and guide Cattail Bob invited me and a friend to attend his last class of the season on September 12, 2009, in Drake, Colorado. This invitation came in sort of a roundabout way. My sister bought me his book, Best-Tasting Wild Plants of Colorado and the Rockies (1998), as a gift for my 35th birthday. However, when Cattail Bob wrote a personalized greeting addressed to her instead of me on the receipt, she took charge and contacted him (as my sister is wont to do) and told him about my blog, specifically the entry where I glowingly review his book. So Cattail Bob contacted us with his generous invitation, and the rest is history.

The name kinnikinnik is a Native American word that translates as "smoking mixture," according to Gregory L. Tilford in Edible and Medicinal Plants of the West (1997). The leaves of the kinnikinnik plant were mixed with other dried plants and smoked both ceremonially and recreationally by Native Americans.

The term comes from the Algonkian family of native languages, explain Kathryn G. and Andrew L. March in Common Edible and Medicinal Plants of Colorado (1979). It has many different spellings, some with a "ck" and some without the second "n" in the middle of the word. The Marchs' reasoning for choosing the above spelling is both amusing and endearing; they like the fact that it is a palindrome--a word that reads the same when spelled backwards.

It seems fitting to be writing a second entry on pennycress today. Pennycress was the first wild edible plant I identified this year, the one that inspired me to start blogging about wild edible plants in the first place. I identified my first pennycress after studying photos of it in Cattail Bob Seebeck's book, Best-Tasting Wild Plants of Colorado and the Rocky Mountains. Today, I awoke with plans to blog about pennycress seeds. I turned on my computer and lo and behold, there was a comment on my blog from Cattail Bob himself, along with a warm invitation to attend his class tomorrow in Drake, Colorado! I seriously could not be more excited. And somehow it seems like I've come full circle with the pennycress.