Not long ago I did a post on dandelion wine, and the comments soon included the food and (possible) medicinal uses. And that gave me the idea that perhaps a topic devoted to edible and medicinal wild plants might be in order. SO, I'll give it a try.

I thought I would start this topic off with dandelions. They're not the most useful plant, but they certainly are abundant, and everyone knows what they look like. For that reason alone, it serves as a pretty good introduction to the subject.


This is my dad’s old recipe for dandelion wine.

One 5-gallon plastic bucket (or thereabouts)

One gallon of dandelion flowers (flowers only, not the green sepals which are bitter)

One gallon of boiling water

Three lemons

Three oranges

Four pounds of sugar

One yeast cake, or one packet of dry yeast

Bottles and corks

Place a gallon of dandelion flowers in the bucket, pour a gallon of boiling water over them, and let stand for 24 to 48 hours. During this time, the flowers should rise.

Add the juice from the lemons and oranges, and stir. Add the sugar and the crumbled yeast cake (or packet of dry yeast) and stir lightly every few hours until the fermentation ceases. (When it stops bubbling, fermentation has ended.) Strain, bottle, and cork.

There’s roughly a zillion slightly different recipes for this, so feel free to experiment.

Dandelion leaves are best gathered in early spring, before the flowers develop. Allied POW’s in WWII ate them raw in salads, but if you desire, they can also be boiled or steamed. The flowers themselves (again, minus the green sepals) are often added to a batter and made into fritters.

The dandelion has a long, deep taproot, which is pretty hard to dig up. I’ve heard the root, when roasted, tastes a little like popcorn. Consider the trouble it takes to dig it up, I think if I want popcorn I’ll buy it.

I’ve also heard a decoction made from the taproot is good for a hangover. Boil half an ounce of finely chopped taproot in 3/4 of a quart of water for about half an hour, until about a third of the water is boiled away, and strain. Sip this liquid several times throughout the day. It’s supposed to remove the toxins from the liver, gallbladder, and kidneys.

Again, I’ve never tried it. In any event, I doubt it would have worked with the last hangover I had, a monumental ouzo hangover in Greece. But then again, I don’t think morphine would have helped that one.

Onward and upward,
airforce