Abby Quillen

Freelance Content Marketing Writer and Editor

Foraging

Dandelions are Superfoods

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Every spring people stock up on Round Up and Weed-B-Gon to prepare themselves for battle against one of my favorite flowers – the humble dandelion. If you’re not as big a fan as I am of these yellow-headed “weeds”, which grow in lawns and sunny open spaces throughout the world, I know of a great way to get rid of them. Eat them.

Every part of the dandelion is edible – leaves, roots, and flowers. And they are nutritional powerhouses. They’re rich in beta-carotene, fiber, potassium, iron, calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, B vitamins, and protein.

Over the years, dandelions have been used as cures for countless conditions including:

  • kidney stones
  • acne
  • high blood pressure
  • obesity
  • diarrhea
  • high cholesterol
  • anemia
  • cancer
  • diabetes
  • stomach pain
  • hepatitis

“There is probably no existing condition that would not benefit from regularly consuming dandelions,” Joyce A Wardwell writes in The Herbal Home Remedy Book.

She also says that dandelion is “one herb to allow yourself the full range of freedom to explore,” because it has “no known cautionary drug interactions, cumulative toxic effects, or contraindications for use.”

So why not harvest the dandelions in your yard? And I’m sure your neighbors wouldn’t mind if you uprooted some of theirs too. Just avoid harvesting near streets or from lawns where herbicides or fertilizers are used.

Dandelion has a few doppelgangers, but it’s easy to distinguish it. Look for a single thick stem filled with milky sap and smooth leaves shaped like jagged teeth.

The leaves

Dandelion leaves have more beta-carotene than carrots and more iron and calcium than spinach. The best time to harvest them is early spring, before the flowers appear, because that’s when they’re the least bitter.

How can you eat dandelion leaves?

  • Toss them in salads
  • Steam them
  • Saute them with garlic, onions, and olive oil
  • Infuse them with boiling water to make a tea
  • Dry them to use for tea

If dandelion leaves taste too bitter for you to enjoy, here are four surefire ways to mask the taste:

  1. Add something sweet, salty, or sour.
  2. Combine them with less bitter greens.
  3. Cook them in oil.
  4. Boil them for three to five minutes.

Don’t let the bitterness of dandelion leaves scare you away. Phytonutrients have a bitter, sour, or astringent taste, so bitter plants are often highly nutritious. Bitterness also stimulates the liver to produce bile, which aids digestion and nutrient availability. Moreover, bitter foods modulate hunger and help curb sugar cravings.

The flowers

Dandelion flowers are a rich source of the nutrient lecithin. The best time to harvest them is mid-spring, when they’re usually the most abundant. If you cut off the green base, the flowers aren’t bitter.

How can you eat dandelion flowers?

The roots

Dandelion roots are full of vitamins and minerals. They are also in rich in a substance called inulin, which may help diabetics to regulate blood sugar. Dandelion roots are often used to treat liver disorders. They’re also a safe natural diuretic, because they’re rich in potassium. The best time to harvest dandelion roots is early spring and late fall.

How can you eat dandelion roots?

  • Boil them for 20 minutes to make a tea
  • Chop, dry, and roast them to make a tasty coffee substitute.
  • Add them to soup stock or miso
  • Steam them with other vegetables

As most gardeners know, dandelions are virile (some say pernicious) plants. Why not treat them as allies, rather than enemies, this spring?

[clickToTweet tweet=”Dandelions are superfoods. Put the pesticides away and eat them. #health #herbs” quote=”Dandelions are superfoods. Put the pesticides away and eat them.” theme=”style1″]

If you liked this post, check out more of my popular articles about herbs:

Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them. A.A. Milne #dandelions #wildfoods #foraging

[Editor’s Note: This is an updated and revised version of a post originally published on March 4, 2010]

Do you eat dandelions? Do you have a favorite dandelion recipe?

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March Seeds Bring April Greens

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It’s spring and it’s gardening time again! It was the shortest winter in history (although I perhaps would not have said that mid-January). I planted a few of our beds a couple of weeks ago. It’s our seventh gardening season in our backyard, and I actually sort of know what I’m doing now. It helps that I have two eager helpers. Ezra, who’s six, and Ira, who’s two, love the garden! Their faces light up at the very mention of planting.

Once we’re in the garden, our activities usually go like this: Ezra and I till a bed. Ira finds a “wormy.” Ezra and I spread fertilizer on a bed. Ira plays with the wormy. Ezra and I plant some seeds. Ira finds another wormy. Ira is enthusiastic about invertebrates.

We’re excitedly watching starts grow and seeds sprout, and we’re already harvesting a bit of lettuce and kale that self-started, perennial herbs, and lots of dandelion greens. Have I mentioned it’s prime dandelion harvesting season?

Wild foods tend to be much more nutritious than the produce in our supermarkets or even farmer’s markets. Jo Robinson, author of Eating on the Wild Side, explains that when we bred the bitterness out of our produce, we also lost nutrition. “The more palatable our fruits and vegetables became … the less advantageous they were for our health.”

Fortunately, despite many efforts to eradicate it, most of us have a wild edible green growing in abundance all around us, and it’s a nutritional powerhouse. A half pound of dandelion greens provides:

  • 649% of your recommended daily allowance of vitamin K,
  • 338% of your vitamin A,
  • 58% of your vitamin C,
  • 39% of your iron,
  • 20% of your Riboflavin,
  • 19% of your calcium,
  • 19% of your vitamin B-6, and
  • 9% of your dietary fiber

Don’t let all those nutrients go to waste! Check out this post or this article for more information about this humble super food and recipes. This year I can’t wait to try Rachel Turiel’s dandelion pesto.

We’ll likely be seeing many more April showers, but you’ll hopefully find us sloshing around the garden playing with wormies or armed with a colander eying our neighbors’ weeds. Wishing you some similar spring-time revelry.

Is it gardening season where you live? If so, what’s coming up in your garden? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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The Healing Power of Trees

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Cough, cough, cough. Cough, cough, cough.

That’s how our household sounds this week. So it was with interest that I read that infused Douglas-fir needles are a traditional cough remedy. Douglas-fir needles? They’re everywhere here; they dust the sky and litter the ground. And yet I’d never thought to ingest them.

According to botanist and medical biochemist Diana Beresford-Kroeger, humans and trees are interrelated down to the most basic level. The hemoglobin, which transports oxygen into our blood, is strikingly similar on a molecular level to chlorophyll, which produces oxygen in the presence of sun and water.

“We cannot survive without the tree,” states Beresford-Kroeger.

It makes a perfect kind of sense that tree needles would be medicinal, especially for our lungs, whose alvioli spread out like branches.

So, this weekend, Ezra and I wandered up to a place we call the high forest in search of Douglas-fir needles. It’s actually a city park, but it feels more like a forest, because it is strangely and magically abandoned. I’ve visited regularly for years, and I’ve only seen two other people there ever.

It’s hard to find Douglas-fir needles at arm’s reach. Most of them sway in the breeze 30 to 60 feet overhead. The trails are covered with fallen branches, but Ezra and I were in search of the fresh, fragrant tips that are supposedly best for tea. We padded along quietly searching, until we spotted a small, spindly tree with branches at just the perfect height to snip off a few.

At home, we boiled the needles for 20 minutes, let it cool, and then took the first tentative sips of our homemade, hand-harvested cough remedy.

What a delicacy! It has a lemony, light, and complex flavor.

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The Healing Power of Trees #plantmedicine

Perhaps you don’t live in proximity to the giant Douglas-firs? Well, you can buy wild harvested Douglas Fir Spring Tea on the Internet. However, you probably don’t have to look far to find a tree with healing qualities right in your own backyard.

According to Beresford-Kroeger, kids can gain protection from childhood leukemia for a year by playing with the green fruit of a black walnut in August. And black walnut leaves, rubbed on the inside of the arm, protect a woman from breast cancer. In her book The Global Forest, Beresford-Kroeger also writes that fatty acids in hickory nuts promote brain development and a compound in the water ash helps prevent cancer.

And, of course, most of us are familiar with the healing properties of willow bark, which contains a chemical similar to aspirin.

I’m not sure if the Douglas-fir needles will cure our coughs, but I can tell you that harvesting them was healing. That’s the thing about forests: just visiting them is medicinal. People have known it forever.

Photographer Jillian Doughty shares a story on her blog about visiting a Mayan massage practitioner, who told her that she needed to be outside with the trees more often. “She said all of us do, we need to go to the trees and let them take the thoughts we no longer need, the feelings we can no longer take, and the memories we should no longer carry ourselves.  She said trees are here to collect what we don’t need.  They breathe what we discard, that is why they are here.”

Modern scientific studies concur that visiting forests is healing for us. “Forests — and other natural, green settings — can reduce stress, improve moods, reduce anger and aggressiveness and increase overall happiness,” says a Science News Daily article. “Forest visits may also strengthen our immune system by increasing the activity and number of natural killer cells that destroy cancer cells.”

Or, as Ezra said, as we wove through the Douglas-firs, “I like naturing, Mom.”[clickToTweet tweet=”Forests are healing, and trees have incredible medicinal properties. #health #plantmedicine” quote=”Forests are healing, and trees have incredible medicinal properties.” theme=”style1″]

If you liked this post, check out more of my popular posts about the healing power of nature:

"If you would know strength and patience, welcome the company of trees." - Hal Borland