Welcome back to an entirely new year of LITFM! We took a long hiatus to get our YouTube channel's second season completed and now this blog is back in action. So to get things rolling and at the request of some folks who visit the Farmer's market, I am posting a new series covering forage foods. Given the current geopolitical situation some of this information may come in handy in the not-to-distant future.
 |
| Here is a specimen of Yellow Dock Growing inside a vigorous Oregano patch. The woody stems you see are last year's flower stalks which can be foraged as a kindling or as light sticks for use around the garden. |
 |
| This is a very healthy and perhaps five year old specimen of Yellow dock. The lobed leaves below it are some sort of Dandelion. Note how soft the leaves look, this is what you'd prefer to harvest. |
 |
| Photo Added 4-14-2022 - I pulled a cluster of Yellow dock up and got the entire root which is pretty rare. You can see the thick taproot these perennials form which is why they can be quite difficult to kill via manual methods. |
Common Name: Yellow Dock
Other Common Names: Dock, Curled Dock, Sour Dock.
Botanical Family: Polygonaceae (The Knotweed/Smartweed/Buckwheat Family)
Botanical Latin Name: Rumex crispus
Season to Harvest: You can harvest the leaves of this perennial plant year-round.
Habitat: Yellow dock can be found in the wild in disturbed sites,
fields, roadsides and vacant lots. It will appear at random in yards and in outdoor planters because mature plants
produce hundreds of seeds that can travel on water, wind and the fur of
animals. Yellow dock is a hardy perennial that can be found all over the USA, it is not a native plant.
Parts to Harvest: The part of this plant you want are young leaves before they get too crinkly and rough to the touch, they may have a slight tinge of red or yellow but tender foliage is your objective.
Poisonous Look-alikes: There are no poisonous look-alikes.
Related Edible Species: The most well-known three cultivated relatives are Sorrel* (Rumex acetosella) and it’s cousin Vietnamese Coriander* (Persicaria odorata) both of which can be found in the wild and are sold in garden centers. Bloody Dock* (Rumex sanguineus) which is exible and is known for its intensely deep red leaf veins in contrast to its bright green leaves is largely only found in cultivation. However this plant is a mutation of a naturally occurring plant so Bloody dock in the wild will look a lot less like its cultivated form. Similar edible wild relatives include Wild Dock (R. crispus ssp. crispus) which is found almost exclusively on waste sites and in farm fields, Coastal Dock (R. crispus ssp. littoreus) which is found in coastal sites and Riparian Dock (R. crispus ssp. uliginosus) which is found on tidal estuarine mud as well as on some riverbanks. Other species that are closely related include Bitter Dock (R. obtusifolius), Marsh Dock (R. paulustris), Golden Dock (R. maritimus) and Tropical Dock (R. obovatus). I have to note here that most if not all of these plants are so closely related that they can freely interbreed which means if you are planning a crop of traditional sorrel, you may want to clear any related species to avoid unwanted genetic traits getting into your crops.
Description: Typically Yellow dock is semi-rosette forming until it blooms. The oval leaves can be up to nine inches long and a significant portion of that length is comprised by the long leaf petioles. Yellow dock has a powerful taproot that only gets bigger with age and can go down several feet. A key identifying feature for Yellow dock is that the taproot is almost always a bright yellow color and will fork and branch regularly making pulling these herbs out pretty difficult. The flower stalks which appear in summer can reach as high as three to five feet depending on the age of the specimen. Fortunately Yellow dock is a preferred host for at least one species of moth, the Dark Sword-Grass whose larva are called black Cut Worms. The worms are an agricultural pest however, these moths are a preferred food for Catbirds.
How to Harvest: Ideally you want to pick younger softer leaves in early spring or late winter and you will want to harvest the seeds as well. Carefully managed you can ‘force’ a Yellow Dock to keep producing new leaves for most of the year providing a decent supply of greens. The one thing to note is that the leaves do contain oxalic acid which is the same stuff that makes Swiss Chard bitter when raw. See the recipe section for more information on how to neutralize this compound.
Recipe: Let’s start off why you should neutralize the Oxalic Acid. Oxalic Acid is an organic compound that plants have as a deterrent for grazing animals. It’s there to make them taste bad and to cause enough gastrointestinal distress that the animal eats anything else. It is also able to repel most insects except a certain moth I mentioned who is totally like ‘That’s my kink’. Before you think this organic acid compound is so horrible that you swear off foraging dock, this stuff has been used to kill the mites that are decimating honey bee populations successfully so it has some real use. Yellow dock should not be eaten raw, you need to neutralize the acid first so you don’t suffer hours of GI tract misery. Much like with Swiss chard you need to cook the leaves, young ones need about ten minutes of boiling in a modest amount of water. By modest I mean something like a 1:1 ratio, one cup of chopped greens packed into a measuring cup for 1 cup of water. Older greens can also be eaten if cooked however they may take twice as long to cook and 2 or 3 changes of water to get the Oxalic acid out of your greens. Once properly cooked they are no different than Beet (old dock leaves) or Swiss Chard greens (young dock leaves) in texture or flavor. I would recommend cooking them with other forage greens of the season to dilute the amount of Yellow Dock you are eating as an additional protection against the residual Oxalic Acid that may be left in the cooked greens. You can serve this as a side to anything else, eggs, wild game or given its flavor as a sort of seasoning. Remember how I mentioned harvesting the seeds? Well, with a bit of effort the seeds can be hulled, winnowed, ground and sifted into palatable flour that you can use to extend your existing flour supply. It’s not ideal but given the sheer number of seeds each plant produces and the fact that they aren’t individually tiny, this may just save you from malnutrition some day.
*Do not fret I will cover all three of these edible forage plants in greater detail later on.
With all that garden goodness covered this is the part of the blog where I have to advertise for the Fayetteville City Market. Now I know you readers probably don’t much like advertisements, but by booth at the City Market helps to cover the costs of running the test garden and literally maintains the Research & Development budget that is used to bring you the information that has made up the backbone of this blog. In addition to being able to process card payments we now take CashApp payments so your payment options for my product have tripled. With that said, if you want to get some GMO-free, Organic fruit, herbs, flowers and perennials, come on down to the Fayetteville City Market on 325 Maxwell Street in downtown Fayetteville between the Hours of 9:00 am and 1:00 pm on Saturdays. Even in bad weather the market goes on though you might have to look for me under the ‘arches’ of the Transportation Museum’s front entryway.
For those of you wondering what plants are going to be at the market this weekend here is the list.
Produce:
Garlic Bulb, $1.00
Soup Kit – Parsnip, $6.00
Soup Kit – Turnip, $6.00
Seasoning Packet, $2.00
Houseplants:
Assorted Succulents, Plastic Pot ($5.00)
Assorted Succulents, Round Resin Pot - $5.00
Assorted Succulents, Square Resin Pot - $5.00
Assorted Succulents, Hexagon Resin Pot - $10.00
Assorted Succulents, Lattice Resin Pot - $14.00
Assorted Succulents, Clay Pot ($9.00)
Garden Stuff: ($3.00)
Elephant Garlic
Softneck Garlic
Lettuce – Parris Island Romaine
Lettuce – Cherokee Red
Lettuce – Five Star Lettuce Mix
Beets – Bull’s Blood
Mustard – Red Giant
Kale – Beira
Kale – Dinosaur
Kale – Redbor
Kale – Ragged Jack
Coming Soon:
Abutilon ‘ Orange Hot Lava’
Okinawa Spinach
How to stay in Contact with Us!
Our group’s online presence has migrated to Nextdoor.com. All you need to keep up with all our activities is to have a Nextdoor account and to look for the ‘Sustainable Neighbors of Fayetteville’ group and ask to join! You don’t have to live in Fayetteville to join us! Feel free to ask all your garden questions of our knowledgeable membership and post your cool garden pictures.
https://nextdoor.com/g/ybvdm226x/?is=nav_bar
Also please take a gander at the Youtube version of this blog:
The Videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/curacaovexxor/videos
>Newest videos (5): Chinese Money Plant, Red African Milk Bush, Pencil Cactus, Desert Rose, ‘Prehistoric’ Devils Backbone.
Meetings still going on! We now meet at LeClairs General Store on the First and Third Thursday of every month. Our next meeting is on April 7th between 5:30pm and 7:00pm. We are in the back room so come on in and join us for a fun garden chat.
No comments:
Post a Comment