Edible Spring Plants of the Inland Pacific Northwest

Spring is finally here and plants are racing to take advantage of the sun. In a dry environment like ours, they have no time to waste before the summer heat beats them back to the ground.

Taking a brief walk within 100 feet of the cabin I saw many green friends reaching out to me and inviting me to take a nibble (while others sternly warned me to only look at them). I'll share my encounters with you but please don't rely on this blog post as a guide to wild edible plants. It can take a lot of experience to be able to identify and collect plants correctly, especially if they have poisonous look alikes. Don't eat anything without being 100% sure of what the plant really is!

And of course, if you harvest anything make sure that you do so from a healthy stand and in such a way that you will be able to return to it year after year. Being a forager comes with the responsibility of being a good caretaker!

Curly Dock

The first one is a weedy plant that often offers the first green salads of the season. The young leaves of curly dock (Rumex crispus) at the center of the basal rosette can be harvested as they unfurl from their sheath and be eaten raw or cooked. They tend to be quite sour and that sourness increases as the leaf ages so stick to the young ones! Warning: they contain oxalic acid and should be consumed in moderation (best used as a side dish). See Rosalee's excellent article on Dock for recipes and its uses as medicine.









Miner's Lettuce (Claytonia perfoliata) doesn't grow very well in our region, except when it's been raining a lot, but it's a nice fleshy green that I never miss to nibble on. All the above-ground parts are edible raw.

Miner's Lettuce just emerging from the ground

Bluebells (Mertensia longiflora) are some of the first wild flowers to dot the hillsides and all above-ground parts can be eaten. A great raw addition to spring salads.

Bluebells

Waterleaf

Ballhead Waterleaf (Hydrophyllum capitatum) is also one of the first plants to emerge from the forest floor, though they seem not to be in a hurry to put out their flowers until a bit later. The leaves tend to be hairy but the young ones are still a great addition raw to salads. The flowers picked at the right time (in full flower) are also edible but if they're picked too early or too late they are way too fuzzy to be palatable and you should stay away from them then.

Waterleaf in full flower. Note the immature flower buds in the background

The ethnographic record indicates that indigenous people cooked and ate the roots and rhizomes of Waterleaf. When I lived on the Pacific Coast I actually enjoyed the thin roots raw, which have an interesting and somewhat strong flavor. I tried to cook a large mass of roots once but I didn't enjoy it much. I tried to dig some roots from a couple of plants here but they went very deep into the ground and didn't have any flavor at all so I don't harvest them here.

Fireweed Shoots

Fireweed (Epilobium angustifolium) offer a beautiful sight when they flower but it's in the spring that they are edible. The young shoots of up to 6 inches or so can be cooked like asparagus. When the stems are a little taller but before they flower you can split the stem lengthwise with your fingernail and scrape the inner pith with your teeth into your mouth. I've felt nauseous after eating a few too many of them after the flowers bloomed so it's best to stay away from them at that stage.

False Solomon's Seal

False Solomon's Seal (Smilacina racemosa and S. stellata) has many things to offer but I always seem to miss the time when the shoots are edible (before the leaves open). The rhizomes are edible raw, at least the final, light-colored part of them. They have a strong flavor and it gets more and more horribly acrid as you get to the older parts. They grow very slowly so they're best used as a survival food anyway, unless you happen to have a huge stand of them.

Rhizome from False Solomon's Seal. Remove the small stringy roots

Spring Beauty with corm attached

Spring beauties (Claytonia lanceolata) are a delight to the eyes, both from generous carpets in sunny meadows and single flowers up close. The above-ground parts are edible and great in salads. They can also be cooked but I find that they become quite slimy that way. I definitely prefer them raw. But their greatest treasures rest under the ground and fairly close to the surface at that. They have a corm resembling the appearance and taste of small round potatoes and they're absolutely delicious.

To find the largest corms, look closely at the thickness and number of stems emerging from a single spot on the ground. In general, if the plant has at least 4 thick stems, or a least 10 thin stems, then the corm has a good chance of being large. Don't bother digging up the smaller plants as these are best left to grow for subsequent years!

Cook the corms as you would a potato. They also dry very well if you cut them in half while raw or if you mash them and dry them as thin patties after cooking them. Alternately, you can store them in earthen pits or buckets full of dirt to keep them fresh.

Spring Beauty

Mariposa Lily leaf

Mariposa Lily (Calochortus lyallii) has an incredible flower and I invite you to take a close look at its beauty. It also has an edible bulb with a great taste that can be eaten raw or cooked. These bulbs tend to be very small though and are probably not worth the effort of carefully digging into the ground for them. They should only be harvested in areas where they are plentiful. Ideally, they should be harvested before they flower and they can be identified by a single, grass-like flat blade that has a bluish hue to it.

Mariposa Lily bulb

Arrowleaf Balsamroot

Arrowleaf Balsamroot (Balsamorhiza sagittata) is the most iconic plant in our region and covers whole hillsides with its sunflower-like flowers. It is also a very generous plant with many edible parts. First, as the snow recedes, find the old browned and decomposing leaves flattened on the ground and gently dig below them to reveal the buds of the coming growth. Snap those buds and eat them raw or stir-fried. They have a strong but pleasant resinous taste. Make sure not to take too many of the buds from a single plant so that it can keep on growing and giving the rest of its gifts later on in the season.

When the leaves appear you can gather some of the leaf stalks, peel off the outer layer with the small white hairs on it, and eat the stalk raw. They also have a strong pleasant taste to them.

We'll go back to Balsamroot later on in the year to harvest probably its most precious gift.

In the meantime, you can read Rosalee's monograph on this marvelous plant.

Arrowleaf Balsamroot buds

Salsify, Death Camas, or grass?

Finally, I'll leave you with two look-alikes that can grow side by side. One is a nice edible while the other is highly toxic. The interesting thing is that before they send out their flower heads they both look like an indistinct bunch of grass.

One particular feature of both is that each leaf is very strongly folded lengthwise along its center. Thankfully, the similarities stop there.

Yellow Salsify (Tragopogon dubius) is commonly found in the wild but has also been cultivated for its dandelion-like taproots that have a very pleasant taste and texture when cooked. Like dandelions, they exude a white latex when you break off their leaves or roots. Salsify also has small white cottony hairs at its base, which tends to have a reddish hue.

Salsify is a biennial, which means that it has a two-year life cycle. In the first year they put out their leaves and absorb energy from the sun into their taproot. In the second year they use that stored energy to send up some flowers. After they go to seed they will die.



It's not a good idea to harvest the root from a second-year mature plant as all its energy will have left. Instead, gather the roots either in the fall of the first year or in the spring of the second year before the flower stalks appear.

Death Camas with emerging flower head

Death Camas (Zigadenus venenosus) tends to have a little paler green leaves and a somewhat cream-colored base. Being perennial they send out flowers every year but the flowers emerge quite a bit later than the leaves.

They have oblong bulbs a few inches below the ground surface.

All parts of the plant are very highly toxic and can lead to death.










Below are a Death Camas (left) and a Yellow Salsify (right) growing side by side (the leaf between them is a Mariposa Lily, which is why you should never harvest a bulb unless it's still attached to its stem: you could never know for sure what you're really harvesting). The Salsify is a second year plant as you can see two flowers heads uncurling.

Death Camas and Salsify growing side by side

Death Camas bulb and Salsify taproot

I dug them up to show you their differences below ground. The Salsify root is not very representative as the one on the right was rotten and another small one was just starting to grow.

 Below is a more representative Salsify root though they can be much longer (this one hit some harder ground and started running to the side).

We'll talk about Yellow Salsify again a little later in the year.

Yellow Salsify taproot

Finally, don't forget to watch our 6-part video series on harvesting and preparing cattail!

Follow the next episodes in our Edible Plants series:

• More Edible Spring Plants
• Even More Edible Spring Plants 
• Summer Edible Plants
• Fall Edible Plants

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