Theres plenty of Rumex for a joke

 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 7^th between 5:30pm and 7:00pm. We are in the back room so come on in and join us for a fun garden chat.

 

Stellar Garden Performances

Welcome back to another episode of Lost in the Farmers Market. I know this episode was supposed to be posted on Friday the 23^rd, but recent events have pushed it back a day or two and I will be covering that series of events after I cover the main topic. This week’s topic is another plant family that never gets enough credit. The family I am talking about has family members used as medicine, food, oils, pesticides, biochemicals and many members that are just there for good looks. This week I am taking a look at the Aster Family, known in Latin as Asteraceae. The word Asteraceae is from the Latin word Aster which means star. This is a clear reference to the shape of its flowers and their round array of petals. The flowers are of note because when we see a Daisy, we think that the whole flower head is the flower, when biologically the petals are just modified leaves and the actual center of the daisy flower (aka the disk) is actually a tightly packed group of tiny individual flowers each with their own tiny petals. This feature is critical to identifying aster family members regardless of what country you are in. Literally there is a aster for every hardiness zone which makes these plants flexible as hell.

Tagetes erecta - American Marigold

I know what you are thinking, ‘Ok, what about those uses you mentioned?” Well that’s easy there are groups of asters you see all the time at the grocery store as food.  The easy cop-out there is to mention Sunflower seeds, but did you know that Lettuce, Escarole, Endive, Chicory, Dandelion greens and, Frisee are all in the aster family and sitting right there in the salad aisle. Additionally, there is the edible tubers of Jarusalem Artichoke to consider as they are also in the aster family. As for herbs the aster family is well represented with plants like Santolina, Coneflower, Arnica, Burdock, Calendula, German Chamomile, Roman Chamomile, Costmary, Elecampane, Feverfew, Tansy, Goldenrod, Mugwort, Tarragon, Wormwood, Safflower, Southernwood and, Yarrow. So yes, the Asters are heavily represented in the herbal/culinary seasoning department. As for oil extraction Sunflowers and Calendulas are both primary sources of cooking oil. In terms of bio-chemicals such as medicine, and pesticides The Painted Daisy and the Pyrethrum Daisy are both sources of the insecticide Pyrethrum, while Extracts from the Narrow-leaf Coneflower are used as a memory enhancer…provided you remember to take them.

 

Echinacea purpurea 'Cheyenne Red' - Coneflower.

Interestingly, in terms of good looks there’s an aster to suit your fancy. Asters come in virtually any color imaginable; if you want blues and purples, Stoke’s aster, Pincushin flower and purple coneflower are your best bet. If you want reds and pinks, Chrysanthemums, Coneflowers, Gaillardia, Cosmos and, Zinnias are a good call. Yellows and oranges are easy also as you can pick and choose between Sunflowers, Tithonia, Gazinia, Marigolds, Calendula, Rudbeckia, Coreopsis, Echibeckia, Zinnias (again) and, Cosmos.  Green flowers are not off limits thanks to strange coneflower breeds like ‘Green Twister’, ‘Irish Eyes’ Rudbeckia, ‘Green Envy’ Zinnias and a few others. White blooming asters are incredibly easy to find but here are a few not previously listed, Oxeye Daisy, Shasta Daisy, Chamomile and, Cape Daisy.

 

Rudbeckia lacinata - Cutleaf Coneflower

As an interesting cultural note, members of the Aster family thrive in most soil conditions, while things like Coneflowers, Pyrethrum Daisies and Gazinia prefer well-drained soil with good organic content and regular water, plants like Helianthis angustifolius or Rudbeckia lacinata Swamp sunflower and Cutleaf Coneflower respectively will grow right beside a stream and don’t mind wet roots. Plants like Tithonia diversifolia (Mexican sunflower), Helenium autumnale (Sneezeweed) can handle sandy dry soils but do their best with extra water and enriched soil. Zinnias, Marigolds and Coreopsis all once established need little to no assistance to survive. So, your options are wide open when it comes to the aster family, as there is a specimen for all your needs, heck you might discover something about one of them that could make you a fortune.

 

Rudbeckia maxima - Giant Coneflower

Now with the topic of asters covered let us move on to why this post was delayed. In the middle of last week, I was sent a photograph via text by Marsha Howe from Sustainable Neighbors of a mysterious plant that needed identification. At a first glance I thought it to be a member of the hibiscus family due to the growth rate and unique leaves. For those who don’t know, certain species of hibiscus such as Okra, Cotton, Roselle, South Sea Salad Tree and the swamp mallows can grow several feet in a growing season easily so rapid growth is expected. Additionally, a lot of Hibiscus family members have large exaggerated palmate shaped leaves. As fluke would have it something told me I should look up a specific species of tropical fruits and much to my surprise the plant pictured below was precisely identified.

 

Carica papaya ‘Maradol’ – Maridol Papaya

Well it turns out the plant was a papaya, and was the largest specimen out of about two-dozen volunteer seedlings and plants. Now I know what you might be thinking, how the heck did Papaya plants get there, those shouldn’t be growing in our climate at all! This is true however Marsha told me that she had added some of her kitchen scraps to the compost at the site and that she had some Papaya leftovers from eating the fruit in there. The seeds germinated within the last month or two and thus all the volunteers. So I asked if it was ok to rescue some of the volunteers and try to grow the plants and see if something special could be done. Marsha was ok with this, and we met on Thursday afternoon so I could see the site and collect a few Papaya volunteers. A bit later I ended up with eight plants of varied sizes as you can see below.

 

The largest one is in a half-gallon nursery pot.

Growing a papaya isn’t exactly easy as the plants are recommended for zones 10 and 11 according to the USDA. In zones 8b (Fayetteville) and 9, they are recommended as being grown as ornamental plants. This is because cold temperatures below 59 F can prevent the tree from properly flowering or forming fruit. Temperatures below 32 F can cause heavy damage to plants while overnight freezes can kill plants outright. As if this were not enough, they are prone to spider mites when kept indoors and need a loamy well drained soil and may require a 21-0-0 or nitrogen heavy fertilizer during the first few months after planting or transplanting.  They also according to numerous sources start stressing when the temperature peaks above 90 F so they have an upper limit on the level of heat they will accept. As a last note it is suggested that for optimum fruit formation Papayas need 4” of rain per month after fruit as formed. Either way, I’m hoping the eight specimens I have do well enough, though I admittedly don’t exactly have a complete plan for them yet. You can bet there will be updates as the Great Papaya Trial continues.

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. Also, as of the start of 2019, my booth can now process credit or debit cards thanks to the acquisition of s a Square reader so your payment options have doubled. With that said, if you want to get some GMO-free, Organic vegetables, herbs and fruiting shrubs 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.

Plants & Stuff Available Now:

Herbs:

Rue, Marbled 3” - $4.00

Sage, Common 3”: - $3.00

Santolina, Etruscan: 5” - $6.00

Santolina, Etruscan: 3” - $4.00

Valerian: 3” - $3.00

Flowers:

Butterfly Weed: 4” - $4.00

Common Mallow ‘Zebrina’: 3” – $4.00

Coneflower, Feeling Pink: 3” - $4.00

Coneflower, Pow Wow White: 3” – $4.00

Coneflower ‘Green Twister’: 3” – $4.00

Coral Bells, ‘Marvelous Marble’ 4.5” - $5.00

Foxglove, Camelot Lavender: 3” – $3.00

Foxglove, Camelot Rose: 3” – $3.00

Rose Mallow ‘Luna Red’: 3” – $4.00

Rose Mallow ‘Disco Belle Pink’: 3” – $3.00

Rose Mallow ‘Disco Belle White’: 3” – $3.00

Salvia, New Dimension Blue: 5” - $6.00

Fruits & Vegetables:

Peppers, Ornamental ‘Black Magic’: 4” - $4.00

Peppers, Ghost: 4”- $3.00

Coming Soon:

[TBA]

These days I am generally at Leclair’s General Store once a week, for the weekly Sustainable Neighbors meeting at 5:30pm through 7:00 pm. If you have questions then I will be there to answer your questions. Since our meetings have an open-door policy you don’t need to sign up for anything or join anything, you can come on in ask for us and join the meetings. If not, you can always send me questions through this blog or visit the farmer’s market or pay attention to what Sustainable Neighbors is doing at the link below.

https://www.meetup.com/SustainableNeighbors/

                        This brings to a close the seventeenth LITFM post of the year, stay tuned the next episode which should be posted on the 6^th of September. There will be more garden updates and other cool stuff.