For those of us who harvest our own food from nature and even from our gardens we know there is a cycle to the harvest that, while not set in stone, is a good rule to follow throughout the year.
In the early spring, before the perennial and biennials plants reemerge we can still gather the roots, as long as the ground is not too frozen or too warm. But usually spring means the gathering of sap as it rises from its storage place of the roots, heading for the leaf buds to begin the new cycle of life. This is also the time to harvest many of the inner bark of trees because that sap moving through them can often give them an extra boost of nutrients and medicinal energies. From there we harvest the tender new shoots and leaves that are just opening. Often these have not only the sun's energy in them but still has the sugars that were stored in the roots all winter. Next is often the new stalks of plants, then the flowers, then the fruit and seeds. The last plant harvest of the year is most likely to be the roots of biennials and perennials as the leaves die back and send their energies down to those roots for storage through the winter months.
I know the summer is drawing to a close, autumn is here, and winter is not far behind when I begin to dig in the soil for the hidden store houses of nutrients that await me underground.
So with the weather getting colder we began the extremely frigid task of harvesting the wapato roots (or rhizomes if we want to be correct). Wapato or arrowhead, is an aquatic plant that grows in shallow, silty, and often deeply mucky waters. It usually grows in large stands that, as they die back, allow us to gather a great deal of wapato quite quickly. Wapato is high in starch and calories which makes harvesting it worthwhile.
Which is a good thing because harvesting wapato is freakin' cold work.
I wear a wet suit to do it and still end up sitting in front of the fire with a gallon of hot chocolate to warm me up at the end of the day. I can not imagine how cold it must have been to the American Indians that waded out into the slowly freezing waters to gather up their stores for the year.
Yes, you must wait until after at least the first hard frost to start a wapato harvest. What we need to wait for is for those leaves to send down the last of their energies to the roots and that does not happen until the leaves freeze. Often the first frost is not enough to affect the leaves though because the air just above the water is heated by the still unfrozen water. So while the rest of the air may be 25 degrees, the 33 degree (above freezing) water is heating the wapato leaves up and keeping them alive. It can take getting that water down to below the freezing mark to start the leaf die back and the roots to fill with their starchy goodness. This mean for harvest you are wading out into water that is at or below the freezing mark. It just hasn't had time to form a thick layer of ice as of yet.
Well, one of our rivers, The Black Jack, runs through several bog areas. Bogs in Wisconsin can stay frozen all year long and it helps to keep the rivers that run through them cold or cool them down faster than surrounding rivers that do not flow through bogs. This gives me an earlier window of harvest than those who will have to wait until it get REALLY cold. Still, wading in freezing water is cold, no matter what the air temperature is.
Wapato is pretty easy to spot, especially if you remember its other name of arrowhead. Most of the species have an arrowhead shaped leaf with long tails pointing back against the arrowhead. All the veins in the leaf comes from a single point, right where the stem attaches to the leaf. As long as you see these two points on a plant that grows out of shallow water you will know that you have found wapato.
Despite wapato growing in shallow waters, it will grow in deep mud. Meaning, if you step into what looks like a foot of water you may sink down another foot or even two into the deep muck that surrounds the plants. Before you start panicking and trying to pull your feet out of this mud, wait....the deeper you sink, the easier it is to harvest the roots. In fact, you WANT to get your feet as deep into the mud as you possibly can. The best way to accomplish this? Dance! Jump around! Leap up, spin around, and jam those feet into the deep, dark silty mud that carries all life down that river. Harvesting wapato is often called the wapato dance because the people who do it look as if they are dancing around in the middle of freezing cold water.
The more you dance about, the more of the mud you will disturb...and then suddenly something will pop out of the mud and float to the surface. More than likely this is a wapato tuber (I'm not discounting that there may be something else in the mud that may float too, lol). The more you dance, the more of them that will float to the surface.
Once you get really going, the surface of the water may be covered with wapato, gentle floating away. Gather them up, this is your treasure. They can be stored easily in a cool root cellar for most of the winter and will bring a good deal of calories to any dish they are added to. For our fat rich world, more calories sounds like a bad thing, but for ancient people it was often hard to get enough calories to make it through the harsh winter ahead. This is why still to this day we crave calorie rich foods, because our bodies remember a time long ago when we NEEDED those calories to survive.
As a person with simple taste, my favorite way to prepare them is to put them on a baking sheet with other root crops, cover them with my favorite herbs (usually garlic, with thyme, rosemary, and sage from the window sill) drizzle some olive oil over them and toss until covered. Baked in a 425 degree oven until a light golden brown crust forms on most the the roots. Talk about a dish that can get you through a cold winter night! All that starch is going to my hips just thinking about it. lol But seriously, the energy from that dish will keep me going while out doing chores in a blizzard or sledding with the kids on a frosty January day.
I also like to bake it, mash it, and make it into flat bread, much like my ancestors used potatoes to make lefse. Rolled up with a favorite stuffing like scrambled eggs and sausage for a breakfast "burrito" or leftover meat from supper and some sliced brussel sprouts or sauerkraut for the German side of my ancestry, or brown sugar and butter for a sweet treat...there is no end to what can be done with a flat bread.
I've even made it into pasta...that was more work than what it was worth, but to find a recipe just look up potato pasta and try it yourself. Sliced in spears it goes great in quick stir fries. Soups can be made more hearty by simply adding a handful of these wild edibles. Basically think potato when trying to cook them. Another name for them is actually duck potato because dabbling ducks will eat around the plants, though the tubers themselves are a bit big and a bit too deep for dabbling ducks to eat.
This is one of my favorite wild edibles to eat...but I have to admit that I have to force myself to harvest it. It's not like harvesting wild rice which you can do from the comforts of a canoe...Nope, you need to get into the water and sink you feet into the mud and muck. You have to feel the nutrient rich silt that it grows in, that is until you lose the feeling in your now frozen feet. You are not only a part of the water, but a part of the earth that is carried in the water, and part of the air that you can see your breath in. You WANT to be part of the fire after the harvest is over. lol So I guess you can say you incorporate all the elements in the harvesting of this wonderful wild edible.
For those who need a bit of pop culture reference to this plant, another name for it is katniss, and it is where Suzanne Collins got the name of her main character in 'The Hunger Games'. She chose the name because she was trying to show how hard hunger can be. Katniss, or wapato can be a hard plant to harvest, but it will end your winter hunger if you can only persevere. Much like the character Katniss needed to persevere to survive.
Funny thing is now that the book has been made into a movie I have many people wanting to learn how to harvest katniss. I find that only the hardiest of the bunch will harvest much more than a handful before they are sloshing as fast as they can out of the freezing waters, showing off their prized rhizomes like they were golden treasures. And indeed they are, because not many people would trade the feeling in their toes for a chance to get a few pieces of gold. But it is a surprise to see how many will do just that to try katniss...or as the American Indians called it, wapato.
Hunger Games my butt, I won't be hungry...just darn cold!
Nice. thanks!
ReplyDelete