Native Edible Plants Part Two: Vegetables, Alliums, and Greens
Episode Introduction
In today's episode, Native Edible Plants Part Two, we go over some benefits of homegrown food, what native prairie plants make interesting and excellent veggies, some extra benefits these plants provide.
Host Stephanie Barelman
Stephanie Barelman is the founder of the Bellevue Native Plant Society, a midwest motivational speaker, and host of the Plant Native Nebraska Podcast.
Guest Bob Henrickson
Bob Henrickson attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and graduated with a B.S. in Wildlife Biology in the School of Natural Resources. Currently, Bob is the Horticulture Program Coordinator with the Nebraska Statewide Arboretum, Inc., a private, non-profit organization and program of the Nebraska Forest Service. Bob is also a Nebraska Certified Nurseryman and a Certified Arborist with the International Society of Arboriculture. Bob has hosted a live, call-in gardening talk show called How’s it Growin’ on a community radio station in Lincoln since 2000. He is passionate about native plants, herbs, dried flowers, vegetable gardening, wild mushrooms and wild edible plants.
Thank you, Bob, for providing some rich and interesting content for this episode!
Listen, rate, and subscribe!
Get some merch! https://plant-native-nebraska.myspreadshop.com/
Find us on Facebook
Visit our homepage https://plant-native-nebraska.captivate.fm
Give us a review on Podchaser! www.podchaser.com/PlantNativeNebraska
Support My Work via Patreon
The Plant Native Nebraska podcast can be found on the podcast app of your choice.
Episode Content
Why shouldn’t we leave food to supermarkets?
There are many benefits to growing native Nebraska plants for food:
Lamb's Quarters
Related to quinoa, lamb's quarters are a forager’s superfood! This is one of the most nutritious foods on the planet. Tender leaves can be boiled like spinach or eaten raw as a green. Usually this one is weeded out, but maybe we all make a designated space for it and reap the wealth! Wilts quickly so put it in a cooler of ice immediately after harvesting.
Bob is again asking you to read Wild Seasons by Kay Young
Look up Creamed Lamb’s Quarters with Mushrooms. This article by Bob https://hles.unl.edu/weed-em-eat-em. Or roast it with sunflower oil. Just let it have a corner of your garden. That’s all we’re asking…
Ohio Spiderwort
- Make Spiderwort Soda or better yet, Spiderwort Jelly. Plant shoots, greens, and flowers are edible. Harvest in spring.
- Ever wonder what’s in a name? Wort means the plant has a long association with medicine.
- Flowers make a colorful garnish and bloom early in the year. Put cooked flowers in your frittata. Make your friends jealous of your conniving hippy ways.
Allium Canadense: Wild Garlic
Bulbs cooked or eaten raw, Iroquois and Cherokee tribes dried it and used it as seasoning.
Allium Cernuum: Nodding Wild Onion
Lesser used native allium with interesting drooping blooms; you know we would probably utilize the native onions more if we stopped growing exotic ones…
Purple Poppy Mallow
- Roots and leaves can be cooked and eaten
- MUCILAGINOUS!!!!!!
- Beautiful, bright colored flower so very cool it has edible uses as well.
- Be a thrifty druid and cut off the crown and replant with a bit of the root. Never ending supply of plant material!
Bob also wants you to read Samuel Thayer.
- I am a hopeless book collector with no hope of reading them all. We really want you to have the same problem.
Common Milkweed
- We all know these are good for monarchs, but guess what- edible uses too! Leaves and immature flowers can be cooked with butter, salt, and pepper; Omaha tribe would use tender shoots boiled and eaten as a vegetable. Recipes of note: milkweed leaf soup, milkweed flower cordial, milkweed flower vinegar, milkweed flower fritters.
- Or be really crazy and scary and eat the undeveloped silk.
- Apparently, common milkweed contains a similar iso-enzyme as papain, called asclepains which works natural to tenderize meats. Native people would boil buffalo meat with milkweed pods and thus make their meat more tender.
- Who hasn’t died from shock yet?
- Exclusive extra from reading the show notes: https://foragerchef.com/guide-to-milkweed/
Jerusalem artichoke- “Sunchoke”
Native sunflower. Can harvest tubers once after frost hits around Halloween/Thanksgiving or in March if you didn’t harvest in fall. Cut seedheads off in the fall and cut back to ankle height and harvest anytime. This plant has invasive potential so you want to isolate it by planting it directly into a whiskey barrel style container or plant it in an island bed or circular garden in the middle of turf grass.
Roast at 400 F for 40 minutes turning once halfway through. Can also pickle sun chokes with turmeric to evoke the yellow of the flower. Tubers don’t store well so use immediately.
28% of your daily iron… You’re welcome.
Soapweed- Yucca Glauca
Yucca Glauca different from Yucca “Adam’s Needle” Filamentosa- both sport unique forms and unusual, but beautiful, flowers.
Recipes of note: roasted yucca stalks, sautéed yucca flowers and eggs, tempura battered yucca flowers, yucca hot chocolate…
Fruit can be used raw or cooked, stems can be cooked like asparagus. Use flowers when they are young and ripe.
It might not have survived the edit, but cordage on par with hemp can be made from the leaves. Roots can be used for soap.
Broadleaf Cattail- Typha Latifolia
Cattail: related to corn, nature’s breadbasket, just an incredible plant that deserves a second look. You might have trouble growing it at home, but might be a good excuse to make a pond scape, bog garden, or sink your kid’s neglected wading pool into the ground and making a cattail garden.
- Can be used to make imitation pulled pork. Cattail Fluff Pulled Pork. You might get a Michelin star from this stuff. Prairie to Table.
- Cattail Pollen Spaghetti; I’m seriously not making this stuff up. Not only does the pollen turn the pasta bright canary yellow it also adds 17% of your daily protein.
Bob is again asking you to read Kay Young’s Wild Seasons and also find out who Euell Gibbons is.
Just do it.
Kay Young Wild Seasons
Euell Gibbons
BONUS: Edible, medicinal, utilitarian qualities of these plants!
- You can find some really wonderful ways to use these plants for your own benefit! Ideas here: Daniel Moerman Native American Ethnobotany
Thank you for listening!
-Stephanie
Additional content related to this episode:
What makes a plant native?
http://bonap.net/fieldmaps Biota of North America North American Plant Atlas database-select Nebraska
https://bellevuenativeplants.org Bellevue Native Plant Society
native (wild type) vs. nativar/native cultivar (cultivated by humans for desirable characteristics)
On the Web
BONAP aforementioned
BNPS aforementioned
http://www.facebook.com/groups/bellevuenativeplantsociety- BNPS on Facebook
Books & Authors
Rick Darke- The Living Landscape
Douglas Tallamy- Professor and Chair of the Department of Wildlife Ecology and Entomology at the University of Delaware, author of The Living Landscape, Nature's Best Hope, naturalist, and curator of "Homegrown National Park".
Enrique Salmon- Iwigara
Daniel Moerman -Native American Ethnobotany
Heather Holm- https://www.pollinatorsnativeplants.com
Native Plants of the Midwest
Planting in a Post-Wild World
Jon Farrar's Field Guide to Wildflowers of Nebraska
Additional Resources
Other Local Organizations
- Green Bellevue
- PATH
- Nebraska Native Plant Society
Listen, rate, and subscribe!
Get some merch! https://plant-native-nebraska.myspreadshop.com/
Find us on Facebook
Visit our homepage https://plant-native-nebraska.captivate.fm
Give us a review on Podchaser! www.podchaser.com/PlantNativeNebraska
Support My Work via Patreon
The Plant Native Nebraska podcast can be found on the podcast app of your choice.
