By Matie Belle Lakish.
July! Gardens are growing well with all this heat and the good moisture we have gotten this spring. Summer is officially here and I’m having lots of salads and green things to eat.
Part of what I am harvesting, though, are wild things, so I thought I would talk about some of those plants this month. By the time you read this, many of them will be too mature to eat, but others will be perfect. Think about the earlier ones for next year. These wild plants come up in my garden and yard and in some of the wilder spaces not far away.
I’ve been having a lot of lamb’s quarters lately. This wild plant, sometimes called wild spinach, is known as quelites by the older Spanish residents of the Valley.
After I Googled the term, I found out that quelites can refer to any wild green in Spanish culture, but I have only heard it referred to the herb many know as lamb’s quarters. I have also heard lamb’s quarters called pigweed, a term that is often also used for amaranth greens. Although what I think of as lamb’s quarters is not the same as what I know as amaranth, it can be confusing. Both make good pot herbs and are frequently found as weeds in a garden.
I eat lamb’s quarters right out of the garden, as I am weeding the lettuce or onions or whatever I planted. Sometimes I have enough young plants to steam them and serve with butter. They are delicious as well as nutritious.
The plant I call amaranth is also called pig weed, or careless weed, presumably because if you were a careless gardener, you would find the plant taking over your garden. My mother used to tell a story about her childhood. When the family would ride in a wagon behind the horses to go to church on Sundays, they would have to allow an extra ten minutes for the horses to stop at the corner and eat the careless weed. They could not be urged forward until they had had their fill. How times have changed! Today we think of amaranth more as a seed crop, but the wilder varieties are more known for their leaves and are prepared like spinach or chard.
Another common leafy green is best harvested early in the summer and is known as dock. There are several varieties. My favorites are yellow dock or curly dock. By summer, the tall flower/seed stalks will be the most prominent feature. The leaves are best harvested when they are young and tender and before the flower stalks appear. As they age, they develop more of the oxalic acid that makes them taste sour, but also ties up calcium in the process. They will need a bit more cooking to make them tender, but as they are one of the first greens to come up in the spring, they are delicious with fried potatoes and eggs. If they taste a little bitter, blanch them first, pour off the first water and then cook and season them to taste.
One of my favorite summer greens is purslane, known in Spanish as verdolagas. This succulent comes up abundantly in between the rows of my garden, and I often will encourage it by not pulling it or covering it with mulch. It is a low-growing ground cover that later in the summer has little yellow flowers that turn into hundreds of tiny black seeds. If you don’t have it in your garden, look along the paths or roads. It is seldom more than an inch high and will have several creeping fleshy stems coming off of the center.
Gather some of those tiny seeds and throw around the property and it will thrive in the sides of roads and waste areas.
Purslane is one of the few land plants that creates Omega 3 Fatty acids, that essential fatty acid that you usually get from fish. Portulaca oleracea, its scientific name, is very nutritious and abundant in many vitamins. Check it out and add it to your menu.
Believe it or not, you can eat tumbleweeds. Probably the most abundant weed in the summertime is the Russian thistle, aka tumbleweed. If you, like most of us, have thousands of them, consider pulling the young ones while they are tender, cut off the root, then sauté the young weeds with a little olive oil and soy sauce. Their texture is a little crisp, but otherwise they taste fine. I remember when, a few years back, a group of Crestonians, connected with the Land Trust, hosted a tumbleweed dinner. Try them when they are still young and tender.
You are probably familiar with the Rocky Mountain bee plant, the beautiful pale purple flowers atop two foot or more stems that bloom for several weeks in the summer. Hummingbirds and bees love them, but most grazing animals leave them alone. Some years back I was visiting an Acoma pueblo in New Mexico and learned that this plant, cut and fermented, was an important food plant, as well as a pigment plant for the black designs on native pots. If cut and eaten fresh, it has a saponin, or soapy, taste, which makes it unattractive to most wild foragers like deer. All the better for humans, who blanched it and created the dried cakes that were used as a base for soups and eaten as a traveling food.
As I write this article, the yuccas are in full bloom. They are so beautiful! Again, they were very useful to Native Americans. The leaves produced thread and the points were sometimes used as needles. But for food, it was the flowers that were important. I personally had never tried them as food until I was preparing this article. A Google search suggests that blanching the flowers first would remove the saponin that can make them mildly toxic to some people and leaves an acrid taste in one’s mouth. I picked a few blossoms to try, blanched them for a few minutes in boiling water, and sautéed them in olive oil. The blossoms became light green and the petals very tender. As some sources suggested sauteing only the petals, I tried both ways. The result: I like the petals, which become very soft and mild. the inner flower parts were fairly mild but had a bit of acrid taste. I think I’ll stick with the petals.
And lastly, how about some flowers? Dandelions have been discussed by many authors, so I’ll leave that to you. Johnny jump-ups are a favorite of my grandchildren, who like to pick the flowers and eat them straight out of the garden. These, like their cousins the pansies, are delightful in a summer salad and will reappear annually if you let them go to seed in your garden.
Have a wild week.