A couple of salt marsh edibles

In the swamp this afternoon seeing how the cattails and a few others edibles are coming along and decided to continue over the dyke into the salt marsh. Here in the photo is a plant with tasty edible leaves known as Orache, this is the most common Atriplex in this marsh and its leaves will start to shrink as it stretches upwards in the warmer weather, so now is a good time to gather a few.

Another look at its spear shaped leaf.

Some other animal has been walking over the dyke and has found and nibbled on these nice tender seaside plantain (Plantago martima), known locally as goose-tongue and passé-pierre.

In the marsh’s taller grass the seaside plantain had long slender succulent leaves over a foot long, harder to see and more difficult to graze as many other plants with similar leaves were well mixed in with them, I needed to check twice on some of them, here they are laying on some dried grass with a couple of orache sprouts in view. I think I’ll sit here for a bit and them home to steam some greens.

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Salt marsh salad greens

It’s low tide now though the muddy area which is approximately 40 ft  below the grassy salt marsh in the photo will be covered in salt water twice a day, everyday, here in the Bay of Fundy, home of the world’s highest tides. This salt marsh and the surrounding dykelands have provided me with numerous summer salad greens and pot herbs over the last 3 decades, so I’ll show you just 3 that are starting to make an appearance now.

On the salt marsh side of the dyke’s bank, here is a common edible plant which grows throughout  much of N.A. and is known as Sow-thistle (Sonchus arvensis).

This one is also on the dyke’s edge and is rarely foraged in the maritime provinces, it is a coastal plant in north-eastern N.A., though I’m going to introduce it inland into my garden this year, Scotch Lovage (Ligusticum scothicum).

There are a few different varieties of Orache out here on the salt marsh and I’ll stick with the most common name used I suspect, Atriplex hastata. There are well over 10 other good edibles greens growing out in this area which I will show you this summer as they appear, many can go directly into salads un-cooked and also make excellent ingredients in stir-fry as well.

Solidago and Suaeda

I haven’t posted any photos or talked about any seaside or salt marsh plants in my blog, but that will all changes tonight as I just transplanted a couple of plants from an isolated beach with a nice salt marsh tucked in behind it.

Seaside goldenrod (Solidago sempervirens) which I’ve never used as an edible plant, though I’ve often admired its healthy green-ness while gathering other seaside greens. It turns out the Monarch butterfly is also attracted to this plant and frequently visit its flowers for nourishment. I’ve recently  become more interested in the goldenrod family and will start making some teas in the near further from seaside goldenrod and a few other goldenrod members.

This Seablite (Suaeda americana) looks like I haven’t been very nice to it, but the truth is it was just as sprawling where I gathered it from as it is now. I may experiment with growing Seablite sprouts this winter. Seablite is another plant I haven’t paid much attention to over the years as the more popular maritime greens like goosetongues, glassworts, seabeach sandwort and sea-rocket were the ones I was gathering for use as vegetables or they were going in the salad bowl. Great fun to stop and get better aquainted with these plants I’ve been kinda just nodding to on my way by for plenty of decades now. ciao