Foraging brings signs of hope, even though it’s not spring yet
On a recent visit to Tilden Regional Park’s Little Farm, we spied an emerald patch of a familiar plant with parasolshaped leaves. Could it be? It looked like miner’s lettuce, which in my two years of pandemic foraging, I had come to believe appeared as a herald of spring.
I plucked one, rolling the stem between my fingers. Miner’s lettuce is the gateway drug to foraging, easily identifiable and widespread in the Bay Area.
“Are we coming back here to forage?” Gege asked suspiciously. I laughed. He and his twin brother, Didi, have been on enough walks with me to know that I’m liable at any moment to start plucking and stowing my finds in my pockets.
“Not today,” I said with a laugh. “We’ll leave it for the animals.”
After I returned home and consulted a local foraging guide, I realized that what I thought emerged only in spring can appear after the first hard rains.
In the winter of 2020-21, I either failed to notice the miner’s lettuce or perhaps the drought delayed the arrival of these tender greens. When I foraged them in the spring, the harvest seemed paltry and dried up soon after.
I’m still young in my foraging practice, learning just how much the weather of a particular year might impact what grows, among other factors. And I’m still getting acquainted with the myriad names a single plant might bear. Claytonia perfoliata is also known as
palsingat in Cahuilla, as well as spring beauty and winter purslane, which hint at the span of its growing season. I’d pictured winter as a time of barren branches and dormancy, but here new life already burst forth.
In my neighborhood, I discovered abundant miner’s lettuce. If I’d wanted to, I could have rolled around in the patches. If I’d been a cow or goat, I could have happily grazed. I returned with a canvas tote and under a light drizzle gathered bunches of the greens.
We’re in a time of omicron gloom, coupled with the postholiday letdown. We’re overextended and exhausted, pushed past our limits yet again, yet more. Many of us are hunkering down until the surge subsides. Amid the monotony — and the sense that time is looping back around — the discovery of a humble weed is all the more thrilling. I stir-fried my haul with sesame oil and garlic and also added handfuls to a brisket stew — a taste of bright green.
On another day, I sought out hawthorn berries, massed on the branches of the trees and carpeting the ground underneath. Last winter, I steeped them in vodka and sugar and made a mediocre moonshine. This year, I decided to try making jelly.
After rinsing them off, discarding stray leaves, I covered the berries with water and boiled for about 45 minutes or so with the juice of an orange, while breaking them apart with a potato masher. Then I strained out the liquid and combined with an equal volume of sugar and a squeeze of lemon and boiled for another 10 minutes until it set.
The jelly was a revelation, bright and tangy like cranberry sauce — but better. I dolloped them in thumbprint cookies, the centers glistening like rubies.
These finds are a gift I’ve never needed more. In her book of essays, “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants,” Robin Wall Kimmerer — a botany professor who draws upon her Potawatomi heritage — describes how foraging wild strawberries as a girl shaped her view of the world.
“A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. ... Your only role is to be openeyed and present. Gifts exist in the realm of humility and mystery — as with random acts of kindness, we do not know their source.”
We’re in a time of omicron gloom, coupled with the post-holiday letdown. The discovery of a humble weed is all the more thrilling.