Instead of being dependant on petrochemical agribusiness and wasting river water to inefficiently water lawns and monoculture crops, why not grow food that is adaptable to the ecosystem of the hot dry central valley??
Dandylions on lawns are valued guests, not "weeds", they are rich in vitamin C and essential elements like iron (Fe) and magnesium (Mg). We sincerely hope people would not spray dandylions with toxic herbicide (another petrochemical byproduct, reason for ongoing occupation of Iraq) as a hungry traveler may wish to eat a leaf or two of this nutritious so-called "weed"..
Sacramento and San Joauqin river delta/valley plants like cattail that are edible could survive in the flooded delta that is now walled of by levees surrounding sinking islands. The levees prevent minerals and nutrients from gathering on islands, part of the reason they have subsided several meters below sea level and need taxpayer money to repair the leaking levees. Farms on the islands are relying on the remnants of once rich topsoil, from when the river remained unhindered by dams and diversions. However, by staying there year after year and preventing flooding from depositing new nutrients/minerals, they are losing the value of the soil..
The starchy roots of cattail can be cooked and taste sort of like potatoe. imagine a time when the Sacramento and San Joauqin merged naturally at the bay and edible plants like cattail grew free and unhindered. Needless to say the poor and hungry would not be turned away..
If dandylions and cattails are not to your liking, there are many other options for growing food on any given lawn space. Garlic and other root vegetables are options, nopalitos cactus would also tolerate the dry heat..
The cattail’s every part has uses. It’s easy to harvest, very tasty, and highly nutritious. It was a major staple for the American Indians, who found it in such great supply, they didn’t need to cultivate it. The settlers missed out when they ignored this great food and destroyed its habitats, instead of cultivating it.
Before the flower forms, the shoots—prized as "Cossack’s asparagus" in Russia—are fantastic. You can peel and eat them well into the summer.
Heart of Cattail
The result of peeling the shoot
photo by "Wildman"
They're like a combination of tender zucchini and cucumbers, adding a refreshing texture and flavor to salads. I love mixing them with pungent mustard greens to balance their mildness. Added to soup towards the end of cooking, they retain a refreshing crunchiness. They're superb in stir-fry dishes, more than suitable for sandwiches, and excellent in virtually any context. I love sliced cattail hearts, sautéed in sesame oil with wild carrots and ginger.
Harvest cattail shoots after some dry weather, when the ground is solid, in the least muddy locations. Select the largest shoots that haven't begun to flower, and use both hands to separate the outer leaves from the core, all the way to the base of the plant. Now grab the inner core with both hands, as close to the base as possible, and pull it out. Peel and discard the outermost layers of leaves from the top down, until you reach the edible part, which is soft enough to pinch through with your thumbnail (the rule-of-thumb). There are more layers to discard toward the top, so you must do more peeling there. Cut off completely tough upper parts with a pocket knife or garden shears in the field, so you’ll have less to carry. Note: Collecting shoots will cover your hands with a sticky, mucilaginous jelly. Scrape it off the plant into a plastic bag, and use it to impart a slight okra-like thickening effect to soups. The shoot provide beta carotene, niacin, riboflavin, thiamin, potassium, phosphorus, and vitamin C.
The proportions of food to waste varies with the size of the shoot. You'll get the best yield just before the flowers begin to develop. A few huge, late-spring stalks provide enough delicious food for a meal. Some stalks grow tall, and become inedibly fibrous with developing flowers by late spring, although just before the summer solstice, you can often gather tender shoots, immature flower heads, and pollen at the same time.
You can clip off and eat the male portions of the immature, green, flower head. Steam or simmer it for ten minutes. It tastes vaguely like its distant relative, corn, and there’s even a central cob-like core. Because it's dry, serve it with a topping of sauce, seasoned oil, or butter. Sometimes I also gnaw on the cooked female portions, but there’s very little to them. It’s easier to remove the flesh from the woody core, if desired, after steaming. This adds a rich, filling element to any dish, and it's one of the best wild vegetarian sources of protein, unsaturated fat, and calories. It also provides beta-carotene and minerals.
When the male flowers ripen, just before the summer solstice, they produce considerable quantities of golden pollen. People pay outrageous prices in health stores for tiny capsules of the bee pollen—a source of minerals, enzymes, protein, and energy. Cattail pollen beats the commercial variety in flavor, energy content, freshness, nutrition, and price. To collect the pollen in its short season, wait for a few calm days, so your harvest isn't scattered by wind. Bend the flower heads into a large paper bag and shake it gently. Keep the bag’s opening as narrow as possible, so the pollen won't blow away. Sift out the trash, and use the pollen as golden flour in baking breads, muffins, pancakes, or waffles. It doesn't rise, and it's time-consuming to collect in quantity, so I generally mix it with at least three times as much whole-grain flour. You can also eat the pollen raw, sprinkled on yogurt, fruit shakes, oatmeal, and salads.
During fall, winter, and early spring, the cattail rhizomes store food. Digging up the thick, matted rhizomes from the muck, especially in cold weather, is not easy. After years of procrastination, I determined that, as a foraging teacher, the time had come to experiment with cattail rhizomes. Late one autumn, a friend and I went to gather cattail rhizomes from Central Park. It was so messy, I emerged from the park splattered with muck, looking more like a “Wildman” than I had ever intended. We hauled two dripping shopping bags across Manhattan, into her apartment and onto her balcony. It took half an hour hosing down our harvest, and the mud clogged the drain.
We peeled off the rhizomes’ outer layers, still imbued with mud, then worked the starch from the fibers with our fingers, in a large bowl of water. The water became cloudy with the starch. We waited an hour to let the starch settle, and poured off the water, getting enough sweet, tasty starch to thicken a small pot of soup—hardly worth the effort.
An alternate method is to tear apart the washed rhizomes and let them dry, pound the fibers to free the starch, and sift. This yields as about as much starch as the previous method. However, I've received reliable reports that people in other parts of the country had better results. Perhaps rhizome quality varies.
I've also tried chewing on the fibers inside the cleaned rhizomes and swallowing the starch, which is very tasty. However, the digging and cleaning is so much work, I'd have to be starving in the winter to bother. Furthermore there are reports that eating the starch of some species raw may cause vomiting.
The buds of the following year's shoots, attached to the rhizomes, are also edible. Although they make a tasty cooked vegetable, I find them too small to be worth digging up and cleaning, although their size may also vary.
Collecting the flower heads and pollen doesn't harm the plant, because cattails spread locally by their rhizomes—the seeds are for establishing new colonies, and each flower head makes thousands of these. Collecting a small fraction of the shoots also does no damage, since the colony continually regenerates new shoots. Since nobody wants to sink into the mud, people normally collect at the periphery of the stand. Of course, if the stand is small, it's already struggling to survive adverse conditions. Finding a larger stand elsewhere will increase your harvest, and give the embattled plants a chance.
The Indians also cattails medicinally: They applied the jelly from between the young leaves to wounds, sores, boils, carbuncles, external inflammations, and boils, to soothe pain.
Besides its medicinal uses, the dried leaves were also twisted into dolls and toy animals for children, much like corn-husk dolls found today. Cattail leaves can be used to thatch roofs, weave beautiful baskets, as seating for the backs of chairs, and to make mats. Archeologists have excavated cattail mats over 10,000 years old from Nevada cave.
No longer edible once the pollen is gone, the brown flower heads make good "punks," supporting a slowly-burning flame, with a smoke that drives insects away. The fluffy, white seeds were once used for stuffing blankets, pillows and toys. The Indians put them inside moccasins and around cradles, for additional warmth. After hours of collecting, I once made a cattail fluff pillow, but something went wrong: My girlfriend sewed shut a pillowcase with the white seeds inside, and I went to sleep happy, on the softest pillow I ever felt. This mood quickly vanished when I awoke at 2:00 AM:. My head was on top of the pillow, but my right arm had "disappeared." I discovered it beneath the pillow. It had "fallen asleep" so badly, it seemed disembodied. After I shook it awake, I wished I hadn’t. There was a row of hives from one end of the arm to the other, wherever it had pressed into the pillow. They itched so badly, it seemed to require a forest of jewelweed to quell the torment. I had never heard of this reaction in any of the books that lavishly praise cattail fluff as stuffing! Confident that my "allergy" was unique, I handed the pillow to my girlfriend the next evening. She agreed that it was the best pillow ever—until the next morning, when the hives marred her once-beautiful face. She was so angry, she wouldn't talk to me until the hives healed. I learned later that my mistake had been not using thick batting material to enclose the stuffing.
Cattails and their associated microorganisms improve water and soil quality. They render organic pollution harmless, and fix atmospheric nitrogen, bringing it back into the food chain. They've even been planted along the Nile river to reduce soil salinity.
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Cattail Recipes
Cattail Fried Rice
Pasta With Cat's Tail
Raw Cattail Soup
I notice that some Vietnamese families garden in the front yard. Sometimes, it looks good, but usually it doesn't. It's best if it is fenced in, because rodents will try to eat the food. Also, people litter, and will toss things into beds of leafy crops like squash, if there's no barrier.
In So Cal, the problem is often the quality of the soil. It's very hard, probably because of the grading performed before the house is built -- you're gardening on hard clay soil rather than on topsoil. So, you have to amend the soil, and help develop topsoil.
As an alternative to developing topsoil, I like to dig a deep hole 1 foot or so deep, and around 1 foot or more around, and fill it with potting soil and compost.
Also, for fertilizer, I use horse manure, which is available for free at horse stables. The stuff isn't sanitary, but it is cheap, and works well. To break down the hard soil, get gypsum and mix it in. Gypsum is used to make drywall, so, any demolition site probably has some. Just take it away.
