The nighttime…I mean the springtime, is the right time for gathering leaves from basal rosettes, tender young shoots and stalks, and a few guys that flower early. Some plants I harvest in the spring include cattail shoot, chickweed, wintercress and other mustard family leaves, leeks, violet leaf, yellow dock leaves, sheep sorrel, daylily tubers, live forever shoots, coltsfoot flowers, spring beauty tubers, and bracken and ostrich fern fiddleheads. I have found limited quantities of regular stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) in our area but wood nettle (Laportea canadensis) is super abundant and supposed to be as good, if not better. I haven’t gotten around to trying it. The Iroquois braided their spring leeks together by the leaves and dried them for convenient year-round use. Dandelion wine can be made from the flower at this time and left to age, preferably until the winter solstice.
Spring is a good time to start harvesting the roots of biennial plants. A biennial plant is one that lives for two years. The first year it sends out only a basal rosette (a whorl of leaves close to the ground) while the second year it grows a stalk, flowers, and seeds. You can eat biennial plants pretty much any time they are in their rosette form. This means you can eat, say, a first year wild carrot in the spring, summer, or fall, and second year wild carrot in the spring. It only gets tough and woody once the flower stalk appears, because it has to, in order to hold up that stalk. I put these roots under spring rather than early spring/winter/late fall because you probably won’t be able to locate them until the leaves come out. Perennial roots, on the other hand, such as Jerusalem artichoke and cattail, grow in large patches and leave behind stiff dead stalks that help you locate them in the colder months, and the roots underneath are still alive. The root underneath a biennial that has flowered will be dead and rotten. Get it? Perennial and biennial roots are both best whenever they are not in flower, but perennials are also good after flower.
Burdock
Other biennial roots include burdock, yellow dock (yellow dock is bitter and better for medicine, but okay chopped in soups in small quantities), and evening primrose and cow parsnip, which I have yet to try because I’m not adept at identifying their basal leaves. Spring is also the time of spring tonics. Dandelion, burdock, and dock roots, and dark leafy greens are excellent for toning the liver, for getting those juices flowing after a long, fat, sedentary winter in the longhouse! Guess what the original root beers were? Sarsaparilla, sassafras, burdock, yellow dock…”blood cleansers”…liver purifiers…spring tonics! Whahaha, it’s all coming together now isn’t it?
Morels are a springtime mushroom, yet I have never come across them in any number and don’t particularly care. I consider them arbitrarily famous. There are plenty of other great mushrooms out there. Just because the big shot chefs make a big deal of the morels…Uh, sorry, something about mushrooms brings out the ranter in me.
Spring is when the sap really starts running in the trees. The snow has melted, water is flowing, love is in the air, and energy is being transported upwards to the growing buds and leaves. This makes it a good time to collect barks such as willow for medicine, because the inner bark is full of life and juices. It also means the bark is easy to peel for use as containers, shingles, or just to remove from the poles you are using for building lodges. I’d like to mention that the bark is also pretty easy to peel all summer too, since no one else seems to mention that. Speaking of love and willow, spring, just before their pussies open, is also a great time to harvest willow shoots for weaving baskets and traps.
Next Up…Summer!
I always hated Queen Anne’s lace because, though it smelled just like carrots, it was too fibery to eat. Then I realized that it got woody because of the flower stalk coming up. I had always depended on the flowers to identify them, and by then it was too late to enjoy the roots. I didn’t realized they were biennial. I have never noticed the basal rosettes, but I will definitely look for them next spring.