Story and photo By Tom Seymour
As the sun passes ever-higher each day, thoughts of spring and springtime foraging come to mind.
Spring rates among the most productive time of year for wild-food gatherers. More edible species become ripe for harvest in spring than in any other season. We’ll cover many of these as the season progresses, but for now, let’s look at one of the earliest available wild treats.
Common cattails, Typha latifolia, become available for harvest just as soon as the ice melts in swamps, wet areas and shallow ponds. Cattails, famously labeled, “supermarket of the swamps” by the late, great, Euell Gibbons, give us several food products at different times of the year.
The first cattail product, which we’ll highlight in this column, is the tender, young shoots. These can grow to several inches long, are pure white, thick at the bottom, sharply pointed at the end and slightly curved.
Harvest Method
To harvest these treats you may need to don waterproof boots, since it usually entails wading out in ice-cold water.
Here’s how to do it. Look for dead, brown clumps of cattails left over from last year. With a spading fork, work the tines under a clump. Keep pressure on the fork with one hand, while pulling the clump straight up with the other hand.
It’s cold, muddy work and your cattail shoot will be covered with mud and muck, so don’t eat it until you get home and rinse it (them, hopefully) in water.
With a quantity of cattail shoots in hand, peel the outer layer from larger ones. Small, tender shoots don’t need peeling. Once rinsed and prepared, these starchy shoots are fine to nibble out-of-hand or cut up in salads. Also, cattail shoots excel as stir-fry ingredients.
As spring progresses, other cattail products will come online. But for now, it’s best to learn about cattail shoots, one of the earliest, edible wild foods out there.
