Vaccinium membranaceum

Vaccinium membranaceum

The Huckleberry is one of the best and easiest to gather berries in the mountains. At least if it grows in your area. It doesn't generally grow in my area, but on a recent trip to Montana, I was able to find and enjoy handfuls of huckleberries for lunch on one of my hikes.

Lolo National Forest has a good foraging policy, for example, "a permit is not required for recreational huckleberry picking up to 10 gallons per season."

The taste of huckleberries does not need much explanation. They are much like blueberries, but somewhat tarter. The great thing is that they grow in large quantities in fields of bushes, so one can easily pick a lot without much effort. Some people use a berry rake to make it even faster, but compared to searching for strawberries, even hand-picking huckleberries seems effortless. You can easily pick a handful in a minute, and a pie-full in a short time.

Fragaria virginiana

Fragaria virginiana

Finding wild strawberries has always been a frustrating experience for me. The plants are common enough, but to find ripe berries requires being at the right place and time (or elevation and season combination) and getting to them before the critters get them. Only rarely does it all come together for me. And even when they do, the berries are very small and difficult to find, hanging under the green sepals, which are under the leaves.

For identification, if you think you have something which looks like a strawberry plant (with leaves in threes, and 5-petaled white flowers with many stamens) the clincher to confirm it is a strawberry is to look for the red runners underneath. The ripe berries are also unmistakable.

The taste needs no description, of course. They melt in your mouth and are even more flavorful than commercial strawberries. But then, they are so small, they need to the extra flavor to be able to taste them.

Rumex obtusifolius

Rumex obtusifolius

Since I had success with other docks, I also sampled this dock to see if it lived up to its common name, Bitter Dock. It does, but the name does not adequately describe why you should not eat this plant. Yes, even the young leaves and shoots are somewhat bitter, but even worse than the bitterness is the taste. Instead of the fresh lemony taste of curly dock, this dock tastes more like rotten lemons!

In my area I usually find this plant by small mountain streams. It can be recognized as a dock by the way the leaves develop, but this dock has oblong leaves, and dark red veins in the leaves, a sign of bitterness in docks.

Rumex crispus

Rumex crispus

The most common type of dock, Rumex crispus is commonly known as Curly Dock if you look at the leaves with their wavy or "crisped" edges, or Yellow Dock if you look at the root.

There are many ways to enjoy this plant, and most of them depend on finding the plants when they are young and tender.

When dock first starts to grow, it can be recognized by the large leaves, and the way each side of the leaf starts out curled to the back or underside of the leaf, and uncurls after it has grown out far enough. The base of the young leaf will be surrounded by a dry sheath at the base of the previous leaf, with a slimy substance down in there as well. The sliminess washes or wipes of easily enough, and the inner stem and base of these immature leaves can be eaten raw, tasting like lemony celery.

The lemony flavor is from oxalic acid, which people who only eat modern highly processed food will caution you against. But it is present in varying amounts in many vegetables. It is safe to eat in reasonable amounts, and toxicity is "wildly unlikely", but it has been linked with kidney stones, so it is prudent to avoid it if you have problems with those.

The young leaves themselves can be eaten raw, and also have that lemony flavor. But the best way to eat the leaves is to boil them for about five minutes. The cooked leaves lose a lot of the lemoniness, because a lot of the soluble oxalic acid stays in the cooking water. But they still have a fresh, enjoyable flavor, and just the right amount of texture to make chewing them enjoyable as well. Cooked dock leaves have a big reputation as one of the most enjoyable greens around and they certainly live up to it.

The dock plant will soon send up a tall stalk with flowers and eventually the 3-winged seeds which are the easiest way to identify the plant when it is mature. But if you catch the stalk when it is still growing, before the flowers open, there will be a part with is still flexible and tender. This can be peeled and eaten raw. The outer surface will still have some fibers after peeling, but still tender enough to bite and chew up if you got the flexible part of the stalk. It is crunchy and the lemony flavor is subdued to a tanginess. Samuel Thayer (in Nature's Garden) says these are his favorites parts of the plant, either raw or cooked. But when I cooked them, the inner stalk quickly turned to mush, which squishes out of the fibrous part instead of supporting it so you can bite through it. This is bad news for cooking the stalks, but good news for cooking the leaves, since the central leaf vein softens very quickly.

I've noticed that after the seed stalk has grown up, there are often some smaller, more rounded leaves growing at the base of the plant which are still tender and a bit thickish. Look for these leaves after the other leaves and stem have become mature and tough. (update:) It's now half way through September, and the stalks and seed have dried to a rusty red, but there are still leaves growing from the bases of the dry stalks. They are only slightly bitter and tender enough to eat raw, although washing off the dust helps greatly, and cooking them is even better.