Little is more emblematic of our
culture's dysfunctional relationship with Earth than our relationship with the
dandelion. We spread cancer-causing, chemical toxins around our homes and
public places to kill plants that produce healthy and delicious dark green
leaves (and may also help cure cancer). Check on pesticide toxicities here.
Meanwhile we eat store-bought dark green leaves (which are mostly water),
packaged in plastic and grown 3,000 miles away in a state in its fourth year of
serious drought.
I really enjoy snacking on
dandelion leaves when I'm working in the garden. Dandelions were the last food
I harvested outside in January before the snow buried everything and the first
green leaves we ate this spring. Besides
garden snacks, we've used these vitamin-rich greens in salads and stir fries
for at least a month now.
Although I've long appreciated the
dandelion as a harbinger of spring, have snacked on and cooked the leaves for
decades and have even made earthy wine from the flowers, I hadn't actively
cultivated dandelions until last year. I
started getting serious about this when the advantages of growing perennials to
improve soil health finally sunk in.
Disturbing the soil damages it.
Perennial crops cause far less soil disturbance. We've grown a number of perennials for years:
strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, hazelnuts, mints and
other herbs, garlic chives, comfrey, horseradish, grapes and more. Dandelions are perennials that already grow
in the garden. Why not weed around them
as we do with clover, another valuable perennial, and learn to harvest and eat
them?
Important Connections
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| Dandelion roots |
Plants connect the atmosphere and
the soil. Whenever they are
photosynthesizing, they are pumping a variety of carbon-containing compounds
(called root exudates) into the soil to feed soil organisms.
Those organisms - billions of
bacteria, fungi and the rest of the soil food web - respond to chemical signals
in the root exudates and provide the specific nutrients that plants need. Managed properly, this process can also
result in carbon being sequestered in soil organic matter, helping to fight or
reverse climate change. That's why bare
soil is such a violation of nature - it starves the soil organisms.
Dandelions photosynthesize between
nine and ten months a year, so they are feeding soil organisms all that time,
probably with a variety of helpful exudates mirroring the complexity and
richness of the leaves' contents. Their tap roots open up passages deep into
the soil for water, air and organisms.
When leaves are picked, some of the roots die and slough off to keep the plant in balance. This adds more carbon to the
soil. (Managing this process on pastures with careful grazing can result in
large increases in soil carbon.)
The dandelion is scientifically
known as Taraxacum officinale which translates roughly to "the
official remedy for disorders." All parts of the plant have been used
medicinally for more than 1,000 years. Dandelion greens have at least as much
vitamin A per gram as any food except red hot chile peppers and liver, more
potassium than bananas and more calcium per gram than whole milk. Its leaves
have been fed to English racehorses to build strength and health and used to
make beer. Recipes are here for the flowers, here, here and here for leaves. I favor the
last one with the double garlic and ginger or capers. We've never boiled the dandelions before
cooking.
The bright yellow dandelion flowers
also make an earthy wine. About one gallon of flowers makes a gallon of wine.
The leaves are said to get more bitter once the plant flowers, but that is a
matter of taste.
Dandelion root is a diuretic. As
such, it may be useful for premenstrual syndrome, high blood pressure and
congestive heart failure. It is said to be good for the liver and to help
prevent gallstones, too. A dandelion root extract is currently in clinical trials in Canada to study its cancer-killing effect.
Dandelions provide important
above-ground benefits to the ecosystem too. Honeybees and at least 92 other
insects collect its nectar and/or pollen. Birds are fond of its seeds.
Dandelion as Target
Yet, advertising images of
dandelions are a marketing tool for toxic pesticides. That's the way most Americans probably think
about dandelions. Selling more of and getting greater profits from whatever it
is that you are making or selling is the name of the game in this system. But if certain real costs (to the
environment, taxpayers or society) aren't included in those calculations, we
have flawed and expensive results.
Our current system is clearly not
sustainable. Undifferentiated,
exponential economic growth is a dead end. A simple example is the increase in
bigger garden centers stocking larger piles of weed and feed lawn
products (combinations of one or more herbicides with water-polluting
fertilizer) to sell to more homeowners and landscapers who become further
disconnected from reality. Where will it end? In many ways and places, we are
reaching the limits of the damage we can do to our environment and still live
here. There are definitely limits to the
disconnection we can tolerate between marketing and ecological reality if we
are to survive.
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| Cultivating lettuce in the California desert |
In our kind of economic/political/cultural
system, the costs (toxicity, fewer soil organisms and bees, less stored carbon
and perhaps more cancer and disease) are spread broadly throughout society and
the environment. Concurrently, the profits are concentrated more and more in fewer
and fewer hands. A recent report
compiled for the United Nations showed that many of the world's most profitable
industries would not have any profits at all and could actually have very large
losses if environmental impacts were considered. And that study ignores social costs and
taxpayer subsidies which would decrease the profits of pesticide, big ag and
many other industries even more.
Learning about dandelions, their
relationship with other living things and the costs of having them as an enemy
provide a model of the kind of holistic thinking needed for our survival. Everything is connected.
Coming to the rescue is the idea
of holism, of using all the costs and benefits to guide us to a sustainable
future. I'm not an economist, but I like
what I see in the Capital Institute's report Regenerative Capitalism:
How Universal Principles And Patterns Will Shape Our New Economy by former
banker John Fullerton. In consultation with a diverse advisory group, he
produced this report which explores using holistic thinking and planning to
address the problems our very un-holistic system has caused. More on this in
the future.
So next time you see a dandelion,
think of it as an ecological champion and delicious food and remember the
importance of holistic thinking. It has
long been a part of the organic gardening, farming and land care movement.
To learn more about caring for
your yard organically visit organiclandcare.net and see especially this downloadable booklet.
