Foraging Series - Dock

I stopped at the Colony Nature Park as I came from town.

It could be a really nice place if whoever is responsible for it would invest a little effort. 

It is, as it is, at least an attempt to preserve a small piece of this area so that generations to come have a natural spot to enjoy nature. Even though it is surrounded by subdivisions. Oh well, progress is progress. Most folks around here seem to appreciate the progress.

The large open area of what they are calling a park was a dense field of goldenrod in bloom last fall when some responsible individual went in there with a tractor and mower. They mowed it down to nothing. All the pretty yellow and everything else that was growing was chopped to pieces. I hated to see the place mown. A big open field of goldenrod is pleasing to the eye and has a sweet smell. They could have waited another couple of weeks. The color would have been gone then.

I was curious to see what weeds were growing along the drainage ditch that runs through the middle of the open field. This ditch, by the way, is the beginning of Cowpen Creek that eventually empties into Fish River. I throw this in as a little geography lesson since understanding the geography of an area is an important aspect of self-reliance.

A lot. Not only a lot goldenrod. A lot of other weeds too.

It’s a curious thing once you start studying on weeds as edible plants. You find yourself looking for them. You find yourself paying attention to their various stages of growth.

One of the things you discover is that you don’t have to go far off to find them. They are all around us everywhere we go. Weeds, a good many of them edible, are growing right outside the doors of our homes. We’ve got plenty of them here at our place. I probably should knock some of them back but I’ve grown to look at weeds through a different set of lenses.

There was quite a lot of dock growing in that open area. I’ve known about dock as a wild edible for a long time now … one of those items on my mental list of if I need it things. Dining on some has been on my to-do list this spring.

Some of the dock at the park had gone to seed and the seed heads were turning brown. Once the seeds are dried they can be ground and used as flour. The seed heads growing on the dock in our garden area will be ground and sampled once they have dried.

There was also quite a lot of young dock plants growing.

I thought to myself … What the heck. I’m the only weed eater walking around out here. … so I reached down and pulled the tops off of a nice young dock plant.

There’s no way that one handful of wild greens was going to hurt the weed population. Besides, in all the years I’ve been driving by there, I am the only person I’ve ever seen walking around down in that bottom. Most would probably think I was doing the park a favor by pulling weeds. If they had any idea what I was going to do with it, they would probably think I was a good candidate for the State Hospital.

That there are mature plants and young plants growing at the same time this time of year is something of an indicator that dock offers fresh pickings of greens from the late fall/early winter when they first appear until late spring/early summer when they’ve run their course and gone to seed. This long growing season makes it a viable, abundant, and readily available food source.

I trimmed the stem ends from the bunch of greens, sliced the bunch into pieces, gave it a good rinse in the sink, then potted it up on the stove to boil just like any other cooked greens.

It smelled like spinach as it cooked.

I let it cook at a low roll for around fifteen minutes, changed the water, and let it go another five minutes or so before draining it. The older the leaves the more bitter they are. Cook them longer and change the water a couple or three times while cooking.

I sampled it.

Shirli sampled it.

Both of us thought it tasted like spinach.

We like spinach.

Both of us thought a little salt and butter would make it sing.

And sing it did!