Spring Plants I Hope to Eat Soon

As I journey boldly forth on my wild foods adventure, therefore, I am making an effort to study plants throughout their growth cycles--from the moment they shoot up--in order to develop hypotheses about what I'm looking at so that I can later prove or disprove my identification upon the plant's maturation.

This is how I approached pennycress last summer on that first fateful day, when Cattail Bob's book helped me to realize that we did, in fact, have edible wild plants growing in our yard--thus inspiring the wild edible plants diatribe of which you are now reading entry #44. At the time I successfully matched the picture with a young pennycress rosette, but since I still felt some uncertainty, I waited until I could identify the mature plant using a second picture in his book. (By the way, Best-Tasting Wild Plants of Colorado and the Rockies still rates very high on my list, in part because each entry contains 4 different pictures--one for each stage in the life cycle of a given plant.)

Now that winter has come and gone, I am tickled to find that quite a few of the plants I identified last fall are coming up in the same locations this spring. (This might not be news for those of you who garden or otherwise know plants--but it was pretty exciting for me.) And so my ability to seek out specific plants improves, because now I know where they grow. (For example, if you want to find yellow stonecrop in my area, head up the mountain, and if you want to find dandelions, head down.)

Pictured in this entry are: a) fireweed, b) thistle, and c) clovers. (I'm doing a very bad thing here by referring to plants by their common names, which opens the door for confusion, instead of their scientific names, which allows for exact identification. But truth be told--I don't know exactly what kind of thistle this is; all I know is that I tasted it last summer and I am still here to tell the tale. As always, eat at your own risk.) And, since this entry contains a very cursory introduction to the three plants pictured, you would do well to check back for future entries after I have experimented further with these plants, or pick up a few wild edible plants books to check on things yourself before eating.

On Fireweed: I found fireweed in Gregory Tilford's Edible and Medicinal Plants of the West, in which he explains that the veins in the leaf are the plant's most distinguishing characteristic--instead of terminating at the edges of the leaves, the veins "instead join together in loops inside the outer margins." Cook the young shoots and leaves like asparagus, he says. More on that after I try it.  

On Thistle: Thistle is one of those plants that has a common name used to refer to a wide range of prickly thistle-looking species. Cattail Bob recommends the species Cirsium, which I actually do think is what we have growing here and what I ate sparingly last summer (the spines are a pain to remove.) Still, the plan for this season is to make a whole harvest of leaves, leaf midribs, and stalks and devise some amazing recipe for it, followed by an even more amazing blog entry.

On Clover: Brill (1994) has a 3-page entry on clovers (two different species--the ones with the red flowers and the ones with the white flowers) in which he discusses eating the flowers in various ways, but in which he calls into question the safety of eating copious quantities of leaves because of conflicting sources (see the book for the discussion). Tilford, on the other hand, says every part of the clover is edible. Since we don't have much else growing around here, I would very much like to eat the clovers--but I suppose it merits a bit more research before I jump into that one.

So with that inconclusive ending, I'd like to wish everyone happy and sustainable spring hunting! And remember, try to take only a small portion of a given plant or stand of plants so that the plant can regenerate. Please always feel free to share your observations, your trials and tribulations, and your realizations about wild edible plants here on the blog any time. We're all in this together!

Post edited and republished 6.1.10.