Weed or Wonder? is a column I wrote for the Appalachian Independent for a couple of years. The online newsletter was developed by a group of concerned citizens--concerned about the journalistic integrity of the local newspaper and wishing for fresh voices and more divergent views via a "Dialogue of Democracy."
My true passion is our natural world, from turtles and newts to tigers and owls. And plants. Particularly beautiful flowers. Particularly wildflowers. Particularly edible and/or culinary plants. Particularly gardening. Particularly foraging. Particularly fungi.
But fungi will have to wait for another episode--especially since my hours of scouring the forest floor today led to the discovery of not one single morel. Still too early, for one thing, and for another: I've never found a morel in my woods. Yet my woods should produce morels. My woods have a northeastern exposure. My woods are hardwoods, particularly oaks and maples. My woods are moist and filled with secret little woodland plants known to grow where morels do. Morels, where art thou? Have you merely hid beneath the leaf litter each spring, camouflaged from my inexperienced eyes?
This year, if a morel exists on my property, I will find it. Now that I no longer can work, I can certainly spend an hour or two in the woods, even if my butt is glued to a boulder because I don't have enough energy to risk my ankles to the deep spring-and-boulder field on the mountain rising behind my "cottage." And now that fungi have stolen two entire paragraphs--they have a way of sneaking up on us, don't they?--I'll list below the plants I've found thus far this spring, and they are few and far between at the moment--we had snow yesterday, for heaven's sake.
Dandelion. Of course, the ubiquitous dandelion (tooth of the lion) is one of the first wildings to green up and is such a nutritious powerhouse and so tasty (early in the year) that it's now sold in grocery stores and makes its way onto the menus of trendy restaurants these days. Dandelion wine, made with the flowers that are still a ways off, is another familiar use of this well-known wonder. I enjoyed miniscule dandelion leaves in my first foraged salad about a week ago, but they were so small I had trouble separating them from their roots and soil. After four or five days of warm temps, the rosettes have now grown larger, and I plan to gather a bunch tomorrow, along with more of the following and anything else edible that has popped up. Sadly, temps again dropped into the 20s the last couple of days, but supposedly they're heading back up again.
Bitter Cress. This pretty little rosette in the mustard family outnumbers the dandelions in my yard. I picked a number of these for last week's salad; just like the dandelions, these had just begun to sprout, so these greens were tres petite. Some of the plants are already sporting tiny white flowers.
Winter Cress. I didn't actually eat this last week because, strangely enough, I didn't recognize it. Quite a few rosettes (once again) now vie for ground, and I"ll be sure to add quite a few of these to tomorrow's salad, cooked greens, and/or green juice.
Garlic Mustard. Yes, colonies of these pretty plants have sprouted all over the place, still petite, with chartreuse scalloped heart-shaped leaves. One could be forgiven for encouraging this plant in the yard. However, it's not native and is taking over the forest floor in many places, crowding out the trilliums and Jack-in-the-Pulpit. NOT acceptable. I gathered and ate a good number of early garlic mustard leaves last week, but they are bigger and more plentiful now, and, in the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, "This means war." At least it will be a tasty war, as this plant was carried here by English colonists on purpose, as it flourished as a salad herb in Britain but remained under control due to factors not available in the New World, thus leading to the plant's invasiveness on this side of the pond. Eat the enemy! If you can stand the atrocious technical mess my article appears to be after it was "automatically" converted to PDF (it's not really that bad, but I'm so A.R. that I'm a bit embarrassed to direct you to it), read my original Weed or Wonder article on garlic mustard at http://appindie.org/index.php?view=article&catid=55:culture&id=662:weed-or-wonder-garlic-mustard-a-weed-indeed&format=pdf.
Gill O'er the Ground, Ground Ivy. This also-pretty little plant loves my yard. I used to go after it with spades (though never chemicals), deluded by mass thinking to believe boring straight blades of grass looked better in the yard than attractive ground-covers that never, or maybe once or twice a summer, have to be mowed. No well-behaved blade of grass flowers in a yard, but familiar yet frequently spurned plants boast colorful blooms, such as the oodles of small but orchid-like purple flowers of ground ivy. Only a few of these plants had emerged in tine for last week's salad, but now they're enthusiastically greening up the yard despite the last two days of cold.
Garlic Chives and Wild Garlic Leaves. No, garlic chives don't grow wild in my neck of the woods, but I planted one of these well over a decade ago and now have four or five plants each year. In last week's salad I substituted for chives the similarly grass-like leaves of field garlic, always an easily identified early green edible wilding, both the shoots and the bulb, though they are quite strong! A little goes a long way.
Ramps. Yippee!! I saw my ramps just popping up today! I transplanted these into my yard from friends who live in Garrett County and grew up in schools in which kids who had to eat ramps at home due to being poor would be sequestered in separate classrooms from those kids whose families could afford to eschew the strong wild leek that has since "sprouted" festivals throughout Appalachia and gained the respect and a place on the menu of gourmet cooks in the finest restaurants. My little patch is growing, but I'll watch that carefully. Ramps, like garlic mustard, can take over the forest floor. In fact, the city of Chicago was once a gigantic ramps field--a Native American term for ramps sounds like "Chicago" and gave the city its name. These are ephemerals, here today and gone tomorrow, and fully deserve to be celebrated. I'm going to make tea sandwiches for an arts show I'll be selling at in a few weeks, and I will definitely include some with cream cheese and ramps, egg salad with ramps, and maybe even crab cake with ramps. This vitamin-packed powerhouse has been eagerly awaited by persons living in Appalachia as long as we know of, and I proudly add myself to that number. (My original AppIndie article on ramps can be found at http://www.appindie.org/index.php/appalachian-culture/55-appalachian-culture/560-weed-or-wonder-ramps-not-just-delicious-alliaceous.)
Other wild and cultivated plants coming up thus far include:
My true passion is our natural world, from turtles and newts to tigers and owls. And plants. Particularly beautiful flowers. Particularly wildflowers. Particularly edible and/or culinary plants. Particularly gardening. Particularly foraging. Particularly fungi.
But fungi will have to wait for another episode--especially since my hours of scouring the forest floor today led to the discovery of not one single morel. Still too early, for one thing, and for another: I've never found a morel in my woods. Yet my woods should produce morels. My woods have a northeastern exposure. My woods are hardwoods, particularly oaks and maples. My woods are moist and filled with secret little woodland plants known to grow where morels do. Morels, where art thou? Have you merely hid beneath the leaf litter each spring, camouflaged from my inexperienced eyes?
This year, if a morel exists on my property, I will find it. Now that I no longer can work, I can certainly spend an hour or two in the woods, even if my butt is glued to a boulder because I don't have enough energy to risk my ankles to the deep spring-and-boulder field on the mountain rising behind my "cottage." And now that fungi have stolen two entire paragraphs--they have a way of sneaking up on us, don't they?--I'll list below the plants I've found thus far this spring, and they are few and far between at the moment--we had snow yesterday, for heaven's sake.
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| Morels - Fungus Par Excellence |
Dandelion. Of course, the ubiquitous dandelion (tooth of the lion) is one of the first wildings to green up and is such a nutritious powerhouse and so tasty (early in the year) that it's now sold in grocery stores and makes its way onto the menus of trendy restaurants these days. Dandelion wine, made with the flowers that are still a ways off, is another familiar use of this well-known wonder. I enjoyed miniscule dandelion leaves in my first foraged salad about a week ago, but they were so small I had trouble separating them from their roots and soil. After four or five days of warm temps, the rosettes have now grown larger, and I plan to gather a bunch tomorrow, along with more of the following and anything else edible that has popped up. Sadly, temps again dropped into the 20s the last couple of days, but supposedly they're heading back up again.
Bitter Cress. This pretty little rosette in the mustard family outnumbers the dandelions in my yard. I picked a number of these for last week's salad; just like the dandelions, these had just begun to sprout, so these greens were tres petite. Some of the plants are already sporting tiny white flowers.
Winter Cress. I didn't actually eat this last week because, strangely enough, I didn't recognize it. Quite a few rosettes (once again) now vie for ground, and I"ll be sure to add quite a few of these to tomorrow's salad, cooked greens, and/or green juice.
Garlic Mustard. Yes, colonies of these pretty plants have sprouted all over the place, still petite, with chartreuse scalloped heart-shaped leaves. One could be forgiven for encouraging this plant in the yard. However, it's not native and is taking over the forest floor in many places, crowding out the trilliums and Jack-in-the-Pulpit. NOT acceptable. I gathered and ate a good number of early garlic mustard leaves last week, but they are bigger and more plentiful now, and, in the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, "This means war." At least it will be a tasty war, as this plant was carried here by English colonists on purpose, as it flourished as a salad herb in Britain but remained under control due to factors not available in the New World, thus leading to the plant's invasiveness on this side of the pond. Eat the enemy! If you can stand the atrocious technical mess my article appears to be after it was "automatically" converted to PDF (it's not really that bad, but I'm so A.R. that I'm a bit embarrassed to direct you to it), read my original Weed or Wonder article on garlic mustard at http://appindie.org/index.php?view=article&catid=55:culture&id=662:weed-or-wonder-garlic-mustard-a-weed-indeed&format=pdf.
Gill O'er the Ground, Ground Ivy. This also-pretty little plant loves my yard. I used to go after it with spades (though never chemicals), deluded by mass thinking to believe boring straight blades of grass looked better in the yard than attractive ground-covers that never, or maybe once or twice a summer, have to be mowed. No well-behaved blade of grass flowers in a yard, but familiar yet frequently spurned plants boast colorful blooms, such as the oodles of small but orchid-like purple flowers of ground ivy. Only a few of these plants had emerged in tine for last week's salad, but now they're enthusiastically greening up the yard despite the last two days of cold.
Garlic Chives and Wild Garlic Leaves. No, garlic chives don't grow wild in my neck of the woods, but I planted one of these well over a decade ago and now have four or five plants each year. In last week's salad I substituted for chives the similarly grass-like leaves of field garlic, always an easily identified early green edible wilding, both the shoots and the bulb, though they are quite strong! A little goes a long way.
Ramps. Yippee!! I saw my ramps just popping up today! I transplanted these into my yard from friends who live in Garrett County and grew up in schools in which kids who had to eat ramps at home due to being poor would be sequestered in separate classrooms from those kids whose families could afford to eschew the strong wild leek that has since "sprouted" festivals throughout Appalachia and gained the respect and a place on the menu of gourmet cooks in the finest restaurants. My little patch is growing, but I'll watch that carefully. Ramps, like garlic mustard, can take over the forest floor. In fact, the city of Chicago was once a gigantic ramps field--a Native American term for ramps sounds like "Chicago" and gave the city its name. These are ephemerals, here today and gone tomorrow, and fully deserve to be celebrated. I'm going to make tea sandwiches for an arts show I'll be selling at in a few weeks, and I will definitely include some with cream cheese and ramps, egg salad with ramps, and maybe even crab cake with ramps. This vitamin-packed powerhouse has been eagerly awaited by persons living in Appalachia as long as we know of, and I proudly add myself to that number. (My original AppIndie article on ramps can be found at http://www.appindie.org/index.php/appalachian-culture/55-appalachian-culture/560-weed-or-wonder-ramps-not-just-delicious-alliaceous.)
Other wild and cultivated plants coming up thus far include:
- Dutchman's breeches. Oh, yes, these adorable little clotheslines hung with the britches of the men of Holland are up! I have a few tiny plants I transplanted years ago from a mountainside covered with them. They've come up faithfully each year and have spread a tiny bit--and tiny also describes the plants and flowers themselves. I'd pictured them as similar to bleeding hearts in size, but the ones I have wouldn't fit a dutchman's pinkie finger.
- Bloodroot. My ONE bloodroot flower bloomed and has now been blasted. I missed its emergence, its one large leaf clasping its little stem like an obi, and the single, gorgeous bloom I'd seen in a field guide many years before finding my first in the wild--how my eyes had lusted to lay themselves on that brilliant white flower. Alas, yesterday, those white petals lay dirtied and shrunken below the little stem that had broken free of the clasping leaf and now stood above them naked, wind-shorn of the raiment I will now have to wait another year to see, at least in my yard. Fortunately, I know a few places where these ankle-height beauties live out their short inflorescent period each spring. [N.B. A few weeks later, I noticed the distinct, solitary leaf of a second bloodroot near the first--they're spreading!, but again I'd missed its flowering.]
- Bleeding hearts. Speaking of bleeding hearts, the shoots of my many bushes--cultivated by dividing the always-enlarging clumps each year--are popping up.
- Ferns. The ferns can be seen in the leaf litter, but they are looking sad. Now prostrate, with brownish, curled fronds, the plants will soon rise toward the forest canopy above and turn the forest primeval. I've tried transplanting ostrich ferns into the yard, but their roots or rhizomes are quite deep, and I've never had much luck getting enough of them thanks to the wet mucky ground beneath them along with having the wrong tools with me when I tried. Again, I'm determined to rectify that this year. As for the ferns growing profusely and naturally in the yard, some are maidenhair and others, I believe, are _______. Try identifying ferns sometime--a true test for the amateur botanist, and one I have no idea whether I've passed or failed given I know no fern experts I could ask.
- Bearded and Siberian Iris. Just shooting up their blades. My previous tenants added several patches of bearded iris, so I'm hoping they will bloom. Wondering which colors they will be! [N.B. The only bloomers were yellow.]
- Persian speedwell. This is a plant I waxed poetic over in one of my AppIndie articles. I'll try to link to it--despite some editing issues (not by me) I'd prefer not to see. I encouraged this plant's growth in my small vegetable plot in the front yard--one of the few places my yard gets good sunlight--it has already spread like crazy and will hopefully keep out other weeds, and I love its sky-blue flower heads smiling up at me as I walk through the garden--already!--just as long as it's sunny. Otherwise, they close up.
- Sweet white violet. I'm just seeing these heart-shaped leaves coming up in the patch beneath my Norwegian spruce. I'd just as soon they take over the whole yard. Violet leaves are quite healthful, as are the flowers, so if mine recover the routing they got from my previous tenants in sufficient numbers, I'll add these to my health concoctions this summer.
- Wild wood strawberry (Fragaria vesca). I'm happy to report that these scrumptious tiny forebears to today's commercial strawberries run rampant in my yard--and I'm happy to let them. The familiar toothed leaves in threes have popped up all over the yard, and added a few of these greens to my salad last week--but what I'm really craving are the full-flavored jewels soon to come. These are also known as fraise des bois are sold to the likes of Martha Stewart, who grows a large patch of them. The berries are so delicate I find it difficult to maintain their shape while cleaning them, though I managed to garnish lemon bars with the once, and I'm a goner for anything miniature. If nothing else, they'll make a marvelous jam, assuming I have enough hours in the day to collect enough to make jam-making worthwhile. Even a cup of this jam would be worth it, and I've no doubt I can get that! In fact, I found them growing as if cultivated under my Honey's deck where they get full afternoon sun. He's since weeded out anything else, and now he has a reliable wild strawberry patch so lush that some of the plants and berries are growing to sizes to rival the "engineered" varieties on grocers' shelves. But still tastier!
- Elderberry bushes. Four of them! Arrived in the mail yesterday from E-Bay seller! Can't wait to plant! Can't wait to harvest, even though that will likely be a few years yet .... Can't wait to make jam! Can't wait to make pie! Elderberry bushes! [N.B. Previously referred-to Honey mowed these down, but how can I complain when he's mowing my yard in addition to his own?]
- Shagbark hickory. The bark is hard to mistake, but since I've focused on herbs rather than trees I wouldn't have known one of these hickories any more than I would a macadamia tree.
Oh-so-many more, but this list should be enough to titillate the taste buds of fellow foragers and perhaps interest a newbie into the hobby--a hobby that could prove life-saving if our world continues to boil and bubble through its toil and trouble until it disintegrates in its own poison brew. A collapse of our food supply is a scary, hopefully far-fetched, but quite possible occurrence given the dying of honeybees and the surge of systems and anarchies at war in our world today, even right here in the good ol' U.S.A. Let's hope nothing so dire happens in this or many lifetimes--and adding these nutrient-packed plants to our diets can help assure our own lifetimes last as long as genetics and fate, with this extra boost of wildness, can possibly manage.
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