Miner's Lettuce: Free and Easy

For a long time after I knew what it was and what it was good for, I stepped around miner’s lettuce to get at other things, or ignored it altogether, or dug it up and planted other things in its place. This attitude has been greatly revised over the past several years, as I’ve observed what happens in my garden and tried to figure out how to quit fighting it. The first thing I did was to reevaluate all weeds, and whether they should be pulled on sight, left to mature, thinned, or harvested as food.

Most gardeners have a categorical understanding of what should and should not be growing in their space, but few give much thought to the needs and capabilities of the space itself. The popularity of false environments, from greenhouses to drip irrigation systems to vertical gardens, testifies to the impulse to tame, modify and optimize literally everything.

This attitude is more than a little arrogant, considering the locality wherever you are has had eons to adjust itself to local conditions, even to evolve with those conditions, on the way to coming up with the suite of native plants that once was found. The first act of most settlers (and subdividers) is to start changing the plant profile, ripping out or composting native plants in favor of food and money crops, or favored decorative vegetation.

This pattern has undoubtedly been with us for millennia: the evidence is everywhere. In some cases the experiment of agriculture has yielded conspicuously better results than in other places, and in some places it’s a miracle any food or cash crop is produced at all, because of salinization, dehydration, and administration of supplements. In many other spots that were once lovely gardens, nothing grows at all, what was there and what was put there having thrown the place itself out of balance. Much of modern industrial agriculture is in fact a battle to recover ruined soil without ruining it permanently, using synthetics and procedures to do what the land itself once did on its own.

When it comes down to the individual backyard plot, it’s rare to find anything native growing if civilization has been in the area for long. But certain plants are more resilient. Many natives adapt well to marginal areas and fallow fields, which has helped them hang on while places like the Sacramento Valley have been turned into massive food factories, capitalizing on existing assets like soil fertility while producing imports like rice, pistachios and tomatoes on a grand scale.

Four years ago, I noticed a single miner’s lettuce plant among my salad greens. Since it was available and I knew it was edible, I started adding a few leaves from it to my salad, and realized it doesn’t get anywhere near the recognition it deserves. This is in spite of the fact that it receives comparatively a lot of recognition by wild plant enthusiasts, botanists, and the gourmet restaurant and produce trade.

In fact, I sold it by the bagged pound one season, as a sideline when I brought in sacks of fiddlehead ferns. It was being sent to restaurant customers in the Bay Area, where it has been a staple of the well-informed for decades, but is still stepped on and hoed out in thousands of yards and lawns, as though it was a noxious exotic like star thistle.

So I was happy when more of it came in the next year, and I realized how easy it would be to simply let it grow where it wants to, at no cost and with no labor expended. All it meant was I was a little more conscious of what I pulled as a weed in that area. Whether hoeing or hand-weeding I go a little slower, and try to make sure I identify whatever I’m pulling, rather than going at willy-nilly.

By this year, it came up shortly after the fall cultivation, when I planted salad greens in the usual way. By early December it had spread to nearly all the unplanted ground near the salad green beds, on soil where I would have otherwise tried to seed in spinach or lettuce.

I started taking the leaves off the young plants when they reached about fingertip size, and kept on harvesting from the same plants until a few days ago, when they finally reached a state of maturity that makes them less attractive in a salad, although if necessary they could be eaten until the plants dry up and go to seed when the weather gets warm.

In short, I ended up with more than half my salad greens for the winter garden being produced at no cost and no effort more than required to get out of the way.

#gourmet #garden #settlersagriculture #wildnativeplants