Springtime salad days (From Worcester News)

Springtime salad days

12:57pm Monday 21st March 2011 in Country News latest By Mike Pryce

THEY might not quite equate to roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, but if you go out into the Worcestershire countryside you will find a veritable banquet of edible plants.

Of course, the trick is to know which bits of greenery you can eat and which will have you doing the Watusi quickstep to behind the nearest bush.

So with spring almost sprung and walks in the country about to gather pace, I put in a call to Worcestershire’s survival expert Dale Collett to ask if he could give a few accurate pointers.

Naturally, this does not give anyone free rein to go crashing around the county’s nature reserves garnering the ingredients for nettle soup but it does allow you to brighten up your salads and score points at dinner parties for going the extra green mile.

If your daughter invites Imo and Clemmie, the PR girls from Islington, for the weekend, it’s a fair bet they’ll never have eaten chickweed – let alone seen it.

Dale said: “There are two very common wild edible plants that are growing right now and probably within a few hundred metres of where you are reading this. “Of course I wouldn’t be a responsible foraging expert if I didn’t give the appropriate warnings first. The main rule is to always positively identify a plant before you eat it and if in doubt leave it out; eating a poisonous plant can have very serious consequences.

“Get yourself a good wild flower book and be sure you know how to use it, understand all the terminology and not just the pictures. Alternatively get yourself onto a wild edibles foraging course.

“The first plant I want to talk about is the peppery tasting, delicate bittercress (cardamine). It has a few subspecies with prefixes such as hairy, large and wavy, but the differences are small and they are all edible.

“Bittercress can be found in damp shady places, gardens, stream sides, waste ground and in the cracks between walls and pavements. It’s a small plant with dark, compound leaves; compound meaning one stalk with many smaller leaves coming off it.

“It has a thin, slightly wavy stalk growing up from the middle with small clusters of white flowers on the top with long, thin, straight upwards pointing seed pods around and just below the flowers. It can be eaten raw, is very much like mustard cress in taste and is an excellent addition to salads.

“The second plant is the crisp, succulent chickweed.

This spreads across the ground in thick mats, growing in a sprawling fashion over disturbed soils, fields, under hedgerows, gardens and also in the cracks between walls and pavements.

“It has a couple of key characteristics that identify it from slightly poisonous plants such as scarlet pimpernel and yellow pimpernel.

“The first is a thin, single line of fine hairs that runs up one side of the round stem. The second is a resistant inner thread that occupies the lower, older parts of the stem. The outside can be pulled and breaks easily leaving this thin, slightly stronger inner core.

“Chickweed has delicate small white flowers and is a wonderful, tasty, crisp addition to salads and sandwiches. Only pick the younger fresh tips which don’t have the resistant thread as these are far nicer and less stringy.

“Chickweed also contains saponins which are found in soaps. These are toxic, but our bodies don’t absorb them; none the less don’t eat too much chickweed or it could give rise to an upset tummy. The saponins do have an advantage to us in that chickweed can also be used as a substitute for soap.”

However, Imo and Clemmie the PR girls might blanche at the offer of a rub down with chickweed in the shower.

* Dale Collett is a wilderness bushcraft instructor and runs the British Bushcraft School based in Worcestershire visit the website britishbushcraftschool.co.uk