Cecil’s recent classic column, “Can you actually eat cattails?” (and a google search) has made me realize that all my life, I’ve been calling the wrong thing a “cattail.”
So what’s this thing I incorrectly call a cattail? It’s like an extra tall grass stalk with a furry part at the end which is made up of a stack of v-shaped stickers that can be pulled apart and thrown like darts. They stick in your socks. You know the ones.
Anyway, those always resembled fur to me, so I thought those were cattails. What are they really called?
Here are cattails. What Cecil didn’t mention is that the immatured seedheads (the brown part in the picture) can also be eaten when they’re green: boil them and eat them like corn on the cob with butter and salt. Pretty tasty, actually.
Ah, the noble cattail! Rising about five feet tall above a wet spot. Who has to sleep on the wet spot? The noble cattail, that’s who. I read somewhere that cattails in a great big ceramic thing would be a cool thing. I pulled my truck off the road near a small patch of lovely cattails. I harvested five out of a group of forty-two. I put them in a big ceramic thing on the mantle. It was quite cool. It was quite cool, until the little white larvae started hatching from the cattail seedheads. Then it was not so cool. No big deal, though. A vacuum cleaner, some insecticide, and all is well.
Know what is invisible, and smells like larvae? Chickadee farts.