First Ways

New Plant Classes

Rebecca Lerner — Tue, 22 May 2012 10:11:52 +0000

Yours truly foraging in an overgrown alleyway / Photo by Darren Hartman

* I’ll be offering a free plant identification walk at 3 p.m. at the ResiliencePDX community disaster preparedness expo on Saturday, June 2, outside the King School in northeast Portland. Come stop by and learn how to survive the apocalypse locally. (This will be an abbreviated version of the beginning of Urban Foraging 101 classes).

* Teri Lysak of Cascadia Wild is going to be teaching a special Forest Ecology Class for First Ways on Sunday, June 10. She’ll cover native tree identification, forest health, succession, plant communities in different habitats, and much more. Check out the details here.

* Urban Foraging 101 classes are happening one Saturday per month all summer. The plants change as the season progresses, so even if you’ve come to one class in the past, you’ll always have an opportunity to learn more when you come back. Upcoming dates are June 23, July 21, and August 18.

How to: Hawthorn Flower Medicine

Rebecca Lerner — Sun, 06 May 2012 03:14:05 +0000

Hawthorn is a heart medicine widely used to stabilize erratic heartbeat, moderate high blood pressure, and heal angina and arteriosclerosis (hardened arteries). It’s also popular as a medicine to heal the spiritual and emotional trauma of heartbreak and heart ache.

Click to enlarge

Late spring is the perfect time to make hawthorn medicine with the flowering twigs.

To make an extract, pour alcohol (grain alcohol, vodka, or brandy diluted with water to 60% or 120 proof) over the flowering twigs in a glass jar. The ideal proportions are one part fresh herb to two parts liquid menstruum (that’s the alcohol solvent), according to late great herbalist Michael R.S. Moore. Cover the jar and place in a dark closet for four to six weeks.

The dose is 15 to 30 drops (from a medicine dropper) up to four times per day for acute conditions, tapering to two to three times per day after three weeks, according to Moore.
I’ve written about how to make hawthorn medicine with the berries using glycerin instead of alcohol, here; how eating the berries helped heal my dog’s erratic heartbeat, here; and how to prepare the berries as food here.

If you want more help identifying hawthorn, this is a good link.

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Sow Thistle: A Tasty Wild Green

Rebecca Lerner — Tue, 01 May 2012 07:10:58 +0000

I was talking on my cell phone and walking down the street today when I happened to pass this plant that I recognized from books: It’s sow thistle, Sonchus oleraceas. Sow thistle has bright yellow flowers and toothed, hairless leaves that resemble dandelion, Taraxacum officinale. But sow thistle grows much taller than dandelion — Sonchus can reach a height of several feet — and its leaves wrap around and clasp the stem. (By contrast, dandelion has just a basal rosette of toothed leaves and one flower per stem.)

When I plucked and tasted a leaf of the sow thistle, I was glad to find that it was really quite good. “And it’s not just-good-for-wild-greens good,” I told my friend. “It’s actually good.” In fact, the Latin “oleraceas” means kitchen vegetable.

The flavor reminds me of a cross between Lamb’s Quarters, a.k.a. wild spinach, as it has the same kind of richness, and dandelion, because it has a slight bitter kick to it. I liked it raw, and I think it’d be really good in a salad. In his wild food cookbook, Steve Brill recommends stir frying it in garlic and rosemary as well.

Nutritionally, sow thistle has a lot to offer: It’s high in protein, essential fatty acids, iron and other minerals, making it an especially useful find for someone on a vegan or dairy-free vegetarian diet. It also has a lot of Vitamin C.

This species is spineless and hairless, but there are other common kinds of sow thistle that do have prickly parts, such as Sonchus asper and Sonchus arvensis.

Close-up of latex

Sow thistle’s closest lookalike is wild lettuce, Lactuca sp., as wild lettuce has similar yellow flowers and toothed leaves, and if you cut the stem open, you’ll see it also has white latex inside. Wild lettuce is edible, though, so if you mix it up with sow thistle it won’t really matter, except that wild lettuce is a lot more bitter and less enjoyable to eat. You can distinguish between the two by looking at the underside of the leaves: Wild lettuce species contain a line of hairs or spines (prickly lettuce, Lactuca serriola, has sharp ones) whereas sow thistles do not.

A final dose of plant trivia: As you might have guessed, the common name “sow thistle” is a reference to the plant’s popularity among farm animals, particularly the piggies.

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