Submitted by Felix Lufkin.

White pine, Pinus strobus, is a tall evergreen tree native to the American north-east. It is easy to identify with its dark black / brown, deeply and widely furrowed bark, its straight trunk and upright aiming branches. White pine, like many other pines in the area, offers a number of different edible and medicinal uses. Since it is accessible year round, it’s a great friend of ours in the winter – when wild foods are more difficult to come by.

White pine is a fast growing tree if given the opportunity. It often germinates and grows in large, uniform stands after fires clear patches in a forest. Most pines in the north east have been cut since European contact, though some old growth beings remain – while not as tall, they are the east coast’s version of redwoods, along with American chestnut – growing to at least 150 feet in height and 6 in diameter.

How to ID white pine:

Bark: White pine bark is dark black with a sort of frosted gray hue. It has wide ridges and deepish groves. It’s not scaly, or shaggy. The bark of the younger branches is quite smooth, with a greenish black color.

Cones: White pine’s female cones are the familiar pine cones of the north-east, roughly the size and shape of medium cucumbers, and dark brown. The male cones are small, like small pickled gherkins – smaller than a baby carrot, and more dense. They are both less scaly than spruce cones, and much bigger than hemlock cones, which are just the size of grapes.

Needles: White pine needles are in clusters of 5 and are about as long as a playing card. Just think of the five letters in W-H-I-T-E. Red pine needles, in contrast, are in bunches of 2, thicker, and as long as hot dog. Pitch pine needles are in bunches of three and can protrude from the trunk itself.

Appearance: White pine has a distinctive, stately appearance, especially when viewed at a distance. It’s branches aim out and slightly upward, like a person with spread arms, lifted up and soaking in the sun. It’s easy to ID them on a ridge even miles away. Its branches are ‘whorled’ on the stem, meaning, many of them radiate out from a single part of the branch they sprout from – different than alternate oak branches, or opposite – aligned maple branches, for example. Whorled branches are somewhat uncommon.

Food / Medicine uses:

Edible needles: The needles are tasty, aromatic and sour. While a bit chewy, there’s no harm in nibbling them right of the tree for vitamins and some roughage. The lime-green new needles each spring are very tender, sour, and refreshing. Enjoy them! Otherwise, take a few handfuls of needles per quart of tea. You can boil water, pour over the needles and cover, or, to make a richer, more resiny and carb-rich tea, you can bring the needles and some thin twigs to a boil for a few minutes then let steep in the pot, also covered. They’re loaded with vitamin C and other minerals (4 or more times more than OJ – and what are we doing drinking orange juice in New England?!). They also make an excellent fortified vinegar.

Inner bark: The inner bark, peeled like a pale, fibrous wonton wrapper off the outer (smooth and darker) bark, is a great survival food. It is rich in carbs. It will sustain you when other food sources are unavailable, though causes harm to the tree – so just use wind falls or pruned branches only if you need to. You’ll have to stew it to make it tender, but it’s worth the experience.

Sap: The sap can be chewed as a refreshing and flavorful gum that freshens the breath. Find a scab on a trunk that is very dry and firm to the touch. If it’s the slightest bit sticky or mushy, it will get stuck all over your mouth. If that happens, just chew a little butter to break it down.

Cones: The small male cones and immature female cones can be steamed or boiled as a vegetable when green and pliable. They are resinous, but the female cones do have tiny pine nuts in them.

Medicinal uses: The pollen can be gathered and tinctured for ‘upright chi’, for vigor and vim. The soft sap can be used as an antibiotic on wounds and to ‘stitch’ together a ragged wound. The needles are great for winter immune boosting, and can be steamed and inhaled for upper respiratory infections.

Practical uses: The pitch can be boiled with fat or beeswax into superglue and is an excellent fire starter. The wood, of course, is used for lumber and to keep us warm. The soft, younger bark can be skinned from branches and folded into baskets or containers which harden, and can be sewn together with flexible pine roots, sealed with pitch, and will be water tight. You can even boil water in them!

Permaculture: Korean nut pine can be grafted onto white pine for a fast growing, canopy evergreen nut tree. The normal pine nuts we eat, from pinon or Chinese nut pines, don’t grow at altitudes below 6000′, so this is an interesting new option for forest gardens.

Submitted by Felix Lufkin.

Yucca is a perennial herb of the agave family.  It is native to the American Southwest and Central America. It can tolerate low temperatures and prefers well drained, sunny, sandy sites. Because it was a staple edible and of its utility, yucca was a very important plant to the human societies who shared its range. For those of us who live in the northeast, it could play a more important role in our lives, if we only got to know it a little better.

Yucca has a number of lily-like bladed, fibrous leaves, and a central flower stalk which can grow to 6′ or more. Its flowers are white, sweet smelling, and fruit to green, 3-sectioned pods full of small disk shaped, crinkly and flat black seeds. The fruits dry to a papery brown husk.

All of its body parts are exceptionally useful to humans.

Yucca root


Its taproot, which looks like burdock, but fatter — is brown and smooth. In its native range it grows to a large size and is a prized starchy root veggie. Here in the north, where it grows more slowly, we probably shouldn’t eat its root unless we have a lot of it. The root is rich like a potato, good boiled, fried, or both. The root’s saponins (broken down by slow cooking) can be made into soap or anti-dandruff shampoo.

Its leaves can be made into very strong rope. Some varieties, like ‘Adam’s needle’, have a sharp tip which can be peeled down the leaf, yielding a needle with a string already attached. Cut the leaves close to their base with a knife (just try to rip them!). Pound them between non-abrasive smooth rocks or rolling pins, until the green leafy part breaks away showing the paler fibers inside. Rinse this out periodically until you just have the fibers. Now twist as you would milkweed or anything else. You can also weave the split leaves into mats. Here’s a video on how to make cordage out of agave.

fire-starting hand drill kit


The stalks are one of the best materials for friction fires. Ever wanted to start a fire by rubbing sticks together? It is totally do-able, empowering, and straightforward! Yucca will be the easiest plant to try with. The stalks are green and flexible. When they dry to a brownish grey, cut or crack them off at the bottom. Cut as long of a straight piece as you can, and cut the lower, thicker end straight across. Cut off any side twigs that are sticking off and try to smoothen it up a bit as you’ll be rubbing this between your hands. This stalk can be used for a hand drill – try to get one as least as long as you arm. Shorter, hotdog sized stalks are good for bow-drill spindles, and once those get short, you can use the plugs for pump drills. Since yucca coals ignite at ~400 degrees lower than other woods they are much more generous for friction fires!Here’s a video about how to do this.

The flower is an edible vegetable, though bitter to some. It can be blended into soapy water for cleaning or shampoo. The fruits can be peeled and baked for a vegetable. The seeds, gathered from the fruits, were once soaked, sprouted, and cooked as protein rich gruel by natives. We can do this too.

Yucca is a great perennial, multi-function nectary addition to a garden, and is commonly planted in parks, graveyards and lawns. It slowly spreads. Because of its deep root, yucca can be hard to transplant unless you get deep under it with a spade. Keep your eyes peeled for it, and see if you can get to know it better by trying these skills.

References:

Plants for a Future database

Wikipedia.com: Yucca angustifolium

Submitted by Felix Lufkin

Milkweed in flower


Milkweed (Asclepias spp.) is a great wildflower to make friends with – offering a number of delightful, tasty and nutritious foods at many times of the year. She is a well-kept secret and it’s time more people got to know her better.

An early succession plant, milkweed seeds sail with the wind to new areas where landslides, fires, beavers, humans, or insects have recently killed an area of late succession forest. They provide habitat and food for many insects like bees, butterflies and spiders, as well as their predators. Many pollinators enjoy milkweed’s sweet nectar, and her leaves are the sole source of food for Monarch butterfly children (who make their own poison, not by concentrating milkweed’s sap, which is not poisonous on its own).

Milkweed stalks


Milkweed is a perennial herb growing 4-6 feet high. Each year her stalks poke out of the ground in the spring – smooth skinned with opposite, simple, ovoid leaves with smooth edges and reddish veins. Her sap is bright white, containing sticky latex, recognizable in spring from the wound of a gently torn leaf.

Flower buds appear in May as clusters of small pale green buds, maturing to large, plum sized clusters, pink to purple in color, each the size of a wild blueberry and looking like a small origami package. They open into firm and neat, white and pink, 5-petaled flowers resembling gummy starfish slightly smaller than M&Ms with a delightful, sweet jasmine fragrance.

Harvested buds


Once pollinated the flowers become tiny, pale green, gherkin-like fruits, growing in size to fat okra pods in August. Spiny and soft, they are filled with soft white unripe seeds, like spaghetti squash. The pods ripen later in the fall, getting tougher and when open reveal a multitude of fruits folded together – each a small tuft of silk with a brown and black seed attached looking like a flattened tick. As the pods die, the seeds drift out and can be blown great distances by the wind. After settling, the seeds drops off the silk, spending winter under the dead grass and hatching in the spring. Thus, the plant’s body spreads across the Earth. By November the above ground portion dies, drying to a pale black with grey and white streaks, bare of leaves, and stands as a skeleton stalk for a while before falling down to the earth again.

Mature milkweed pods


Most field guides warn about milkweed’s bitter taste and poisonous constituents. Sam Thayer, in ‘A Forager’s Harvest’ , clarifies this as a case of mistaken identity where foraging hero Euell Gibbons gathered a ‘mess’ of dogbane, and even after many changes of boiling water, pronounced it unpalatable. Since then, other authors have perpetuated this misconception. Thanks to Thayer, folks are rediscovering milkweed as a delicious vegetable as tender and tasty as spinach – requiring no special processing or boiling to remove bitterness (of which there is none), or toxicity (of which there is none).

Comparing milkweed to its toxic cousin dogbane is easy. Dogbane’s central stalk branches into several sub stalks, where milkweed’s is single and straight. Dogbane’s stalks are thinner like pencils and are green to reddish brown – while milkweed’s are thicker, like magic markers with green skin in summer and black in the winter. Dogbane’s compound flowers are more dispersed, empty and whitish yellow, while milkweed’s are pink and purple and fairly compact. Dogbane’s fruit is thin and long like vanilla beans, milkweed’s are thick and fat like okra. Dogbane’s leaves are thin, short and bitter where milkweed’s are wide, long, and pleasant tasting.

Milkweed flowers


Dogbane flowers


Milkweed is food – delicious cooked or raw, and safe to eat without any processing.

• Shoots: Young spring shoots and leaves, while floppy, are entirely edible and tender. They are great raw, in fritters, omelets, in quiches, or cooked any way you would asparagus.

• Stalk tips: The floppy tips and leaves at the top of the plant, when bendable enough to snap off, can be treated as above. As milkweed ages, her stalks and larger leaves become tough – so focus on the smaller leaves.

• Flower buds: Like broccoli, the buds are nutty and taste like spinach. Great as savory fritters, pickles, stir fries or soups. These dry well for winter use in soups.

• Flowers:  The sweet flowers make excellent infused honey, mead flavorings, sweet donut-like fritters, pickles, or a cooked veggie.

• Milkweed fruits: The unripe pods are excellent raw, pickled, cut and dried for winter use, blended for soups, battered and fried, or steamed and stuffed like jalapeno poppers. Keep harvesting them at any size until they become too fibrous and tough for your liking.

• Immature seeds and fluff: Inside the soft unripe pods is a whitish mushy mass which can be eaten out of the pod and reportedly melted down into a cheesy treat.

• Nectar: The sweet flowers are energy rich, can be fermented, and are a good trail food.

• Sap: After drying, chew the sap like gum for an interesting, nutty tasting nibble.

Milkweed, Part 2: String & Rope will be posted next week…