In looking around for more information about edibles we can gather without having to grow them in our fields and gardens, I was again reminded of that voracious “Vine that Ate the South” – kudzu. We hear about how the leaves and tender vine ends are high-protein greens either for animal fodder (goats especially love it) or for pot likker greens you can make for dinner. There is usually a sort of side note whenever you read about kudzu that says the root starch is used in China and Japan as “food,” usually unspecified. Those of us who homestead in the south where kudzu has managed to claim millions of acres all for itself, should probably learn about all the ways this plant can be consumed. Not just greens, flower jelly and flower wine.

Originally planted as an ornamental, government and railroad workers planted it across the south in the 1930s for erosion control. It can grow up to 2 feet a day, cover everything in its path, and no known herbicide is ultimately effective against it. The roots can weigh as much as 200 pounds and extend underground to a depth of 10 feet, no topical herbicide is going to kill something like that. All parts of the plant except shallow, bark-covered smaller roots are edible, but it’s unlikely any homestead could consume enough spring shoots, vine ends, leaves or roots in a year to keep it from taking over valuable fields. A herd of goats is about the only thing known to actually keep it under control.

Kudzu has a long history in herbal medicine and shows some promise as a treatment for chronic alcoholism, high blood pressure and as a systemic alterative for colds and flu. But this doesn’t override its value as a wild food source. Roots are dug in the winter, after the kudzu has died back for the season. That annual die-back leads to a thick accumulation of fine compost that can be gathered at the same time and used as a garden amendment. Just be sure to sift first through a screen to remove seeds so you don’t introduce kudzu to your beds. Roots are best dug with a fork like potatoes. If you find a big one you may have dig out around it with a spade. You want the fat, deep roots. If all you can find are the tree root like shallow ones, remove the bark first and only use as powder.

Kudzu root can be used as a general root vegetable in soups and stews, stores well without drying in a good root cellar with your turnips and rutabagas. Or it can be sliced and dried, stored in jars like other dried produce. Once dry it is easily powdered in the usual manner to be used as a thickener for stews and soups, pies and quiches, or as a high protein vegetable-based flour.

It is the root flour that is most often used in Asia for a staple food item. In Korea and China it is mixed with arrowroot powder and made into pasta/noodles. Both the kudzu powder and arrowroot are starches, so cornstarch should work as well. The noodles are nearly transparent, highly nutritious and can be fortified with wheat or rice flour, potato or bean flour, etc.

Making your own pasta and noodles is quite the operation, but well worth it in the fall and winter when it’s not so hot and humid. My family likes home made herbed pastas, veggie pastas made with powdered dry tomatoes, greens, beets, etc. and such. Well dried home made pastas will keep just like store bought pasta, or can be frozen. This year I will be making noodles with kudzu as well.

“The Vine that Ate the South” offers us a highly nutritious staple food we should not overlook in our efforts to live self sufficiently off the land.

We await berry season with watering mouths around the homestead. Check the progress from green to red for the wineberries, green to that luscious deep blue for the blueberries, and red to black for the blackberries every day on our walks and drives.

Actual Due Ripe date is 4th of July, but if we wait that long we’re entirely likely to be beaten by bears, who roll around in the thicket and strip berries by the bunch, leaving nothing but matted weeds behind. So my strategy is to get those first ripe ones as they ripen and save them up over a couple of days for cobbler. Of which there’s one in the oven now, it’ll be long gone by supper.

Grandson #1 and his girlfriend hit the creek yesterday for wine berries, a whole strainer full of the first rush with more to come by Monday. They look like raspberries but with fuzzy calyx and no thorns. Grandson #2 went to the top of the knob and got half a strainer of early blueberries, a task that always requires taking a dog because bears tend to actually guard blueberry patches when they’re ripening. Not big on sharing, I guess.

Meanwhile, I hit the high field for the second time this week, garnered another full strainer of juicy blackberries. Mixed them all together for cobbler, the one in the oven now is the second in as many days. Some ice cream for on top would be nice, but we’re not picky. There will be cobblers enough to serve with ice cream over the coming week and the usual 4th of July blow-out. Which reminds me we need to slip down to South Carolina and stock up on bottle rockets…

Anyway, here’s my recipe for quick and easy berry cobbler that you should always make two of if you can, because it disappears like magic!

High Field Berry Cobbler

6 cups mixed berries, washed and drained
1/2 cup sugar
1 tbsp. lemon juice
3 tbsp. butter

Crust

1.5 cups whole wheat bread flour
1/2 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup sugar (white, brown or mixed)
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
3 tbsp. vegetable oil
2/3 cup milk

Mix dry crust ingredients in a bowl, then stir in oil lemon juice and milk. Mixture should be thick, not runny. If too thick, add a little milk until you get the right consistency.

Spray or butter a 12″ casserole or 9 x 11 glass cake pan. Add berries and sugar, stir to mix. Cut butter into chunks and dot over the berries. Spoon batter onto the berries and spread lightly with the back of the spoon to the edges. Doesn’t have to be pretty and doesn’t have to cover completely, it’ll spread as it cooks. Bake at 350º for 45 minutes or until crust is golden. Let cool a bit before serving. Top with ice cream if you like, spooning loose berries and juice over the top.

If you like a less watery berry concoction, mix a tablespoon of corn starch with the berries and sugar, it will stiffen the juices a bit. For peach cobbler add a tablespoon of cinnamon with the peaches and sugar mix and top with the same crust.

Happy summer cobbler!

3 cups pumpkin puree
1/4 cup maple syrup
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup ground mixed acorns and pumpkin seeds
* [can add flax and/or sesame seeds as desired, whole, toasted]
1 tbsp. ground cinnamon
1 tbsp. cornstarch
1 tsp. ground ginger
1 tsp. ground nutmeg

Now, 3 cups of pumpkin puree is about what you get out of a single mini pumpkin. If you’re growing giants, good luck (you can eat pumpkin bread and pie every day for a year from just one of those). Cut it in half, scoop out the seeds into a colander, quarter and put into an oven roasting pan with about an inch of water. Bake at 350º until soft. While the oven’s on, roast the cleaned and rinsed seeds on a baking sheet, stirring every 5 minutes to roast evenly (don’t burn). The pumpkin will be done in about 30-40 minutes.

Unless you already have acorn flour, you’ll have to make that too. First shell the acorns and half them on their natural split line, use only those with cream-colored meat. Put into a pot of boiling water for 10 minutes then drain. Refill the pot and do it again until the boiling water is no longer dark with tannin. Some oaks need only one leaching, some need two or three. When the water is clear, drain the acorns well and arrange on a baking sheet, single layer. Roast at 300º (stirring occasionally) until well dried. Some like to air dry the acorns and then blender-ize into a chunky, oily-but spreadable paste. Then dry that, break into pieces, and grind again to get a finer flour.

Now, if you really want to do things the old way (and if so, you’d be using a potato masher instead of a blender, and grinding the seeds and acorns on a rock by hand), you can leach acorns in a flowing creek or stream. Once they’ve been shelled and halved, put into a burlap or mesh bag and weight the bag in the flowing water for a few days, then dry in the sun. Acorns were once a staple food crop for people as well as squirrels and such, they are very nutritious. You just have to get the bitterness out, and that’s what the leaching is for. You can mix acorn flour – which is “mealy” and somewhat oily, with fine-ground dry cattail heads to make a tasty flatbread. So if you’re out camping and ‘roughing it’ just to see if you can, there’s a good hunter-gatherer project right there! Acorn flour is also a good thickener for soups and stews (excellent, I hear, in venison stew), or mixed with oatmeal and other rolled grains for breakfast gruel.

Anyway, on with the pumpkin cracker recipe…

Put the dry roasted pumpkin seeds in the blender and grind into powder. Add the acorns and grind as fine as possible. Either or both may have high oil content, so you can freeze them in sealed containers first to get it as powdery as possible. Add this powder and the syrup, sugar, cornstarch and spices to the pumpkin puree in a saucepan and bring to a slow boil on medium heat, stirring constantly. The mixture will be thick, so when it starts bubbling from underneath cook another 3 minutes still stirring, remove from heat and let cool.

Drop by spoon onto oiled sheets, spread to 1/4 inch thickness with the back of the spoon to make separate round chips. You’ll want them to be about 2.5-3 inches in diameter, as they shrink significantly when dry. Dry at 140-150º. When firm enough to flip, do so and dry until crisp.

Store in airtight jars or zip-lock bags. If they aren’t still crisp when you want to eat some, spread them on a cookie sheet and warm them at 300º for a few minutes until they crisp up. Scrumptious with cold apple or pear butter for a dip. Perfect for fall get-togethers, include a handful of chips with a serving of apple butter or fruit leather in school lunches!

The fruit crops were abundant this year due to lack of a hard late freeze as well as due to a killing late freeze last year that killed off the apple, pear and cherry crops altogether and reduced the grape harvest by at least half. The trees and vines think they’re dying after such a bad year, so will produce like crazy the next year. Yet oddly enough, there are no acorns or hickory nuts or wild walnuts on the homestead this year. Either they’re all getting eaten as fast as they fall by deer, or there just aren’t any. So again this year I’ll have to gather my acorns a bit south at my sister’s place on the lake.

Cherries are the first to ripen in early June. My family eagerly looks forward to them and I’ve never had to try and preserve – they get eaten just as fast as I can gather. Then comes the apples in August. This year the golden delicious were fat and happy, enough to turn into pie and apple butter in addition to being eaten regularly fresh off the tree. The pears fall in September and there were plenty this year to process. These are hard cinnamon pears, not great to eat straight because they’re so tough even after sitting for a few days, so I make pear butter that needs very little sugar and is great on toast or mixed into hot oatmeal or cream of wheat.

The grape harvest starts with concords in early September and then muscodines later in the month. With those, I thought the fruit harvest was done for the year when I happened to discover now in mid-October a lone American persimmon tree [Diospyros virginiana] in the back corner of the yard behind the shed that is absolutely loaded. We’ve lived here 16 years and I never saw fruit on this 40-foot tall tree, so I guess it must have reacted to last year’s late freeze just like the other fruit trees did. Hmmm… what to do with persimmons?

These persimmons are a pretty golden with patches of red, about an inch or two across. To eat fresh you should wait until they fall and are quite soft and pulpy, picked they are just a bit unripe and tart. I quartered and seeded some of those and packed them into a jar with vodka. These will make tasty tidbits during the holidays. The rest, which I’m gathering on a sheet tied around the trunk and staked up off the ground to catch the falling ripe fruit, I will dry for use in my holiday fruitcakes and fruitcake cookies.

Dried persimmons are a little softer and sweeter than dried dates, but with similar consistency. Traditionally persimmons in Asia (some big enough to weigh a pound) are halved and dried for three weeks in the sun, then finished off in low ovens. I will use the low oven method exclusively, to avoid the “no-seeum” issue (tiny gnats that manage to come right through screens and mesh). I haven’t had any real experience with persimmons – this is the first time I’ve had them readily available – so I’ll let my readers know if they turn out well enough to use in baking. They sure taste good, so the trick will probably be to keep the family from eating too many at one sitting.

That can be an issue, I’ve learned from my researches on the internet, because of their tendency to induce diarrhea if you aren’t careful. The good news is that persimmons are high in vitamin c, packed with riboflavin (vitamin B2), and contain tannins as well as anti-tumor compounds and phytonutrients. They can be as good of antioxidants as dark grapes, and in traditional Chinese medicine the fruit is used to regulate the ch’i – the vital power. Below are some links to information about persimmons for those interested or who find that they too host a tree or few on their property.

Wikipedia: Persimmon
Persimmon – Diospyros, Ebenaceae
Persimmon General Crop Information

I’m sure most people as as glad as I am that “Standard Time” was shortened significantly this year, having never quite made the adjustment to early darkness in the first place. Springing the clock forward early just puts us back where we were anyway all the dark winter long. Easter’s early this year too, and as my mother used to say, you can’t be sure it’s really spring until Easter.

Of course, last year we suffered a hard Easter freeze in mid-April that ruined the fruit and mast crops irreparably – even fooled the dogwoods that were in full bloom! So while garden preparations are proceeding apace with the march of March, and potatoes, lettuce and peas have been planted, we’re not ‘safe’ to really get things in the ground until late April.

Despite this, the daffodils are in glorious bloom along with forsythia, the crocus have come and gone, the lilies are growing fast and everything’s budding. All I can do is hope the fruit and mast aren’t ruined this year by another late freeze, but there are many things growing right now that a homesteader can make good use of just because it’s there. All of these goodies are packed with vitamins and serve to help prep the system after a long, slim, dark winter.

First and foremost are the new dandelions and wild onions. These are everywhere, tender young dandelion greens and soft wild onion chives make a great addition to spring salads. There’s hardly anything as nutrition-packed as dandelion greens, but the older they get the more bitter they become. The new ones aren’t bitter at all, so gather as many as you can. Toss them in with the first of the purslane that greens in the garden, some young violet leaves and flowers, and any sheep sorrel growing along the fence. Toss it with virgin olive oil and a little of last season’s wine vinegar, some early mint leaves just now appearing among last year’s dried stems, and garlic. Cut in a bunch of fresh wild onion chives and toss well, eat hearty!

Other excellent spring tonic offerings are the buds of tulip poplar trees. These aren’t yet present at my elevation, but will be in a couple of weeks. Because spring is windy, the buds fall regularly from my 100+ foot trees when the wind blows. And spring is always windy. I like these raw, some people like to marinate them. Purely a matter of taste. Spring is also a prime time for puffballs and early oyster mushrooms if you’re certain you can identify them. When the tiger lilies start budding, they’re delicious sliced into a salad, eaten straight off the plant, or battered and fried (if you like fried food – I don’t).

If you like your tonic to be formally ‘tonic’ go ahead and take a swig of the now-filtered vodka-based tonic you made last fall from ginseng and goldenseal roots, dogwood berries, rose hips and sassafras bark. It’ll give you a vitamin, mineral and flavonoid-packed pick-me-up good until dinner! Or, if you’re like me and are busy rough-filtering last fall’s oaken-aged basalmic wine vinegar, take a spoonful of the must while you’re working. This will not only help you gage how well it’s aging, vinegar and the grape must are seriously good for you!

Mine’s been in gallon jars with big oak chunks (to give it the oak flavor since I don’t have any oaken barrels). Once it’s rough-filtered it’ll be returned with fresh maple chunks. After another 6 months the maple will be replaced with poplar. Each time I’ll skim a small bottle off for use in the kitchen. Don’t forget that this increasingly aged wine-with-must vinegar is a great home remedy as well as spring tonic. When your family gets the inevitable spring cold, use it liberally on fresh wilding salads (or just give ‘em a tablespoon full). Cuts phlem, eases coughs, soothes throats, energizes digestion.

Take care of yourselves, and happy spring!

The Common Cattail (Typha latifolia), a.k.a. the broadleaf cattail, and its cousins the narrowleaf cattail, southern cattail and blue cattail, grow throughout North America and much of the rest of the world. They like to grow in shallow water-catchments off the side of roads, at the low end of agricultural fields, near ponds, lakes and swamps. Most people are very familiar with stands of cattails in their area, but may not have thought much about how useful this plant is as food and medicine.

Almost all parts of the plant are edible at the right time of year. As a member of the grass family (as are wheat, rice, corn, oats, barley and rye) that has thus far escaped concentrated cultivation, the homesteader might develop as much a liking for cattail foods as for other wild foods such as acorns, sun chokes, ground nuts and kudzu. Particularly if s/he has a nice natural stand of cattail in the bottomland marsh, where it’s easy to harvest edible parts at all times of year. In fact, management by harvesting can contribute to the general robustness of a fine stand of cattails and increase yields.

According to the USDA’s pdf National Plant Data Center Plant Guide: Broad-Leaved Cattail, young shoots (the round flower stems, not the flat, pointed leaves) can be cut from the underground ribozomes (stems) in the spring when between 4 to 16 inches long. These taste like cucumbers raw, and make some fine pickles. When steamed they taste a bit like cabbage. The lower part of the stem where it attaches to the ribosome can be boiled like potatoes and is good in soups and stews like you’d use sun chokes (a fall harvest).

As the stalks get 2 or 3 feet tall, they can still be harvested and peeled to remove the woody outer layer, then boiled, sauteed in stir fry or steamed and eaten like corn. Cattail is sometimes called “Cossack Asparagus” because of the Russian fondness for steamed stalks.

By late spring and early summer the female bloom spikes and male pollen spikes begin to emerge. These are a cylindrical projection at the center of the plant, you’ll have to peel back leaves to see it. Each spike has the male pollen part above and the female flowers below. It is the female part that will eventually develop into the familiar brown ‘cattail’ seed head, while the male portion will dry out and easily break off. These pollen spikes can be boiled and eaten like corn on the cob, or simply eaten raw.

At this time of year you can collect the spikes for pollen, which is a good substitute or additive to all flours for pancakes, breads, cookies or biscuits. The yellow color is nice, and the pollen requires no special processing… it just has to be collected. The underground ribosomes and above ground stalks can be gathered throughout the season, peeled and eaten raw, baked, boiled, broiled or roasted. They have a sweet taste and a high starch content. The peeled ribozome cores can also be dried and ground into flour. According to one study (Harrington 1972) an acre of cattails would yield approximately 6,475 pounds of flour – more than any homesteader is going to use in a year, so there’s no need to decimate the stand!

Cattail flour contains gluten, so should be avoided by those intolerant. It does rise well for breads. The Iroquois Indians macerated the roots and boiled them down to a syrup used to sweeten cornbread and other dishes. Native American tribes had many uses for cattail, making baskets, mats, caulking and rope. The late fall fluff from cattail heads was used to make bedding. In some areas bundles of stems were bundled to produce tule boats, or arrow shafts.

Euell Gibbons called cattail the “Supermarket of the Swamp” in his book Stalking the Wild Asparagus [linked below]. In my bottomland the ground near the creek is marshy, growing a pretty good collection of stunted bamboo, cattail and some bushy white willow trees. So far none of these “invasive” species have grown out of the marshy creek edging, I suspect because of the hardwoods and hemlocks that shade everything away from the water. All of these plants are useful (we love bamboo shoots here, and both bamboo and willow are good for crafting furniture).

Links:

The Incredible Cattail

Wonderful World of Weeds

The Forager’s Harvest: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants

A Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants (Peterson Field Guides)

Stalking the Wild Asparagus