Wild Harvesting: Springtime Plants From my Childhood

Wild Harvesting: Spring Greens

Historically, winter diets in northern climates have been poor in fresh foods. By springtime, even the canniest farmer is starting to run out of winter apples and sprouting seeds.

Leafy greens and tiny wild onions are among the first plants to start pushing their way out of the ground. Here are a few of the early harvest plants from my childhood:

Dandelion: Taraxacum officinale grows wild throughout the United States. By lawn purists and many gardeners, it is considered a weed. It spreads rapidly from the root and from the flying seed in summer. Every part of the dandelion (from the French dentelion or lion’s tooth) is edible. It may be eaten raw, boiled up as “greens” or wilted with hot dressing. It has a bitter, strong flavor that the modern palate may have to learn to like. Once appreciated, “store” lettuces seem tame and a little bland. Dandelions are easy to identify, and have no poisonous look-alikes. A serving of raw dandelion greens (1 cup) provides the following portions of recommended daily vitamin intake: Vitamin A 112%, Vitamin C 32%, Calcium 10%, Iron 9%. It is also a good source of various trace minerals needed for good health.

Purple Wood Sorrel: Oxalis drummondii grew abundantly in the woods and meadows of the mid-Missouri farm where I grew up. The yard of the little country school where I attended first grade was covered with them. At recess, the students (all thirteen of us) would graze on “sheep showers” as many of us called them. If I could gather enough of them, my grandmother would make them into a pie. It takes an incredible amount of sugar to make a sheep sorrel pie-and a lot of sorrel! This lovely little plant has a lavender bloom, trefoil leaves that are green on top with a rich purple underside. It grows from a corm which has an incredible delicate sweet taste. I was not able to find nutrition information for it, but I would expect it to be rich in vitamin A and C.

Yellow Wood Sorrel: Oxalis stricta was also a tasty spring time treat. The bloom resembles that of the purple wood sorrel, but the leaves are a solid green (no purple underneath), and the roots grow long and branching instead of being a tiny ball. Although not quite as tasty as its purple cousin, it is still a mouth-puckeringly tangy treat.

Sour Dock: rumex acetosa , also known as garden sorrel is actually a European import that has gone wild. We also ate Rumex crispus , although it was usually mixed sparingly with other greens. Some sources state that Rumex Crispus may contain high concentrates of oxalic acid, and may prove irritating or even poisonous in large amounts. Advice is given in some sources to boil and pour off the water before cooking for actually preparation. Since “dock” was usually mixed in with poke, it received the same treatment as poke Sallet.

Poke Sallet: Phytolacca Americana appeared on our table in the spring with quite a bit of regularity. Grandmother would pick it by the bushel, boil it down, pour off the water, cook it yet again, pour off the water, and finally fry it in bacon grease. Some sources recommend boiling and pouring off three times before eating. No one in our family got sick from eating it, so she must have been doing it right. We picked it only when it was young and tender.

Wild Onions:A. validum or A. canadense are a relative of the domestic onion, Allium cepa L. Wild onions is a rather generic designation for several onion/garlic-like plants that grow in the wild. At home, I dug them up along the numerous little wet-weather streams. At school, they took over the playground each spring. All of the children pulled them up by the handful, bringing them inside, enlivening their lunch with them, stuffing them into their desks. Our teacher, heartily sick of smelling onions, finally forbade anymore onions inside the school building! At one time, I wanted to run away from home, build my own log cabin and live on sheep sorrel and wild onions. A late evening tummy ache from eating too many little onions before supper quickly showed to me the error of that goal.

Mullein: Verbascum thapsus, the plant my mother had been making tea of all winter, got a fresh workout as a spring tonic. The lovely little fuzzy leaves could be found in fields where the soil was deficient. The tea has a slightly bitter, green taste.

Sassafras:  Sassafras albidum was a spring-time treat.  Grandma said it was a tonic and a blood thinner.  In her opinion, blood needed thinned after a winter diet of meat, beans and potatoes.  It was served as a tea made from boiling the roots dug just before the sap began to rise.  Needless to say, a pot of sassafras tea meant somewhere the destruction of a sassafras tree.  This wasn’t too much of a problem, since sassafras is a prolific spreader.  In more recent time, safrole, an oil contained in sassafras has been linked to cancer.  Well, Grandma always said some was good, but not to drink too much.  A brew of sassafras tea was also used to treat pinkeye, or sore tired eyes in general.

The season of harvesting wild greens was relatively short-usually from mid-April to early June. By the time the wild bounty had grown woody or gone to seed, the garden greens were beginning to be ready to eat, haying season had begun, and tending the garden was a constant.