Wild Food Foragers of America - Wood Sorrel Page 2

Page 2 of each issue features a captioned slide show on how to harvest and prepare the featured weed, and further information on how to identify the plant. Botanical, historical, and medicinal information, recipes, and links can be found on Page 3.

Tools Required: Just your hands.
Total field harvesting time: about 5 minutes will net you about a cup of minced leaves.
Total home preparation time: about 5 minutes
Yield: leaves, flowers, stems, bulbs.
Flavor: Strong lemony flavor.
Harvesting Tips: If you grab handfuls, you're likely to grab a lot of intertwining weeds as well. If you spread your fingers and grab the leaves between them from underneath and pull gently, you'll get a much cleaner pick of flowers and leaves. Pick only what you need for the day's salad unless you plan to chop and freeze. There's no need to store it, though, because the harvesting season is long and you shouldn't eat large quantities. Freezes well but after freezing, comes out limp and only good for cooked dishes.
Serving Suggestions : Add leaves, stems and flowers raw to salads. Use leaves and stems as lettuce in sandwiches and pita pockets. Dry and make a tea. Dry, grind to a powder, mix with sugar and store in the refrigerator for a powdered "lemonade" that tastes pretty good. Use stems (and leaves) to brew a nice hot lemony tea.
Notes: Available for a long growing season, and plentiful in temperate zones.
Nutritional properties: High in chlorophyl, fiber, vitamin C. Contains oxalic acid.
Medicinal properties: Wood sorrel is reported as cooling (refrigerant, febrifuge), diuretic, stomachic (relieves indigestion), astringent, and catalytic. It's attributed with blood cleansing properties and is sometimes taken by cancer patients. A decoction made from its pleasant acid leaves can quench thirst and allay fever. The juice was once used as a gargle for curing ulcers in the mouth, and to heal wounds and to stanch bleeding. A cloth saturated with the juice and applied to the body is held to be effective in the reduction of swellings and inflammation. The whole plant can be boiled to make a yellow dye. Go to Page 3 to learn more.

Sorrel Identification

All the leaf and flower petioles (stems) come from a single bulb, with a white "root" sometimes appearing beneath the bulb as a water storage tank. Growing off the bulb are sometimes found tiny bulblets which propagate the plant from year to year and spread the clump.

The bulbs and bulblets, lying just below the surface of the soil, are edible, but if you leave them in the ground the clump will resprout and spread year after year to give you many, many harvests. The little root bulblets pictured below are easily transplantable into your flower gardens, and the clumps look charmingly attractive for half the year, under the right conditions flowering all year long.

The whole plant is edible from the flowers down to the bulb and water storage "root", and tastes best raw! Chock full of vitamin C.	The bulblets cling to the parent bulb.
	After the flower falls off, the seed pod swells like a rose hip, and chewing it gives a delightful burst of flavor. If left alone, it forms a seed pod.

All the leaf and flower petioles (stems) come from a single bulb, with a white "root" sometimes appearing beneath the bulb as a water storage tank. Growing off the bulb are sometimes found tiny bulblets which propagate the plant from year to year and spread the clump.

The whole plant is edible from the flowers down to the bulb and water storage "root", and tastes best raw! Chock full of vitamin C.

The bulblets cling to the parent bulb.

After the flower falls off, the seed pod swells like a rose hip, and chewing it gives a delightful burst of flavor. If left alone, it forms a seed pod.