marchweblog

After a long, quiet winter hibernation, herb enthusiasts are as eager for signs of green harvestables as gardeners are to get their first seeds in the ground. Here in the Coulee Region, spring is bustin' out all over by mid to late April, when we've generally seen the last of the snows. Many plants tune their emergence to the lengthening days and increasing temperatures, and there's an incredible variety of edible or tonic herbs available by MayDay. But no need to wait until April for the first harvesting expedition! There are a few pre-season delicacies to prime the pump and get a jumpstart on spring!

Maple Sap

The very first wild harvest of the year is Maple Sap! I call this time of the year the 'quickening' and consider Maple Sap to be a topnotch tonic, chockfull of life and pure energy. The sap begins to run in late February or early March when temperatures are below freezing at night and above freezing in the day, ideally 40 degrees and sunny. Everyone is familiar with maple syrup but how many enjoy the fresh, raw, life-giving sap? Even one maple tree in your backyard will yield gallons and gallons of fresh sap. Many local hardware stores carry taps; a simple drill bit to bore a ½ inch hole and a bucket are all you need. The sap looks and tastes like clear water with a mildly sweet taste.

Over the years I've discovered lots of ways to use the fresh sap. Here are some ideas:

1. Drink it fresh, right out of the tree! Maple sap is a pure, raw, living food, low in calories and high in energy. It will chase the winter blahs away in a hurry!

2. Try making your coffee and tea with sap instead of water! (If you like them sweet, that is.) We make all our coffee, morning beverages, and tonic infusions with fresh sap when it's in season. Sassafras tea made with sap is a traditional spring tonic in Appalachia. Mints are especially good, too, but don't stop there! I even freeze a few gallons of sap to make yummy iced teas in the summer.

3. Try cooking your oatmeal or other hot cereal grains in sap. You won't need any additional sweetener. I cook rice and quinoa in sap as well, no need for salt or any condiments. Try wild rice'n'sap for an extra-special wild treat! This year I made a recipe for a Sweet Rice Salad using rice or quinoa cooked in sap.

4. This year I made baked beans, cooking them down in sap in a crock pot for several hours, adding a just a little salt and chopped onion. They were so good I made a big batch of them to freeze for summer picnics. I didn't add any brown sugar or molasses, they were plenty good with just the maple sweetness. For recipe see Maple-Baked Beans.

Psalm 104:16 The trees of the Lord are filled with sap!

Wild Mustards (Brassicacae)

Wild Mustards take center stage during this early pre-spring season. There are three different varieties in my region that are readily accessible and extremely cold-hardy, so they make a very early showing. They tend to be available around the time that the sap starts to run and the snow is pretty well melted. They make a great excuse for a walk when the weather gets up in the 40°s again and the sun is shining and you're hungry for nature's first fresh greens.

The Mustard Family is a very large family that includes many of our favorite domestic vegetables as well as wild. Broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, to name just a few, are garden-bred cousins of the wild, carefree mustards. All mustards are edible, and many species have very distinct flavors.

Mustards provide lots of calcium, potassium, and vitamin B & B2. Research has shown that all mustards, even commercial ones like broccoli, contain concentrated substances which help prevent cancer, including isothiocynates, beta carotene, vitamin C, and fiber.

Watercress (Nasturtium officinale)

Watercress grows abundantly in many of the natural springs and slow-moving creeks scattered throughout the Coulee Region. It is a vivid, radiant green, especially striking because it is usually the only green against a white or brown winter landscape.

Folklore tells us that watercress is edible any month that has an 'r' in it, so May-August is considered off-season. I find it tends to be much too small to bother with until mid-March, when 40° & 50° days coax it to grow taller, making for an easier and more fruitful harvest. Watercress and any of its kin in the mustard/brassica family is a rich treasury of nutrients and makes a great, revitalizing spring tonic. In the good ol' days, when a winter diet consisted of largely canned and stored food, the first fresh spring greens were highly prized and sought after. Watercress surely ranked among the best of them. In fact, it is considered a gourmet item and fetches a high dollar on the market.

Watercress has a hot, spicy taste, kind of like radishes, but lacks any of the intense bitterness that many of the wild mustards are noted for. When cooked or dehydrated, it releases an unexpected flowery aroma that rivals the best vanilla in virtue. This heady fragrance is a well-kept secret hidden away inside this humble plant to be discovered only by the most dedicated watercress connoisseurs.

Wildman Steve Brill comments on watercress and wild mustards in his book "Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants" : ""Along with dandelions and lambsquarters, watercress is one of the world's most nutritious vegetables, excellent for convalescence. It's an outstanding source of beta carotene, iron, and calcium. It also contains vitamin C, bioflavanoids, vitamins E, B1, & B2, and the minerals phosphorus, sodium, iodine, manganese, sulfur, zinc, copper, cobalt, and vanadium.

When I harvest watercress, I try to just pull handfuls out here and there, thus thinning the patch and making room for what is left behind to grow. This thinning actually helps keep the patch healthy, otherwise it tends to get very crowded and stunts the size of the plants.

In the kitchen I put it right in the sink and pull the greens from the roots by a gentle twisting motion. I give the greens a good rinse and then lay them out on a towel to drip dry, put them in a large gallon-sized plastic bag or other suitable container and they are ready to use.

There are a lot of little pond critters that live in the root system of the watercress that I find in the sink when I'm through. I sometimes scoop them up and put them in a glass jar or terrarium for my children to examine. Most commonly we find fairy shrimp, tiny snails, and caddisfly shells.

Because watercress is virtually the only fresh green available in abundance at this time of the year, there's plenty of time to experiment in the kitchen and I have developed numerous recipes over the years, including it in soups, salads, dips, dressings, and spreads. Some of these recipes I substitute other greens for later in the year as they come available, but watercress has a way of adapting to all my favorite standbys and is wonderfully versatile in the kitchen.

Here are a couple of links that will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about watercress, and lots of recipes too!
watercress.co.uk
watercress.com

For an excellent nutritional analysis of watercress:
Nutrition

Garlic Mustard is considered an invasive species, literally carpeting huge areas of deciduous forest floors, especially

near parks, farms & other areas of human activity. In fact, it is considered a 'Class A noxious weed’ and is the focus of many eradication programs. But while the DNR is cursing it, I’m out there praising it in mid-March when I’m so hungry for fresh wild greens.

The leaves survive under the snow as they contain a sort of natural antifreeze, so you can start looking for them as soon as the snow melts. The leaves smell strongly of garlic when crushed and there are no poisonous look-a-likes.

In Europe, unlike here in America, it is not considered unusual to harvest from the wild gardens and ‘hedgerows’. Gathering spring tonic herbs such as wild mustard (known in England as hedge-garlic), nettles, dandelion, etc. is routine and commonplace.

Garlic mustard is quite easy to harvest as it’s often the only green herb growing, and it likes to grow in thick carpets, so I can easily fill a basket in a few minutes.

Unfortunately it does not behave in the kitchen as nicely as Cousin Watercress, which is freely adaptable to many good recipes, raw or cooked. Instead Garlic Mustard has a rather interesting effect on the palate, being at once sweet and bitter, with a strong garlicky overtone. In the end, though, the bitter taste wins out and most people wouldn’t appreciate it too much without some clever kitchen magic.

In the various traditions of herbal healing world-over, bitters are highly valued for their stimulation of the entire digestive system. In the kitchen, however, when trying to convince others of the virtues of the bitter wildlings, I find myself quite challenged.

Sometimes I can sneak a small handful of chopped leaves into a salad, and a few leaves easily disappear into any soup unnoticed as long as you don’t use large quantities. But the arena where Wild Mustard wins a culinary victory is in pesto. For some reason, as concentrated and raw as it is in a pesto recipe, the bitterness is much more palatable and disappears entirely when melted over a pile of pasta.

It is possible to remove the bitterness by simmering in 3 or 4 changes of water, and then using the cooked Garlic Mustard more freely in various recipes, but you will lose the water soluble vitamins in the process. You might be comforted in knowing there are plenty of stable vitamins, in particular minerals, that will still be in the greens, so it’s not a total loss. Since there’s not much else out there this time of year, it’s worth the compromise.

Here’s Wildman Steve Brill’s Garlic Mustard Pesto recipe, which uses the root as well as the leaves, and is the only Garlic Mustard recipe I could find on the internet:

This is the last of the three very early mustards in my region. Whereas Watercress rules the springs and waterways, and Garlic Mustard reigns in the woods, Wintercress has dominion over the open fields, especially farm fields where the soil is frequently disturbed. In fact, it is just as invasive as its cousins in that it is notedly a prodigal (recklessly abundant) weed. By the end of April the fields will have a yellow haze crowning them as it blooms.

Wintercress begins as a flat basal rosette and later puts forth an upright stalk about a foot and a half high. It is also available as soon as the snow melts and throughout the early spring.

In March, the leaves are harvested, but later when the flowerbuds form I harvest these as a sort of wild broccoli. The tender young seedpods are also edible, and later the mustard seeds.

Wintercress surpasses Garlic Mustard in bitterness by a long shot. Woe to anyone with an ‘immature palate’, sampling this bitter herb! This would be a good one for the traditional Passover Dinners!

Euell Gibbons was quite fond of Wintercress and devoted a whole chapter to it in his classic “Stalking the Wild Asparagus”. He includes vivid descriptions of the Italians driving out from the big cities to the country fields as soon as the snows melted on Wintercress harvesting expeditions.

In the deep south, Wintercress greens are called “Creecy Greens”. I didn’t have much luck finding Wintercress recipes until I became privy to this nickname, then I found an abundance. Here’s a couple of neat links on Creecy Greens:

In the kitchen, the best I can do is slip a few baby leaves into salads or soups, or pour off the bitterness in several changes of boiling water. Sometimes I eat a few leaves raw when I’m out foraging for the bitter stimulation but, to be perfectly honest, it is not a favorite of mine.

There are lots of other edible mustards, it is a HUGE family in the plant kingdom and is found in nearly every habitat, even the sandy beaches on the coast. No mustards are poisonous and they vary greatly in bitter and hot qualities. There will be a number of other mustards appearing on the stage here in Wisconsin as the season progresses, including Shepherd’s Purse, Peppergrass, and Pennycress. But for now they whet my appetite for the soon-coming wild feast in the months ahead.

Mullein (Verbascum thapsus)

There is often a lingering and persistent cough in the family from winter colds and flus and from months of breathing indoor air. We are just craving a good, warm sunny day to burn out the last vestiges of winter, but until then we harvest the earlybird medicines and foods that come forth from the land as we wait for the fullness of spring. One such medicinal herb is MULLEIN.

Mullein is best known in the herb world as a cough remedy. It has a special affinity for the lungs and is used in formulas for all kinds of lung ailments such as persistent coughs, emphysema, asthma, hay fever, bronchitis, and whooping cough. It is used as an expectorant and a tonic.

Mullein is a biennial herb, meaning it grows a basal rosette the first years, and then puts forth a very tall flower stalk (up to 8 ft. high!) in the second year. Even when it is this early in the year, I can find it by looking for last year's tall, dried flower stalks and then hunting around on the ground nearby for last year's basal rosettes, dried and brown but still distinguishable as mullein. In the very heart of the old rosettes I will find several new-growth, baby mullein leaves. I harvest several handfuls of these wooly little treasures and bring them home.

At home I make them into a strong herbal infusion. What leaves I don't use right away, I store in the refrigerator to keep them fresh. I don't harvest mullein for drying and storage at this time, only for immediate use. Later when the new rosettes grow large and abundant I will gather in a store for winter use, but for now it is a tender little treat to help chase away the winter congestion and renew our lungs for the good spring air just around the corner.

Mullein is very mild-tasting so it is quite palatable as a tea either by itself or mixed with mint or other suitable dried herbs leftover from last year's harvest. (For example, this year I mixed mint, catnip, oatstraw and fresh baby mullein together for a tonic cough formula). It is especially nice to make the mullein tea with fresh maple sap! This adds sweetness and even more nutrients. I have a 2-quart canning jar so I can make this tea a half gallon at a time, my family loves it! We drink it either hot or cold.

The scent on my hands after harvesting baby mullein this year was very familiar to me, but it took me a moment to jog my olfactory memory to recognize it. The fresh mullein smells very much like wild cherry bark, which is another old timey cough remedy. I am just sure they have some similar chemical components.

For the chemists out there, mullein tea provides vitamins B2, B5, B12, & D, choline, herperidin, PABA, sulfur, magnesium, mucilage, saponins, and other active substances.