More Ramblings

     One thing I have discovered about hiking, fishing, hunting, trapping, or any other outdoor endeavor is that you always get hungry.  I’m not the first to discover this. Our colonial forebears must have faced many moments of serious indecision when trying to supplement their meager food supplies and treat illnesses from the huge number of new plants, fruits, seeds, potherbs and such.  It is amazing to me that in a mere 200 years, thousands of plants, roots, seeds have been tried and tested without the use of modern laboratories and technicians. To-day we can take no less than 200 books from a city library without thought to the courageous people who made the book possible, and learn how to make a hike in the city park or the mountainous wilderness more of an adventure.
      In addition to the many useful plants that were already here when the colonists arrived, those Indians of the East. Who were friendly, taught the colonials their methods of using wild edibles.  Today we benefit in many ways from those same ancestors by their cultivation of plants that have since returned to the wild.  We sometimes find wild-growing Jerusalem artichoke being the only visible remains of a vanished homestead.  The cellar is usually filled in with debris, but the location of what was the back door of the house is often easy to find because of the wild sunflower.  Its sunny yellow composite flower on six to ten foot tall stems makes it easy to identify.  In the fall and even in the spring the roots can be dug up to provide a crunchy, potato-like tuber that can be eaten raw or put in a stew.  These tubers have as much food value as the potato, but most of the starch is in the form of insulin. Making this a valuable vegetable for diabetics and others who need a low starch diet.  Finding the flowers of this plant between August and October, will help you find them again in the fall, winter and early spring, after the frost but before the ground warms up so much that they sprout.       
     In pioneer days, there’s no doubt that these tubers served as potatoes after the real
  Crop was gone.  Since potatoes have been such a staple of diet all through the years, perhaps I should tell you more about the ones that are fairly easy to find and which you will have no problem identifying.  The Arrowhead family of wild potatoes, including “duck Potatoes,” grows in shallow water or at the muddy shoreline.  They can be loosened with a closely forked stick and will float when dislodged.
     Along with the Arrowhead, you should find the Bulrush or Cattail, a versatile plant.  You can use the young shoots, raw or cooked, in the spring.  The white base of the stem can be used as a raw salad and root, raw or cooked, as a vegetable if you have time, dry some of the roots and grind them up for part for your flour.
     The white and yellow water lily produces a large fleshy root which, when peeled and cut into pieces will add flavor and thickening to your stew as well as nutrition.  Speaking of thickening, perhaps you would like to know a good way to thicken your wild stew without flour.  Use Reindeer moss or lichen.  In northern conifer forests, the pretty, gray, antler like plant is found almost everywhere.  Lichens are commonly found on boulders and old logs.
      There are a lot more potato-like roots that could be used and have been for years, but man has pushed and pulled at their habitat until  some are considered endangered in their local habitat. The ground nuts and lily roots with which Roger’s Rangers warded off death from starvation at the “Upper Coos” on the Connecticut River after Roger’s raid against St. Francis in Quebec, are in this endangered species category.
     Now is a good time as any to remind you to take only what you need and do not waste what you take.  I’ll also tell you that you won’t like everything you try.  I don’t suppose the colonials did either, but they frequently were in a situation of either eat it or go without. Perhaps it s unfortunate that we do not have the same situation  a little more ourselves...  I can only suggest that a wild edible be used “in place of.” I did not say, nor would I say, that something tasted like something you buy at the grocery store.  I still suggest you try new and different wild foods.    
     It seems that everywhere you walk, whether roadside, waste field, or lightly brushed openings and pastures, you will find a finely cut, lacy-leafed plant, two or three feet tall with a pretty white flower cluster;  wild carrot of queen Anne’s lace. Now, a caution, you might mistake this for poison hemlock.  However, wild carrot has hairy stems and the stem of poison hemlock is hairless and is spotted with purple.  Dig a few of the wild carrot and tuck them into your sack.  Stew will be perked up with the addition.
     In this same kind of terrain you might find Stag horn Sumac, the branches of which resemble deer antlers while still in velvet (hence “stag horn”).  With a regal, proud red fuzzy berry clump on the end of a fuzzy stem.  This makes the greatest tea, pink lemonade and fake lemon pie.  Eaten out of hand, they provide you with a large amount of vitamin c.  I was once told a very easy way to remember the difference between poisonous and edible sumac.  The poison sumac grows in low, swampy land and hangs its white berries beneath its stem as if ashamed of being poisonous, while the red-berried stag horn sumac stands on high ground and raises its berries high so as to be easily seen.
       Along about here don’t forget to look down.  There just might be some wintergreen, an evergreen leaf that is unmistakable when bitten into.  This makes a pretty good tea, but it takes quite a lot of boiling.  I would rather chew on the leaves and eat the berries.
       A large part of my enjoyment of wild edibles is not those I take home but the ones I eat as I come to them.  I like the tiny pollen-bearing male cones of pine as will as the new tips of tamarack and hemlock (meaning the tree, this time not the water hemlock).  In times of need these can be remembered as emergency food.  Conifer pitch, especially spruce, makes good chewing.  If you get used to the different taste.  Perhaps deciduous forest would please you, and there you can try all the buds and young leaves.  Basswood buds, aspen, maple; some you’ll really like and some you’ll spit out.  Take a young twig and chew it. It makes a good toothbrush.  All the wild cherry fruits are good and please enjoy these, but be sure to spit out the pits, as they and the wilted leaves contain cyanide and should not be ingested.
        If you know where there is a pond with marshy edges, I think you’re sure to find rose hips. Very outstanding in winter.  The leaves are gone but the thorny stem with its bright orangey-red fruit is usually well above the snow.  They are an excellent survival food rich in vitamin c. Containing no less than 24 times vitamin c than orange juice.  These are good in tea, dried and crushed to add to flour or just added whole to whatever bread, biscuits, or muffins you are making.  If you pick enough they make good jelly as well.
        If you are out and around much, sooner or later you will come across a open bog.  One where you’d get  your feet wet and feel like you are walking on a waterbed, but go back after a frost in the fall and see if you can find some lovely red, tart cranberries.  After you have the location fixed in your mind, go back on snowshoes and scrape the snow away. They will still be good, and a juice made from them is really good.  If you are really against getting you feet wet and aren’t dead set on real cranberries, along roadsides you will find a tall shrub bearing clusters of a bright red juicy fruit called high-bush cranberries, but which is actually a Viburnum Trilobum.  Normally to tart to be eaten raw, these berries are excellent when cooked with lemon peel, seeds strained out and sugar added to taste and result will be much like real cranberry sauce.         

Don’t forget to give thanks.

                 Tommy-two-toes