Weeds: They're Tasty, Attractive, and Everywhere!

A basswood tree growing at the edge of a playground parking lot. Basswood in bloom is easily recognizable by the tongue-like bracts that are attached to the flowers and buds.

My eldest son displays a basswood flower
connected to its leafy bract.

Although I love to go foraging -- intentionally take my backpack, tools, and some plastic baggies and go looking for food -- much more often I find plants I can eat when I'm not even looking for them. Just this morning I took my kids to a playground I've only been to once before. As we were getting out of the car, I spotted two large walnut trees at the edge of the small parking lot. Then I noticed another large tree, this one with the most interesting, sweet-smelling flower clusters. The flowers were at the end of a long stem that was connected midway up a long, narrow, tongue-like bract that was a much lighter shade of green than the other leaves. Immediately, I recognized this tree from one of my foraging books. I knew which book it was in, but I couldn't remember the name of the tree or which parts one could eat. Still, those flowers and bracts were unmistakable.

I took some pictures, and my eldest son picked a sample to take home, where we identified the tree as a basswood. The leaf buds, young leaves, and tiny nuts are edible. The cambium, which lies underneath the bark, is also supposed to be tasty, but you'd have to kill the tree to get it, so it isn't an advisable snack unless you need to fell the tree anyway. Some people enjoy tea made from basswood flowers, although my source (Samuel Thayer) finds basswood tea overrated. He does highly recommends the young leaves as salad greens. It's past time for me to try any parts except the tiny nuts this year, but now we have an excuse to visit this playground again in the spring.

Burdock growing beneath some walnut trees at a local playground.

Playgrounds seem to make good foraging spots. On a recent trip to a different local playground, we found so many edible plants that it would be difficult to list them all. There were walnut trees growing over a lush border of burdock and pokeweed and, farther along, blackberry bushes and cattails. The latter had crept under a chain-link fence separating the ball field from a marsh. I showed my middle son how to pull up cattail leaf hearts, and we collected some for dinner (this was my second attempt at cooking the leaf hearts; they were delicious boiled and then served with a little butter and salt). As we tried to pull up one heart, the entire plant, roots and all, came out, and I was excited to find a lateral stem attached! My middle son was the only one of us who had yet had the opportunity to try a lateral, reportedly the best part of the cattail plant (see my February 2 post for details). I can now report that the lateral tastes just like the leaf hearts, except that it's not at all fibrous.

Lady's thumb in flower.

Cattail latteral stem.

After finding the cattails, we made our way around to the other side of the ball field, where there was a little building. Outside the building was some flowering lady's thumb (the peppery greens make a nice addition to salads and are tasty sauteed as well).

Wild food isn't just at playgrounds, though. In previous posts I've established the supermarket-like quality of certain parking lots. Now, let's add rest stops to the list. It was there that I collected some burdock flower stalks on the way back from a recent trip to New Jersey. Burdock is a biennial, which means it flowers every other year. All along the treeline at this rest stop were burdock plants, and many of them had sent up tall flower stalks. Most had not yet made flowers, though (once the flowers appear, the stalk is too tough to eat). I remembered that the flower stalks were supposed to be the best part of burdock (I had never tried any part of burdock before). I cut off several stalks and took them home, where I boiled them until they were tender. They were quite tasty, sort of like potatoes.

Milkweed growing near the school where my sons played spring
soccer. Unfortunately, most of the plants were infested with
some sort of black goop; I'm really not sure what it was.
I'm hoping the pods will be unaffected.

The beauty of being a forager is that I seem to find plants I can eat wherever I go: wood sorrel in the garden of our bed & breakfast, curly dock on the side of the road near my son's school, milkweed at a soccer game, sumac shoots at the edges of parking lots, thistle, wintergreen, and a variety of different berries at a cousin-in-law's house. I don't have to go foraging to go foraging, and that's just what I love about learning to recognize wild plants. Weeds are no longer weeds.

Not only can weeds be delicious; they can also be attractive. I was particularly inspired while visiting a local children's museum because, while walking along a pretty garden path, I noticed that all the beautiful flowers in the garden were so-called "weeds." I don't know the names of many of the flowers, but I recognized them as native plants that grow around my house in places we don't necessarily want them growing. Or at least in places we think we don't want them growing. Perhaps we should take a different approach and cultivate them. The museum garden and path were quite lovely.

My eldest son displays
a milkweed flower.

In fact, many edible plants make pretty flowers. I love lady's thumb, for example, and sheep sorrel makes striking, if tiny, red flower spikes. Wood sorrel's yellow flowers and heart-shaped leaves are cute, and chickweed's white flowers would look nice along a border. Even milkweed, which I found growing alongside "proper" garden plants in front of my son's elementary school and near the the boys' soccer field (see picture above), produces an attractive flower (see photo at left). I suspect that the plants got in without the landscaper's permission, but I think milkweed could be an attractive part of a planned garden as well.

Ox-eye daisies.

I also recently learned that the young leaves of ox-eye daisies are edible. The daisies are all in flower here already this year, but I've been noting good future collecting grounds, which so far include the field near our train station, the field by our favorite picnic rock, and the conservation land behind a local church.

Open day lily and some
unopened buds. Delicious!

Some flowers that people already plant in their gardens make excellent table fare. Yesterday afternoon the boys and I picked some day-lily buds from around our house and sauteed them in a little butter. We had never tried day lilies before, but they were so tasty that I decided to use them in a stir-fry for dinner tonight! The results were worth sharing; see the end of this post for my recipe. The taste of day lilies is similar to asparagus and green beans but is definitely its own flavor.

The day lilies on our property are being taken over by invasive vines, so in the process of collecting dinner, my oldest son and I ended up getting out the clippers and preventing at least some of the flowers (and a couple of birch trees) from getting dragged to the ground under the weight of the vines. It turns out that clipping invasive vines is addicting! I know it sounds crazy, but we didn't want to stop. We only came reluctantly inside because the rest of the family wanted dinner, but we have plans to continue the work in the morning.

Sauteed day lily flower buds.

I learned about eating day lilies from a great little book called The Edible Flower Garden by Rosalind Creasy. Unfortunately, I don't have enough sun at my house to plant many of the flowers she showcases, but I have planted some, including violets, violas, borage, pinks, and Johnny jump-ups. If you're interested in the prospect of being able to admire your garden and eat it, too, I highly recommend her book (which you can find in the list of recommended products on the right-hand side of this blog).

My youngest son with
a mallow pea we collected
from my garden.

Mallow makes a pretty purple flower, although it might be too inconspicuous for attractive garden plantings. I did plant some mallow in my vegetable garden, though, and the little spiral "peas" have started coming out. I've been freezing them by the handful as they ripen. They have thickening properties, similar to those of okra, so I'm planning to use them in a soup once I've collected enough (I only have two plants in my garden).

Mallow with flowers and fruits at our train station.

My middle son and I also recently collected some mallow peas from our favorite train station. Someone clears the brush away around the edges of the parking lot from time to time, so there weren't as many plants as we were hoping for because the trimming had just been done. We were able to collect a fair amount of peas, though, as well as some mint leaves for iced tea.

My most exciting recent discovery was in New Jersey, where we met my dad at a campground for a couple of days. I kept seeing these plants that I thought might be mayapple, but I hadn't gotten my book out to compare the live specimens to the photos. I have seen mayapple only once, on a foraging walk with Russ Cohen. We were on a community farm, and Russ mentioned, much to my disappointment, that mayapple does not grow natively in Massachusetts. I'd read that it grows in southern Quebec and in states south of Massachusetts, so I figured it grew here, too, and I'd been searching for it, apparently in vain.

Mayapple leaves.

Mayapple usually consists of a single stalk with an umbrella-like leaf. In flowering years, the stem forks and produces two leaves, and after the lone white flower appears, a lemon-shaped yellowgreen fruit (which turns yellow or yellowish brown as it ripens) begins growing underneath the leaf. Mayapples are apparently a bit fickle about producing fruit. If they don't have enough sunlight, or there hasn't been enough rain, or they're in the wrong mood, they just hang out as leaves. Even when mayapple plants do make fruit, raccoons and other animals are likely to get it before people do. The unripe fruits are toxic (as is the rest of the plant), but the ripe fruit is apparently so delicious that it's worth long hours of searching just to find one the raccoons missed.

To give you an idea of why I'm so excited to try a mayapple, I invite you to read the words of Samuel Thayer in Nature's Garden: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants. Thayer has just described the lengths to which he has gone to hunt down a mayapple. Then he writes,

Mayapple plants.

"I have never examined the input/output ratio of calories for this pursuit, nor have I calculated my labor efficiency. But please don't do it for me. Let us mayapple hunters have our fun. Who cares how many hours are consumed; we are driven by our memory of that one time, when there was a fruit on every forked stem, some as big as kiwi fruits -- and we got hundreds. You don't understand; you weren't there. Maybe someday we'll find that again. And if not, sixteen will keep the memory alive."

Mayapple plants with fruit hanging under nearly every one!

 So I'd been seeing all these possible mayapple plants in New Jersey, but I hadn't seen any fruits, and I hadn't checked Thayer's book yet to see whether I'd found the real thing. Then, as my middle son and I were hiking along a trail in the state park where we were camping, we came upon something that made consulting a book completely unnecessary. There, on either side of the trail, were mayapple plants, and mayapple plants, and more mayapple plants, and almost every single one had a lemon-shaped fruit dangling underneath its leaves. I was beyond excited, and it hardly mattered that the fruits were unripe and still toxic. (My son got so excited that he was campaigning to drive back to New Jersey when we thought the mayapples would be ripe, but of course I don't intend to drive four and a half hours to find out the animals beat us to the prize).

Unripe mayapple fruit.

I might not have been able to taste a mayapple, but I could and did dig up a few plants to take home. I chose them from shady spots where the tree canopy had grown so tall and shady that the plants were just hanging on, not making flowers or fruits. I chose them from the middle of the trail where they were only going to get trampled. And I brought them safely home to my own garden, where fortunately a few are doing well in their new soil and, with luck, will someday allow me to taste a fruit (a few, unfortunately, have withered in their new home). Of course, I fully expect to have to fight the local wildlife for them (the chipmunks ate every single strawberry from my garden this year).

Even if I don't get to eat all the fruit from my future mayapple colony, though, at least the attractive flowers will make a fine addition to my garden!

Photo Gallery

Here are some more pictures from our adventures over the last few weeks. And check out the recipe for day-lily stir fry at the end.

Unripe fruit hanging beneath a mayapple leaf.

Curly dock (center) and ox-eye daisy in the field near our train station.

Curly dock near my son's elementary school. It's easiest to spot curly dock when it's in flower, which isn't the time at which you want to eat it.

A selection of edible plants growing near my town's train station. Pokeweed is at the top left, mallow is at center right, and mint is at the far right. I'm no longer sure whether the plant at bottom center is anything interesting. I gathered a bunch of mint to make iced tea the day I took this picture.

My youngest two sons play in the sandbox at the playground where we found the cattails. My middle son is building a volcano.

My youngest son.

We found a great climbing tree at the playground!

Here are the cattails that have crept under the fence. We made some friends after we collected these. A little boy saw us carrying the cattails across the field and ran over to ask what they were. I told him they were cattails and that we were going to eat them, and he ran off to tell his mother, who was apparently interested in the idea of eating cattails and other wild plants.

There were also some walnut trees.

Here's a closer view of the walnut leaves. Walnut trees can be distinguished from butternut trees because the terminal leaf in each leaflet is not well developed on a walnut tree. I keep examining walnut-like leaves in the hopes of finding a butternut tree, but so far no luck.

There was also a lot of pokeweed at this playground (this is way too big to eat now).

Pokeweed. Too big to eat. The pokeweed across the street from my house is about to make berries, so I'll post pictures of that soon.

A burdock leaf. I neglected to take pictures of the flower stalks I collected and ate.

Last year's dried burdock burrs.

 

Here's a close-up of a mallow pea.

This snail was hanging out in the field at the train station, and he seemed photo worthy.

 

 

 Sweet-and-Sour Day-Lily Stir Fry

Sauce:
6 T red wine vinegar
6 T orange juice
6 T sugar
3 T ketchup
1 t cornstarch
 1/2 t salt

Stir-fry:
1 lb chicken, flank steak, pork tenderloin, or tofu, cut into small, even pieces (I used chicken)
2 t soy sauce
2 T vegetable of peanut oil
1 1/2 lb vegetables, including as many day-lily buds and flower petals (remove stamens and sepals from open flowers) as you can collect; supplement with other vegetables, such as bamboo shoots, baby corn, or mushrooms
1 14 oz can pineapple chunks
3 garlic cloves, minced
1 T minced fresh ginger
cashews, for sprinkling
serve with rice

1. Cook rice. While rice is cooking, toss meat or tofu in soy sauce. Heat 2 t oil in nonstick skillet or wok and heat over high heat until just smoking. Stir fry meat or tofu, stirring occasionally, until lightly browned. Transfer to a clean bowl (prepare sauce while meat or tofu is cooking).

2. Add 1 T oil to the pan and return to high heat until shimmering. Add vegetables and pineapple and stir fry until crisp-tender, only a couple of minutes for day lilies (add vegetables at different times if some will take longer to cook than others).

3. Clear the center of the pan, add 1 t oil, garlic, and ginger, and cook until fragrant, about 30 to 60 seconds. Whisk sauce to recombine, add to pan, and bring to a simmer. Cook a few minutes or until thick. Serve immediately over rice and sprinkle cashews on top.

Getting Wild in the Kitchen: Soup and Risotto

Thistle stalks: trimmed, peeled, and ready to be chopped up for soup.

Thistle plant with all its defenses.

In search of dinner one recent rainy day, I drove around to check out a few favorite foraging spots and a few I haven't thoroughly examined this year. Let me explain about the weather: on a rainy day, no one minds letting me go by myself. So, with rain jacket donned, I began at the end of my road, where I was hoping to harvest some pokeweed shoots I wanted to substitute in a green-bean dish. Unfortunately, the pokeweed was too tall and probably already getting toxic, so I snipped away at a few of the plants to encourage the root to send up new growth. I could then come back a week or so later.

The thistle plants had also gotten markedly bigger, but in this case bigger was better. Tall, thick flower stalks a couple of feet high had sprung up where only ground-level basal rosettes had been before. I'd previously tried the midribs of thistle leaves and found them to be like celery, only slightly more bitter. I had read that the flower stalks are the best part of the plant and so was excited to see such tall specimens.

Thistle flower stalks trimmed of leaves.
Grape leaves can be seen at the right.

All those thorns and prickers certainly did look intimidating, but I took out my scissors and carefully snipped away until just the flower stalk remained (it helps to start at the top of the plant so that one has increasingly more room to maneuver as the project unfolds). Then I snipped that too and held it cautiously at one end, where my fingers could take advantage of the prickerless hollow inside of the stalk. Gingerly, I carried the stalk to my car and used a knife to scrape off as much of the prickly hairs and thorns as I could while resting the stalk on the hood of the vehicle. Then I was back out snipping away at another stalk.

At home, I used a vegetable peeler to finish the pricker removal (see top photo), and then it was time for a taste. Even more celery-like than the leaf midribs, thistle would make a great addition to salads (I would like to try it in my chicken salad), stir fries, and soups. And in fact, the latter was where this thistle was destined, but I'll come back to the soup.

Milkweed flower buds. The buds turn pinkish
just before they open. I understand it's
best to collect the buds at about 2/3 the final
size, and probably not when they're pink, although
I did collect some pink ones and didn't notice any
difficulty in eating them (older buds are supposed
to be slightly tougher).

After collecting a few thistle stalks, I drove to my favorite parking lot to see whether the milkweed shoots I'd collected had grown back (I'm not sure whether milkweed sends up new shoots to replace harvested ones). I think perhaps new shoots are growing, but there were certainly a lot of tall plants -- many more plants than I'd noticed when they were only 6 inches tall and hiding in the weeds. Now the plants had green flower buds, slightly reminiscent of broccoli heads. These flower buds are edible, so I snapped off a small baggieful to add to the soup.

Next I was off to some local conservation land, where two of my boys and I had found a cattail pond back in February. Alas, the overgrowth was now so thick that I couldn't even see the pond, much less get to it without pushing through tall grasses and overgrown bushes, becoming soaking wet (remember, it was raining, and water would be clinging to the grasses), and probably getting covered in ticks. Although someone had mowed a path through some of the field, apparently the area with the pond is not maintained.

I thought this was a blackberry bush,
but now I'm not so sure.

I therefore settled for walking along the mowed path. I found what I thought were some blackberry bushes, although since then I've found some bushes that already had little green blackberries on them, and although the leaves are similar, they do look slightly different. There are so many blackberry relatives, and I can't keep them all straight, and now I'm not entirely sure that what I found that rainy day was any type of berry bush. The flowers did strongly resemble blackberry flowers, though.. Someday I'll have to spend time really studying the differences between blackberries, dewberries, raspberries, black raspberries, wineberries, and all the rest. I'll have to visit these bushes again later in the summer and get back to you.

Cattails in a soggy field.

As I was nearly at the end of the loop through the field, I came to a stand of cattails, which I remembered having seen the previous fall, when they had their brown, velvety spikes. They hadn't been there in February because someone had mowed the entire field, cattail stalks and all. They weren't growing in a pond but in soggy ground, so it would have been difficult to harvest the roots or lateral stalks (the horizontal stalks that grow underground before sending up a new above-ground stalk). But they were perfectly located for harvesting the "hearts," the tender core of a growing leaf stalk. I could walk right into the patch and pull up as many hearts as I liked: no rubber boots or wading through ponds required!

Cattail stalk resting on my backpack,
which is obscured by its rain cover.

To pull out each cattail heart, I tugged first gently, then with increasing force at the inner bunch of leaves until -- squeak! -- out slipped the heart. Easy! Fast! Fun! I pulled out several more in a matter of minutes. I then trimmed the green tops off the leaves to make it easier to carry the bundle back to my car.

After a relatively unsuccessful venture down the part of the trail across the street (no one had mowed the field at all there, and soon my pants were so soggy and the grasses so tall that I had to turn back short of the plum trees I wanted to investigate), I took my harvest home to the cutting board. I've already discussed my preparation of the thistle stalks and milkweed buds (both of which I chopped up) above. The cattail hearts were a bit trickier because I wasn't really sure how much of the leaf core was tender. It turns out that the leaves become fibrous on the outside of the stalk before they do on the inside, so the trick is to use only as much as you can easily puncture with a fingernail pressing horizontally to the direction of the fibers (I used too much of the leaf core the first time I tried this, so now I also apply the bite test -- it's fine to eat cattail raw, so I bite into a leaf from the outside just above where I plan to stop cutting, and if it's still tender, I use a bit more).

My collection of trimmed cattail hearts lying on top of the dark
greenery I discarded (only a small portion of each heart is
tender enough to eat, though, so the size of this pile is deceiving).

I also wasn't really sure how to cook it. I was modifying a recipe for potato-leek soup, so I first tried sauteing some of the cattail in a little butter, as I would leeks (afterall, the trimmed cattail looked a lot like leeks). That method produced tough and unchewable results, though. I then tried boiling some cattail hearts in a bit of water, and the result was soft and tasty, slightly reminiscent of corn and very mild. I then decided to throw the rest of the cattail hearts, along with the thistle and milkweed buds, in my soup during cooking. The results were yummy enough to warrant my sharing the recipe. Also see below for a recipe for chickweed risotto.

Milkweed flower-bud clusters on my cutting board. Milkweed
buds taste exactly like the stalks. The texture is just different.

Potato Soup with Leek, Cattail Hearts, Milkweed Flower-Bud Clusters, and Thistle

2 leeks
approximately 2 cups cattail hearts or laterals
several handfuls milkweed buds
1 to 2 cups thistle flower stalks, sliced
6 T unsalted butter
1 T flour
5 1/4 cup chicken broth (preferably homemade)
1 bay leaf
1 3/4 lb peeled, cubed red potatoes
2 ham steaks, diced into 1/4-inch cubes
salt and freshly ground black pepper

1. Bring water to a boil in a small pot and boil milkweed buds 15 min. Chop and set aside. (I am not clear on whether there is anything toxic in milkweed broth, so I took this precaution).

2. Chop the white and light-green portion of the leeks by slicing them lengthwise and then chopping into 1-inch pieces. Heat the butter in a Dutch oven over medium-low heat until foaming, then add the leeks and increase the heat to medium. Cover and cook, stirring occasionally, until the leeks are tender but not mushy or browned. Sprinkle the flour over the leeks and stir to coat evenly. Cook until the flour dissolves, about 2 min.

3. Increase the heat to high and gradually add the broth while whisking constantly. Add the bay leaf, potatoes, cattails, milkweed, and thistle. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to low and simmer, covered, until the potatoes are almost tender, 5 to 7 min. Remove pot from heat and let sit, covered, 10 to 15 min. Place a portion of the soup in a blender and puree, then stir the puree back into the soup. How much puree you use depends on how creamy or chunky you like your soup. Add diced ham and heat another few minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Parmesan Risotto with Chickweed

A lush patch of chickweed grows at my house.
I've been snipping off the tops and adding them to various dishes.

I also recently made this tasty risotto with the chickweed lushly growing under some pine trees at my house. I highly recommend it!

3 1/2 cups chicken broth
3 cups water
4 T unsalted butter
1 medium onion, finely diced
salt
2 cups Arborio rice
1 cup dry white wine
1 cup freshly grated parmigiano-reggiano cheese
as much chickweed as you can collect, perhaps 1 to 2 cups loosely packed, then chopped

(optional) throw in some sheep sorrel or wood sorrel leaves if you find them, but not too many because they will overpower the more mild chickweed (a quarter cup chopped would be good)

1. Bring the broth and water to a simmer in a medium saucepan. Reduce the heat to the lowest possible setting and keep warm.

2. Melt the butter in a 4-quart saucepan over medium heat. Once the foaming subsides, add the onion and 1/2 teaspoon salt and cook, stirring occasionally, until the onion is soft and translucent but not brown, about 9 min. Add the rice and cook, while stirring constantly, until the edges of the grain are transparent, 2 to 4 min. Add the wine and cook while stirring constantly  until the wine is completely absorbed, about 2 min. Add the broth mixture, 1/2 cup at a time, and stir frequently until each portion is absorbed. Continue until rice is cooked through  but still slightly firm in the center (taste to test for doneness). You might not use all of the broth mixture, but cooking time should be approximately 20 to 25 min. Add the chopped chickweed (it's OK to use the flowers too) and cook an additional minute, or until chickweed is wilted. Remove from heat and stir in cheese, then season with salt and pepper to taste.