Dude, got some weed?  The kind you find in your lawn, that you cut with a sharp blade or douse with herbicides?

I am looking for one in particular — the dandelion.  The French named this flower dens leonis, or “lion’s tooth” referring to the jagged points on the leaves. You know the yellow flower or the puff ball after the flower goes to seed.  But dandelions offer more than momentary entertainment or irritation.

Weed ‘Em and Eat

In France people grow dandelions to eat, just as we might grow lettuce. It’s best to collect dandelion leaves in early spring and then harvest again in late fall. As Wildman Steve Brill tells us:

“Dandelion greens are wonderful in salads, sauteed or steamed. They taste like chicory and endive, with an intense heartiness overlying a bitter tinge. People today shun bitter flavors; they’re so conditioned by overly sweet or salty processed food. But in earlier times, we distinguished between good and bad bitterness. Mixed with other flavors, as in a salad, dandelions improve the flavor.”

Some good news, too, for locavores and for nervous parents. There are no poisonous look-alikes for dandelions.

And it’s a rare weed indeed that  has a book named after it:  Dandelion Wine is Ray Bradbury’s recreation of a boy’s childhood, combining moments from his life and his imagination.

“Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered.”

The days are getting warmer but the nights are still cool. If you’re lucky enough to have sugar maples or black maples in your backyard, it’s time to get out the buckets, the wood drill, a half-inch bit, and some taps.

Concentrated Sweetness

But don’t start whipping up a stack of flapjacks immediately: just like any other type of farming, turning sap into syrup takes time and work.

First you’ll need a maple at least 10” in diameter. One tap hole can yield five to 15 gallons of sap, though under ideal conditions a tap may yield between 40 and 80 gallons. Depending on its girth, a tree may support up to three tap holes.

Forty gallons of sap boils down to just one gallon of syrup. To accomplish that boiling-down, some Native Americans heated rocks and dropped them into hollowed-out logs filled with sap. Hard work, but think of the reward.

A “Tree Whose Juice Weeps”

In fact at one time maple syrup and sugar were an important part of the North American Indian economy. When impatiently awaiting the bounty of Spring, a happy distraction is welcome; so are the nutrition and much-needed calories.

“Just when we need these vegetables most, in the bleakest part of the winter, they give us the sustenance to carry on until spring. Their texture and sweetness come from a combination of starches and sugars. To the plant, starches represent food that has been stored for future use, while sugars can be immediately converted to energy. Starches are chemical compounds that resemble tough little pellets when raw. After they are heated in combination with a liquid, they soften.

Sugars are closely related to starches. In fact, enzymes produced by the plant can convert starches (stored food) to sugars (usable food) when doing so is necessary for the plant’s survival. This is why parsnips are almost always sweeter when harvested after a hard frost: the plant, feeling threatened by cold weather, has started converting its stored food to food that can be used immediately.