One of the goals here our homestead, @mountainjewel, is to reduce workloads through gardening wisely by teaming up with tasty, nutritious plants that love to grow and come back year after year!

This includes eating and encouraging the growth of things people usually deem as weeds which are actually highly valuable food plants (dandelion, chickweed, burdock, purslane, nettle and more!).

What we envision and are actively creating are guilds (basically intentional groupings that work together enhancing one another) of plants that "take care of themselves" for the most part. We each (separately) spent much of our 20s working on annual vegetable market farms. While this was a lot fun (tasty food, great groups of people attracted to it, satisfying work getting organic food to people), we knew the vision (and perpetual workload!) wasn't for us.

Perennial Agriculture

Perennial agriculture (meaning reoccuring, lasting for a long time or referring to perennial plants which come back each year), which we learned about through Permaculture (breaks down to basically creating more resilient "permanent cultures"), was the direction our vision took.

In this vision, we team up with plants that come back that way we aren't re-busting our asses each year seed starting, putting out seedlings, amending soil, tilling, weeding the heck out of those organic beds, picking ephemeral veggies, washing them, refrigerating them and then using food-truck miles and our time to get them to market. Instead, we are allying with as many plants that come back year after year through being perennials and biennials (literally have a root that is hardy and overwinters and has energy for the plant to come back- plant never dies, but only "dies back") and what are called re-seeding annuals, which as you can guess by the name are plants that are vigorous enough and produce enough genetic offspring (in the form of seeds) to easily come back year after year.

In this article, I'm going to focus on one particular self-sowing annual that is a wild plant often brought into gardens and perennial agriculture guilds as a groundcover for an easy food crop.

Miner's Lettuce

Miner's Lettuce, Claytonia perfoliata, hails from the Montiaceae family and also goes by Indian lettuce, spring beauty, winter purslane, or miner's lettuce. It has a very mild crips flavor, is full of Vit C and has fantastic succulent juicy crunch!

Oddly enough, there is another wild flower indigenous to our area that is also is a part of the Claytonia genus called Spring Beauty! This spring wildflower is Claytonia virginica (I'll share more about it below!).

Miner's Lettuce hails from the West Coast of North America (from Alaska to British Columbia to Southern California), but can handle a lot of climates beyond those mountains. It has a favorite time of year and climate, however, as this source points out:

C. perfoliata is common in the spring time, and prefers a cool, damp environment. The plant first appears in sunlit areas after the first heavy rains of the year, though the best stands are found in shaded areas, especially in the uplands, into early summer. As the days get hotter and drier, the leaves turn a deep red color as they dry out.

What this says to me as this plant makes a perfect understory plant in a food forest! Understories have natural shade from the canopy and how amazing is it to have plants that love to grow in them!

Also from the above source, a little about the history of the intriguing name:

The very common name of "miner's lettuce" refers to how the plant was used by California Gold Rush miners, who ate it to prevent scurvy. It can be eaten as a leaf vegetable. Most commonly, it is eaten raw in salads, but it is not quite as delicate as actual lettuce that is cultivated. Sometimes it is boiled like spinach, which it resembles in taste and chemical composition.

What a cool plant with a history to have on the homestead!

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After seeing a traveling friend who was on the West Coast share wonderful things about Miner's Lettuce (and how easily it grows and comes back year after year!), I knew I wanted some on the homestead!

Vision Continued

Here is my little secret, y'all, are you read for the download??

So I bought these seeds last early spring from EBAY! (You heard that right, plant genetics through Ebay :)!) for ~$2. I sowed this in a recently tilled area and I think no more than a few plants came up and they soon were discouraged by the strong summer heat and left! I was seriously thinking they weren't going to come back, but as the pictures I've shared in this article all demonstrate (I took them a week ago), we got an abundant RE-SEEDING of this hardy annual plant!

This is the secret:

On the homestead we start small and act wisely. Notice I didn't go out and buy 100 lbs of seed and try to establish it "everywhere right now" on the homestead. I started with one patch and established what is known as a "seed bank/bed" there. This year, I'm allowing the abundantly flowering heads to go to seed AGAIN and, when the seeds are ready, I'll sprinkle them in understories (remember, she loves shade!) around the homestead. What I'm doing is basically establishing patches.

Year after year WITH THESE SMALL EFFORTS (and this is the key), the amount of naturally-returning Miner's Lettuce will grow and grow and, as I walk around the homestead, there will be plenty of food for no real effort for me to just bend down and eat! This is the FOOD FOREST vision. It takes years to establish, but once the beginning work is finished it's basically just tending! Imagine food plots popping up all of your land (no matter if a back yard or a large holding!).

This is the perennial agriculture food vision that saves us a butt load of work while providing food year round! Can you feel how excited I am?!

It is obviously fantastic to include wild foods in our diets because they lend us their wild vigor, nutrition and ease (we don't have to plant them). Essentially, when sowing wild plants in our backyards, we're taking part in a long line of human-plant relationship behavior. You're basically bringing the wild to you!

Claytonia virginica

The other Spring Beauty I mentioned above is also a wild edible. They're also known as Fairy Spuds (how cute!) which gives us an idea of its edible nature!

They aren't prevalent everywhere, so obviously use caution and respect (and proper ID!) when foraging in your area.

As one source says,

In his book “Stalking The Wild Asparagus” Gibbons wrote about eating them daily if not twice a day for several weeks. He said: “We tried them fried, mashed, in salads, and cooked with peas, like new potatoes. All these ways were completely successful, but, as regular fare, we preferred them just boiled ‘in the jackets.’ My friend grew so fond of this food that he was afraid he would experience withdrawal symptoms when the supply was exhausted.” While Gibbon’s friend thought they tasted like potatoes Gibbons thought they were sweeter, closer to chestnuts in flavor.

We actually haven't tried them, but I do love their sweet beauty each spring and was intrigued that they're also a Claytonia and edible!!

Gibbons also has said!

"The tubers are good food for the body," he wrote, "but after a long winter, the pale-rose flowers in early spring are food for the soul."

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I hope to impart some of my passion and ideas to you who are reading this, dear ones! I believe in an abundant, healthy world and I know I'm not the only one!

Have you established (or plan to) any "wild foods" or awesome reseeding annuals (or perennial veggies) on your land? If so, we'd love to hear about it!

Spread the wild food love!