Getting Wild in the Kitchen

My middle son helped to make a pasta primavera that included four types of wild vegetables.

Searching for, and eventually finding, new edible plants is great fun, but the ultimate goal, of course, is a tasty meal. Although I'm not ready to write a cookbook yet, my recent forays into actually cooking with the plants I've been finding have left me almost giddy with excitement about the culinary possibilities.

Curly dock in flower (the spiky pink things in the center) next to a thistle,
which is spiky in a different way. We've eaten both plants in recent dinners.

My most successful cooking project of late has been knotweed streusel muffins, which I have now baked four times (and all but the first time I doubled the batch because otherwise the muffins would have disappeared almost as soon as they were out of the oven). Taking advantage of the similarities between knotweed and rhubarb, I modified a recipe for rhubarb muffins and got spectacularly tasty results. I've shared my recipe at the end of this post. I also baked another knotweed-strawberry pie, given that my first attempt turned out a bit soupy. This time I used a recipe for strawberry-rhubarb pie from Cook's Illustrated's Best Recipes collection (of course, I substituted knotweed for the rhubarb). The addition of arrowroot instead of flour as a thickening agent definitely helped, although further experimentation is still in order.

I recently attended an excellent foraging walk with wild-foods expert and author Russ Cohen (more on this later), and he mentioned that raw knotweed tastes much like Granny Smith apple. I tried a piece of knotweed raw when I got home and found that he's absolutely correct (I don't know why I'd only cooked the plant previously). I'm now thinking of trying knotweed as a replacement for green apples in a variety of recipes, not only for baked goods but also for salads. The knotweed season is about over (once knotweed gets beyond the shoot stage, the stalks become woody and fibrous and are not suitable for eating), but fortunately I blanched some and stashed it in my freezer. Someone also seems to have cleared the knotweed that was taking over at the end of my street, and I'm wondering whether new shoots will come up

Two curly-dock rosettes. The newer leaves
don't have such wavy margins.

Other plants with which I've been experimenting have been newer discoveries. I finally decided to get serious about identifying curly-dock greens, and I'm glad I did: they're tasty! The dead stalks sporting the dried seeds are easy to find; as I mentioned in a previous post, last fall I gathered a bunch of seeds and have now planted them in my garden. The little sprouts are just coming up but aren't even recognizable as curly dock yet (at least not to me). However, I kept seeing all these rosettes with curly leaves all over the place, and I began wondering whether they were curly dock. I admit that I'm a little intimidated by all the basal rosettes (many plants spend their first year as a group of leaves emanating from a single root in a circular, flat pattern and then send up a flower stalk in their second year), which just seem to look so similar. There's dandelion, mustards, docks, sow thistle, shepherd's purse, and cat's ear, to name just a few.

Young curly-dock leaves. One isn't completely
unfurled yet

Nonetheless, I got out a couple of identification guides and set down to the task of examining these curly-leaved rosettes. Sure enough, they seemed to be curly dock. My books advised picking only the young leaves, preferably before they opened up, but certainly while they were still slightly elastic (if you stretch the leaf gently in opposite directions between two fingers, it should not break) and a little slimy at the base of the petiole. I found such a young leaf and tasted it. The flavor was mild and pleasantly lemony! Sauteed in a little olive oil and the water still clinging to the just-washed leaves, then sprinkled with a bit of salt and pepper, these greens made a fine addition to dinner all by themselves, and I've now added them to two other dishes (see below).

Milkweed shoots before being stripped of their leaves and peeled.

We also found milkweed shoots growing in the parking lot of a nearby music school (this is the same lot where we already knew we could find autumnberry, evening primrose, wild carrots, and Japanese knotweed; see my April 2 post). Milkweed shoots (although not the mature plant) can be easily confused with dogbane, which is toxic. In his book The Forager's Harvest, Samuel Thayer provides an excellent account of the confusion surrounding these two plants in the literature. Many books recommend boiling milkweed in multiple changes of water to rid them of bitterness, but in fact (and I can now confirm this from personal experience), milkweed is not at all bitter and need only be boiled in one pot of water. It tastes something like green beans, only better. There are many ways to tell dogbane and milkweed shoots apart, but one is that milkweed stalks are hollow and exude copious latex (a whitish, goopy substance), whereas dogbane stalks are solid and only exude a little latex. Milkweed shoots are also somewhat squared, whereas dogbane stalks are completely round. Thayer also says that milkweed shoots have a fine pubescence (tiny 

Milkweed shoots are hollow and exude
copious latex (which is the white stuff oozing
out of the cut end of the stalk).

hairs) on the underside of the leaves and on the stalk and that dogbane is completely hairless. Although the milkweed we found did have fuzzy leaf bottoms, I couldn't find any hairs on the stalks. Nonetheless, because all the other characteristics fit and because I have seen mature milkweed in this particular location, I felt confident I had the right plant.

For our first taste test, I simply boiled the milkweed and seasoned it with a little butter, salt, and pepper, but now that I know its basic flavor, I plan to experiment with it in more exciting dishes (as a general rule, I find eating boiled vegetables seasoned with nothing other than salt and pepper a disservice to the vegetables and my taste buds). I've already tried a pasta primavera in which I substituted a mixture of milkweed and pokeweed for the green beans specified in the recipe.

Which brings me to pokeweed. You might recall the highly toxic nature of almost all parts of the pokeweed plant from my previous post. Apparently the purple color of the root, mature stalk, and berries owes to the phytolaxin that makes this plant so dangerous, and so one of my books recommended avoiding any shoots that have already started to develop a purplish hue. When I went to collect my first pokeweed shoots at the end of my street, however, I found that even the smallest emerging stalks, which were too tiny to even be worth harvesting, already had a few reddish streaks. I could definitely see that the older shoots were more clearly purple, and I assumed that the author of my book meant that readers should avoid pervasive purple coloring, not faint red streaks. But, given the seriousness of making a mistake, I didn't want to take any chances. It just so happened that I had signed up for a foraging walk and lunch with the author, Russ Cohen, the next day (I came across his website over the winter and had been waiting excitedly for an opportunity to go on one of his walks in my area). I thus brought along a few of my pokeweed shoots to ask him about at lunch. The verdict? The shoots I'd collected were perfectly fine.

Pasta primavera with homemade egg fettuccine, pokeweed,
milkweed, curly dock, mallow leaves, and store-bought
mushrooms, tomatoes, basil, zucchini, asparagus, and peas.

Thus reassured, that evening I stripped the leaves off the pokeweed and boiled it for 10 minutes according to Russ's directions. I seasoned it with a bit of salt and pepper and ended up with a vegetable tasting somewhat like a cross between asparagus and green beans. The take-home point, though, is that everyone liked it. My middle son even asked for seconds! We only ate a couple of stalks each just in case there were any adverse effects, but when we were all alive and feeling fine the next day, I decided to use the pokeweed in that pasta primavera dish. Because I also had a little leftover curly dock and some mallow leaves I hadn't used up, I chopped those up and added them to the sauce as well. The result was tasty, and two of us (my eldest son and my mother) went back for seconds!

Other recent culinary exploits have included violet syrup, which smells delicious but hasn't had any noticeable effect on anything I've baked with it yet (I tried shortbread cookies and cream biscuits). I'm still experimenting, so stay tuned for more news on that front. I also made a frittata with red potatoes, onions, curly dock, and thistle midribs. I think the frittata would have been a greater success if I hadn't undercooked the potatoes, but the results were still not bad, and any flaws could certainly not be attributed to the wild additions.

Thistle. Prickly but tasty!

By the way, if you're thinking that thistles seem a bit too thorny to eat, you're both right and wrong. Although I certainly would not eat the spines, these can be removed. The first few times I tried to do this, I could be heard chirping "Ow!" numerous times as I accidentally pricked myself (my kids thought this was funny, and my 2-year-old helpfully began echoing me), but I understand that the trick is to grab the leafy portion adjacent to the central leaf vein and strip it off all in one piece. I haven't managed to get it all in one go yet, but I'm making progress. The midrib is juicy and crisp, a bit like celery. I understand that the portion of the thistle plant that is really worth the time and effort involved in removing the spines is the flower stalk, but it isn't time for that quite yet.

Mint

The first thistle I tried was at the edge of the field where my kids play soccer on Saturdays, but we subsequently picked some near our favorite train station. While I was busy collecting mallow, curly dock, and thistle, my eldest son was using his nose. "I smell mint," he told me, then followed his olfactory senses to a nearby velvety plant and plucked a leaf. Sure enough, it was mint, although not a variety that looked that much like the few types I've grown in my garden. The plants were so plentiful, though, that I couldn't believe I hadn't noticed them before. Although we didn't collect any that day, I made a point to include a minty dish in my recipe planning this week.

As a reminder, here's garlic mustard again.
You can also read my April 22 post.

I'm also hoping to do a little more experimenting with garlic mustard, which Russ mentioned had been featured in a cookbook called From Pest to Pesto, published by the Kalamazoo Nature Center in Michigan in an effort to interest people in controlling the spread of this invasive weed. I plan to order the book, but in the meantime I've found a recipe for garlic-mustard pesto online. I'll report on more cooking adventures soon, but for now you can check out the recipe for these yummy knotweed muffins (and see a few more pictures from our foraging efforts this past week) below.

P.S. To purchase Russ Cohen's book, Wild Plants I Have Known ... and Eaten, visit the website of the Essex County Greenbelt Association. All sales benefit the association, which generously allows foraging on all of its properties. The book is interesting and covers some plants (such as pokeweed) not extensively covered in my more thorough foraging guides, although the pictures are grayscale and not detailed enough to allow definitive identification. I've used the book as a way of learning about some of the edible plants that grow near me in Massachusetts, but I've gone to other sources for additional help with identification. The book does include several recipes, although unfortunately not the recipe for the delicious sour-cream knotweed coffee cake Russ shared with those of us who attended his walk this week (he also shared some autumnberry fruit leather, shagbark hickory nuts, and black walnuts, which do taste better than the kind one can buy in the store).

Knotweed Streusel Muffins

Streusel
1/4 c. all-purpose flour
1/4 c. white whole-wheat flour
1 T. sugar
3 T. light- or dark-brown sugar
1/4 t. ground cinamon
pinch each nutmeg and salt
3 T. unsalted butter, melted

Muffins
1 large egg
1/4 c. light- or dark-brown sugar
3 T. sugar
5 T. unsalted butter, melted and slightly cooled
3/4 c. plain Greek yogurt
1 c. white whole-wheat flour
1/2 c. all-purpose flour
1 1/2 t. baking powder
1/4 t. baking soda
1/4 t. salt
Generous 1 cup diced, peeled knotweed (slice the knotweed lengthwise and then dice into 1/4-inch pieces)

Heat oven to 375 degrees.

Make streusel. In a small dish, stir together all streusel ingredients until you can press them together into a ball or disc that sort of stays together. Refrigerate until needed.

Make muffins. Whisk egg in the bottom of a large bowl with both sugars. Whisk in yogurt, then cooled butter. Add both flours, baking powder, baking soda, and salt and mix until combined. Add knotweed and approximately 1/3 of the streusel mixture (this should not be thoroughly mixed in).

Divide the batter among 10 muffin cups and sprinkle each muffin with streusel (you'll need to break the chilled streusel apart a little, but it's better if the streusel is in mostly large chunks rather than looking like fine grains of sand). Bake 15 to 20 minutes, until the tops are golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean.

We found marsh mallow in two different locations this week. As its name suggests, it grows in marshes. Unfortunately, it's past time to eat the greens because the flowers have already opened, but we'll know where to look next year.

My two older boys insisted on navigating the marsh with me so that we could get a closer look at the marsh mallow. Fortunately, nobody got wet!

Marsh mallow is in the center, and the larger plants are skunk cabbage, which I have been seeing everywhere lately (for example, around my church and on a hiking trail that starts from my kids' soccer fields). I've been wondering what it is and finally got the answer on the foraging walk with Russ Cohen. (No, you can't eat it.)

I've been hoping to find some fiddleheads (ostrich fern), but all I've been able to find are interrupted fern and these woolly cinnamon ferns, which aren't the kind you can eat. Supposedly, fiddleheads grow all over New England, but I guess I need to learn where to look for them!

A closer look at cinnamon fern. Notice all the light-brown fuzzy stuff clinging to the entire plant. Ostrich fern, the edible fern whose fiddleheads are so prized in culinary circles, has a smooth, fuzz-less stalk with a deep groove reminiscent of the groove on celery.

Easier Than Pie

My two youngest boys show off their Japanese knotweed stalks.
The plants are also growing in the background. Collecting these invasive weeds
is easier than making knotweed-strawberry pie.

A mallow plant sprouting at the edge
of the parking lot at the train station.
Mallow leaves are roundish, with gently wavy
margins. They are covered in tiny hairs,
have a long petiole, and have a dark spot
at the tip of the petiole (in the
center of the leaf). I find this latter
characteristic helpful in distinguishing
mallow from look-alikes, although I haven't
seen it mentioned in any book.

This past Saturday I took my two youngest sons to our local train stop to see what we could find growing there. It was much easier to look around the edges of the parking lot without so many commuters' cars in the way. I was hoping to find some purslane, which I did find there last year and unsuccessfully tried to transplant to my garden (this is both annoying and unbelievable given that my books claim it is sure to be found in every garden but, believe me, I've looked! Especially after I tasted the purslane I finally located at the train station last year; it was yummy! Succulent and lemony. So I tried to transplant some, but it didn't take, even though supposedly other gardeners have a hard time getting rid of it.) The purslane must not be up yet, but we did find lots of garlic mustard (see previous post), wintercress, and mallow.

Mallow has mild flavored but slightly mucilaginous leaves, which are covered with fine hairs and are thus a little fuzzy on the tongue. I first identified it at a kids' birthday party on a farm in southern Massachusetts last summer. It's most recognizable when it bears its tiny fruits, mallow "peas," which are cute little spirals that my kids thought it was so fun to eat. They don't really taste like much, but the cuteness makes up for it. They're a little crunchy and would make an interesting salad addition. They (like okra) have good thickening properties and would be useful in soups (one of my books has a gumbo recipe I'm interested in trying). When we first identified the mallow growing by the barn, my eldest son was so excited that he collected a handful of the mallow fruits and ran off to offer some to his friend, big sister of the birthday girl. To his great disappointment, she wouldn't try any, but another little girl volunteered. She put the "pea" in her mouth but almost immediately spit it out whilst delivering the most dramatic display of disgust I have ever seen. "Ew!" She shrieked. "That is disgusting!" I think she even spat. Truly, it was an amazing performance. And performance it most certainly was; I assure you that no

Wintercress in flower. A mallow plant is in the
foreground.

open-minded person could possibly object to the mallow pea. I later learned that this little girl objected to vegetables on principle, so that leads me to wonder why she would so enthusiastically volunteer to sample the thing in the first place.

Unlike field mustard, wintercress (a member of the mustard family)
has ridges along its stalk.

Well, now that I've got that off my chest, let's get back to the parking lot at the train stop. In addition to the mallow, (which isn't making its fruits yet), I found multitudes of yellow flowers that I thought might be field mustard. After reading the description of field mustard, though, I decided that couldn't be right. A little more investigation pointed to wintercress, which my sources agreed was bitter, bitter, bitter. Usually, if a plant is bitter, my guide will advise that one just needs to harvest it at the right stage, or harvest the right part, or cook it the right way, and then the thing will be delightful. Not so with wintercress. No part of the plant is not bitter, and there's really nothing one can do to make it otherwise. Boiling the unopened flower buds and tender stalks for a few minutes reportedly makes the plant marginally less bitter, so that it tastes pretty much like broccoli raab. That wasn't warming me up to my discovery; I detest broccoli raab. However, being the adventurous outdoorswoman that I am, I picked a leaf and put it in my mouth. I'd like to be able to tell you that the reports were wrong, but in reality I couldn't spit that leaf out quickly enough.

A collection of wintercress flower buds.

Not one to give up without giving something a thoroughly fair trial, I decided to broil some of the unopened flower stalks with a little olive oil and salt, as I do with broccoli (which I also find bitter unless I prepare it exactly right). I then squeezed a little lemon juice on top and tried again. Although I managed to swallow this time, my mother-in-law, who was with me, can assure you that my reaction did not invite further tasting. "Oh! That is really nasty! Disgusting!" I cried.

Later I read another wintercress description that claimed the flower buds are excellent in cheese sauce. I'm not sure I'm willing to give this vegetable another trial, or at least not quite yet. My taste buds are still recovering. The bottom line is that, if I'm ever lost in the woods, I'll have a ready source of food if I can just manage to swallow without tasting or chewing. Wintercress is apparently loaded with nutrients, and it grows everywhere (although I first found it in a sunny location, I later found it while hiking in the forest, too).

We collected this knotweed in about 2 minutes.
I'm sure it would take an adult
without kids even less time.

The most exciting discovery at the train station, though, was that the Japanese knotweed stalks were coming up. As you might recall from a previous post, Japanese knotweed is an invasive weed with large, hollow stalks. When the stalks are just growing and still tender, one can easily snap off the shoots and have an excellent substitute for rhubarb. The boys and I collected an armful of shoots in our few remaining minutes before we had to head to soccer practice (my husband and my eldest son were already there). It turns out that there was more Japanese knotweed growing at the fields, so after his game my eldest son collected more. So much more that it took me quite a while to peel all the leaves off when we got home!

My eldest son collects Japanese knotweed after his soccer game.
He has made a little pile of it by his soccer ball.

We of course had to try a knotweed-strawberry pie right away, so my middle son and I headed to the grocery store to get strawberries. Collecting the knotweed turned out to be much easier than making the pie; the juices didn't set right, so we ended up with a pie crust dunked in a knotweed-strawberry soup. Nonetheless, the results were delicious. I have read that knotweed-strawberry pie is even better than strawberry-rhubarb pie. Without the two contestants in front of me at the same time, I would be hard pressed to say, but the knotweed version is certainly in the running.

I also tried sauteed knotweed, which at first I rather liked, as did my middle son; my other family members found it too sour. After eating several stalks, however, the sourness began to get to me. I will have to experiment with more ways to eat it, especially given that I now have two gallon-sized Ziplock bags full of it in my freezer!

Here you can more clearly see the dark spot in the center of a mallow leaf.

Now Growing in a Parking Lot Near You

One of many wild carrots we found growing at the edge of a church parking lot.

I'm sure I made an interesting sight as I knelt at the edge of the church parking lot after services, asparagus knife (see photo) in hand and a plant book at my side. One woman called quizzically as she got in her car, "What are you finding?" "Wild carrots," I replied. She raised her eyebrows, probably deemed me a little too far removed from sanity for her taste, and got in her car without further comment.

An asparagus knife has a V-shaped blade
that is perfect for digging up roots.

The first time I saw a wild carrot, a friend had taken me to the edge of a landscaped area of her yard, pulled up a scrawny white root, and asked me to smell it. "Doesn't that smell like a parsnip?" she asked. "Can I eat this?" It did smell delicious. But of course I cautioned her not to eat it until I'd done a little research. I went home and looked up wild parsnip (which is just the same as the cultivated kind you buy at the supermarket; this is not so for wild carrots). The plant looked nothing like the one we'd seen in her yard, so I told her she definitely shouldn't eat it until further notice.

I cannot say why it did not occur to me then to find out whether there was a wild carrot, but it didn't. It was winter when I happened upon a description of wild carrots and their close resemblance to poison hemlock. After looking through the photos and reading the description, I was sure we had found a wild carrot. My friend and I attend the same church, and she had mentioned seeing these plants all around the parking lot there, but I'd had to wait until the spring to go looking for them.

Cleaned and washed wild carrots.

So there I was, digging up these miniature white carrots. I consulted my book closely to make sure I understood the difference between wild carrots and poison hemlock. Both plants go by the common name "Queen Anne's Lace," but they are decidedly different plants: most importantly, one is tasty, and the other will kill you. But what I had was certainly a wild carrot: witness hairy stems (poison hemlock lacks hairs), grooved petioles (petioles of poison hemlock are round and hollow), lack of a purplish tint to the root, and a delicious carrot smell (poison hemlock smells only faintly of carrot, and the leaves smell bad). I had a positive ID!

Most of the carrots were no bigger than my pinky. It's not possible to peel them; there just wouldn't be anything left (trust me, I tried). A thorough cleaning is thus in order. And how did they taste? Well, if you expect a crisp, cultivated carrot, you'll be in for a disappointment. They were rather stringy, although they did definitely taste of carrot. They were also a little softer than the cultivated kind. I tried one raw and put the rest in the refrigerator in the hopes of finding enough elsewhere to warrant cooking them. My book reports that chopping them into small pieces and boiling them makes them much easier to eat.

The basal rosette of an evening primrose. Note that the midrib is
much lighter than the rest of the leaf.

The next day, I took the two older boys on a hunt for more wild carrots in a parking lot within walking distance of our house. We only found two, but we found a multitude of evening primrose roots. I'd seen the flower stalks growing there last summer and had tried the flower buds (a bit spicy and not my favorite thing, but they would probably be good in certain soups), so I knew it was a good place to look for the rosettes that mark where to dig for roots. Evening primrose is a biennial; the first year, it exists as a basal rosette (see photo), and the second year it shoots up a flower stalk and produces five-petaled yellow flowers. Both the growing stalk (before buds appear) and the flower buds are edible, although I'd only tried the latter.

Evening primrose root. Note the purple coloring
near the leaves.

The rosettes were everywhere around the edges of this parking lot, and we got a bag full without much trouble. We also spotted some of last year's Japanese knotweed stalks, of which we made note so we can return a little later this spring (see March 11 post). Last year we collected autumn berries there (yum!), and there are a bunch of sumac bushes and some milkweed as well, although we didn't collect any sumac from that location (and I haven't tried milkweed pods or shoots yet). I wonder what food we'll discover there next!

On the way home, we walked around the edge of an athletic field and found some blueberry bushes just starting to wake up, lots more evening primrose, and a couple of blooming trees I think might be cherry trees. I can't figure out what kind of cheery tree they are, though. I considered pin

As-yet-unidentified cherry-like tree.

cherry and sand cherry. I don't think the flower clusters looked like those of black cherry, and the trees were pretty small, which suggests sand cherry. The leaves were too small for me to tell what shape they will be or even whether the margins will be serrated or smooth. The flowers were about an inch in diameter, which is larger than my books say the flowers of either pin cherry or sand cherry should be, but the bark (which is dark brown and has horizontal lines, or lenticles, along its length) is suggestive of some type of cherry, and the flowers look like cherry blossoms. I'll have to keep an eye on these trees. (Postscript: when the fruit finally appeared, it was golden brown and speckled and did not look like any edible fruit I'm familiar with, so I still have no idea what kind of trees they are, but obviously they're part of the landscaping plan at the high school).

Blossoms of the mystery tree.

On our way home, we discovered a multitude of wild carrots growing at the side of the road, just a minute from our house. We only dug up a few because by now it was past time to be starting dinner, but now we know where to find more. Wild carrot shoots are reportedly better than the roots, so I look forward to gathering some later this spring.

At home, I scrubbed the carrot and evening primrose roots with a potato brush, picked off all the root hairs, and sliced the roots into quarter-inch chunks. I vowed to find larger specimens next time; scrubbing the little ones hardly seemed worth it. Although my guide book advised that raw evening primrose root is a bit spicy and itches the back of the throat, I tried it anyway. At first I thought, "This isn't spicy! This is pretty good, actually," and then I started to feel it at the back of my throat. Yep. A bit spicy and a bit itchy. So I roasted the carrots and evening primrose in a little olive oil, sprinkled some garam masala (an indian spice mix) over them, and squeezed a little fresh lemon juice on top.

The boys resting by some Japanese knotweed stalks
on the way home.

The result was ... still a little itchy and spicy. The carrots had promise (they were just a little overdone and dried out; they seemed to cook more quickly than the evening primrose), but evening primrose prepared this way is not something I'd try again. I might try boiling it next time (this is what my book recommends, and perhaps the water carries away the spiciness). If that doesn't work, then at least the boys and I had fun digging them up, and I can look forward to trying the growing shoots of both wild carrots and evening primrose a little later in the spring.

Sometimes It's Better Not to Know Where You're Going

The fire road we walked at the end of our

hike and last year’s dead Japanese knotweed

stalks on the left.

 It's not officially spring yet, but the weather this weekend made it feel like it was. On Saturday all five of us -- me, my husband, and our three boys – packed a picnic lunch to take on a loop trail we'd seen a few weeks ago. We had no idea how long the trail was, and we failed to consult a trail map; we had just noticed a trail sign saying "loop" and figured we'd see where the arrows led. From this information you might conclude that we have little hiking experience; if you happen to know that we in fact have extensive hiking experience, then you might conclude that we were feeling adventurous. As it turns out, it somehow just did not occur to us that a sign that said "loop" but gave no indication of the mileage of this loop could be anything more than a quick trip.

So off we went. The trail starts from an open field where the kids and I often picnic. We usually eat atop a giant rock that just begs little boys to climb on it, but today we continued past the rock to the far edge of the field, where the "loop" sign points into the woods. At first we picked our way across several trail-wide mud puddles and wondered whether we'd picked the wrong season for this trail, but fortunately it soon began to climb to drier ground. We encountered frequent helpful "loop" signs pointing the way. As the first real

A great climbing tree!

ascent began to taper off, we came to a magnificent climbing tree whose three large trunks made the perfect seat – our boys longed for such good tree-house material on our own property. After the boys all had a chance to sit in the tree, we moved on to the next trail junction and "loop" sign, which much to our surprise indicated that the loop went farther up the hill, away from our starting point. So, with a  lingering dash of skepticism, we kept climbing. Eventually we came to another trail junction – this one pointedly missing a "loop" sign or any arrows.

My husband, who has an infallible and impressive sense of direction, figured we should turn to the right. I wondered whether we were intended to keep to the main trail, only because we hadn't been told to do otherwise. Admittedly, though, the main trail was not going in the right direction, and we'd already been hiking for quite some time. We could see a nice picnic spot on a stone wall a little ways down the trail to the right, so we veered off and stopped to eat our lunch.

Hello, spring! Sprouting chives.

With full tummies, we then proceeded down the trail and came to a little cabin and an education center. There were some picnic tables out on the lawn, but no sign of a continuing trail. We thus backtracked to the main trail and continued to the next trail junction, where once again there was no "loop" sign to guide us. Fortunately, while my husband and I were debating the best course to take (and the kids were running wildly ahead on their own despite our instructions to the contrary), another couple and their dog came along. We mentioned that we were trying to hike the loop, and to our pleasure they seemed to know exactly which loop we meant.  They pointed us to the right and said we'd hit a fire road in a little bit. We'd then follow the fire road until it intersected another trail on our right, and that would lead us back to our starting point.

My 6-year-old looking through a dead

Japanese knotweed stalk. Japanese knotweed

is hollow, like bamboo. You can see the rest

of the clump behind him.

All of this turned out to be true, and although the loop took us beyond our 2-year-old's nap time (and although this meant I had to carry him for much of the way), I'm glad we didn't know the length of the loop at the start. We would definitely have deemed the trip too large an undertaking given our late-morning beginning, and we would have missed out on a pleasant walk, not to mention a great climbing tree and a nice picnic spot. What's more, I would have missed seeing the little tufts of chives sprouting at the base of our favorite picnic rock and hinting at spring. I would have missed the multitudes of nutshells scattered about beneath a tree at the picnic area near the education center (although the tree looked a little different from the shaggy-barked trees I discovered on our recent bike ride -- see my previous post – the nuts looked identical, so I'm guessing this was a variety of hickory). And I would have missed the stands of Japanese knotweed along the edges of the fire road. (Japanese-knotweed-strawberry pie is reportedly even tastier than strawberry-rhubarb pie, which is one of my favorites; incidentally, when I pointed out the dead stalks at the side of the fire road and excitedly made plans to come back to harvest the new stalks later this spring, my husband raised his eyebrows a little -- he remembered the weed growing at his childhood home but never knew the plant was edible. In fact, most people with Japanese knotweed on their property have no idea it's so tasty but would dearly love for people to pick it; it's considered an invasive weed that can strangle out other vegetation.)

I also would have missed noticing several trees with a peculiar habit of sending multiple branches sprouting from a single point along the trunk. I remember reading that a distinguishing feature of the hackberry tree is that it produces "witches' brooms" in which several branches sprout from one place like this. This multiple sprouting is caused by a fungus that commonly infects the tree. The bark of the hackberry tree is rough and ridged, which

At several places along its trunk, this tree is

sprouting multiple new branches. I’m wondering

whether it might be a hackberry tree, which 

produces edible red berries in the fall.

also fits the description of the trees I saw. Now at home, I have learned that the twigs are greenish or reddish brown, so I'll have to examine the twigs of this potential hackberry the next time we picnic in our field (the trees are alongside the path to the field from the parking area). Hackberry trees produce edible red berries in early September, and the berries apparently can remain on the tree throughout a good portion of the winter (I didn't see any berries on these trees, though).

Finding four edible or at least possibly edible plants when just about all the vegetation is still brown and dead isn't too shabby! Add in some exercise, a pleasant walk, and a great climbing tree, and I'd say getting a little lost isn't always so bad.