There’s a long list of crops growing at Henderson Farm, a non-profit operation on the American Bald Eagle Foundation’s Comstock Road property. It starts in the farm’s high tunnel, with tomatillos, tomatoes, and beans, and continues into the field: Brussels sprouts, collard greens, cabbage, kohlrabi, cauliflower, broccoli, green beans, celery, parsley, garlic, leeks, onions, bunching onions, strawberries, asparagus, wormwood and indigo.
As long as the list is, it’s not exhaustive. Out to the fence line, beyond the cabbage, you get to the crops no one planted — the nettles, dandelions, sorrel and more. To some, like farm manager Liz Landes, that’s a whole other harvest.
“The land provides no matter whether you planted it or it grows wild,” Landes said Monday morning. As she spoke, she moved just a few steps from the high tunnel to pick from a row of butterbur flowers along the treeline at the edge of the field.
Landes is not a lifelong forager. She’s from Illinois, and it was only when she moved to Southeast Alaska that she started identifying plants. “It’s part of the identity of the place, so I wanted to learn,” she said. Now she goes to work at the farm with just a serving of rice and beans for lunch, knowing that the rest of the meal can be picked off the floor of her outdoor office.
“The first time I went back for a quick visit to Illinois after I moved, I realized, I’ve lived here for 18 years and I don’t know any of these plants,” Landes said. “But I could go back to Southeast and know which ones I could eat, which ones are medicine.”
On the Menu
Now, foraging is a regular practice for Landes.
“I like to do a big harvest for the things that are ephemeral, but there’s also the, ‘Oh, I just want to get something for dinner harvest,’” Landes said.
A number of staples fill Landes’ fridge, including nettles, which she estimates she has harvested 20 pounds of this season. Landes eats those fresh, dried and sometimes makes bulk quantities of nettle pesto that can be frozen for storage.
While nettles do sting bare skin, Landes harvests barehanded. “I have grown to really like the feeling,” Landes said of the sting. She describes it as “kind of like a better version of when your hand falls asleep and comes back to life.” Landes says nerve damage in her hand makes the stinging feel less intense and the sting can be a treatment for arthritis and circulation. Luckily, for the less hardy out there, the sting disappears after the plant is soaked in water or cooked. And gloves can be worn for protection while harvesting.
Along with nettles, Landes picks other fast-growing greens like sorrel and puts them into meals like soups and salads.
A new item on her menu this year is dandelion buds. Besides just the edible greens of the plant, Landes said that the separated flower bud, before it blossoms, can be thrown into stir-fries, pickled into a sort of caper, or put into — of all things — pancakes. “[The buds] almost have a sort of chicken texture,” Landes said.
Between the foraging and the farm, which Landes said produced roughly 1,000 pounds of produce last year, Landes has plenty to fill the fridge. But, for Landes, it’s not just about having food in the fridge.
Landes’ favorite harvests are hard-to-find items like chantrelle mushrooms. She describes that as more along the lines of an “Easter egg hunt” – learning clues, then following them to a prize. Landes said learning is a matter of repetition. “You’ll see standing dead cottonwoods and there’ll be no mushrooms,” she said. “But as soon as you find a cottonwood on the ground, the whole thing is covered in mushrooms. So you start looking for that.”
From paying attention to these clues, season after season, Landes has built an extensive mental map.
“My old favorite nettle spot was along 21 Mile, and there’s another one at 7 Mile,” Landes said. “You get nettles, then you go a little higher and there’s devil’s club, and you go a little higher and there are fiddleheads. All at this one spot that you otherwise wouldn’t have stopped at because there’s no pull out.” Landes notes that when harvesting slow-growing plants like devil’s club or harvesting the whole plant like with fiddleheads, sustainability is a concern. Landes tries to reduce her impact by harvesting just a little from each patch before moving on.
Each new season Landes’ mental map expands, usually with new tasty harvests, but not always. This year, she started to collect moose scat. Over the next few months, the plan is to start turning the scat into art paper.
“It’s so funny that I’ve added moose poo to my mental foraging,” Landes said. “When I’m on a run I’m like, ‘ooh, that’s a good pile,’ and I’m coming back with a bag.”
Anyone interested in following Landes’ lead, in addition to watching where they step, should know the plan doesn’t come out of the blue. There are commercially available art papers made from the fibrous scat of other grazers like bison and elephant.
Gatherer’s Notebook is a series on food-gathering in the Chilkat Valley. Reach out to [email protected] with your hunting, foraging, harvesting, and growing activities. We’d love to tag along to learn about what you do and why you do it. And don’t worry, we’ll keep any secret techniques and locations confidential.