Like police officers, there’s never a patch of stinging nettles around when you need one.
Eric Akis’s treatise in Wednesday’s Times Colonist on cooking and eating stinging nettles is not the first exposure I’ve had to the culinary possibilities of the plant. Since coming to Vancouver Island, I have heard several times of people using nettles, and I’m determined to try them.
It’s just that they can’t be found in my neighbourhood in sufficient quantities for cooking. The three or four stalks that grew along our driveway were enough to cause some temporary discomfort for a grandchild, but not enough to make a decent meal. I’ll keep looking, as I will keep looking for other edible “weeds.”
A weed is a wild plant that’s growing where it’s not wanted. Therefore, one way to eliminate weeds from your garden is to want them, sort of like getting rid of enemies by turning them into friends.
There was much talk in my youth about weeds that could be eaten. My parents and grandparents knew how to find and prepare such things as lamb’s quarter, pigweed, dandelions and wild mustard. But I never saw them eat those things, except occasionally using tender mustard leaves in salads or sandwiches. The greens that grew in the garden were more plentiful, easier to harvest and generally a lot tastier than the more unconventional fare.
But it started a lifelong interest in eating wild things that was further fuelled by reading Euell Gibbons’ 1964 book Stalking the Wild Asparagus. Gibbons would fit right in with today’s foragers and natural-food enthusiasts, but back then, he was regarded as a bit eccentric and was frequently lampooned, sometimes with his good-natured co-operation.
The first thing I tried from his book was wild asparagus. That’s a no-brainer. It’s the same asparagus you buy in the grocery store. Birds eat the red berries on the mature plant, and their droppings help the plant spread to roadsides, fence lines and stream banks.
Gibbons was enthusiastic about cattails, which were plentiful where we lived at the time, so I gave cattails a try.
Several parts of the plant are edible, but the easiest to harvest is the tender core of the green stalks before they get too woody. It tastes a bit like cucumbers.
Hiking with some grandchildren, I showed them how to pull out the two centre leaves to get at the edible core. Kids who had to be coerced into eating salad and cooked carrots at the table munched on cattail stalks with gusto. Go figure.
Purslane (or wild portulaca) was another favourite. It’s a scourge for most gardeners, but not for us — the kids liked to eat it raw, and demand usually exceeded supply.
One day, I was standing on my lawn visiting with a neighbour when I reached down, plucked a couple of fairy ring mushrooms and popped them in my mouth. My neighbour, having been told all his life that they were deadly poisonous, seemed a little disappointed when I didn’t keel over.
But his caution was not misplaced. If you aren’t absolutely sure about what you’re eating in the wild, don’t eat it. That goes doubly for any species of fungus.
Foraging is growing in popularity, and there are many benefits from eating wild food. But it wouldn’t be good if all of us forsook the market entirely and took to the forests. There just isn’t enough to go around, and environmental harm could result from over-harvesting.
Fragile ecosystems could be damaged by large numbers of people digging and cutting various plants in the wild. For example, blue camas was a staple for Vancouver Island First Nations who harvested the plant’s bulbs, but the blue camas is now a threatened plant, and its recovery would be thwarted if people started eating camas bulbs.
Cultivation is a more efficient way to produce our food, although we need to step back from the industrial approach and look more to nature on how to grow food better.
Meanwhile, have at those nettles and dandelions. Don’t think of it as weeding, regard it as harvesting.
And if you have a recipe for Scotch broom, I’d really like it.
