Dandelions

Yes, dandelions. The weed that a great many people hate, that people would poison with chemicals were they allowed. The bane of the “noice” people on the street.

Not the people like me.

I have a special fondness for dandelions because here in Bonavista they pop up early and often, and cloak the town in my National Colours.

They are usually the first colourful flower in your yard, beating the crocus, and are often the last colourful flower, surviving everything from daffodils to dead roses.

Of course! They are one of the most successful plants known to us, and it is because they are successful at reproducing that they are seen as weeds. After all, crocus are delicate things and sometimes the bulbs rot during a series of freeze-thaw cycles, and your rose are eaten by aphids.

But the trusty dandelion starts on the first try, and runs to the end of the year.

Only a strong, healthy, genetic system can do that.

So why not consider the dandelion to be a great success and see what gives it this success.

When young, my sister and I were taught about Dandelion Clocks. We took a dandelion stalk with a fluffy head of seeds, and blew and blew until we had blown off every seed from the head. The number of puffs it took us, added to ten o’clock gave us the time. Three puffs meant that the time was one o’clock in the afternoon.

How many seeds are there on the head of a dandelion? Two hundred? Let’s use 200 as a working figure; we can always change it later.

Yesterday the last thing you saw was a golden yellow dandelion head, but overnight it changed into a head with 200 seeds. Each seed has a light fluffy bit atop that will float in the air for quite a distance.

The seed-with-parachute drifts away and then drops to the ground. The tiny seed will drill its way into the earth with every breath of wind. It wriggles and giggles and diggles itself into the soil as early as May.

This one seed will sleep quite happily through Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, then next May it WILL respond to rain and warm sunshine by sending out a radical (root) and a plumicle (usually two small leaves). The tiny root and tiny leaves are enough to allow the plant to harvest water and sunlight enough to grow a little more, so the next thing we see are Real Dandelion Leaves and the plant grows and grows and bursts into bloom for a couple of weeks, then BAM! Overnight produces 200 seeds.

What other investment has a ROI of 200:1?

So far so good.

Now go back and think about that tiny brown seed that hangs from the parachute. That tiny brown seed holds energy, vegetable protein, and anything else that is needed to survive ten months of the year and then energize a plant.

That tiny brown seed, one of two hundred blown away today from ONE dandelion flower-head, is a store of valuable nutrient material.

Do we eat the seed? Of course not; far to difficult to harvest.

Now go back just one day and think of the flower-head-that-was, bright golden yellow, like a factory busy creating seeds, and the next day Poof! Seeds!

I reason that on the day before the seeds appeared, that bright golden yellow flower was a miniature factory stocked with all the raw materials (proteins, carbohydrate, amino acids and so on) that it would need to manufacture 200 seeds overnight.

A consequence of this thought is that the flower-head must have a full complement of seed-as-food, just waiting to be shipped out of the door.

So eat the flower-heads; they are storehouses of proteins, carbohydrate, amino acids and so on that the bacteria in our gut can break down and use.

And they are free!

And they grow right here in your backyard and on your front lawn.

Don’t spray with weed-killer is all!

No wait! THERE’S MORE!!

The flowers get their supplies of nutrients from the activity of the leaves. The leaves should be nutritious. There are a great many leaves on each plant, and they can be used as a salad green or boiled with your pork and potatoes at night time.

I tell people that dandelions leaves are more nutritious, better for you, than any green-leaf vegetable that is sold in the local supermarket.

“No!” they say in disbelief. “Prove it!”

To this I reply “Prove that it isn’t”. I am the one making the claim; the onus is on them to disprove it to their satisfaction.

More material here .

And here on YouTube (“Dandelions and Civilization: A Forgotten History”)

Of course, the roots can be dried and then roasted and ground to be used as an ersatz coffee.

To the best of my knowledge, only the flower-stalk cannot be eaten.

How to Harvest Dandelion Leaves

Tug, rotates, and pull a whole pant from the soil, gripping the plant where it exost the ground

With a sharp knife, sabre the root system from the stems. Strike down and up until the root system falls to the ground (use roots for a roasted beverage)

Reverse stalk clump in your left hand

With your right hand gently pull the flower and bud stalks and any long grass from the sheaf of leaves.

You are left with a sheaf of dandelion leaves.

Reverse stalk clump in your left hand, and with your right hand brush the stems with your other hand to dislodeg short bits of dried grass.

You now have a clump of leaves that is almost clean.

Soak in a sink of cold water for an hour, and remove any stray buds or debris that floats to the surface.

Drain and place in a clear plastic bag, with the neck down, for an ahoir before lettinh excess water drain out of the neck of the bag.

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