More than Burrs - Eating Burdock

Every spring and late fall, Fred digs up the roots of a few Burdock plants, which he allows to grow for eating. Asians have domesticated Burdock domestically for its culinary and health benefits, under the name of Gobo, but in our opinion, the wild plant is similar enough to the garden varieties to be worth harvesting, just as we also eat wild Parsnip. 

As with many root vegetables, Burdock roots are good eating both after the plant dies back in the fall, and also before it shoots up in the spring, with only three problems: the roots are so long that no matter how deeply you dig, you only seem to get half of the total volume of the root, the skin is so rough and dirty-looking that it's unappealing to peel, and in older roots the flesh contains so much fibre that it's difficult to chew. 

Fred with a 53 x 64 cm Burdock leaf

We have two species of Burdock, both introduced from Eurasia, Arctium minus and A. lappa. A. minus, "Lesser Burdock," credited by Wikipedia with 1.8 m height and 30 cm roots, was the only species around in the 1970s, but through the years we've tracked the regional spread of A. lappa ("Greater Burdock," wikied at 3 m tall, with a 1 m root), and have introduced some of its seeds, though we can't tell the plants apart until the greater or lesser burrs form. Last fall and early this spring the plants in our sandy garden got away from us, so we didn't harvest many roots, and now the leaves have shaded big areas of the garden, and Fred is on a campaign of cutting them back to expose soil to plant Squash, Potatoes, and other vegetables.

In the early spring the first-emerging shoots can be cooked as greens, or used fresh as a salad ingredient - but now, in May and early June, as the stems get thick and tall and begin to leaf out, we happily harvest the stems before the flowers form, while the stem centre is still full and tender, before it becomes hollow and pithy.

The thick outer layer of even the heaviest young stems peels easily with a little help from a paring knife. The inner core has a rather stringy appearance, and darkens quickly when exposed to air. I like to further peel this until the tougher fibres are removed - you can see them because they’ve turned brown. This leaves an abundance of pale tender inner stems, ranging in thickness from your thumb to your little finger, and ready for boiling. 

We steam them, or boil them in just enough water to cover, for about ten minutes. With a similar slightly sweet flavour (but not as strong) as cooked tubers of Jerusalem Artichoke, Burdock stems also have the same translucency and texture - both contain inulin, the low-glycemic starch that’s good for diabetics and popular in Keto diets. 

They are marvellously adaptable to all kinds of dishes. We cut them up and toss them into stir fry before serving, and they’re very nice used cold in bean salads. Of course, they’re great hot out of the pot with salt, butter and pepper, or mixed with any other cooked leafy green such as Kale, Chard, or Lambsquarters. 

Here is a Chicken and Burdock salad, just made today, with the addition of raw asparagus, green onions and tomatoes. I dressed it with a bit of green relish, a tablespoon of fresh squeezed lemon juice, a tablespoon of olive oil mayonnaise, a dab of dijon mustard, and a few dashes of smoked chipotle Tabasco sauce. 

The only problem with Burdock stems is that the harvesting season is so short! However, if you know where there’s lots of Burdock that you’d rather not allow to mature into burr production, you can in a couple of hours reduce them to stem cores and pack them into the freezer to diversify your diet all year round.

The Dandelion Diet

Now that spring has finally arrived, Dandelions have become a major component of our diet. We have two species of Dandelions, Taraxacum officinale, the Common species, and T. palustre, the earlier-blooming species of soggy areas of oldfields Officinale means "of the shoppes," and that's the species we collect from our lawns and eat, though T. palustre is doubtless just as edible.

You've probably heard that Dandelion root has medicinal benefits - anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer... so do the leaves. And the flowers, which folks have traditionally only made wine of, or tossed the petals onto a salad... have even greater health-promoting properties than either roots or leaves! As well as being richer in polyphenols, having anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.
I'm not going to copy all the information from this page, but let you read it yourself:
Is The Healthiest Part of Dandelion its Flower?

My search did not come up with a listing of the nutritional content of Dandelion flowers - just that 1/2 cup of uncooked flowers contains 25 calories. They are easier to harvest than the roots, and milder in flavour than the leaves, and during their short season, we should all eat them as often as we can!

The other day Fred left half of his breakfast for me to finish (he's always chopping whatever wild greens are in season into his green soup mug and microwaving them up with whatever will enhance its texture and flavour) and I tasted it... and then finished it! Here, in his own words, is how he makes  Dandelion Breakfast:

"...my method is to pick a bowlful of heads, and add an egg, some oil, a source of saltiness (in this case sauerkraut), some Tumeric-based spice, and a crush them into a mug, then put slices of cheese on top, and microwave for longer than you'd think appropriate."



This meal is totally "keto", and is full of good fibre. I prefer to add the cheese in the last minute of cooking, but Fred likes it chewy!

Here's my microwave version, to serve two. Along with two eggs, I've added chopped kolbassa and  grated cheese - I push a small drinking glass into the centre, for more even micro-wave cooking. I didn't remember to photograph it again before we ate it!








My specialty is Dandelion Flower Fritters - I've made them every spring for decades. Each year I use a little less flour, and they still turn out fine, even though now they're much more flower than flour!  Just mix a small amount of your favourite pancake batter, fold in the dandelion flowers, and fry! Maple syrup and a dollop of sour cream or yogurt are great as toppings.

Back in the day, some were judgemental about lawns with lots of Dandelion blooms, but with the banning of recreational herbicides this became the normal condition - though you can still occasionally see gentlemen on their hands and knees in Kingston manually digging out dandelions from a small lawn.


But to us, a gold-spangled lawn looks insufficiently harvested, suggesting a household menu deficient in flowerheads - but even a fully taraxacophagic diet wouldn't empty an extensive lawn - a whole new set of flowers appear, each day of the short blooming season. 

Dandelions mostly don't reproduce sexually, but produce seeds asexually by apomixis, without pollination, resulting in offspring that are genetically identical to the parent plant. This means that clones which have adaptive characteristics can take over uniform habitats, such as lawns and roadsides. Since they don't require pollination, selection among clones may favour those with reduced nectar and pollen production, explaining their relative unattractiveness to pollinators https://www.gardenmyths.com/dandelions-important-bees/

Autumn Dandelions!  26 September, 2019

After this summer's drought, through which only a very few, limp Dandelion leaves could be found,  autumn rains have brought out veritable fountains of large, lush, mild-flavoured leaves, which we are using in all he ways we used the spring leaves. 

Today's brunch was "toasted cheese sandwiches" request and instructions by Fred... chop a large handful of leaves finely (we have a clever, many-bladed pair of herb-cutting scissors for this) and mix with shredded cheddar cheese. Pile on one half of a flat bun, and toast in a buttered frying pan. He suggested that I might shake some Turmeric into the cheese & leaves mixture, but in this case, my frying pan was getting hot... well, next time.

Lambsquarters

Lambsquarters in the garden 2016

Lambsquarters is a pioneer plant (often considered a weed) that volunteers in exposed rich soil such as the quarters where lambs have been kept. The biggest Lambsquarters plants we've ever seen were in the rich clay of the Scarborough Bluffs on the shore of Lake Ontario: 250 cm tall, with stems 25 mm in diameter! "We plucked the foliage from this enormous plant like penned Goats offered cut branches, and found them mild and succulent" (15 August 1994).

When we moved to Bishops Mills, we tried to grow Spinach in the garden, but it was always overwhelmed by the Lambsquarters (LQ), which both grew faster and tasted better than the Spinach. After a few years we gave up on Spinach, evolving our procedures into what we now call 'Neolithic Gardening' in which we encourage weedy species rather than exclusively encouraging planted crops. We now plant various large-seeded garden vegetables (mostly domesticated in the Americas) which tend to shade-out competition: the Three Sisters (Squash, Corn, & Beans), Potatoes (from the Andes in South America), and the nearly wild Jerusalem Artichoke. There are also a lot of edible perennials in our garden which we encourage in various ways: Rhubarb, Day Lilies, Asparagus, Curly Dock, Spear- and Pepper- mints, and Catnip.

The weeds are about the only small-seeded annual species in the garden - this year mostly Sow Thistle, Carrot, and Lambsquarters. Inedible weeds such as Ragweed and Motherwort are ruthlessly composted, so our main battle of cultivation and mulching is with densely rhizomatic Brome grass.

We manage the Lambsquarters in dense beds by snapping off the tender tops. This leads the lower plants to grow up above the snapped-off plants, and to be snapped off in their turn. If the stand is a bit less dense, the snapped-off plants spread new axillary shoots into the space between the plants, which are then snapped off in their turn.

Blanching Lambsquarters for freezing

In 2016 we had two harvests, which we blanched and froze for winter. I heat water in a stock pot, and chop handfuls of tender-stemmed Lambsquarters into a colander with scissors, and plunge it into rapidly boiling water for as long as it takes for the water to come up to a rolling boil again, then lift the colander out and run cold water through the limp, bright green Lambsquarters. It's similar in taste to Spinach, but milder and not as mushy - and more nutritious. 

As the season goes on, the plants become impatient with this exploitation, and the tender snappable shoots become shorter and shorter and more and more made up of flowers. This progression can be slowed by application of water and nitrogen - the latter as diluted urine carefully watered in at ground level. As the plants toughen, we select the ones we want to go to seed as the parents of the next year's crop, and pull the rest.

New stands spring up on soil that was disturbed or uncovered later in the season, but these late stands bolt to maturity more quickly than the spring stands. One pest is the Lambsquarters Leaf Miner, Chrysoesthia sexguttella, a Twirler Moth that hollows out a lot of the leaves in some years, but has been nearly absent this year. In some years there's a wilt, perhaps due to the fungus Verticillium, which crumples up the tops of some plants, but we haven't seen any this year.

If you consult a botanist about the taxonomy of Chenopodium, you get wafflely answers, and form the idea that there's been so much hybridization and global movement of weedy & cultivated stocks, that there's no close correspondence between the variation in your garden and any set of names for species and varieties.

Wikipedia says: "Chenopodium album has a very complex taxonomy and has been divided in numerous microspecies, subspecies and varieties, but it is difficult to differentiate between them... It also hybridises readily with several other Chenopodium species..."

We try to select for the tender slow-to-bolt red-stemmed plants that generally correspond to the Chenopodium album name. We've selected against the long-stemmed rangy kind that seems to correspond to Chenopodium berlandieri - a form, or species, that is said to have been cultivated by local First Nations, and so is presumably more native to our area.

This summer [2018] has been so unprecedentedly dry that in our shallow soil the beds have done well only where Fred has watered them. I snap tops for my daily smoothies, and Fred for his weed-and-Oats microwave quiches. These photos are from our 2016 harvest. It was also a dry year, but we happened to have larger area of exposed soil for Lambsquarters to come up.

The Logging Chain

It's a commonplace that the reason that Canadians exist is to pull each other out of snowbanks... (which came first, the Canadian or the snowbank?)

Wednesday morning after Tuesday's big snowstorm, we were awakened by a rumble in front of our house. I got up to see what was going on, and there was a grader idling on our side of the road. It had likely been pressed into service as a snowplow.  On the other side, a small red SUV tipped sideways into the deep snow at the culvert of our neighbour's driveway. The driver of the car was standing beside it, raising his arms at the grader operator, who had his hands in his pockets, and was shaking his head.

It appeared to me that the car had pulled over to let the grader past, and wasn't aware that there's no shoulder on that side of the road. The driver of the car was now asking the grader to pull him out - so I hollered to Fred that we needed to find a rope or a chain, fast! A chain... both of us remembered the lost logging chain that we'd found in New Brunswick last summer, tangled with a road-killed hawk.

Throwing a cape and hat on, I rushed out to the front of the house and plunged my hand into the snowdrift at the corner of the porch, and there it still was, where it's been since we unpacked from that trip (the chain is one of those placeless things that one often sees in passing - always when there's not enough time to decide where it should better be put). Lifting the smooth heavy chain I shouted over the engine noise and beckoned. The operator plunged through the high bank of snow left by his plow on our side, took the heavy chain and gave me a "thumbs-up". Then I noticed that a small tractor with a plow had appeared (I guess it had just finished clearing our other neighbour's driveway). The chain was promptly hooked up at both ends. The appearance of the little tractor was fortuitous, because it turns out that even if the grader had possessed a chain, it is not allowed for County equipment to tow a private car! In less time than it took for me to snatch up my camera the car was hitched to the tractor, pulled back onto the road, and drove away, its driver waving happily...... only fifteen minutes after he'd tipped into the snowy ditch!

This incident is more deeply satisfying than the event itself, as it raises the memory of another logging chain... It was in Maine in 1976, during the first part of our travels with Frank Ross in the fieldwork for Canadian Nature Notebook. We had driven our two vans across a seaside meadow to the best spot for me to do a painting of the blue water and salt marsh in late afternoon light. After supper and as it was getting dark, we prepared to depart. Frank's '68 Dodge van had "positraction" on the soft turf, but one of my rear wheels began to spin, and before long the Ford Ecololine was mired.

Noticing the lights of a nearby house, Frank and I decided to ask for help, leaving Fred to do what he could with the shovel. A potter and her son welcomed us in. The only thing they had that might help was a magnificent two-metre segment of logging chain - a found treasure that decorated their living room wall. I remember it being as thick as my wrist. As they lifted it down for us we thanked them profusely and promised to take good care of it.

Hours later, when we'd finally extracted ourselves from the deep soft loam of that seaside meadow, the chain, which had been wrapped around a wheel for traction, was nowhere to be seen or felt. We returned in the morning to search again, but with heavy hearts, knocked on the door of the potter's cottage and confessed its loss. I remember that her son was not with her, having gone off to ring the bell of the village church, it being Sunday morning. I seem to remember giving her my little watercolour, but no gift could have replaced that magnificent chain, and I've always been sad about that.

Now somehow I feel a closure - as if something in the universe has come round, and here we are, with a found logging chain to pull someone out!

The Year of the Ice Apple

 Apples remaining on the Bitter Red Tree after earlier harvesting. 

Bishops Mills, along Buker Road, 19 January 2017.

This winter, many Apple trees have held their fruit long after it would have fallen in any other year. 

In November we were still bringing in apples from our own wild trees "out back" which were still good and firm, their sweetness having resisted many nights of freezing temperatures. 

We sliced the good parts away from the cores and ran them through the food dehydrator until we had two gallon jars full of sweet leathery pieces, some of which are dark and crisp, shattering between our teeth in an instant burst of rich apple flavour.

Popcorn Bags

A lot of our equipment has come to us through the decades by chance or good fortune. In 1983 the Herpetology and other sections of the National Museum shared the 1501 Carling Avenue Beamish Building in Ottawa,  (which had been the warehouse of the failing chain of Beamish Stores) with some general storage warehousing. 

An old Jewish janitor, with the thriftiness traditionally ascribed to his ethnicity, was reluctant to follow orders to pitch boxes of popcorn bags from a failed "Canadian Heritage Food" enterprise (which had evidently splurged too much of its startup capital on these wonderful bags) into the dumpster, and repeatedly urged the museum staff to make use of them. The late Mike Rankin (as thrifty as a Scottish background is supposed to make one) accepted several of these boxes, and dispersed them among Herpetology, Ichthyology, and us. We have since then inherited the museum's stock of popcorn bags. 

Just Put Oats In It...

A few days ago, Fred was doing an inventory of the fridge and dragged out the covered glass bowl of cream cheese icing that had been rejected by our daughter as not stiff enough to crown her batch of cupcakes.

Fred has a longstanding tradition of mixing oats in with everything - or adding anything to oats - and putting it in the microwave. I used to complain about having my carefully saved leftover vegetable soup thickened with oats and a splash of umeboshi vinegar and fried in leftover chicken fat.

I kept trying to explain to him that I liked my oats sweet, not savoury... but recently we've come to an agreement -