Preparation Tips for Bitter Greens

Dandelions, chicory, thistles and wild lettuces are some of the most nutritional edible wild plants you can harvest but in their rawest forms they are very bitter and generally uneatable by any but the most die-hard foragers. Luckily, it is very simple to turn these plants into dishes that are not just eatable but actually delicious. It always helps to pick the leaves at the proper time (early young leaves before the flower stalk(s) have appeared) but these tricks will even help with late-harvested, extremely bitter leaves. These four different methods are as follows:
1. boiling
2. wilting with hot grease or oil
3. diluting with mild greens
4. overpowering the bitterness with salt, sour, and/or tart flavors

Boiling
Many of the bitter-tasting chemicals in these plants are soluble in hot water and so can be removed with 1-3 changes of boiling water. However this method also removes/destroys some of the nutrients so you'll need to increase the amount of greens you are cooking.

Cover the greens in excess water, boil for 10 minutes, then rinse of and taste a small bit of the plant. If it's still too bitter pour off this water and replace it with fresh water, then boil for another ten minutes. Keep doing this until the greens are edible. The resulting mass will be unattractive and lacking in the more water-soluble "good" chemicals, but the protein and other large phytochemicals will remain.

Wilting with hot grease or oil
This is my particular favorite method. Drizzling hot bacon grease or hot seasoned olive oil causes a chemical change to the bitter molecules and also leaves a protective coating on the tongue which reduces it's sensitivity to bitter flavors. Bacon/egg/sow thistle omelets are a Sunday morning treat at our house. The hot bacon grease converts the bitterness to a rich, deep flavor that I can't really describe other than to say I (and my young daughters!) find it to be fantastic. Vegans can use olive oil though for some reason I find the results to be inferior to bacon grease.

Don't completely cover the greens in the hot oil/grease, just dribble it on so most of the leaves have become a little "crinkly". I like to include a variety of bitter plants in the bowl to give a very complex mix of flavors. You will have to experiment a little to find the amount of wilting you prefer but luckily most of these plants are plentiful and it's easy to harvest plenty.

Diluting with mild greens
This is the best way for raw-foodists to incorporate dandelions and the such into their meals. It retains all the beneficial chemicals though it does require having assorted mild greens such as dayflower, young dollarweed, plantain, chickweed, amaranth, young hibiscus and turk's cap leaves, or even regular lettuce.

Finely chop or shred the bitter greens and combine them with the mild greens in a ratio of 1 part bitter-9 parts mild. This will greatly cut the bitterness to just the point of adding a unique flavor to your salad. As you grow accustom to the flavor you can increase the bitter portion, but few will go more than 3 parts bitter-7 parts mild.

Overpowering the bitterness with salt, sour, and/or tart flavors
The tongue, while amazingly sensitive to flavors, can be overwhelmed at times. Combining the bitter greens with soy sauce or a tangy red wine/vinegar dressing over-stimulates most people's taste-buds resulting in a reduced ability to taste the bitterness. This technique is another favorite of vegans and raw-foodists.

A similar effect occurs when incorporating the greens into homemade sauerkraut or kimchi. The sour fermentation of these foods will help break the bitterness though it requires more experimentation due to the unequal levels of bitter chemicals from plant to plant. In my opinion that is part of the fun of wild foods, though!


Buy my book! Outdoor Adventure Guides Foraging covers 70 of North America's tastiest and easy to find wild edibles shown with the same big pictures as here on the Foraging Texas website.

Merriwether's Immortality Elixir

A daily shot of a mixture of Reishi mushroom, Elderberry flower, Burdock root tinctures, Agarita wood, and honey keeps me healthy and knocks out anything trying to pull me down! This combines the anti-cancer, anti-viral, and anti-fungal powers of Reishi mushrooms, the immune system strengthener of elderberry, and the general adaptogen and blood/liver cleaner of burdock root. Berberine from agarita is added to maintain telomere lengths which reduces the physical aspects of aging. Honey is antimicrobial and a soothing agent.

Burdock Tinture:
1. Finely dice enough peeled, fresh burdock root to fill a quart jar 3/4 full.
2. Add enough 100 proof vodka to cover burdock root 1/2 inch deep.
3. Soak for six weeks, shaking twice daily.
4. Strain out solids, place in a tightly capped jar and store in a cool, dark place.


Elderberry Tincture:
1. Fill a 1 quart canning jar 3/4 full with fresh elderberry flowers (no stems!).
2. Add 1 tablespoon of honey, two shots of Triple Sec orange liquor and fill most of remaining space in jar with 100 proof vodka.
3. Soak for six weeks, shaking twice daily.
4. Strain out solids, place in a tightly capped jar and store in a cool, dark place.


Reishi Tincture:
1. Finely dice fresh Reishi to 3/4 fill a PINT jar.
2. Add enough 100 proof vodka to cover Reishi 1/2 inch deep.
3. Soak for six weeks, shaking twice daily.
4. Stain out the Reishi mushroom pieces and boil them for 10 minutes in water equal to the volume of vodka you used in the second step.
5. Allow water to cool, then strain out Reishi, discarding the mushroom bits.
6. Add fresh water to replace any that evaporated during boiling.
7. Combine mushroom extract water with mushroom extract vodka. Some solids will appear. You want these along with the vodka/water.
8. Place in a tightly capped jar and store in a cool, dark place.


Agarita berberine to maintain telomere lengths, preventing aging.

Final Mixture:
1. Combine 2 pints Burdock tincture, 2 pints Elderberry Tincture, and 1/2 pint Reishi Mushroom tincture.

2. Stir 3 minutes with a peeled agarita stick to add berberine.
2. Add 1.5 pints of honey (making the final blend approximately 1/3 honey), it may take a few days to dissolve into elixir.
3. Shake well before using. One shot a day is what I take but keep in mind I'm a 6'5", 240 lb, 50 year old male who works out and lives a somewhat insane life. I can't tell you what sort of dosage you should take.


Buy my book! Outdoor Adventure Guides Foraging covers 70 of North America's tastiest and easy to find wild edibles shown with the same big pictures as here on the Foraging Texas website.

Tips on Making Wild Teas

Many wild (and landscaping!) plants can be used to make flavorful and medicinal teas. However, getting the best results requires knowing a few tricks based on plant physiology. To understand the tea one must understand the plant.

Let's start with flowers. Since the source of flavors from flowers reside on the flower's surface you can use blossoms either straight off the plant or in a dried form. Most flowers will have the best flavor right at opening which usually means mornings unless they're a night-bloomer. Pick flowers before the day's sun has baked away all their flavor. If they're to be dried make sure any morning dew or rain has evaporated away and then hang the flowers someplace to dry. Don't use a dehydrator as that'll force out much of the flower's delicate flavors...though your kitchen will probably smell great. To make flower tea, bring water to a boil, let it cool five minutes, pour it over the flowers, then let steep at least 5 minutes in a covered pot or mug (again to keep the flavors trapped in the tea).

Next up, leaves. Making tea from leaves requires aging the leaves first for best results. Remember, plant cells are enclosed in a rigid cell wall which among its duties is to prevent stuff inside the plant cell from getting out just as much as stopping stuff from outside the cell getting in. If you steep fresh leaves most of the flavors and medicinal components will remain trapped inside the leaves' cells rather than entering your tea. However, when a plant get's harvested or otherwise killed a set of enzymes inside the cell are activated and begin chewing holes in the cell wall. This is part of the mechanism used by plants to return their nutrients back to the soil when they die. After about two weeks the cell wall will have assorted holes so now when the leaves are soaked all their wonderful goodness will flow into the tea. To make tea from leaves, bring water to a boil then pour it over the dried and somewhat crumbled leaves, then let steep 3-10 minutes in a covered pot or mug. Strain out the leaves before drinking.

If you do want what's inside the leaves without the time needed to wait you must chop and grind the leaves up. This ruptures the cell walls, releasing the cellular compounds. The vitamin C found in pine needles or cleavers falls into this category. When one is suffering from scurvy one can't wait two weeks for the necessary vitamin C!

Fruit teas such as rose hip or Turk's cap fruit are similar to leaf teas in that dried fruits will give a better flavor than fresh fruits. Also, since the fruits are tougher than leaves go ahead and actually boil the fruits in the water for about five minutes then let everything cool down to a drinkable temperature. I eat the fruit afterwards but be sure to remove any rose seeds from the rose hips before drying as the fine hairs on rose seeds can cause irritation at the end of their journey through your digestive system.

Root and bark are usually the toughest parts of plants so they require vigorous boiling rather than just steeping in hot water. Boil roots/bark at least 10 minutes then remove from heat and let the tea steep and cool at least another 10 minutes before straining out the plant matter. As mentioned earlier, it's best if the plant has time to "age" a few weeks so that enzymes can break down the cell walls. If you need it right away you'll have to crush/grind the roots or bark.

Flowers for Tea:
Basswood, Barbados Cherry, Blackberry, Bottlebrush, Sweet Clover, Red Clover, White Clover, Dandelion, Dewberry, Elderberry, Goldenrod, Heal's All, Henbit, Horsemint/Lemon Beebalm, Mallow, Mullein, Parsley Hawthorn, Passionvine, Pineapple Weed, Rose, Milk Thistle, Turk's Cap, Violet, Wild Bergamot, Yarrow

Leaves for Tea:
Balloon Vine, Blackberry, Bottlebrush, Burdock, Carolina Bristle Mallow, Cleavers, Dandelion, Dewberry, Ginkgo, Goldenrod, Heal's All, Henbit, Yaupon Holly, American Holly, Horsemint/Lemon Beebalm, Lizard's Tail, Pine Needles, Loquat, Lyreleaf Sage, Mullein, Parsley Hawthorn, Passionvine, Pimpernel, Pineapple Weed, Sassafras, Stinging Nettle, Bull Thistle, Milk Thistle, Violet, Yarrow


Roots, Barks, Fruit, and Mushrooms for Tea:
Blackberry, Buffalo Gourd, Burdock, Chicory, Dandelion, Dewberry, Honey Locust seedpods, Horsetails, Indian Strawberry, Lizard's Tail, Mallow Seeds, Mayhaw, Reishi Mushroom, Turkey Tail Mushroom, Parsley Hawthorn Fruit, Rose Hips, Sassafras, Slippery Elm, Sumac Berries, Bull Thistle, Milk Thistle, Turk's Cap Fruit, Willow


Buy my book! Outdoor Adventure Guides Foraging covers 70 of North America's tastiest and easy to find wild edibles shown with the same big pictures as here on the Foraging Texas website.

Making Maple Syrup & Sugar

Maple sugar/syrup is easy to make and is a wonderful source of stable, storable calories. You can collect the sap from any maple tree (not just sugar maples) in any part of the world if you know what you are doing.

First, a little plant biochemistry. The sugar in maple sap is used by the tree as building blocks for making new leaves. This means the sugary sap starts flowing in late winter when the tree starts making the leaf buds. Up north, the tree "wakes up" and begins pumping sap up to its branches when nights are still below freezing but daytime highs are in the mid-40s. This is when you need to tap your tree. In southern climates knowing when the sap flows is trickier. I suggest you drill a 1/4" hole into your tree at a slight upwards angle 3" into the tree on New Year's Day and then watch for sap to begin leaking out. Drill this hole on the south (warmest) side of the tree about 3 feet off the ground, just as you would place a tap (aka "spile"). I wouldn't put a tube or anything in it other than maybe a cotton ball that had been treated with the bleach solution. Just keep an eye on the hole and see if it starts weeping.

Traditional maple tree taps are called spiles and can be ordered on-line from various sources. You can also make your own spiles from PVC tubing, Tygon tubing, plastic pen bodies, hollowed-out pieces of elderberry, bamboo, etc. Just make sure the hole you drill will hold the spile tightly. If the hole is too big you can pack the opening with softened wax. The spile should be cut at an angle with the longer part of the spile up against the top of the hole. Sap flows into the hole from the bottom (duh), so you don't want to plug the bottom of the hole. Sterilized soda bottles make great collectors as the small top keeps crap out of the sap. Traditional sap buckets have hinged cover to do the same thing (crap protection).

You need a maple tree at least 12" in diameter to tap. Drill the tap hole(s) on the south-facing side of the tree about three feet off the ground. If the tree is more than 20 inches in diameter you can add a second spile, and if it's greater than 27 inches you can have three spiles. The tap holes are drilled 3 inches deep at a slight upward angle. Spiles will be either 5/16 inches or 7/16 inches in diameter, so use the corresponding drill bit. Pound the spile into the hole and hang your bucket from the little notch on the spile.

IMPORTANT: Wash all your drill bits and spiles with a bleach solution before they enter the tree to avoid infecting the tree with fungus or bacteria! Use a 1:10 bleach to water solution (example: 1 teaspoon bleach in 9 teaspoons of water). Let any plug-dowel soak in freshly-made bleach solution for about 15 minutes before inserting it into the hole. Soak-time for spiles and drill bits ranges from 2-3 minutes for metal or plastic objects up to 15 minutes for porous materials. Some people spray this solution on the tree just before tapping but I have a bit more faith in the strength of trees than that.

Sap will run 4-6 weeks, but the sweetest, most sugar-filled sap will be at the beginning. Check your buckets and collect the sap every day at first as the sap will really be flowing and this will keep non-sap stuff out of the buckets. By the fifth week all the sugar that had been stored in the roots has been transferred up into the new leaf buds. Remove the spile, disinfect the tap hole, then place a bleach-treated wooden dowel in the hole.

It takes about 10 gallons of sap to make one quart of syrup, or a 40-to-1 sap/syrup ratio. Boiling it down releases a LOT of water vapor so it is best done outside. Side story: one year my dad decided to boil off the water using the stove inside the house. Mom was out of town that day. Dad boiled off approximately 50 gallons of sap which caused all the wallpaper in our house to peel. When mom got home she was pretty upset.

It's best to evaporate most of the water over a wood fire outside using a big pot. Pure water boils at 212F, finished syrup boils at 219F. Keep track of the temperature with a large candy thermometer. Once you've driven off enough water outside over the fire to raise the boiling temperature to 216F you can take it inside and finish it off over the more controlled heat of your stove. Transfer the fluid to a smaller pot, filtering it through some cheese cloth if there are solids present. Once it reaches 219F transfer the hot syrup to clean (sterilized by boiling) jars.

This syrup will stay good as-is for about two months and if frozen for up to a year. For longer-term storage it is best to reduce it down to maple sugar. To do this carefully keep boiling the syrup to drive away the rest of the water. You want the temperature of the boiling sugar to be between 290F and 300F. It will want to foam over and if it does remove the pan from the heat until the sugar/syrup settles down, then return it to the heat. Traditionally, the boiling sugar (290-300F) is transferred to a wooden bowl and stirred with a wood spoon to remove the last bit of moisture. It will harden into a solid mass as it cools. This mass is broken off the spoon and out of the bowl and stored in an airtight container. When sugar is needed use a heavy-duty cheese grater to grate off what you need.


Buy my book! Outdoor Adventure Guides Foraging covers 70 of North America's tastiest and easy to find wild edibles shown with the same big pictures as here on the Foraging Texas website.

Making Self-Watering Earth Buckets

A bold person can get an almost infinite supply of free 5-gallon buckets. Restaurants, bakeries, and fast food joints are particularly good places to ask for these. At worst they'll say no, at best you'll be needing a truck to get them all home. So what does Merriwether do with free buckets? He turns them into uber-productive (hopefully) container garden thingies aka Global Buckets.


Just finished these two hours ago. Meanwhile the rest of the world seems to be wrapped in blizzards. I love Houston!!

Global buckets are based on the self-watering Earth Boxes, but are made from easy to find scrap materials. I did have to buy some 1.5" diameter PVC pipe and the soil mixture for inside the buckets, but everything else was just laying around.


1. inner bucket
2. outer bucket
3. fill tube made from 1.5" PVC tubing
4. cotton cloth to wick water from reservoir to soil
5. soil (mix of peat moss, topsoil, and vermiculite)
6. gap between two buckets which acts as the water reservoir



This is the bottom of the inner bucket.
A hole approximately 1.5"-2" in diameter is cut in the center of the bottom, this is for the cotton wick. A second hole 1.73" in diameter is cut near the edge of the bottom, this is for the fill tube. A bunch of small holes (about 5/16" in diameter) are drilled randomly around the bottom of this buck to improve drainage and allow air to get to the plant roots. Sidenote: do you really think I drilled a 1.73" hole? I just cut until the tube fit.


The bottom of the fill tube has a large notch cut in it to simplify the system.
A precise person could measure (twice) and cut (once) fill tubes to the exact length needed for perfection. Luckily, plants don't need a perfect system in which to grow, so just hack a chunk out of the bottom of the fill tube, stick it through the inner bucket, and whack it off somewhere around the top rim of the inner bucket.


An overflow hole is drilled in the outer bucket.
To keep from flooding the buckets a drain hole is drilled in the outer bucket just below the bottom of the inner bucket. Hopefully you can see how I precisely measured the location for this hole.


Completed buckets before adding soil.
Now you can see all the drain holes, the fill tube and the cotton wick. The wick was made from this really hideous dust ruffle thing that I've always hated. Hopefully this hatred won't affect the plants.


Getting ready to fill the buckets.
Being lazy, I didn't feel like holding up the wick while adding the soil so I tied it to a stick. This picture is slightly misleading as the wick does end 2"-4" below the top of the soil once the bucket is filled.


Making soil.
My soil recipe is based on Square Foot Gardening and is composed of roughly 1/3 cheap topsoil, 1/3 peat moss and 1/3 vermiculite (the stuff in the wheel barrow) mixed together thoroughly. The peat moss helps hold water, the vermiculite keeps the soil loose and aerated, the topsoil gives the plant roots a place to grow. Depending on what I grow, some fertilizer may be added to the particular bucket.


And here we are back at the beginning.
It took me about four hours total to make these eight buckets and they have all been planted with different wild edibles except for the one on the end which has chard I picked up on clearance.

This is a great way to set up a container garden in a small area, especially in hot, dry locations. Another benefit of these Global Buckets is that you can move them around to optimize their access to sun or to protect them from freezing.

Once the plants are growing I'll add either a thick layer of mulch or some secondary plant like nasturtiums to shade the soil which reduces evaporative water loss. Water is added to the system through the fill tube until water flows out the overflow hole. The plants will eventually grow their roots through the holes in the bottom of the bucket directly into the water reservoir. Until then the wick keeps the soil at the perfect level of moistness.

Update January 8th, 2011: to help protect the new plants from cold weather I picked up several 12" diameter cake covers from a local "dollar store". These covers fit over the buckets perfectly, turning them into mini-greenhouses. Originally I wanted to find some sort of clear bowl, but the shape of these cake covers works better as the fill tubes don't get in the way of the covers.


Water has condensed on the inside of the covers, making them translucent rather than transparent.


Buy my book! Outdoor Adventure Guides Foraging covers 70 of North America's tastiest and easy to find wild edibles shown with the same big pictures as here on the Foraging Texas website.

Make a Worm Composter

Here be worms.


Give me a Dremel tool and I'll change the world...or at least improve my backyard. Today's project is a vermiculture worm bin. I've been wanting to raise worms for a while, mainly for fishing but also for the great soil they produce from kitchen fruit/veggie scrapes.

So, worm bins. They are easy to make out of two identical, opaque plastic bins, shredded newspaper, and something that will make holes in two different sizes (1/4" and 1/16" diameter). The ideal bins would only be about a foot deep but as wide as possible to maximize the surface area. Right now Walmart, Target, Home Depot and other stores all have their "Christmas storage bins" on clearance dirt cheap (ha ha ha) so it's a great time to tackle (ha ha ha...fishing joke...worms...get it) this project. You want opaque bins as worms hate light and won't act naturally or even die if exposed to too much light.


1. inner bin
2. outer bin
3. loosely wadded up strips of damp newspaper
4. fruit/veggie waste
5. red wiggler worms
6. worm casings (aka worm poop) both in inner and outer bin
7. bricks or other thing to lift up inner bin

The key to a healthy worm bin is ventilation, hence lots of air holes are drilled in both bins. The holes in the wall of the outer bin should be 1/4" in diameter but only 1/16" in the walls and lid of the inner bin. If you use holes larger than 1/16" on the inner bin the worms will crawl out which leads to dried out worm carcasses all over. Yucky. Also drill about twenty or thirty 1/4" holes in the BOTTOM of the inner bed to allow the processed worm casings to fall into the outer bin. Occasionally you'll have a worm drop into the outer bin, too. Oh well.


Outer bin with brick risers in place. The risers raise the inner bin away from the outer bin to increase air flow to the inner bin.

There are several ways to get red wigglers, I bought mine from a bait shop. If you do this make sure you don't buy the big nightcrawlers used for bass fishing as they won't eat you kitchen waste. You'll want the smaller worms used for trout and panfish. If you don't want to buy the worms you can gather your own from the wild. Look in/under compost or manure piles or just lay some wet cardboard down on the grass for a day or too. When you lift it there will likely be a number of red wigglers under it. Even Amazon.com has jumped on the worm-wagon.


Place the worms and the media they came in in the bottom of the inner bin. If you caught them yourself then put a 1" layer of damp earth in the bottom of the bin. This soil shouldn't be dripping wet nor dusty dry. Aim for somewhat clumpy.


Worms, now home. Note all the ventilation holes.


Worm food: potato peels, lettuce, and a few other scraps.

One pound of worms will eat 1/2 pound of kitchen waste every day. Some people add their scraps every day, others collect about 3-days worth of kitchen waste before added it to the bins to minimize annoying/disturbing the worms. Do whatever you significant other tells you to do. It's just easier that way. Once you have a large, hungry horde of worms you can expand you scraps to include meat and other non-plant matter.


Newspaper layer. Yes, worms are excellent climbers.

Cover everything with 2"-3" of shredded newspaper. Cut the newspaper into 1" strips, soak them in water, squeeze them out to "damp sponge" wetness, loosely wad them up and toss them in the bin. Don't use glossy advertisements as they don't dampen well and the inks may be somewhat toxic.

That's about it. Store the bins in a dark area where they will neither freeze nor overheat. They can handle temperatures close to 30F and as high as 100F but will stop breeding at these temperatures. Under ideal conditions your worm population will double every 90 days. Note that like with every other creature, worms don't like living in their own excrement. You'll have to empty the inner bin about every 4 months to keep your worms healthy. Worm casings are loaded with beneficial microbes and nutrients vital to plants, often having five times as much nitrogen, seven times as much phosphorus, and eleven times as much potassium as ordinary dirt, making it a wonderful natural fertilizer.

Worm bins should have a nice, earthy smell to them. If an unpleasant odor is noticed you've probably been overfeeding the worms. Don't add any scraps for several days until the current material has been consumed. Also check that your system isn't too wet. If it is more than just damp add some more shredded newspaper to absorb excess moisture. My problem in Houston is the system drying out so I keep a spray bottle of water next to the bin to dampen the newspaper as needed.


Buy my book! Outdoor Adventure Guides Foraging covers 70 of North America's tastiest and easy to find wild edibles shown with the same big pictures as here on the Foraging Texas website.