Wintergreen, Take II

On a hike this weekend, my two older boys and I happened upon some more wintergreen, much of it buried beneath the fall's deposit of leaves. At first, it seemed that those little red berries, which guide books tell me can cling on all winter, would elude me yet again. Then I spotted it – one lone bit of red peaking out from under a leaf. "Hey guys, look! A berry! I found one with a berry!" I cried enthusiastically. If you had been there, you probably would have thought my excitement was slightly out of proportion to the circumstances, but my kids rushed right over; they, too, were eager to see this rarity. I picked the berry and admired it for a moment, until my 4-year-old (the one who gobbled our sole cattail lateral this past summer; see my previous post) remarked excitedly, "I want to try it!"

Now, because I love my son very much and because I love the fact that he is such an adventurous eater, I reluctantly handed over this single treat, which he pronounced to be tasty. I searched around for other berries, but although there were plenty of shiny green wintergreen leaves poking out all over the ground, I didn't see any more flashes of red. I brushed dried oak leaves aside with my boot. I overturned a few wintergreen leaves in case any berries were hiding. I walked farther and farther away from the trail and into the woods, under the pine trees (wintergreen likes to grow under the deep shade of pine trees). Just as I was beginning to despair that I had found the only wintergreen berry in the whole forest, I found a plant with two berries. Phew! One was shriveled and not suitable for consumption, though. So, I did what any loving mother would do and asked my 6-year-old whether he would like to try one. He shook his head: "No, thanks." Phew again! (He doesn't care for mint, so I admit that I was expecting and hoping for this response.)

I carefully bit into the berry. The texture surprised me at first: It was mealy, not smooth or juicy, as I had somehow imagined it would be. I suppose its texture was to be expected given that it had alternately frozen and thawed all winter (we've had an unusually mild winter). After I got over my initial shock and resumed the taste test, I found the flavor to be pleasant – like eating a wintergreen-flavored LifeSaver without the hard-candy aspect.

The seeds were numerous and tiny, perhaps the size of poppy seeds. They were pale yellow and enclosed in a white mushy pulp (below is a picture of some crushed berries on a tea saucer).

Throughout the rest of the hike, I collected leaves here and there until I had a little plastic sandwich baggie full of them.¹ At home, I boiled a small pot of water, added the leaves, covered the pot, and let the leaves steep for 2 days – my previous attempt to make wintergreen tea (see my first post) included an inadequate steeping time of only 20 minutes. Now, two days later, I sit beside an empty mug. The wintergreen tea was delightfully minty, almost as good as peppermint tea (which I love). The only drawback is the extraordinarily long steeping time – this is not a tea for the impatient! I made enough tea for perhaps three mugs, but next time I think I would collect enough leaves to make an entire pitcher at once. 

Wintergreen would also make a lovely evergreen groundcover for a shady area, and if I can find some more berries, I plan to try planting some in our yard (we have a shady spot where the grass just refuses to grow). Wintergreen makes pretty white flowers in the summer, and the attractive berries of course can hang on over the winter (which sounds better than it would really be if only a few berries remain by the end of February, although in a more typically snowy winter, the animals might not get so many of them).

I have also read that wintergreen berries make nice additions to salads and baked goods. One book suggested muffins and pancakes. I am not sure how I feel about wintergreen-flavored muffins or pancakes, but it seems to me that the wintergreen cookies have promise, and I bet wintergreen ice cream would be fantastic. I'm resolved to beat the animals to the berries next year!

¹Incidentally, I also found a few more berries, and my older son decided he would try one afterall. His initial suspicions were correct; he didn't like it. But, at least he tried!

Weekend Cattails

This past weekend, my two older boys and I finally discovered a good place to harvest cattail rhizomes (horizontal stems that, in the case of cattails, are underground). If you read almost any book on edible wild plants, you'll soon discover that cattails are the supermarket of the wilds. They contain so many edible parts that there is something one can eat during any season (if you can dig into the ground in winter, that is). What's more, they are almost everywhere you look – the sides of highways, the edges of ponds and lakes, the drainage ditches near parking lots at shopping plazas. Unfortunately, often the plants are inaccessible except by canoe, are growing in compacted soil that makes for difficult digging, or are located in polluted or at least dirty waters (no car runoff in my cattail rhizomes, please). I am looking forward to collecting some cattail pollen (and trying cattail pancakes), spikes, buds, and hearts once spring arrives, but when I started on my foraging adventures last summer, it was too late for these parts. I've thus been on the lookout for cattails whose underground rhizomes I could easily get to.


This weekend we found the dead stalks of last year's cattails at the edge of a pond on some local conservation land. The boys discovered (OK, I discovered) that if you pinch the brown spike at this time of year, it will release its fluffy seeds in a slow but dramatic poof. The boys had fun spreading cattail seeds all over the pond and even in a little puddle that seemed to have grander aspirations. The ground is too frozen for us to dig up rhizomes, but as soon as it thaws and the new rhizomes start growing, we'll be out there collecting some laterals, which are the cattail part I'm most excited to try. Cattails reproduce by sending out horizontal, underground stems and then shooting up a new stalk every once in a while; the older rhizomes are apparently tough and fibrous (although fine for making flour), but I have read that the rapidly growing portion, called the lateral, is smooth, not fibrous, and delicious.

I did actually dig up one lateral  last year, but I haven't eaten any. Growing at the edge of my town beach is a small stand of wimpy-looking cattails, and after the kids' swimming lessons one day I decided to see whether we could find a few laterals. I pawed around in the mud and soon found a nice-looking specimen. I handed it to my middle son (who was 3) to hold while I searched for some more, but unfortunately I just kept pulling up dead rhizomes and eventually decided to give up. We could all share the one I'd found and decide whether it was worth searching for a better stand. When I turned to my son, however, the lateral was nowhere in sight; it turns out he'd promptly eaten it! "You ate the whole thing?" I asked, incredulously (it had been about 8 inches long). As I guess you can tell, my son thought it was delicious, and I hope I'll think so too – if he lets me try one someday!

An Indian Cucumber Started It All

My three boys on a camping trip last summer. The one who inadvertently found the Indian cucumber is in the middle.

I’ve always found a certain thrill in happening upon a wild-blueberry field atop a mountain or spying a blackberry bush at the edge of a playground. I know I could go to the store, part with a few dollars, and end up with the same amount of food for a fraction of the time and effort, but that would not be nearly so fulfilling. If you’ve ever spent hours picking blueberries and continued to reach for that one more berry – even though it’s getting dark and even starting to rain and the car is a good hour and a half away – then you know exactly what I mean.

Until this past summer, my foraging was almost entirely confined to those plants that just about everybody can recognize: blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries. Then, on a family camping trip, my then-5-year-old showed me a dirty white root he’d pulled out of the ground. It was about the size of his thumb, hairy, and shaped like a miniature, twisted carrot. He had absolutely no idea what it was, but he was chirping excitedly, “Mommy, Mommy, look what I found!”

When I looked at what was in his hand, I got excited, too, because I did know what it was: an Indian cucumber! I had learned about Indian cucumbers on a school trip to Maine in the fifth grade, and from then through my teenage years I would often dig up Indian cucumbers at the edges of yards or while hiking in the woods. The tiny roots taste something like a mild onion but are crisp and refreshing like a cucumber, and they make a wonderful trailside nibble. Somehow, though, I’d stopped finding Indian cucumbers as an adult and had even managed to forget exactly how to identify the plants. In recent years, whenever I tried to dig up the root of a promising-looking speciman, I’d found nothing even resembling what I was looking for. And here my 5-year-old had accomplished it without even intending to! 

Indian cucumbers have two tiers of leaves:
a bottom tier of 5 to 7 leaves and a top tier
of 3 to 5. The plants in this picture haven't
sent up the second tier yet.

We dug up several more Indian cucumbers on that trip, and when I got home I pulled out a book I’d been meaning to read about edible wild plants. I’d picked it up at a used-book store some number of years before and had always intended to study it but had never really even opened it up. I looked up “Indian cucumber” in the index and flipped to the indicated page. There was a single black-and-white drawing and a short paragraph of descriptive text useful only because I was already familiar with the plant. I could immediately tell that I would not want to eat any plant on the sole basis of information found in this book. I thus went onto Amazon’s website and searched for other books about edible wild plants. I found two that got extremely good reviews and ordered both.¹

 I spent the rest of the summer studying my books and examining plants everywhere I went, from my own backyard and the local playground to camping trips and Ultimate Frisbee games. My kids have also become enthusiastic foragers, but nonetheless on more than one occasion they have been heard saying things like, “You don’t need to stop and look at every plant, Mommy!”

In just a few months, I managed to make some exciting identifications, including but by no means limited to mallow “peas” by a barn at a kids’ birthday party; a cattail lateral rhizome at a beach; some black cherries by the side of a highway on a family vacation; wood and sheep sorrel in my backyard; goosefoot  (or wild spinach), purslane, and black nightshade (not the poisonous variety, of course) at a train station; and autumn berries and sumac just about everywhere (we made some delicious jelly out of those – check for details in a future post).

Alas, now it’s winter, the season that tests a forager’s patience. I’ve spent the cold months studying my collection of foraging literature so that I’ll be ready to recognize all the tasty treats that will pop up in the spring. Plants simply cannot be hurried, in winter or any other season, and for most of the year it’s the wrong time to harvest any particular edible plant part. A forager therefore must take the opportunities as they come, but now we’re back to the fact that winter holds few opportunities.

Yet there are still a few, and one of those is wintergreen. I rediscovered wintergreen on a hike with two of my boys recently. I had completely forgotten having been introduced to it as a child, and as we were walking along under the pine trees, as I was scanning the woods for any promising signs that spring might bring delicious bounty to these woods, right there beneath my feet I spotted the shiny oval leaves. I’ve read that wintergreen often keeps its (also tasty) red berries throughout the cold months, but none of the wintergreen we found still had the berries. Nonetheless, the minty aroma that came from gently torn leaves left no doubt about the plant’s identification.

I knew one could make tea from the leaves, but I had no idea how many leaves to use or how long to steep them. We gathered a couple of handfuls and brought them home to compare to pictures and descriptions in several of my foraging books. None of the books mentioned anything about steeping time, so I simmered the leaves for 20 min or so, added sugar, and gave everyone a sample. My 4-year-old was delighted, but he can be counted on to drink just about anything with sugar in it. The tea was a bit too weak for my taste, and later I discovered that one should steep the leaves for a day. Whoops. Well, I guess we’ll be hitting the woods again soon.

¹If you have an interest in this topic, I highly recommend both books, “The Forager’s Harvest” by Samuel Thayer and “From Dirt to Plate” by John Kallas. (Samuel Thayer has now written a second book, “Nature’s Garden,” and that is excellent as well, and he has put out a good DVD based on the first book.) Both books have beautiful color photos – several for each plant – and lengthy descriptions of the plants themselves as well as poisonous or just confusing look-alike species. (As a side note, I’ve since acquired a good beginner’s foraging library, and my initial book, “Edible Wild Plants of Eastern North America” by Fernald and Kinsey, is a welcome addition. It has some useful information and covers a lot of plants – it’s just more helpful as a supplement than as the main attraction.)