Wild Edibles: Ditch Lilies
Cleaning and settling in continues on the commune. Although they have rooms to house at least twelve residents at any given time (more, if you include families), there are currently only five of us. It turns out that having an old school hippie commune doesn’t work quite as well these days as it used to, and they’ve been struggling to keep residents. One result of this is that they’ve fallen behind on a lot of the necessary work that goes into keeping a 44-acre forest-farm running, and the residents that do come have a tendency to get burned out on the amount of work there is to do. And so they leave. The problem of outstanding work and decay becomes a vicious cycle.
All of this is exacerbated by the fact that a lot of folks have a tendency to want to do big, one-time jobs that are visible and dramatic (let’s build a strawbale house! Let’s make a garden! Let’s build a fort!) and/or they want to have meetings strategizing what needs to happen, but almost no one wants to do the routine daily maintenance it takes to keep those things functioning. I’m sure none of you have ever seen anything like this at your jobs, where everyone is excited to do routine daily tasks like purchasing supplies and fixing the leaky sink and are rewarded for that, and no one spends their time and energy building a fancy new center for whizzymabaubles with ribbon cutting ceremonies, nor do they jump at the chance to convene endless task forces where they are responsible for recommending action that it falls on someone else to carry out. That kind of irrational need to posture heroically without actually doing any of the work involved in making the thing run only exists in hippie communes.
So it is that I have been spending most of my time so far doing relatively unglamorous but satisfying work like weeding overgrown planting beds, stacking firewood that has been inexplicably sitting in a pile in the middle of a yard for the last year, throwing away trash that no one has thrown away, and de-rusting and oiling tools. But while these jobs are the types of ongoing, repetitive things that will continue to need to be done daily, weekly, monthly, seasonally, there are a few things that pop up and have a short window of time to do them. And one of these, which I hardly like to call work at all, is foraging.
It’s true that foraging is something that is done on an ongoing basis, but each individual plant tends to have a short window of time that it’s available. In another few weeks the unripe green walnuts should be ready to turn into pickles and nocino, for instance. And the blackberries are starting to turn color and look like they’ll be ready in a few days. But while I eagerly wait for these treats to be ready, I’ve been enjoying my time in between other tasks to forage ditch lily blossoms.
Ditch lilies are one of the first things I learned to forage. They’re easy to identify, prolific, and every part of the plant is edible depending on the time of year. Even if you think you aren’t familiar with them, chances are you’ve seen them all around you. Their orange blossoms are easily mistaken for tiger lilies, and you’ll find them growing wild along roadsides and streambanks (hence the name ditch lily).
Unlike tiger lilies, which are actually a different species, the ditch lily can be eaten in its entirety. While the flowers look similar, you can tell you’ve got a ditch lily on your hands if the long green leaves coming from the base face each other. Tiger lily leaves spiral all the way up the stem, in contrast. The tuber-like roots of ditch lilies have a sweet, nutty crunch that’s reminiscent of jicama. Those are one of the first parts of the plant available to eat in early spring, before the lilies flower and the roots become mushy. They can be eaten raw, lightly sauteed in butter, or even treated like you would potatoes — mashed and all. The stalk, meanwhile, can be sliced up and cooked like you might a scallion or leek. It doesn’t have much flavor, but it gives a nice little vegetal element to stir fries and other dishes. The thing that people really go wild for, though, are the blossoms. When they open up, they can be stuffed and fried the way you might use zucchini blossoms in Italian cooking. And just before they open, when they’re still in their bud stage, they can be eaten raw, pickled, or sauteed with just a little salt in butter. You have to act fast, though. Ditch lilies are sometimes also called day lilies in reference to how fleetingly their blooms appear and disappear. The window of time to enjoy the buds and flowers is a short one.
I can already see the flowers beginning to fade on several of the lilies that line the streambanks beside my new Mill house, and so I’ll be spending the next couple of days enjoying some sauteed lily buds. But I’m also going to try putting a few jars of pickled buds away to enjoy their mild taste later in the year — provided, of course, that I can wait that long to snack on them. Their mild taste is almost like lemony asparagus stalks, and I’m not entirely sure I’ll be able to resist the urge to dip into them sooner rather than later.
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