Merrimack Valley Magazine

Eating the Weeds

July 31, 2021 by Katie DeRosa

Summer Foraging From Backyards to Backwoods

Foraging is Mother Nature’s scavenger hunt. Outdoors, we find many hidden gems in the form of what most call weeds. Once you start learning and building your foraging confidence, this activity can quickly snowball and begin to transform the way you look at everything from your lawn to your local hiking trails. Before you set off on your first expedition, here are some guidelines.

General Guidelines for Foraging:

1. Always be 100% certain of what you are eating before you eat it. Assume your discoveries aren’t edible until proved otherwise. Check multiple sources to confirm.

2. Tread lightly and be mindful of sustainability. Lots of things live under our feet. Research what is a considered a sustainable harvest of the plant you seek, never taking more than what you need unless it’s invasive. Often, other animals or insects eat it, too.

3. Keep an eye on where you are foraging. Beware of common dangers such as poison ivy and ticks, and be on the lookout for less common concerns such as giant hogweed. Don’t forage in areas treated with chemicals or possibly contaminated with heavy metals or pollutants.

4. It’s easy for new foragers to get lost. Use good mapping software and make sure your phone or GPS unit is charged. Better yet, learn map and compass skills.

Bonus Tips for Foraging:

1. Find something good? Pin-drop the location on your phone’s mapping app so you can return. I also set reminders to check these spots when the time is right — many common edibles are only available for short periods of time.

2. Bring the right gear. I keep a couple of bags and a knife with me every time I forage. It’s also useful to bring along a small field guide.

So, on to the good stuff. The following are a few species to look for in the summer months.

Wild Blueberry (Vaccinium sp.)

Here’s one we all know and love, but finding blueberries in the wild makes them even more fun and delicious. Who doesn’t love wild blueberry pancakes?

ID: You’ve got highbush and lowbush blueberries; they have small, ovate and alternate leaves on woody branches. Their flowers in spring are small, white to pink, and grow in clusters, each with five petals fused together into a bell shape. The berries have a five-pointed crown on the end and often have a white bloom. Highbush can get taller than the average person, and lowbush are about shin height. They like acidic soil, so look for them around evergreen trees in July and August.

Turn these tasty berries into a blueberry sumac (see below) jam or just enjoy them as is. We aren’t the only animal that likes these, so leave some behind.

Garlic Mustard (Alliaria petiolata)

Garlic mustard is a blessing and a curse — it’s exceptionally invasive and a bully. It spreads seeds readily and inhibits the growth of other plants. Whenever you see this plant, you’re doing the world a favor by pulling it out and throwing away whatever you don’t use (NOT for compost). However, garlic mustard is one of my favorite plants to forage because it’s everywhere and you can use it almost year-round.

ID: Garlic mustard is a biennial, meaning it has a two-year growth cycle, with a shifting appearance as it develops. When you break or crush the leaves, you’ll smell garlic and a hint of mustard. In spring, it sends up a flower stalk with a seed head that looks like a mini broccoli. The flowers are small, white and four-petaled. The flowers turn into long, slender capsules filled with dark-colored seeds. When ridding an area of garlic mustard, it’s best to pull the plant by the roots before the seed pod sets. It grows in partially shaded areas that have been disturbed by humans.

The leaves are the least bitter and most tender in early spring. Cook them quickly with olive oil and salt, make them into a pesto, or add them to homemade sauerkraut for a kick. Before the flower heads open, you can use the top few tender inches like broccoli rabe. You can even use their roots as horseradish. For this, it’s best to find thick roots and peel off the tough outer part, mince the inner roots and mix them in a splash of vinegar. If they’re too tough, make an infused “horseradish” vinegar.

Staghorn Sumac (Rhus typhina)

I know how many people will react to reading about staghorn sumac. Isn’t that poisonous? I would love to get the phone number of poison sumac’s marketing team because it did a bang-up job of promoting it. There is a poison sumac, but its appearance is wildly different from the edible varieties. The beautiful and striking conelike clusters of the immediately recognizable staghorn are pink-red and upright, not the drooping clusters of greenish-white berries of the far less common poison sumac.

ID: Staghorn sumac commonly grows along highways and often goes unnoticed until you know how to ID it, at which point you start to see it everywhere. It reaches a height of 10-12 feet. In the fall, the compound leaves (many leaflets on one leaf stem) turn a lovely pinkish scarlet. The most common form of sumac in our area is called staghorn sumac because it has a fuzzy antler appearance. It grows in open sunny areas, often at the edge of fields. The berry clusters are ready to pick in mid to late summer, when they are rust colored. The coating on the outside of the berries is the tasty part. To tell if they are worth harvesting, touch the middle of a cluster and lick your fingers to see if it has a lemony tang. Taking a few clusters from each tree won’t hurt them.

To make pink lemonade, soak the clusters in cool to room-temperature water and break up the clusters, massaging them a bit to get the berries to give up the goods. Strain, and you have an unsweetened lemonade — a great source of vitamin C. You can also dry the berries to create a lemony spice, or use the lemonade and/or dried sumac to make a nice “lemon” wild blueberry jam!

Chicken of the Woods (Laetiporus sp.)

Certainly not a weed, but sometimes treated as one by those who don’t appreciate its value, this mushroom is easy to spot and ID.

ID: The first thing to note is that the underside has no gills. It is a polypore mushroom, which means the bottom will appear smooth with many small holes (these are the pores). They grow as a group of thick, stemless, fan-shaped caps, one often overlapping the other. They are shades of orange to yellow-orange, making them really stand out. They are commonly found growing out of dead or dying oaks, but can also grow from other trees. Look for these in late spring through fall. If they seem bug ridden or dried out, leave them.

I think these are best when breaded and fried; they really do taste like chicken. Be sure to try a small amount at first and wait a day to make sure it doesn’t upset your stomach. This is a good policy to employ with any new edible. Because of the dangers associated with mushroom poisoning, it’s also helpful to attend guided walks sponsored by organizations such as the Boston Mycological Club.

I hope searching for some of these wild edibles brings you joy and lets you connect to nature in our fast-paced, electronics-centered world. Nature always has something to teach us! Happy foraging.

The Backyard Naturalist – A View From the Treehouse

July 19, 2020 by Sarah Courchesne

My usual habit is to make at least two circuits around my yard each day from March through late November, inspecting the garden beds and tracking the almost imperceptible progress of the plants: what is coming into bud, what flower heads are melting away to reveal maturing seed pods, what the deer in their infinite caprice have chosen to cut down and what to spare.

As the weather warmed this year, and the pandemic kept us home all day every day, I found myself sitting out in the yard more. If I want to see my plants, I have to go to them, but I found, by sitting still, an astonishing number of living things would come to me. Curious what I might encounter from a loftier perch, I mounted the ladder to the treehouse my uncle built for my kids at the edge of the swamp by our house. With construction interrupted by the pandemic, the treehouse remains an open-air platform, and I partly hope it never gets finished so I can continue to sit at the edge with my legs swinging in space above the tussocked sedges and ferns and see what turns up.

I had startled a robin by climbing, and she stood on a branch, scolding me, with a mouthful of mud, clearly liking this same platform for a nest. It was a while before she gave up and moved to watch me from a farther tree. I settled in, trying not to do anything, or even, and this is much harder still, to be waiting for anything to happen. At first, I turned my head to every rustling sound, but it was mostly the dry hemlock cones rubbing against the branches in the breeze. It got me wondering, as I thought each time, “Was that something?” about what counts as “something.”

We tend to think of wild animals as stealthy, almost undetectable, and they are, often, almost impossible to detect, when they choose to evade our predatory attentions. When humans move through a landscape, it’s noisily, giving the creatures fair warning and time to take cover or freeze, shallow breathing in the shadows until the danger is past. But when you sit still, and become yourself, undetectable, animals, or mammals anyway, reveal themselves to be surprisingly noisy. Deer, human sized, make crashing, human-sized noises as they move through the woods on their business. Mice lift the scraping dry leaves above them as they forage. From the treehouse, I watched a rabbit try to traverse the tussocks, but fall into one of the pools and extricate itself in a plunging, cacophonous flail. After it was gone, I watched the pool a while. There was a rippling on its surface that was too consistent to be the wind. I wondered if there were some underground spring or something feeding the pool and there it was again — the question of what counts as “something.”

The treehouse is built in a three trunked hemlock with two of its massive trunks lost over the years to ice and wind. One lies across the swamp, the other points away, its long branches arcing up like, my younger child pointed out, an elephant’s ribcage. It’s been lying there for at least five years now, and from the treehouse, I could see a wild sarsaparilla growing straight up out of the trunk, indicating that the wood has softened and rotted enough to be less tree, and more dirt. But that is a process. There will never be a particular day or hour delineated when the tree is no longer itself, and now is something else instead, but it will become that nonetheless. And isn’t that something.

Florals, Fruits & Fascination

January 18, 2020 by Lysa Pelletier

There’s an inherent beauty in nature, and you can bring all that loveliness inside even during these cold winter months. Natural woods, fabrics, florals and even colorful fruits can warm up any room. Just head to your local grocery store and experiment with varieties that you find visually appealing: pomegranates, persimmons and maybe some figs. Don’t go overboard — keeping things simple can make a dramatic statement.

For those who lean more toward the modern, scientific or minimalist sides, we’ve mixed in a set of brushed metallic rhombuses. If you need to look that word up in Merriam-Webster, you’re not alone. Keeping in line with the naturalist vibe, test-tubes make excellent and surprisingly elegant vases.

Rotate out your flowers and fresh produce as needed. When the time is right and your fruit is almost past prime, it makes a great addition to a carafe of winter sangria.

Acorn Design Center
Andover, Mass.
(978) 273-9717
AcornDesignCenter.com

Gianna Home
North Andover, Mass.
(978) 655-7455
GiannaDesignGroup.com

Mak & Co.
Andover, Mass.
(978) 475-5511
MakAndCoAndover.com

Helen Thomas Simply Smashing
Andover, Mass.
(978) 475-7981
HelenThomasSimplySmashing.com

Whole Foods Market
Andover, Mass.
(978) 749-6664
WholeFoodsMarket.com/Stores/Andover

The Backyard Naturalist – Salamanders

June 15, 2019 by Sarah Courchesne Leave a Comment

I’ve been on more than a few nature walks in my time. Bog walks, woods walks, swamp walks, sometimes leading them myself but mostly trailing along with the rest of the group while the naturalist in charge points out interesting features with the calming assurance of a flight attendant indicating the emergency exits.

I love nature walks, but what amazes me about them is how alike they are, each to each, at least here in my pocket of New England. Even though you never know what you will find in the woods, you don’t literally never know. There are reliable performers — organisms that are common enough to predictably find, but unknown enough to provide astonishment when you do find them: oak apple galls strewn on the trail that you pick apart to reveal a larval wasp at the center, like the prestige of a magic trick; water-dwelling caddisfly larvae that build homes for themselves like tiny log cabins out of sticks, with gravel and mud for the chinking. I was 10 when I first found one, and I remember feeling my vision tunnel and my classmates’ voices grow muffled as I crouched by the culvert watching it.

Red-backed salamanders are reliable performers like this. Turn over a couple of rotted logs and it’s possible you’ll turn up an equal number of red-backed salamanders. They are common in the extreme. In some American woodlands, their population density approaches 1,000 salamanders per acre. As a result, they are a go-to for naturalists leading walks. It feels almost cheap to kick over the first dead wood you see and come up with stub-legged creature, glistening like a gummy worm. If you’ve been on even one nature walk, you may have heard your guide trot out the astonishing statistic that red-backed salamanders outweigh the biomass of all the other vertebrates in the forest. Pile up all the deer, and foxes, and ovenbirds, and weasels, and squirrels, and the pile of red-backed salamanders from the same woods will be heavier.

The truth the nature walk leaders might not be pleased for you to know is that you don’t need them to help you find these creatures. Red-backed salamanders don’t just live in the deep, distant woods. If you have a woodpile in your yard (and if you don’t, you should), then you have these beasts in your garden, quietly keeping the slug population in check for you.

If these salamanders are so common, how do they retain their ability to delight and amaze when pulled forth from under a log? Most animals this common elicit indifference (pigeons), irritation (mice), or outrage (woodchucks). How do salamanders maintain an aura of mystery despite such astonishing ubiquity? Unlike common animals that saunter around all day long in plain sight, red-backed salamanders stay under cover, and sometimes hide away underground, too. Revealing one gives a treasure-hunt thrill. They seem primordial, but an investigation into their life history shows unnerving alignments with our own. We tend to think wild animals are interchangeable automatons behaviorally. Read Wikipedia and it will tell you “this species does thus and so” as if there were no individual variation. But red-backed salamanders defy such pat ethography.

Salamanders live in a landscape of smells, defining their territories and demarcating the boundaries with scent cues. Some prefer to live singly, making contact with the other sex only briefly to mate, but others establish a pair bond and jointly defend a territory. When the male strays, coming home with scent molecules of another female clinging to his rubbery body, his mate, taking in the story of where he’s been, will hold her body high to look bigger, and then pick him up and slam him to the forest floor. Males will similarly punish females who return smelling of infidelity.

When these pair bonds form, it appears to be out of genuine choice. Any old male and female housed together do not build such a relationship out of simple proximity. It’s a decision some salamanders make upon meeting some particular other salamander. The mechanism for these choices is not, as they say, wholly elucidated. But then, what desires of any living thing ever are?