Tracker of Plants

A few days ago I received a question from Rock Scout:

I’ve been working on a survival handbook (notebook) that is specific to me, here, in this climate. I’m creating a cache network that I can’t wait to tell you more about. Will you help me with something? It’s more or less a chart. It will show me how to best invest my time when it comes to food.

The climate Rock Scout is speaking of is our native northwestern Pennsylvania. This is where I learned 90% of what I know about plants so my answers will be Allegheny specific, yet the basic harvesting patterns will apply to most bioregions. I started composing the answer to this question and things got unwieldy, so I’m going to be posting it in a series over the next few days starting with some basic guidelines:

1) To get energy for you, go where the energy of the plant is. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle is about getting the most bang for your buck. So think about the life cycle of a generic perennial plant (a plant that lives for more than two growing seasons). The energy will generally be stored in a root, rhizome, or tuber during the winter in the form of starches. Then in the spring it will, well, shoot up into the first tender leaves and fast growing shoots.

As spring turns into summer the plant sends out more leaves and branches, the older leaves get tough and the stalk gets stiffer, but tender flower buds begin to form and the newer top leaves may still be palatable. Next, the flowers open. On many a plant these are edible, though ethereal and not too filling. Luckily, they make up for being sucky food by making tasty, fragrant teas and excellent medicinals.

By fall most of the flowers have turned to seeds, fruits, or nuts. Harvest season provides some of our most satisfying foods! As the cold sets in the top of the plant dies and the energy returns to the roots. I would note that while the same rule generally holds for true for medicinal plants, you may sometimes choose to use a plant part at a different time to control the strength and type of chemical constituents you are getting. For example, dandelion roots dug in the fall have different properties than those dug in the spring.

2) The second rule is don’t follow any rules. Although it might be starchier in the late fall, if you are hungry there is really no reason not to harvest a cattail root in mid-summer, or eat a dock leaf even though there are flowers on the plant. I eat plants “out of season” all the time. When you are first learning plants this is a bit of a conundrum. I recommend trying a plant even if it is not quite peak season, just to introduce yourself, get familiar with it. If you are always waiting for the perfect time, you’ll be doing A LOT of waiting. On the other hand don’t judge a plant as food or medicine until you have tried it several times and during the “right” season, otherwise you might unfairly decide you don’t like it.

broccoli flowers

To help you understand this think of your garden vegetables. Each one has a specific stage during which it is considered primo and most commonly harvested, but many are edible in a variety of stages. Baby spinach is delicious and older, regular spinach is pretty good too, but spinach that has bolted (gone to flower) is not so great. Bolted lettuce is full of bitter latex and downright disgusting. Broccoli on the other hand is something most people eat during the unopened flower bud stage, but you can eat the flowers too and some people eat the seeds as sprouts. Pea flowers are edible, but mostly we don’t eat them until they’ve gone to seed, but only when the seeds (peas) are new and tender. So you see, timing is pretty important, but most plants are edible at multiple stages.

Some feral failures of mine in this respect include:

-Harvesting wild carrot root in the fall of its flowering year. They were hard, woody, and inedible.

-I tried angelica root in mid-late summer and I found its taste too strong and burn-y in my throat (Yes, I’m positive it was angelica).

-I tried to make roasted chicory root coffee in early fall and found it exceedingly bitter even in small quantities. I bought some from the local herb shop for comparison and that was much, much better.

-On the other hand, I’ve tried burdock roots that were not supposed to be good anymore, I forget exactly why, perhaps they were in their second year, and they still tasted great. All I remember is that Tom Brown Jr. was wrong! Haha, fuck you Tom Brown.

To get to the real answer to the question, I’m not sure of the exact months or order that things happen in PA, so I’ve broken it down into general seasons. Also I don’t have any field guides with me, so I’m just going to suggest the plants that come to mind and try not to forget any important ones. Also these are only plants that I have actually tried unless otherwise noted. I don’t feel comfortable passing on secondhand information, but there are plenty of good wild foods out there that I just haven’t gotten around to harvesting. Also I cover some medicinal and utilitarian plants even though the question was specifically about food.
To be continued…