June
Mint, Lambsquarter, Cattail, Red Clover
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Psalm 104:24 O Lord, how manifold are Your works! In wisdom You have made them all. The earth is full of Your possessions. |
June brings us into the fullness of the year as the summer solstice draws near and the light takes dominion over the darkness. I think of June as the “full sun” of the year—long days and short nights bring about rapid growth in the plant kingdom. Green dominates the landscape and all is a–buzz with life and life more abundantly.
We move into a new season of harvesting. The wild food menu is changing from the spring rush of supergreens to a lazier summer course. Some of the spring herbs like Dandelion and Chickweed will be with us throughout the year, but others get older, tougher and go to seed around this time. Summer greens like Lambsquarter, Purslane and Wild Amaranth replace the spring offerings.
In the early summer, my garden is beginning to yield up its first lettuce and peas, radishes and greens. I am already satiated with fresh foods from the land, so the urgency subsides. I tend to turn my harvesting expeditions more to medicine herbs. Summer is a good time to make salves, tinctures, and vinegars, as well as drying and storing herbs for winter teas.
There are a few specialty food items that appear in June that I try not to miss. Cattails (shoots, flowerbuds, & pollen) are a must-have each year. Milkweed flowers, buds and tender seedpods as well as Day Lilies also make unique and surprisingly delicious additions to the table.
The Mint family is HUGE, encompassing many of our kitchen herbs as well as their wild cousins. Well-known herbs like thyme, basil, oregano, and rosemary are in the Mint family. Lemon balm, bee balm, and catnip are some Mint relatives that flower and herb gardeners might be familiar with. In addition there is a vast spectrum of wild Mints, ranging from tasty aromatics to bitter medicinals.
I am going to be focusing on the minty
Mints here rather than all their diverse kin. Here in Southwestern
Wisconsin I have found several varieties and counting of fresh, wild Mints.
Mints are easy to
identify because they always
have square stems, opposite leaves, and a strong mint smell
when you crush a leaf between your fingers. Their
flowers are tubular, usually tiny, and can be
white, purple, pink or blue. Once you get familiar with Mint, you shouldn’t
have any trouble identifying it even without the flowers.
Mint comes up pretty early in the spring. I even find it in the late winter when I’m gathering Watercress in March. By June it’s perfect for summer iced teas and minty salads. You can harvest Mint anytime you find it, spring to fall. I harvest it both with and without flowers. If I’m harvesting it to dry for winter teas I like to wait until it’s tall and full as I can gather large quantities quickly.
Mint has an affinity for water, so it likes to grow along riverbanks and lakeshores, near springs and in marshy places. Whenever I’m near water in the summer, I keep my eyes and nose open for Mint, and am rarely disappointed.
Distinguishing between all the
subspecies of Mint can be very tricky
and involves a bit of botany and detective work. I like to sharpen my plant
identification skills by pinpointing the various Mints in my field guides, but
it’s not necessary to do so to enjoy their goodness. All Mints can be used
interchangeably in recipes. If you become a Mint connoisseur you will find that
some are hotter than others and there are
subtle variations in flavors as well
as much diversity in textures. There are fuzzy Mints, smooth Mints, wide-leaved
and narrow-leaved Mints, dark green, light green and purple-stemmed Mints. Some
Mints interbreed with each other and create localized varieties you won’t find
in your field guide.
If you have a wet spot in your yard or on your property, it is very simple to transplant a little Mint to have some close by. Just break off a good, spicy wild Mint at any point on the stem and put it in water. Within two weeks it will develop a nice root system. I have a Mint patch underneath the outdoor faucet by my house. It can be aggressive and migrate into flower beds so be judicious in your planting
!
I keep bouquets of wild Mints on the windowsill in the kitchen; they stay fresh for weeks as long as you keep the water topped off in the jar. I like to nibble on the leaves for a breath freshener and snip a few to add to salads, to float in glasses of Mint lemonade or to decorate fruit platters. These Mint bouquets make lovely, natural air fresheners as well!
I harvest large quantities of
Mint
to dry for winter teas. I tie the stems into
bundles using old twist ties from
bread bags and hang them upside-down on a string out of the sun to dry. I try
to dry my Mints as quickly as possible to prevent loss of volatile oils which
evaporate very easily. Most of the flavor and some of the medicinal components
are in the essential oils. You can see a
thin sheet of these oils floating at the top of a good quality Mint tea. Once
they are crispy dry I strip the leaves off the stems and put them away in
plastic sandwich bags or glass jars. Store them in a dark cupboard and you’ll
have Mint for tea all year long.
Not only are Mints tasty but they are incredibly nutritious as well. They are especially high in calcium. I like to add Mint to my tonic infusions for both their good flavor and the calcium boost. A little Mint also makes a nutritive tea kid-friendly, as kids love Mint! When I want to give my children a little extra high-powered nourishment, we throw a tea party! A little toy tea set is a great way to give children their vitamin supplements or a special medicinal brew. The Mint family is a welcome guest at all the tea parties!
In the summertime I make Mint iced tea frequently, both by itself and combined with other mild herbs. I also make a refreshing Mint lemonade out of a full-strength Mint infusion. You can even freeze some Mint tea in ice cube trays to add to water or lemonades for a hint of Mint.
Candied Mint leaves are a fun project to make with kids and can be a decadent confection at a wild food dinner party. A dehydrator set on high is the perfect tool for these. If they dry too slowly the sugar seems to melt rather than crystallize.
I don’t hesitate to add chopped Mint to summer salads. It goes especially well with taboulis, cucumber salads, and lightly sprinkled in fruit salads.
Medicinal properties of mint:
Native American Indian Resources: Mint Family
Here’s an interesting article about mint farming in Michigan:
Lambsquarters (Chenopodium album)
Lambsquarters is a top-notch wild food and nutritive herb. It grows all over America in many different habitats from rich farm soils to empty lots in the desert towns. It tends to grow in disturbed soils, close to humans rather than in remote places, so you needn’t go far to find it. In fact, a very likely place to find it will be in your garden. The odds are high that you’ve been weeding this one out every year. Not only does it grow everywhere but it has a very long edible season. It gets to be a good eatin’ size around June, being a late spring arrival, and its tender leaves are available for the rest of the growing season.
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Lambsquarters is a close cousin to spinach, but far, far more nutritious. It ranks right up there with Dandelion, Watercress and Nettles as one of nature’s nutritional powerhouses. It has a mild, green flavor like our domestic greens. In fact it is a relative of Swiss chard, beets and a few exotic garden greens like orach, all in the Chenopodium family.
Lambsquarters nutritional profile:
Lambsquarters has a few different nicknames like pigweed or goosefoot depending on where you live. Whatever you decide to call it, it would be to your advantage to befriend this precious tender herb.
I get a double harvest out of my garden beds when I let Lambsquarters grow side by side with my vegetables. When it gets to a good size, about 12 inches tall, I weed it right into a harvesting basket. I usually get several crops of it during the summer, enough for the freezer, too!
To harvest it from the garden, I pull up the roots and all, and with a pair of scissors I snip the dirt-laden roots off and put the green tops in the basket. Thus I am weeding and harvesting at the same time, and it keeps the mud out of my sink when I’m prepping the Lambsquarters.
Once inside, I strip the leaves and
the tender tips off the stems. I like to wash my Lambsquarters because the
leaves tend to have a harmless, powdery white substance on
them that I don’t like in my
raw salads. After washing, I spread the leaves out on a towel to drip dry
before storing in a plastic bag or tupperware container in the fridge.
It’s possible to dry Lambsquarters to use in the winter by adding to soups or reconstituting for other dishes, but I much prefer to freeze them. When I have a large harvest I will prep them and then blanch the leaves in boiling water for 3-5 minutes. Strain, cool, and put in freezer bags or containers. Lambsquarters is an excellent, first-rate frozen vegetable. I try to put up a lot of it each year.
Be sure to save the cooking water when you cook Lambsquarters. It makes a wonderful stock to make soups and boil your rice in. The old-timers called this liquid “pot-liquor” and were well aware of it’s value. I like to drink it with bouillon or mixed with tomato juice as a breakfast cocktail.
Lambsquarters can be used raw or
cooked in any recipe that calls for spinach. It is endlessly versatile in the
kitchen and can be included in all kinds of dips, dressings, sauces, soups,
salads, and main dishes. It is one of the finest spinach substitutes; no one
would ever know the difference if you didn’t tell them, so here’s a good one for
sneaking into a skeptical husband’s dinner!
Here are a few of my favorite Lambsquarters recipe to get you started:
Lemony Lambsquarter Feta Salad
Here are a few more links for more information on Lambsquarter:
Cloudnet: Lambsquarters, Pigweed
Marquita Farms: Lambsquarters Recipes
Indian Spring Herbs: Lambsquarters
Cattail (Typhus angustifolia, latifolia)
June is the time to
visit your local Cattail patch. 
What a great excuse to get out to a
beautiful place since Cattails love to grow by ponds, lakes, marshes or other
such places that are virtually teeming with life. My Cattail expeditions
are always blessed with cool wildlife encounters….beavers…wild herons…redwing
blackbirds…..snowy egrets…….
Almost everyone knows what Cattails look like so finding them isn’t very hard. The only look-a-like they might be confused with by a novice is the poisonous wild iris.
Harvesting Cattails
can be done by canoe or boat or from the shore in some places. I have
Cattail stands scoped out that I can harvest
without getting my feet wet and others that involve getting the whole family
together for a canoeing adventure. Either way, a pair of tall rubber boots
is generally a good idea when going out for Cattails.
Cattail season runs from mid-May through July, although it’s possible to glean something to eat from them year round. Cattails offer a four-course meal to a savvy forager as their shoots, flowerbuds, roots and pollen are all edible and each is quite unique in flavor, texture and use.
Cattail Shoots:
When the new leaves begin to grow
in mid to late May it’s time to harvest the tender shoots. 
In early spring the
Cattail gardens are golden-brown from last year’s spent plants, but soon enough
fresh green blades rise up out of the old, heralding a new season and cycle of
growth. From the time this new growth appears until the blades are about 3 feet
tall, they yield a fresh vegetable known among wild food enthusiasts as “Cossack’s
Asparagus”, named after the Russians who eagerly
sought out this wild treat.
The edible portion
of the shoot is
the tender, white inner core found at the base of each plant.
It is harvested by grasping the inner leaves close to the base and gently but
firmly pulling the plant out of its ‘socket’. If done properly it does not
pull the root up but leaves the outer leaves intact. I have a sharp
pocketknife ready and cut the shoot about 6-10 inches up, leaving behind the
upper, darker green portion of the leaves. It takes
roughly 30 Cattails to
yield about 2 cups of the chopped, prepped, ready to cook Cossack’s Asparagus,
so plan accordingly.
Cattail shoots are edible both raw or cooked. They are a very interesting wild vegetable and it
takes a bit of
creativity to learn to use them and adapt them to different
recipes. They taste
a bit like cucumbers when raw; but being rather bland, they easily take on the
flavors of condiments and sauces used in cooking. They remind me of bamboo
shoots used in Asian cooking so would easily make a wild substitute for these if
you make stir-frys and such.
Cattail shoots have
a mucilaginous texture, reminiscent
of okra, so they would also perform well in
gumbos if you do any Cajun-style cooking. This slippery, gelatinous
substance is used medicinally in much the same way Aloe Vera is used. It
is rather handy for the insect bites you’ll probably get in the swamp, as well
as the sunburn from your day out in the canoe.
In the kitchen, I store the 6-10
inch shoots in a plastic bag in the fridge until I’m ready to use them; they
keep well for several days. To prep them for use I slice them into thin rounds,
between ¼ and ½ inch thick. You can slice them thicker to make them resemble storebought bamboo shoots. The shoots are layered like a leek and the tenderest
portion is the white inner part. I peel the outer layer away and slice the
inner part until it feels tougher, much like you .
do for
asparagus, feeling with
the knife for the woodier, fibrous texture to tell me when to stop slicing.
(This will make more sense when you do it.) The tenderest portion may only be
the lower 3 or 4 inches. Sometimes I peel another outer layer off farther up
and get a few more slices.
Now your Cattail shoots are ready
to use. At this point i
t isn’t difficult to imagine ways to cook them. They
are easily absorbed into stir-frys, fried rice or rice pilafs, soups and
casseroles. Raw, they can be added to pasta salads, cucumber salads or cold
grain or bean salads. If they are left long like celery sticks, they can be
filled with a good cream cheese filling and served like some exotic hor’d’erves.
Flowerbuds:
The flowerbuds of the Cattail are an entirely different food from the shoots. Somewhere around mid to late June the Cattails send up a flowerstalk with a tight green head all wrapped up in a leafy sheath. Inside the sheaf there are two elongated heads. The bottom one is the female and will receive the pollen from the upper male one, later becoming the familiar brown Cattail head and turning to fluff. (The bottom female head is edible but there’s so little on them it’s not really worth it). Oftentimes last year’s fluffy heads are still present in the midst of the new growth, thus Cattail stands are intergenerational.
The top one is the male and is the
one that is sought after for food. These male heads are actually a tight cluster
made up of hundreds of tiny flowerettes. When they are in the green stage they
are technically unopened flowerbuds. When they are ready
to actually bloom, the
head will rise up out of its protective sheath so the flowers can disperse their
pollen to the winds.
While they are still wrapped up in the sheath, I go after them with gusto! They are truly a gourmet item, delicious beyond your wildest expectation! Their flavor reminds me of fresh artichoke hearts that leave a delicate flowery essence as an aftertaste. The flowerbuds have a pretty short season so be ready for them! I try to check the Cattail stands at least twice a week during June, especially if it’s a hot, humid year. Usually when the Cattail leaves are about 4 feet tall it won’t be long before the flowerheads rise up. Summer solstice is the average time for a prime harvest, but a hot or cold year could vary the timing.
In order to gather any quantity of flowerbuds you will probably need a canoe. Otherwise you’ll end up knee and thigh deep in muck trying to fill your basket. You don’t have to worry about overharvesting the flowerheads as cattails spread through their root system. The wind-borne seeds mainly help to establish new colonies in other parts of the pond or lake.
You will definitely need a sharp
knife as the stems are pretty sturdy and don’t just
snap off. Be sure to harvest
only the heads that are still wrapped up in their protective sheaf. It’s
helpful to have some sort of a wire crook to help pull hard-to-reach flowerheads
towards you so you don’t tip the canoe. I like to have my husband paddle the
canoe while I collect so I can focus on the harvest.
In the kitchen, you
have to peel the sheaths away, much like shucking corn, and snap the upper head
off. It takes 30 or 40 heads to make 4 servings as they are not very big.
I simply boil them in water for 5-10 minutes, then coat them with garlic butter,
and serve hot. They are eaten like little
miniature corn-on-the-cobs.
Sometimes if I have a lot of them, I scrape the green from the ‘cob’ after
boiling them to use in various dishes.
Cat on the Cob with Garlic Butter
Cattail Pollen:
Cattail Pollen takes some effort to
collect in any quantity but it is well worth it both in nutritional value and
flavor. It adds an indescribably delicious flavor to pancakes and muffins. I
am sure there are lots of other ways to utilize it as well, but I have never
collected enough at one time to play around with it in the kitchen as much as
I’d like.
You will definitely need a canoe or small boat to harvest pollen, as well as an oarsman so that both hands are free. You can gather pollen at the same time you are gathering flowerheads as both will be available simultaneously. It’s a busy time in the cattail patch this time of year!
Look for Cattail flowerheads that are fully unsheathed but not yet turned fuzzy. They will still be green, but getting puffed-up rather than tight and hard-looking. The pollen is designed to release at the slightest movement, such as wind or birds and animal activity, so just touching the head will bring a shower of brilliant yellow pollen. You need to work carefully because you will be competing with the breeze for this precious gold.
Most field guides teach you to
collect the pollen by grabbing a ripened flowerhead
and bending it over into a
paper bag, shaking it roughly so that the pollen falls into the bag, and then
moving on to the next flowerhead. This works fairly well, but in my experience
I have not been able to bend them without breaking them. I have also learned
that there is quite a bit of pollen still in the flowerheads that I miss this
way.
My method of collecting pollen is
to clip whole ripened flowerheads into a paper bag and bringing them home. 
I
let them sit overnight in the bag and in the morning my pollen yield will have
doubled. This is because clipping them causes them to bolt, or in otherwords,
any unopened flowerbud in the head will hasten to complete its sole purpose in
life of producing pollen and ensuring the survival of the species. You can
actually see this demonstrated if you leave a ripened flowerhead laying on a
plate overnight. In the morning it will be lying in a bed of pollen that was
not there the night before.
I then take all the spent flowerheads out of the bag, giving each a good shaking before discarding. Then I transfer the pollen to a sifter and bowl and sift out any fuzz, bugs, or other foreign objects. I now have a portion of florescent yellow powder, finer than the finest flour in texture.
If I cannot use it right away, I store it in the refrigerator for up to 3 days. If I want to keep it any longer than that I put it in the freezer as it is quite perishable because of the moisture it contains and high protein content. If you don’t have a fridge or freezer, it is necessary to dry it thoroughly or even to bake it at a low temperature before storing it to prevent it from molding.
I estimate it takes about 20-25 pollinating flowerheads to yield 1 cup of pollen, so plan accordingly.
To bake with Cattail pollen, I mix it 1:1 with flour. You can use lesser amounts if you didn’t collect very much, but to really experience the unique and superb flavor it’s best to have a full measure. Even if you end up using your whole yield for one batch of pancakes, I guarantee you will never forget them!
Here are a couple of recipes you can try:
More Cattail recipes:
Primitive Ways: Cattail Pollen Pancakes
For more information:
Herbal Educator: Cattail Harvest
Backwoods Home: The Incredible Cattail
Red Clover (Trifolium Pratense)
Red Clover is a
member of the Clover family and a very good herb to get to know. It
blossoms all through the month of June and usually isn’t too hard to find.
It likes to grow in open meadows, hayfields and along roadsides, but could
easily show up in your garden as well.
It has long lists of medicinal actions attributed to it, and was one of the starring herbs in the famous Hoxsey anti-cancer formula back in the 40s. Here's a few webpages that elaborate on the healing properties of Red Clover:
http://www.symmcorp.com/info/red-clover.htm
There are other varieties of clover with white or lavender blossoms that have similar properties, but herbalists seem to exalt Red Clover above all the others. Although it is a fairly common herb in the land, it fetches a high price on the market —17$-20$ per pound dried! This is comparatively steep as the price of herbs go.
Red Clover is one of
the herbs I use in my daily
tonic infusions
so I like to gather in as much as I can. 
I
find an abundant patch of it and pluck the
fully opened blossoms. Look for ones that are fresh and vital, before they
start to turn brown. I like to just pick just the flowerhead but some
herbalists like to get the top couple of leaves as well. It can take quite a
while to fill an ice cream bucket so it’s nice if you have some little helpers
with you. I usually go out for Red Clover three or four times in June in order to
gather a year’s supply.
At home I store some
of the fresh blossoms in the fridge for iced tea or fresh herb infusions, and to
cook with.
The rest I spread on screens or newspaper in a hot, dry place out of the sun to
dry for winter use. I’ve dried Clover in attics, in my solar herb dryer,
and even in a car with the windows rolled up. Whatever works in an often
humid climate! This year I broke down and bought an electric dehydrator
and dry many of my herbs that way now.
Good quality dried Red Clover will still be purple rather than brown. If the blossoms turn brown before drying it was probably too humid and you’ll need to find a better way to dry them. It’s not a total loss as many of the stable nutrients will still be intact, so don’t hesitate to use them anyway if this happens.
Red Clover blossoms make a wonderful, nutritious iced tea that can be drunk both hot or iced. You can also mix them with other herbs, creating your own recipes. There are no hard and fast rules for formulating beverage teas, so experiment freely! Some herbs that mix well with Red Clover are Lemon Balm, Mint, Chamomile, Nettles, and Comfrey. I also like to mix my Red Clover tea with different juices for some interesting summer refreshments.
Red Clover blossoms are edible while they are fresh. The tiny flowerettes must be pulled out of the flowerhead, as the green part is very difficult to chew or digest. Cattle need four stomachs to digest clover and grasses! It is rather time-consuming to prep the Clover flowers for cooking, but once you have a cup or two you can use them in many different ways. They can be added to salads or you might experiment with mixing them with grains like rice or quinoa:
I make a syrup with the Red Clover Blossoms, similar to the Dandelion Blossom Syrup. I like to make a good supply of this syrup, at least a gallon or so and can it into pint jars. This syrup can be used to sweeten baked goods or iced teas, or to pour over Red Clover pancakes. The Red Clover flowers can also be added to pancake or muffin batters that are sweetened with Red Clover Blossom Syrup for some extra special baked goodies:
I also make a hearty herbal vinegar with Red Clover blossoms each year, which is an excellent way to extract their rich treasuries of calcium and other minerals. I sweeten the vinegar with a little honey and use it for a daily supplement as well as cooking with it.
You can also find Red Clover Seeds for sprouting in the health food store or fresh Red Clover Sprouts in the more progressive grocery stores in the produce section next to the alfalfa sprouts. I imagine it’s possible to collect your own seeds if you have a good patch of clover handy, although I have never tried this personally.
The nutritional value of Red Clover is worthy indeed:
The man on this website likes to make wine out of anything, including Red Clover. Here’s a recipe for Red Clover wine, of all things!
Jack Keller's Winemaking: Red Clover