From HerbMentor.com, this is Herb Mentor Radio.
You are listening to Herb Mentor Radio on HerbMentor.com. I'm John Gallagher. My guest today is doctor Peter Gail. Peter has a PhD in botany and left a career in academia to follow his dreams of helping others learn the uses of plants for food and medicine. For nearly fifty years, since nineteen sixty, he has been researching recipes and folklore of wild plants. Peter has written thirteen books, tons of articles, and has taught all over during that time. He is the director of Goosefoot Acres Center for Resourceful Living in Ohio, and they sell books focused on edible plants, the Amish, and the Northeast Ohio area.
Like myself, Peter is a champion of the dandelion as he wrote the dandelion celebration, a guide to unexpected cuisine and is the sole distributor of dandelion, a delicious herbal coffee like beverage. You can find out about Peter dandy blend and a link to his blog at dandy blend dot com d a n d y blend dot com.
USA Today called him the king of dandelions.
Good morning, America. The wizard of weeds. Doctor Peter Gale, welcome.
Happy to be with you.
You know, Peter, I felt like that intro, like, I'm introducing James Brown of, of edible plants here. The king the king of dandelions. The wizard of weeds. There you go. I mean, those are two titles that I can only dream to have, you know, you're definitely blessed.
One of my one of my my, passwords that I use, in on on my various website not websites, but the various websites that I that I contact is o o seven. So you see, I can I look at it as James Bond also?
James Bond band. I like that.
Yeah.
You know, Peter There's there's a bunch of us that do this kind of work Mhmm.
That are full time professionals in edible wild plants. And and you'll give us this the one that people most commonly compare us to. Back in the 60s, Eul Gibbons wrote the book Stalking the Wild Asparagus and there are several others following that. And everybody keeps saying, oh, you're the Eul Gibbons of the East Coast or you're the Eul Gibbons of the West Coast and whatnot. And so for some years there, I was supposedly the Eul Gibbons of the East.
People like Steve Brill and and and John Kalis and others are taking over those titles now, but as I'm getting older still, It's it's a it's a fun thing to be compared.
You know No one's still.
It was, yeah, it was my love for dandelions really led me to your book and Dandubeland early on when I was learning. And, I think I even had a bumper sticker with Defenders of the Dandelion, and that was you too. Right?
That's me too. Yeah. Tell tell us, you know, celebrate dandelions. If you can't beat them, eat them.
I love it.
Call call Defenders of Dandelions at eight hundred six nine seven four eight five eight.
You know, it it was the same number.
There was the one thing I didn't like about selling my old car. Yeah.
The the getting rid of that lumber. Hey.
We'll send you another bumper sticker. Yes. We got plenty of them here. Yeah. I'll put a note down here now. Send John a bumper sticker. Okay.
Now now, you, used to do Dandelion cook offs and gatherings too. Right?
Yeah. We did. For ten years, we did the National Dandelion Cook Off here in Dover, Ohio. Mhmm.
We, did an organization that made wine or makes wine, Brighton Bush Brighton let's see. Brighton Bush Herb Symposium is out there. Right? Brighton Bach Wine Cellars is the organization here.
And they were putting on a Dandelion Mayfest right after Dandelion celebration was issued. And I was down there pretty much selling them some Dandelion, and, we got to talking about the fact they're putting this festival on. I said, well, look. We go hand in hand with each other.
I can just slide my National Dandelion Cook Off right in under your umbrella, and we can have this thing go national. And so for ten years, we did a national cook off. We get people in from all over the United States bringing their recipes in to try to compete for the best Dandelion recipe in the country for that year.
Now what what, you know, I just so for you, what led you to want to do that in in in Dandelion?
You know, like, what what was your story with Dandelion?
Yeah. Back in in nineteen forty eight, my dad died and left the family with no money. And my mother didn't really know how she was going to feed us. Friend of hers came over one day and told her that we could live off of lamb's quarters, which is a wild spinach until she learned how to make a living.
And so back in the forties, this was not an unusual or an uncommon thing. And my mother didn't say, oh, weeds, we can't eat weeds, you know, like we would today. But back then, she said, oh, that sounds intriguing. Peter, go out and gather some.
And so she took me outside, and the the the lady that told my mother took my brother and I outside showed us the plant and we started gathering the young tops of it every day, bringing it in for breakfast. My mother made every kind of spinach recipe you could imagine. And I thought it was great. It was fantastic.
And as I was walking out there to gather these tops, I began asking myself, what else is there out here that's edible as well? And that question sort of hung on my mind for a number of years. Didn't really do much research as a nine year old on it, but I was curious about that. And so as I got through high school, I worked at the logging camps in Northern California when I was seventeen, sixteen, seventeen years old.
And my friends and I would go out after work and gather berries, huckleberries and other kinds of berries, salmonberries, and take them home and their mothers would make them into all kinds of good things, jellies and pies and whatever. And I became fascinated again with the whole topic, majored in botany in college, got a master's degree in taxonomy, plant taxonomy and then a PhD in plant ecology.
But all the time, I was curious about how people were using backyard weeds and other wild vegetables for food and for medicine. And as I found information about it, I would write it down and I would begin filing it. And so by the time I've been at it for a number of years, I had probably the largest collection of recipes and folklore for wild foods in in America.
Wow.
This was probably about nineteen seventy nine. And At the time, I was the I was the coordinator of of international studies for Cleveland State University.
Had been going overseas to England and doing workshops with my students from Cleveland on environmental studies in England and Wales and discovered one summer a bookstore in York that had a display in the window that was all kinds of books on edible wild plants.
And they were coffee table style books, you know, All Good Things Around Us and The Countryside Cookbook and Roger Phillips Wild Foods and Mhmm. And so on. And I was fascinated.
So I went in and I found it.
I I was looking for them in the in the nature section, which is where they'd be in America, but they weren't. They were in the cookbook sections and there were a bunch of regional cookbooks. Most cookbooks had recipes for wild foods in them and so on.
And so when my students went home that year, I began going around and interviewing farmers' wives and suburban wives and others and discovered that they were using these as vegetables. They weren't weeds to them. They were weeds to us but not to them. They would go out and they would they would harvest these as they weeded their garden.
They would take everything that was edible, put it in the colander and bring it in. And they even had a little section of their garden which was a wild garden, that they had extras of purslane and extras of metals and so on. So if they didn't get enough from weeding their beds, they could go over and supplement them. Well, this fascinated me because this was not happening in the US, and it was something I thought Americans should become aware of.
So when I came back home, I, got my graduate students to work on, on the files. I had seven file drawers of recipes in folklore already collected. They hadn't really been sorted much. And I got them to work on organizing them with the intent that for every plant that I had at least fifty recipes for, I do a book for.
I mean, there's some people who like carrots, some people who don't. The ones who like carrots want a cookbook on carrots. The ones who don't, don't want it. So I assume that people would probably like some of these wild plants and not like others.
And so they would like to have specific cookbooks on the ones that they do like. Oh. Well, then the question became, I mean, we came up with twenty six plants, twenty six common backyard weeds that we had at least fifty recipes for. Wow.
And then the question became, well, which one do we start with?
And the criteria for shortlisting those twenty six was to was to ask which of them was the most popular, which do we have the most recipes for and which were the most recognizable.
And two of them came up near the top. Dandelions with six forty three recipes from six thirty two recipes from forty three countries and Violets with one hundred and twenty eight recipes from how many countries.
But dandelion clearly was the winner. And the irony of that was that dandelion was my least favorite plant.
I mean, I like most everybody else, I tried dandelion and it was bitter, man. I mean, who's gonna eat this bitter thing and who would want it? But all of a sudden, when you find that that all of Italy is eating dandelions and and most of the other part of the world is doing it also, you begin asking why. I mean, what is it about this plant that makes it so good? And so in researching it, we found that the first thing was that it was the most nutritious vegetable in the world.
Had more nutrients, more healing properties and just about anything else.
And secondly, it was easy to mask the bitterness that just like chocolate, you add a little something sweet to it and all of a sudden it's not bitter anymore. It's now got a very nice flavor to it. And so we began researching how people or what foods people use to complement dandelion in the recipes. Found that tomatoes were very big and that cheese and meats were very big and bread cubes and whatnot. These all these things would mask the bitterness of dandelions in addition to a sweet and sour dressing on a salad or raspberry vinaigrette or whatever. And we all of a sudden had a book.
Wow.
That was going to be the first one.
And then the first book, was originally titled On the Trail of the Yellow Flowered Earth Nail because dandelions in China are called Yellow Flowered Earth nails.
And since my column in the business of herbs for so many years was on the trail of the volunteer vegetable, we were going to carry that forward into the book titles and in this case on the Trail of the Yellow Flower and Earth Nail.
And that was published in one hundred and seventy nine page version, eight point five by eleven and did it at OfficeMax, spiral bound it and sold it for from nineteen, I guess about nineteen eighty three or 'eighty four until nineteen ninety one. And it was becoming so popular that we decided we better put it into a typical standard trade paperback Yes.
It had it had all the health benefits. It had the history Yes. It had it had all the health benefits. It had the history. It had the botany of it. It had, you know, recipes for the flowers and for the leaves and for the roots.
And we did nineteen ninety four published that book called The Dandelion's Celebration, A Guide to Unexpected Cuisine.
And that's where we got started.
From there on, I became known as Doctor. Dan O'Lion and all the other kinds of things. And and food television network got on my case and that did an exotic food show that played years after year after year on the food television network of the Dandelion cook off. And the Cook Offs brought us a lot of notoriety.
Finally in two thousand and three, USA Today featured me as the king of dead lions with the whole cover, the story, and the lifestyle section on it.
That's great.
That's how it goes on.
Holding holding a copy holding a copy of it right here.
There you go.
Exactly. Well, you know, it really fascinated me was the especially in here where, like, a lot of the nutritional charts, Right. Which are very helpful because, you know, when you're teaching classes out there, it's nice to photocopy some things and have some proof, Yeah. I would love that.
And there's a lot of these old photos too of for people selling dandelions Yeah. Yeah. Products and all. But, you know, what what what got me, you know, really interested in in in dandelion after re with what your book did was kinda break it through for me as far as actually using it in my life.
Right. Other than that, for me, it was, noticing that people how many people the the fact that so many people sprayed and that was the number one weed culprit out there to ortho and all these kinds of people is what, you know, led me environmentally as as a kind of a a symbol environmentally to, you know, for us to stop poisoning ourselves and our kids and our rivers and streams and everything and our fish, is to, you know, to spread the education of this plant. And then hopefully less people will spray, and then it will have that residual effect, which is why dandelion is in the logo of my company.
Yeah. Right. Well, that's true. Now, you know, that's interestingly, the whole there's a whole story behind that particular aspect too. When you look around the country, you find an awful lot of get stop using pesticide organizations and they get out there and they give the old negative negative pitch, you know, stop using, you're killing these people and you're doing this and doing that.
My approach to it from the beginning has always been if you help people learn what the plants are and to appreciate them and how to use them, that you will no longer be wanting to kill them.
Exactly.
And so my answer to the pesticide groups has been you're going about it the wrong way. Mhmm. You're you're creating an environment where people are not gonna be stopping using pesticides. They're just gonna brand you as Kooks.
Exactly.
And so I said the way to do it is to help people get to to appreciate them. A very good friend of mine, Betsy Bancroft, who works for Rose Berry Gladstone.
We've we've interviewed her on this show.
Have you? Yeah. Betsy is a very close friend. And she was down with her with her brother.
I guess, her brother her it could be something, it could be uncle or somebody else. But she was down with a family member in Baltimore, Maryland, staying with them for a while and her the son of this family who was in this preteens became very interested in going around the yard with her and she taught him how to eat Johnny Jump Ups and other wildflowers and so on out of the garden. And and, he got fascinated by that and he took him to school one day, to feed to his kids at the show and tell time to his to his classmates in show and tell time. And they ate them and they loved them and they went home and started eating them from their yard too.
Oxalis was another one that she taught them how to eat. And they they started using these and they their parents were very appalled at this because they said, well, we're spraying these things. There's poisons all over that stuff. And they they said, well, we're gonna continue eating them so you better stop putting the poisons on.
And it cost the lawn chemical companies an awful lot of business because these kids had just picked up on on what Betsy had taught one one of the kids and with the whole subdivision was pretty soon off of pesticides.
Wow.
This is something that we've hoped and do hope will be the result of the kind of teaching that we do. Now back in the late 1900s, maybe it was in about nineteen ninety six, I mean a little earlier than that. We got wind of the efforts of the Environmental Council of Carbondale, Colorado under the direction of doctor John Phillip who is a chiropractor there, who were interested in getting people to stop using pesticides and we're telling them all the reason you shouldn't be using them. But he got the idea that if we taught people how to use these plants then they wouldn't be wanting to do that.
And so he got in touch with me and we began feeding him the information he needed from our newspaper dandelion doings and from the books and so on. And they began working toward establishing dandelion as their town flower.
And in early two thousands, I think it was, they were successful in getting the the town to adopt dandelions as a town flower. Wow. And they got national publicity international publicity for doing this and began educating people about the value of Dandelion.
And so it's taken off. I mean, it's one of those things been in nineteen ninety four when I first published my Dandelion Celebration book, I would do workshops and be a keynote speaker at workshops and cooking kinds of workshops and so on. And we'd have a time before we started and I've asked people how many of them made Dandelions and most of them or some of them raised their hands and said they have. And in one in one particular workshop in Morgantown, West Virginia, I I did that and several people raised their hands and a couple of people said, oh, how can you eat dandelions? They're awful. They're weeds blah blah blah. You know, all that kind of stuff.
And these people started letting the ones who were criticizing know why dandelions were so good. And I realized that at that time, there were a lot of people out there who keep their mouth shut when somebody starts criticizing dandelions because they get intimidated. They don't wanna be attacked. They don't want people to come after them.
But if there are three or four of them there or five of them, they'll get the their their courage will will increase get the and they'll start speaking up. And then the others will say, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
You know? And all of a sudden, you've got yourself a group that is defending Dan the Line.
I came away from this Morgantown experience on my way to Maureen Rogers, our business Getaway in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
And all the way over there, I began thinking now look, if we could start an organization called the Defenders of Dandelions and get all these people around the country that are supporters of it, we could then maybe have a good solid base of people who would go out and and let those who were opposed to analyze know why they shouldn't be. Mhmm. And so that's how I got born. And when I got to Albuquerque, I went over to Kinko's and, cranked my my little computer up and and put out an invitation for people to join Defenders of Dandelions and came away from that business getaway with I think twenty or thirty members at that time. And it was perfect. It was it it just went it it it just kept growing from that point onwards.
You know you know what I'm seeing here, Peter? I'm seeing getting together and and pitching to the the some cable thing where we do a reality TV show of doing exactly what you talk just said with dandelions. Pick a kinda like Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution.
Yeah.
ABC, but with dandelions. Absolutely.
It's it's it's something I've dreamed of. As I've gotten older, I've gotten less mobile and so I've not and Dandy Blend has taken up so much of our time in marketing it and producing it Mhmm. That we haven't had really the the time or energy to to go to take the reality TV cable network route. I love that. It's the ideal way to go. I'm I'm looking for I'm looking for a manager. You know?
If I can if I can, dupe if I can, duplicate myself and make another of, you know, then I can Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I can I can put that person on that project?
Yeah. Me me too.
But I don't know if my wife would want another one of me.
I I know my wife would want another one of me.
Speaking of which, congratulations on being married fifty years to your wife.
Well, thank you. Yeah.
That was Yeah.
Both of us have have somehow found selective hearing and the ability to put up with one another's.
So it's weak. This is a shortcoming.
We've we've made it through. We finally on August thirty first, we we crossed that that boundary.
Congratulations.
Congratulations.
Thank you. Appreciate it. You were just mentioning Dandelion before, and I wanna mention that, that on the Dandelion website, you've got, like, recipes. Like, in case anyone buys it and and doesn't know this, there's, like, Dandebelon latte, dandy tiramisu.
I even kinda, like, looked at what you had and kinda kinda came up in my own head, you know, with a, you know, because it was hot out one time, and I I Right. I I blended. I took the Vitamix or the blender out and blended it up with some ice and milk. And There you go.
Made a really nice it's really good.
You add add add a little flavor to it, cinnamon and nutmeg, and it becomes an Oregon chai. Mhmm. You add some chocolate to it, it becomes a mocha, wonderful mocha. You're gonna make ice cream out of it. Excuse me a second here.
Oh, sorry. We fighting one of these new fall colds. Mhmm.
Alright.
But, you know, that that's one thing we've done. Now I do need to bring your attention to something. You mentioned that our website is w w w dot dandy blend dot com. Mhmm.
Well, that's our old and our our basic website. That's the one you can order on. Mhmm. But we've been working on a new one called w w w dot dandy blend dot biz, b I z, which is available for anybody to go to.
Oh, okay. And on and on there, the cookbook is available for free. Oh. Magic the many faces of Dandy Blend.
You just click on the the products and then on on books and then when you get to books, the first item there is many pages of Dandy Blend, the PDF file, and then it says free now. And you click on the free now, and it'll download the PDF file for you.
Well, and on your on your mentor page, I'll link right to that.
So Okay. That's that's a good place. They just can't order from that file yet.
Okay. Okay.
Hopefully, in another week or two, they will be able to. But right now and then it'll be rolled over to dandyblend dot com. I mean, they'll be merged together and there won't be a dandyblend dot biz in separate. Okay.
Cool.
Alright. But until then, that's the site that has on it all the all the good information, all the new recipes, Cindy Lauper's endorsement of Danica. Really? Oh, yeah. Dandelion. He has it every Sunday morning. Wow.
So it's not good girls just wanna have fun with Dandelion.
Yeah. Well, yeah. Right. Actually, it was there was an article in New York Times.
She's of my generation.
Yeah. Right. There you go. Yeah. No. Mine too. I like it. Not not really exactly, but I sure appreciated it.
But Cindy Lauper, was featured in the New York Times about a month ago or two months ago, maybe a little even longer than that, but not no. This year.
And it asked what you do on a Sunday morning.
And she said in there, her husband goes off to get bagels, and I make my dandy blend up. Ah. You know, and then she tells how she found dandy blend and why it's so good for her. And, you know, this is what allows her to to be able to sing the way she wants to without getting hoarse voice and so on. Wow. And so she's she's great. So I I just copied the whole thing and put it in my website.
Who'd have thunk? Yeah.
Who'd have thunk?
I I would have thunk, but I wouldn't have known that she'd like it. Exactly. She did, and it was great. So we were very happy with that.
Yeah. Yeah. But we're looking for more endorsements from more celebrities.
And So Is any celebrities listening?
Yeah.
Send me my we have a fan page too. Dandy Blend fan club.
Dandy Blend we haven't told what Dandy Blend is, really.
Oh, yeah. We didn't.
I think we ought to do that.
Dandelion is okay, but Dandy Blend is the real thing.
Back when I was when I was teaching in England, I ran into a product called, Symington's Dandelion Coffee Substitute, which is made out of roasted dandelion roots and it was just wonderful. And it found that it was a big seller in Europe, and particularly in England. And so I came back home. I couldn't find it in the States, and decided after I'd gotten I'd left the university and started building my own business that I would like to import this product.
And so I found that Symington had sold it to another company in England and they had tried to make it bigger quantities commercially and couldn't do it with their formula. So they sort of screwed up the whole thing. And I couldn't bring it in because it didn't taste like anything. So I was frustrated by that one time when I was up in Toronto wandering around Kensington Market in a little herb shop and I found a product called Tunis Dandelion, Instant Dandelion Beverage, and brought that home, tried that, found it was just exactly what I wanted as far as flavor went.
Started bringing it into the country, introducing it at the medical herbal conferences around the country and most of the top herbalists in the country loved it, started introducing it to their patients. And so by nineteen ninety five, I had I I had, gotten so many customers for it that the people in Canada couldn't produce it fast enough for me anymore, and they gave me the rights to private label it. So when I got the formula to to private label from, I looked it over and I found that they were way too low on dandelion for it to be therapeutic.
And so I quadrupled the amount of dandelion in it, roasted dandelion root and, we renamed it Dandy Blend.
And it's a product that is made out of roasted dandelion root extract.
The extracts actually have five common herbs and grains, barley and rye grains and the roots of chicory, dandelion and beet root.
Those are the five ingredients. There's nothing else in it except those five ingredients. They're roasted. They are then blended in the proper proportions.
They are then extracted by water only, which leaves the gluten back. So it's gluten free, the gluten in the barley and rye. And so it's gluten free and is then spray dried and put into the containers and that's how we sell it.
We make enough now to supply not only this country, but Hong Kong and Singapore and Malaysia and all kinds of Wow, that's incredible.
And it's we have relatively little limit on it. We're getting it made for us in Poland, because over there, medicinal herbs are the way that they treat ills. They don't use very many allopathic medicines. So there's a lot of medicinal herb farms who are growing chicory, dandelion, dicchinacea and all the other things. And so there's no limit on supply, relatively little small limit on supply and we can get as much as we want. So we have not yet come to a place where we are being limited by the people over there who manufacture it for us, because, they run out of dandelion or anything.
Yeah. So And you shouldn't really run out of dandelion.
No. No. You really shouldn't. But that means somebody's gotta harvest it. You know, you people look at it here and they laugh at that.
But, you know, when you when you figure I I gotta get this stuff out of the ground, and I gotta process it and get it roasted and all that. That's not happening here. I mean, Trout Lake Farm up in Washington is doing it and Pacific Botanicals and a few others are doing it, But they're doing it in small scale.
And so in the United States, it's being done, but it's not being done anywhere near the number the quantities that we would need to keep this product rolling along and less than the price of coffee.
So when we came in with Dandelion or Dandelion, one of the things that we decided we wanted to do was make sure that it always stayed below the price of coffee. Wow. And right now, it is when you buy it in the two pound bag, it's at seven cents a cup. Wow. You can't you can't buy coffee for that. And you're getting all the health benefits, all the therapeutic benefits of dandelion root along with cherry with with chicory and and beet root, which is good blood strengthener and barley and rye, which are good sources of vitamin B and other things. So you're getting a tremendous product without any of it any side effects at all.
And people are finding that it's we have not had to advertise it much because it goes by word-of-mouth. Exactly. When people try it, they either like it or they don't like it. If they don't like it, they don't ever look at it again. If they do like it, they like it so much that they tell all their friends about it. It.
Well, you know, it helps me keep the not wanna go for the second cup of coffee.
Yeah. Well, that's true too.
Or you could It does.
Yeah. Or you could blend yeah. You can blend coffee. You can do half and half. Daily blend and coffee.
I never thought of it.
A lot of people start to start the day off with a with a half and half like that.
I never thought of that.
Yeah. You can do that or you can you can have one cup of this in the morning, or you have one cup of coffee in the morning, then you have the rest of the day Dandy Blend. You know? It tastes the same.
It, you know, it's cost the same. Mhmm. And it it has it's good for you compared to coffee, which isn't good for you. Right.
Right. Exactly. Exactly. So, anyway, Dandy Blend is available, through our website, w w w dot dandy blend dot com.
And the information isn't dandyblend dot biz, the more complete information. And then we have a Dandyblend fan club on Facebook.
That's cool. Well, this has all been this I mean, you know, the dandy blend thing, I mean, for those listening, it's kinda been fascinating for me since it's, just so folks know, it's actually something that, it's been in my life for about ten years or so.
So Yeah.
Right.
So I'm just curious. I mean, it's just fascinating to hear the background story for me and how it's done and everything. So I'm just enjoying listening.
Everything has a backstory.
Right? I know. I know. You probably do. You know, you know what? Some folks listening to this now, you know, may might be the first time we've seen our mentor ID or even knowing about our mentor dot com or anything like that.
And and who knows? Maybe just the idea of eating wild plants or dandelions is is strange to them.
So, if someone's getting into this and and new at it and you're out, you're teaching at one of your, classes or workshops that you're doing, what are, some things that you often, say to folks? I'm sure you dandelion must be one that you often say is a great one to start with. But, you know, do you do you ever have a a wrap as far as, you know, precautions or what plants they should do or how they should gather?
Yeah. That would You bet. That would be great to hear.
Yeah. Okay.
The, the the the big thing about these plants, the thing you want people to first know about them is that eighty percent of the plants that you call weeds to grow in your garden are in fact vegetables that were brought here by immigrants back when they came in the seventeen hundred, 1800s, even 1600s because their immigration company said, look, bring all the plants that you like, that you like to eat or use for medicine, you're not liable to find them in America. And so if you bring them and you can plant them and they will be available to you. And many of them did bring them, did plant them.
The seeds usually were small and they got out of they got away from them out of their yards and they traveled through the air or through on the feet of animals, birds and so on. And they got spread over the country to the degree that a plant like plantain for example became known as White Man's Foot. Because everywhere the White Man came into the Indian territories, the Plantin was right with him. Mhmm.
He came right behind him and so he would wasn't there before. All of a sudden, he was there and the white man taught him how to use them. Planting for example, which is so incredibly common in everybody's yard, almost everybody's yard is in fact one of the best poultice plants there is for healing cuts and bruises and wounds, things that fester for a while and don't want to heal. It's tremendous for that.
And it also is good, you drink the tea of it and it helps you stop smoking. So there's a lot of benefits of one plant that plant them. And most of these plants that we're talking about, we're talking about such things as lamb's quarters, dandelion, burdock, violets. Violets are the second richest source of vitamin C in the world.
And you're talking about Oxalis, the sour grass, a purslane which is a very rich source of omega three fatty acids. You know, all of these plants are available to everybody. I could go out in my backyard now, stand in one spot, spread my legs a little bit and look down and I'll find about fifteen different edible wild plants, including the clovers and the daisies and all of those other kinds of plants. And so what I try to help people understand is that you need to know the plants individually.
You start with the plants you know and then you use them and then you learn them one at a time. You don't go into the grocery store and instantly know everything that's on a produce stand when you're seven years old. Mhmm. You know?
You go in and you've got mom's gotta teach you the difference between cabbage and lettuce. And you'll go and pick up cabbage for lettuce two or three maybe four times before mother finally gets through your thick skull that that's not lettuce.
This is what lettuce looks like and then finally you bring the right stuff.
Kids are the ones that learn best. My kids by the time they were four or five years old, be twenty five different edible wild plants, knew how to get them, where to find them and then how to bring them in and in many cases how to prepare them. They just soak this stuff up. It was just incredible. I have daughter now who still teaches edible wild plants out in Utah where she's moved as an adult.
And so it's a good thing. But the important thing is that you don't wanna eat things that you don't know.
That's first caution. You wanna make sure you know the plant. If you know dandelion, you can eat dandelion. You can use it in its various ways.
We encourage people to get a coach to come to your place and you go around with those little plant stakes that you put in the garden next to the tomatoes and whatnot to tell you what kind of variety it is. And you're right on when he tells you what a plant is, you take and write the name of the plant, lamb's quarters, xeroxalis on the stake and you put it in right next to the plant. And then you watch that plant as it grows through the season. And then you can see it and you can see all its different forms, you know, how it looks at different times, what the different parts are, and if you can eat the fruit, you'll see when the fruit comes on and what it looks like.
And then that plant will become yours. And from then on, you'll be able to use that plant. But I do not encourage people to be eating plants that they don't know. Right.
It's important to be able to do that, and to to to identify the plants accurately. Now today, my book, The Volunteer Vegetable Sampler, Recipes for Backyard Weeds, profiles forty one common backyard weeds. There's an index at the beginning of it. There are recipes for all the different plants.
There are both medicinal and culinary recipes.
And then if you want to see what they look like, either call someone in the nose and have them take you around the yard to show you, or you go online and then, you know, you put the name in the browser. You put Burdock in the browser and you hit it and you'll find every so many different pictures of or put Burdock pictures in it. And you'll the whole whole line of the search engine will will will take out picture after picture after picture. And with the ten different pictures, you'll be able to pretty accurately identify what you've got in your yard.
And we have our mentor dot com now for this too.
There you go. Very good. Okay. Herb mentor dot com will do it for you.
But I always recommend, and like you said, if you if it's possible, that if there's somebody in your area doing teaching live classes, please seek them out, support them, and take those live classes. Because nothing beats the hands on.
Yeah. Well, let me let me suggest a a few for those of our listeners in different parts of the country. Mhmm. If you're in the New York area, wild man Steve Brill, New York City is one of is one of the best. Mhmm. And he runs classes regularly.
If you're out in the West Coast in Portland and in that area, the other one out of Doctor. John Kalas, k a l l a s. He runs Wild Food Adventures and he does workshops all the time and he's one to get to know. Down in the LA region, it would be Christopher Nyrges, n y e r g e s, Hungarian name. He runs a school of self reliance and he's one to look up, find him. Those are three of the top people in the country who are doing things. In Minnesota, you're wanting to look up Sam Thayer, t h a y e r who's written a very, very fine book and he's a very fine edible wild plants teacher.
And around the country there are others who are lesser, not as involved and haven't written as much, who you can find that are also good at that.
If you contact any of us, Calus, myself, Brill or those others, we can get you to people that are local for for And, I wanna mention we do have a earlier Urban to Radio episode with, Steve Brill.
And, John Kalas, do wanna mention if you Google him, k a l l a s, has a, excellent new book.
Oh, yeah. He's a phenomenal book. Yeah.
It's it's it's a it's a Well Definitely it's definitely a work a life's work. It's amazing.
Yeah. The thing the thing that is interesting about this, and then most of us will tell you that you want to be learning from people who are actually doing this stuff.
Most of the Edible Wild Plant books that are out on the market or many of them at least are written by people who will go into other books and get the information and then pass it on to you.
Mikaelus and Thayer and Brill and myself and, Niergesh along with Linda Runyon also, who I guess is in New Jersey right now.
And and she has, two of her mentor radio interviews up there. Linda Runyon, you you love Linda.
All of us have been doing this for fifty years, you know, as many years as we have been. And we we eat the plants. We know the plants. We, we're writing from personal experience.
And those are the people you really want to try to learn from if you can. I've been with people who supposedly are experts in this field and they introduce people to a particular plant in the backyard and it's the wrong one. Right. It's not it's not unedible.
There are very few plants that are poisonous in the backyard.
And there are plants that are said to be poisonous that really aren't. Milkweed buds and flowers and whatnot are very edible.
Supposedly you have to prepare them properly, but submersing them in boiling water for three minutes and then pouring that off and then putting them back in boiling water and doing that a second time and then finally there they all these poisonous alkaloids are gone from them.
People like Sam Thayer say, well, that's not necessarily the case. He's got a lot of people who eat them raw.
And so and deadly nightshade has many plants, the tomato family that has in its potatoes, tomatoes, eggplants, peppers and so on, also has plants that are poisonous, Belladonna and the Deadly Nightshade so on. But the black, what is the black anyway, Solanum nigra is the black nightshade is one that is not poisonous.
In fact, if you go into the literature from other countries, from Europe particularly, you find that some plants that people in America are saying are poisonous or saying that it might not be healthy for you, are some of the favorite plants eaten by those people in those other countries.
Right. I think Coke has that reputation too. Yeah. That's true.
Yeah. Poke is another one. Poke, though, you need to know how to use it. You have to make sure you use the the green, you know, only the green parts. And usually, it's a young shoot six inches tall, that don't have any red in them because the red is a cyanide. Mhmm. And you don't wanna get too much cyanide in your system.
No. You don't. No.
And the and the roots are poisonous. So you gotta know what you're doing with some of these plants.
Yeah.
But but most of the ones at your backyard, the burdocks, the the lambsquarters, the violets, the dandelions, the chicories, the clovers, all of those are edible without any restrictions.
They don't you don't have to prepare them in any other way. They just go out and and forage for them.
What's your, as you're getting in the fall, what's your favorite fall backyard wild edible?
Right now, in the in the fall, let's see.
You had the kid hit me with that one, didn't you?
Oh, well.
Yeah. Lamb's lamb's quarters go into November, and we use we'll use Lambsquarters and Lambsquarters seeds in the November. Dandelion lasts a long time, and you can use DanfLion, you know, in into the fall and into the winter.
You've got hawthorn berries or hawthorn is a very, very can make wonderful Hawthorne jelly and Hawthorne pies from Hawthorne berries right now. And also and that's good for the heart and also crab apples the same way.
We use we use both of those.
What else have I got going? Oxalis will still be available.
Purslane, I'm still finding quite a bit of Purslane out there Mhmm. That we're using the the particularly on the Amish farms out east of us here. We're getting a lot of it from there.
Yeah. Those are some of those are some of the ones that we're using now.
There's none that's specific to the fall that I use, except I'm just trying to think what nuts we're using.
Well, none that are none that that come to mind particularly quickly. Mhmm. But those others, the greens that I mentioned, they're ones that are still available and still good.
Right. That's great.
They have a long season. They go a long time.
Do you, are you finding, now with, you know, as with the economy and skyrocketing food prices that there's a resurgence in interest in Yeah.
There is. There's quite a bit of resurgence in interest in local foods, first of all.
That's true.
And the farmers markets are coming up everywhere.
That's right.
And it's amazing the number of farmers after having heard me at Ohio Ecological Food and Farming Organization, the organic farming conference.
Many of these farmers are now taking wild vegetables to market and giving recipes for them and so on. And so you'll find purslane at the local market, you'll find various wild mustards there, you'll find dandelion greens there.
All of these kinds of things are available now. And chicory, it's a chickweed and chicory bowl.
Chickweed in the salad mixes is big.
Yeah. Chickweed is out there now. It was a good local farmers market not too long ago. And the farmers are putting out bits of information on how to prepare these things and then giving some samples sometimes. So you're getting you're beginning to see wild foods at farmers markets, have been for a number of years, but they're getting more and more now.
Oh, that's great.
We've been pushing farmers to do that because it's another profit center for their for their farm. Yeah. You know?
Yeah. And, we we've told our our own farmer, and and some of you listening, if you know some of this information, sometimes you just might wanna key your farmer into it because we did that with our we belong to a CSA community support agriculture. We have a share our local farm. And it's when we educated our our local farmer about this that he actually started putting some Chickweed into the salad mix.
And he actually, occasionally will, gather bundles of lamb's quarter and even put it out as something extra that somebody can grab if they're in the know. Right. Right. Recipes into the, look into his little flyer that he gives out.
So, you know, tell your farmers, you know, and and and, and also, I don't know, Peter, if you've ever told folks this at your classes, but for me locally, because I'm lucky enough to have so many great local organic farms in my area, places is those are the primo places to go and gather your quote, unquote Absolutely.
And they don't mind. They don't mind at all.
I've done I've done I had to do a lot of selling to some of these guys to tell them that that you could harvest them and sell them yourself.
Yeah. Exactly.
On Lamb's Quarters, I want to let you know that for many years, Rado Brothers, maybe they're still doing it out in Sacramento area, Oakland and Sacramento area. Rado Brothers is a truck farmer, produce farmer and he sells lamb's quarters as Belgian spinach.
Calls it Belgian spinach and sells it for five ninety nine a pound.
Oh, brilliant. Yeah. I love it.
And gourmet chefs the gourmet chefs are the ones that grab these things. Purslane Purslane, a few years ago, after the New York Times did a big feature on Purslane and and, in restaurants in gourmet dishes.
They were selling for eleven point nine nine dollars a pound in the California market.
Koosman and Sons, the commission merchant out there called me one day and actually the one here in Cleveland called me one day and said, could do I have any source of purslane? He'd be willing to pay me eight ninety nine a pound for it because it cleaned and ready to go. Because out in California, they're paying eleven ninety nine a pound. Oh. You could ship it out to them and they could do it. And that's just because somebody did hit the papers. When I started pushing dandelions around here, there's a whole we could go for days on this dandelion thing.
I know.
But but, right now just one last story on it. When we started when we put the book out in nineteen ninety four and a bunch of articles out, The local market was only selling about one hundred cases of dandelions a week. The not the farmers market, but the local food terminal, selling about one hundred cases of dandelion greens a week.
Within a year after starting to push it in the local flame dealer and other newspapers and in the magazines, they were up to six fifty cases of dandelion a week, from the whole through the whole season, whole year from from January to to January, and that had never been done before.
Wow.
We I've people had not been writing about dandelions.
And that was fascinating to me because most of the herbalists knew that they were good for you, but they weren't writing about it. And one day, I talked to to Joyce Wardwell, the gal who wrote Herbal Home Remedy, what she called her Herbal Home Remedy book.
Right.
Put out my storybooks.
Joyce Wardwell, I asked her why she started writing about dandelions and she said, you know, after your book came out, many of us, Greg Tilford, yourself, and then Rosemary Gladstar and Susan Weed and some of these others who had been timid about writing about dental hyzer featuring them, began saying, well now look, you know, I have up to that time they they didn't have enough background so if their people asked them, they could tell them.
But all of a sudden, the book was there as a Bible which had it in all the information, the background information, then I was there as a resource. They said, we felt confident now to write the articles because we knew we had a backup.
You were there watching our back. And, so they started writing and then and the work that I had started now had begun spreading all over the country. Excellent. It was appearing, dandelion articles were appearing written by different herbalists in every conceivable magazine and news for cooking schools and people would say, well, we hated dandelions and a few people would come up and say, well, they're great then those became the defenders of dandelions.
Well, beyond that, the important thing was that they not only became defenders of Dandelions, but they you began seeing more and more people at these conferences. Then I'd go to other cooking schools as the years went by. And when I first asked people in in nineteen ninety four, you know, what they knew about dandelions, they didn't know anything. They thought they were weeds. By the time nineteen ninety six came around, it says, well, I hear they're good for you. By the time nineteen ninety eight came around, they're saying, oh, we're we're eating to analyze now because we've, you know, we've learned that they're good for you. So the the general level of understanding of the value of Dandelions increased readily as people started publishing articles in variety of media and talking about them on television and radio.
And so as the years went by, the level of understanding increased. What happened back after World War II was that people who had been eating dandelion all through the Depression started asking their kids to go collect dandelions as they used to. And the kids would come up to grandma and grandpa and say, oh, you know, those were things we ate when we were hungry and we were poor. Now we have money.
You know, we don't need to do that anymore. We could buy all this food in the grocery store. And so as the years went by, dandelions stopped having defenders. These people stopped asking their kids and nobody would nobody was talking about dandelions.
The pesticide company saw a vacuum. They saw an opening there where they could come in and they could brand Dandelions as the the number one lawn villain in the country. Right. And nobody was going to fight them.
Nobody was going to contend them, contend with them. And so what happened when I came on the scene was that all of a sudden the pesticide companies had somebody who was fighting back, who was in fact taking the position of the dam line. And so they they they would no longer were were pushing out their propaganda and avoid. Right.
Now they were pushing it out there and they were they were getting people talking back at them. Oh, good.
And so and so the, this is what what what was was necessary.
What we need on the case of all of these plans, violence and purslane and all these others are people who are talking, who are spreading the word to the country, to the common people who are going out and buying vegetables at the grocery store that these plants that have they've been told all this time are weeds, aren't weeds at all. They're vegetables and they're medicines. And then you need to get to know them. And here's what you here's what they're good for. And that's exactly what we've been doing. Our our my job has been to do that the same with John Kalis and Christopher and Steve Brill and all of these others that are doing this pretty much full time.
Our job is to make people aware, to let people know that there's another side to that story.
So let's let's dig deep into the archives of, on the Trail of the Volunteer Vegetable and, resurrect them on Earth Mentor.
Because I think it'd be a great idea. Let's do it. Yeah. Well, I've See? I've got I've got a bunch of columns. I've got a bunch of columns that that ran for ten years that that give you background on all these plants, and I have much more information than a parent's own column. And so what I'll do is I'll give them to you and then let you let you push those things out there and let's get all the Herbbetter, you know, partners that our partners in in Herb Matter, let's, let's give them the the the tools that they need to go out there and defend these plants too.
And like you said, there are, you know especially when they're hearing from somebody who not just teaching this, but just doing this for fifty years. And to hear you speak today was was to so awesome for me because I really could connect with you on that level of, yeah, that's what I've been that's what got me into this twenty years ago. And and to talk to somebody who's been doing it since, you know, for fifty years, I mean, just thank you so much for the work you've done in the world.
I mean, it's Well, you're welcome. It's been my pleasure. It's a joy to do this work, and it's a joy to see people pick up on it, you know, and start becoming healthier because they're using these plants.
Well, doctor Peter Gale, king of dandelions, thanks so much for joining us today on HerbMentor Radio, and we really look forward to hearing more of you here because I only got to, like, half my questions.
Okay. Let's do it again.
And, let's get schedule another time, and we'll come back on.
Sounds great.
And we'll do another hour or so, and we'll we'll have some fun with it. And I'll start getting you some of those articles, and we'll we'll start playing with it and see what we can do with it. Meanwhile, let's make sure that all of our listeners know, or our readers know that they can find out more about this, two ways. One is w w w dot, dandy blend dot com Mhmm.
Or dot dandy blend dandy blend dot biz. You know, both of them, you should check with. And then my blog is w w w dot edible weeds dot com, and that's linked to the dandyblend dot biz and the dandyblend dot com so you can get to it from there. And that's it's not been kept up for a while, but it does give you my basic philosophy and my background.
And you'll you'll find a lot of information in there that might be useful. That it just just for your information, that's where I store stuff. When I write something, when I when I wake up at three in the morning and I write something that I wanna keep so that I'll have it available when I'm when I rewrite my book, the to the third edition, that's where I store it. So there's a lot of repetition in it because there's different ways I wanna say the same thing.
Awesome.
But but I think it it'll you'll find it very useful if you if you sort of skim through it and and pick out the stuff that's useful.
Well, on HerbMentor.com, we'll link people to those pages. So, thank you so much, and we'll see you again, Peter.
You're welcome. We'll talk to you soon.
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