Learning to live off the land

A poor gardener am I, which makes wild edibles one of my favorite hobbies. With baseball season comes a new spring crop of edible “weeds” that will hold me over until my fitful gardens start spitting out peas and lettuce.

“Good thing we weren’t settlers, or we would have starved,” is the phrase around here each summer. I put my six edible tomatoes from 27 plants and my limited amount of zucchini last year — not even enough to pickle — down to the cool summer and my location up in the cooler hills. Those reasons didn’t account for my neighbor’s lovely garden, or the bushels of tomatoes my friend gave away from her 12 Better Boy plants in a suburban garden, but I did start most of my vegetables from seed and they might not have. So went the excuses all season.

The children didn’t notice. We have enough wild edibles in the yard and the back field to keep them busy spring through summer. Most wild edibles taste better young, so springtime is the busy time for gathering.

Right now, wild chives are stretching to the sky. These hollow, swirly-topped onion-family plants grow wild along roadways, in fields, and in my backyard. They grow in clumps, and were the first green things to be seen before the grass caught up two weeks later. By now, the chives are nearly 12 inches tall, unless a little girl already picked them for her basket. We started picking them at six inches.

We do use wild edibles sparingly, and only after comparing them to a botanical reference book or website. No one wants to make a hospitalizing mistake. Last week, the wild chives flavored our butternut squash and corn soup. The kids didn’t eat the chives; they only pushed them around in their bowls. Picking must be more fun than eating when it comes to chives.

Cattails, though, are always best for eating, not picking. If you get a stubborn cattail, you can end up on your backside from trying to haul it out of the swamp or creek. Landing wrong side down is only fun the first few times.

Lucky for us, we have a swampy creek, or ditch, in the backyard. New cattails should be peeking out from the dried over-wintered stalks next month. When they’re 12- to 18-inches high, the children’s favorite sport besides baseball will be pulling them out, or asking me to pull them out, and then peeling them, upside down, like bananas to get at the cucumber-like inner stalk. Only the first two or three inches from the bottom are soft enough to eat.

The children like to eat them raw, but cattails can be sautéed and served warm. My father once told me they could be roasted on a campfire, too, but ours never last long enough for us to find out.

Around the same time, fiddleheads should start poking up. Fiddleheads are young ferns before they unfurl. I haven’t tried these. I enjoy knowing that, if I had to eat them, I could, but for now, I won’t. I did try canned fiddleheads from the grocery store once, but one bite was enough. Perhaps fresh fiddleheads, like fresh green beans, taste much different than canned, but I am not interested enough to find out. Sautéing or boiling fiddleheads, after checking a book or other reference on wild edibles, is probably best.

Another wild edible we have in abundance if we refrain from mowing is milkweed. As I plucked the milkweed stalks from our back garden last year, I felt guilty tossing them on the ground without gathering them. I read once that they could be served like asparagus. Anyone trying them should certainly read about them, as well. We like our milkweeds in the field to flower and form pods for gathering and drying. They are beautiful, if messy, dried in arrangements.

Dandelion farms are unnecessary. I have dandelions in abundance, and they are free for the taking. Aside from dandelion wine made from untold bushels of the tiny flowers, the leaves of the young plants can be used for salads. The leaves of older plants can be bitter, but are still edible.

My grandmother refused to eat them of any age, as her mother had picked and served them. Each year, I pick a small amount and offer them to the children. The first few times, my son tried them. Now he refuses them. My daughter will still try the first one of the season, but she promptly spits it out. But if we were ever hungry, we’d have food to eat, I say. They tell me to go to the store.

Visits to the Cohotate Preserve near Catskill are always fascinating. In addition to the pond where we look for tadpole clutches, the picnic area near the Hudson River, and the paths with small footbridges over the steep hills, the preserve offers information about edible plants found in the area. Tea from pine needles, hulled acorns roasted multiple times, and a lemonade-type drink from sumac flowers are some of the options.

Each sounds less appetizing than the first, but each time I see another sumac seedling popping up along my driveway, I wonder if I ought to gather some of the flowers from its parents and make lemonade. I don’t. I pull or cut the seedling, and drink iced tea from the store, instead. Knowledge is a wonderful thing, but so is a commercial grocer.

I’ve taught my children to never, ever eat any mushroom they didn’t buy at a store, but I catch my son sticking grass in the corner of his mouth every summer while he looks for frogs. My little Tom Sawyer is more of a Donald Trump-type. He’d rather own several grocery stores than supply them.

The one wild edible we do harvest, and the one that everyone helps with, are wild grapes. The kids pick with me each September as long as grapes remain in their reach, and we make grape jelly, or, if we have slim pickings, grape syrup.

I didn’t use a reference book for the wild grapes. My other grandmother visited once and offered to help with them. Sharing knowledge between generations, in person, is the best kind of inheritance. If I’d only inherited my grandmothers’ knack for gardening, we could have homemade pickles with our jelly. At least the kids won’t care. If they don’t get cucumbers this year, they’ll enjoy the cattails.