Pam Linn
As the Spring Equinox approached and local gardeners began waging their annual war on weeds, a curious group of naturalists were actually harvesting the tastier specimens.
Led by Wild California Cuisine expert Hilla Futterman, they trooped across the fields of Soka University on a recent Sunday afternoon carrying brown paper bags and sharp scissors. They poked around under the oak trees for miner’s lettuce (not actually a lettuce but a member of the portulaca family), so named because during the Gold Rush days, miners suffering from scurvy learned to make salad of the Vitamin C-rich green.
Futterman explains that our search is not limited to “Technical Natives” (those here before European settlers arrived), but would include what she calls “New Natives” if they reproduced here. Miner’s lettuce is one of the only true natives growing here that was actually exported to Europe. Biologists have different views on the benefits of true native plants over what are termed exotics. Futterman says, “America was built on the new. Plants got here in many ways. We should use what grows here.”
Milk thistle, a common weed in waste places, pastures and fields all over California, is despised by state biologists bent on exterminating it from parkland. “It is not an enemy,” Futterman says, though she cautioned only those wearing thick gloves should pick it. Milk thistle, scrupulously trimmed of its prickly edges, was included for our salad.
All thistles are supposedly edible, but it’s hard to imagine anyone eating yellow star thistle, for example. Sow thistle, kind of a country cousin to the dandelions that plague city lawns, has tender leaves and is high in Vitamins A and C, a nutritious addition to our salad greens.
There are those who admire fields of tall golden mustard flowers in spring. And then there are those who see its several local varieties is the axis of evil, overwhelming native grasses and contributing to wildfire fuel in the fall. I admit to having yanked out my share of the ubiquitous and extremely hardy gray mustard, no mean feat with its taproot long as a Kansas well rope.
Along the edges of Soka’s newly mowed fields, we discovered London Rocket, a black mustard variety whose seed is used commercially for seasonings and Shooting Stars, a tender leafed type favored by gourmets if picked before the blossoms form.
I was relieved to learn I would not be uprooting mustard plants this day. “Take only a few leaves at one time from the base of each plant,” Futterman says. “It’s thinning, so you leave the plant to grow.” Well, maybe in your field, but not in my backyard.
My other nemesis, filaree, a nutritious livestock feed but vigorous invader of gardens, is also edible if the leaves are harvested young. The red-stemmed variety grows in a rosette pattern close to the ground and is also known as Storksbill or Clocks, as it reseeds by a corkscrew shaped needle that drills the seed into the ground (clockwise, I assume).
Left unmolested in the field were the large filaree, horehound (used mainly for syrup and candy), bur clover and spiny clot bur, which we were told was “Not good for anything.”
We returned with bags full of Curly Dock, thistles, wild lettuce and mustard greens, which were trimmed, washed and made into salad with chopped apple, avocado and a light vinaigrette. The miner’s lettuce was prepared separately with vinaigrette and a little sea salt. Delicious.
Futterman shared with us a soup she had prepared at home that morning using mallow picked the day before. Very simple with onion, garlic, carrot and potatoes simmered in water. No oil or meat or soup stock required.
Teaching at Pierce and L.A. City colleges and privately, a course called “Going Beyond Civilization,” Futterman says she came to this calling partly because her father was “an ecologist before we knew what that was. He let everything grow.” She read her father’s farm journals since she was a child and realized the soil had been so damaged it could no longer grow nutritious crops.
“I decided Western food wasn’t worth eating anymore,” she says. “The only way to get the world back to where it was before it became damaged is to take care of the plants and soil around us. We need to learn as quickly as we can.”
Acknowledging that we are into protectionism now of our native plants, she says that’s all right but we could still allow the others to grow and use them.
Feeling somewhat guilty for all the mustard and filaree I’ve ripped out over the years, I vowed to harvest instead. I went to the library and got a book Futterman recommends, “Edible and Useful Plants of California” by Charlotte Clarke, which I am studying at night and carrying with me into the fields to forage. I’m still not sure about which parts of which plants might have unintended consequences if eaten. Indians, after all, did make laxative teas out of many of these plants.
I learned I could make tea (nonlaxative) out of the pineapple weed (a chamomile relative) growing in the driveway, soup out of mallow and salad out of curly dock (which I discovered struggling beneath some large filaree). I still haven’t found any miner’s lettuce. But I’m taking Futterman’s words to heart: “We need to take what nature provides seriously.”
Now more than ever.
Earlyn Mosher, assistant director of the Botanical Research Center at Soka, has organized a plant sale of Santa Monica Mountains natives on March 29, 9:30 a.m. to noon.