This will be a regular column about the wild edible plants we are harvesting on our land.
As spring creeps back to Dancing Rabbit, the word of wild edibles expands rapidly. This is a great time of year for sweet tender greens. First up was the corn salad (valerianella olitoria), which has a nice flavor until it starts to go to flower.
The low rosettes of leaves covered the garden we had dug last year for our squash. It was soon joined by curled dock (rumex crispus), which is also tasty when young. The common lawn weed, plantain (plantago major), has a delicious nutty flavor when the leaves are young and is my favorite. The leaves are also good, when crushed, for treating stings and bites. If you venture into the woods you'll find all the common chickweed (stellaria media) you can eat. I just want to kneel down and eat it right off the ground, where it creates a light green bed. Once I was lucky enough to find where the chickweed had been an actual bed, for a deer, and can understand why the deer chose it.
In early spring, it's also a good time to harvest roots and tubers, before they start sending their energy into growing plants. Many a meal at Dancing Rabbit features wild parsnip (pastinaca sativa), a white carrot-like root. They are extremely common around here and quite distinctive. Their young celery-like second year stalks are easy to spot. But watch out! As the season moves to summer and the plants grow up to 5 feet tall and flower, they cause in some people phytophotodermatitis, an irritation caused by sweaty skin, sun and contact with the leaves. It can be worse than poison ivy!
We also are blessed with the jerusalem artichoke (helianthus tuberosus), or sun choke. A member of the sunflower family, it helps to spot the plants in the fall when they are in showy flower and note their location for the winter or early spring. 
The tuber can be prepared like potatoes.
Every meal needs its herbs and spices and nature indeed provides. Wild onions and wild garlic (allium spp.) provide flavoring as our home grown domesticated varieties begin to run out. But look closely, because they resemble grass. For a sweeter treat, we look for sweet cicely (osmorhiza claytoni) with its distinctive smell of anise. Areas of our woods are carpeted with the fern-like plants that are flags for the sweet, tasty roots.
I thoroughly enjoy eating flowers. Its rare that one gets to eat things so pretty. Flowers are rare this time of year, much less edible ones. But I have sighted some blue violets (viola papilionacea) in the woods and other shaded places. Cousin of the domesticated, and also edible, violas and pansies, these little flowers are nice in a salad or great decorating on a cake.
The wild edible palate diversifies quickly as the earth warms and wakes up. I can hardly wait for the coming options: morel mushrooms, berries of all kinds, varied flowers, and more. Until next time...
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