Are their wild patches of indigenous iceberg lettuce growing in Vermont? Prob’ly not. But there are plenty of other things you can use for salads or other eating.
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Well, you have wild carrots (commonly seen on the side of the road as Queen Anne’s Lace). Aside from that, dandelion greens and flowers are edible (batter dip the flowers and pan fry, either cook the greens like you would spinach or other greens or use them in salad). I’ve also eaten wild raspberries, blackberries and fox grapes, ramps (a type of wild onion), poke salet, wild mustard and sour dock, made tea from the bark of sassafras roots and eaten black walnuts from trees in the yard. These are still common enough in the area from Tennessee to the Great Lakes. Some of them are tastier than the cultivated varieties, but others are things that you have to aquire a taste for. Many varieties of fruits, vegetables and nuts were cultivated to improve flavor, yield or transportability.
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In addition to these, I’ve made salad with lamb’s quarters, chickweed, cleavers and red clover flowers…and of course wild lettuce! (*Young *wild lettuce, though. The old stuff is more bitter than old dandelion.) Stinging nettles are edible (and delicious) but must be cooked or pounded into a pulp to deactivate the sting. The baby leaves and shoots of sassafras are delicious in the springtime, and a lot easier to harvest than the roots! Fiddlehead fern shoots are very tasty, like asparagus, but there’s some indication they may be poisonous, so I don’t give them to my students anymore (but I still eat them myself). Violet flowers are a delicious and tasty addition to salads, as are the flowers and buds off of day lilies. Elder flowers make yummy pancakes when battered and pan fried. Every part of the cattail is edible at some stage or another. I’m not entirely familiar with Vermont’s flora, but most of these are pretty ubiquitous across the north/midwest/eastern part of the country.
Note the first: “poke salet” is not a cute country pronunciation of “salad”. “Salet” means **cooked **greens, and it’s important to cook poke to make it safe to eat. It should also not be eaten past the end of May, as the poisonous alkaloids in the shoots increase with the season.
Note the second: only pick wild plants for consumption with an experienced guide. Lots of newbies confuse wild carrot with water hemlock which could make you dead. That said, don’t be too afraid to try new stuff. There’s really nothing that grows in your area that could kill you with one taste (mushrooms being the exception). If something tastes bitter, it’s probably best to spit it out and not eat more. Bitter usually signals alkaloids which could be harmful (or fun, depending on your intent!) Most plants that are “poisonous” make you puke or give you diarrhea. Or both at once. Not pleasant, to be sure, but not deadly either.
Note the third: Only harvest 1/3 of any one stand of plant, and only with the landowner’s permission. The last thing you’d want to do (I hope) is pick the last ginseng growing in Indiana because it looks like a tasty treat!
I’m leading a weed walk in a couple of weeks in an area that’s new for me. I can’t wait! I hear there are huge tracts of twinleaf growing there, which I’ve never seen.
