Newsletter 5 March 2013

Goosegrass is a short-lived winter edible. Photo by Jeremy Sell.

The goose is on the loose, Goosegrass that is and you have to look quick or it will be gone. If there’s an edible that seems to be around even less time than Pellitory or Chickweed, it’s Goosegrass, a fleeting forageable of spring. Also called Cleavers and Bedstraw, it’s distantly related to coffee. I saw my first patch of it Saturday while teaching a class just south of Daytona Beach. Generally we see two common species locally, one with edible tips and one whose roots were used for red dye. To separate the edible from the dye plant you only need to count to seven.  That and the fact that one is a natural Velcro and sieve. To read more about Goosegrass go here.

Blossoming pawpaw, photo by Shirley Denton who has been photographing Florida wildlife for many years.

Now is the time to locate pawpaw bushes. In Florida pawpaw are runts of the genus so to speak. Farther north they are trees you have to look up to find. Here, one usually has to look down. We have shrub-sized pawpaws and dwarf ones that barley reach knee height. And, just as soon as they ripen the denizens of the woods eat them, after all it is their grocery store. While you can find pawpaws nearly everywhere (except swamps) the most common places I find them are at the base of tall pines trees in scrub area (I presume that is where the creatures eat them, or in the tree above) and in pastures. In fact in the month to come one can often drive by a pasture and see three or four foot high spindly shrubs with white magnolia-like blossoms. Those are pawpaws. Maybe the livestock distribute the seeds in pastures, or perhaps gopher tortoises. To read more about pawpaws, or papaws, go here.

Christmas Berry, photo by Roger Hammer

Our local Goji Berry is also blossoming. We saw some flowers and a few early berries during the aforementioned foraging class near Daytona Beach. Interestingly it’s in the nightshade family as is its famous relative, the true Goji Berry. Our local version is Lycium carolinianum, better known as Wolf Berry and Christmas Berry. There are several edible ‘Christmas’ berries in Florida so don’t just go by the common name. More so Lycium carolinianum also does not fruit anywhere near Christmas but rather around April. It’s also salt tolerant and favors coastal areas should you need an edible shrub for landscaping. To read more about our “Goji” berry go here. 

Skunk Vine Stipule

Botany Builder #22: Stipule. A stipule is an outgrowth arising at the base of the leaf stem (petiole.) They can be modified into hairs, glands, spines and tendrils. Often they are an element of identification. The edible Skunk Vine has two stipules at each node though sometimes they wear off or grow old and drop off so you have to look at several nodes. In the picture at left between the leaf stems you can see a triangle-shaped growth. That is a stipule (STIP-yewl.)  The Skunk Vine also has one on the other side. Besides the vine’s aroma the stipule is one of the identifying characteristics of the species (in a state that has a lot of vines with opposite leaves.) To read more about the Skunk Vine, go here.

Researchers have studied the “unconscious selection and the evolution of domesticated plants” and discovered two things, one of which we would expect. That was that growers select traits they are interested in, such as a sweeter berry. The other “selection” was more covert. Taking plants from their original wild habitats and putting them in new and usually very different human-made or human-managed environments can automatically lead to drastic changes in the plants.

Ground nuts can be cultivated

“Numerous adaptations vital for survival in the wild environments lost their fitness under the new sets of conditions,” said the researchers.* The wild plants in domestic environments showed new traits resulting in a build up of “domestication syndromes.” For foragers this suggests two things. If you want the wild plant to stay the same collect the seeds in the wild annually and use them once. The other option is to collect wild seed, cultivate the species, and then keep cultivating it with the domestic seed and see what happens which is where many of our food crops came from. A recent example is Apios americana, the ground nut. The University of Louisiana took wild Apios out of the swamp and developed larger domestic varieties for the common garden. To read more about ground nuts click here. *Journal of Economic Botany 58(1):5-10.

New articles: An edible oriental import that is invasive in parts of North America, the Chocolate Vine.

Southern Forest Invasive App

I haven’t used this because I don’t have an Iphone or Ipad (I still have a simple clam shell.) The USDA Forest Service has an iPhone/iPad app designed to help southern forest land owners and managers identify and manage non-native invasive plants in the field. No doubt there should be some edibles among the invasive lot.

It’s the first ever iPhone/iPad application developed by the world’s largest forest research organization. The app was funded  by a grant and is based on the popular SRS publication A Field Guide for the Identification of Invasive Plants in Southern Forests and a companion management guide.

To download the free app go here.  You can also use the following links to access and print the field guides. They are huge files and open far better in Safari than Firefox. A Field Guide for the Identification of Invasive Plants in Southern Forests is here.   A Management Guide for Invasive Plants in Southern Forests is here.  The latter two pages look almost identical, double check the titles.

Florida Invasive Species App

Speaking of apps, there is also one for Iphones and Androids on invasive animals and plants of Florida. IveGot1 was developed by the University of Georgia Center for Invasive Species and Ecosystem Health through a cooperative agreement with the National Park Service, in cooperation with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the University of Florida Center for Aquatic and Invasive Plants. The features are: Easy species reporting that captures your current location and allows you to submit an image of your sightings. IveGot1 allows for both online and offline reporting with reports saved on your phone for uploading when you have network connectivity. It has images and information on Florida’s worst non-native invasive animals and plants. Real-time point distribution maps are centered on your current location. To learn more about it go here.

Florida Scrub Jay, photo by 10,000 Birds.

Totally off topic but related is the bird life we spied during the foraging class in Melbourne Sunday. We actually saw three Scrub Jays, Aphelocoma coerulescens, a threatened species. They were quite noisy and busy. Scrub Jays are naturally tame enough to eat food out of your hand. Unfortunately as their habitat becomes suburbia their numbers have been dropping.  They are the only native bird found only in the state of Florida. Scrub Jays look similar to Blue Jays but are missing the head crest. They also appear to be a bit plumper… then again, it was a chilly day. To read more about the Scrub Jay go here.