Lamb's Quarter

What’s blooming in the area behind the walls and fences: Hybrid tea roses, roses of Sharon, buddleia, lilies, daylilies, silver lace vine, honeysuckle, trumpet creeper, Heavenly Blue morning glories, Russian sage, purple phlox, Sensation cosmos, zinnias; green tomatoes and squash visible from road; cut alfalfa.

Outside the fences: Tamarix, Apache plume, winterfat, Queen Anne’s lace, whorled milkweed, leather-leaf globemallows, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, white and yellow evening primroses, bindweed, datura, bush morning glory, stickleaf, Dutch, white prairie, and white sweet clovers, buffalo gourd, goat’s head, alfilerillo, silver-leaf nightshade, 5' pigweed common, Russian thistle, goat’s beard, hawkweed, paper flower, Santa Fe thistle, spiny lettuce, horseweed, strap-leaf and golden hairy asters, áñil del muerto, native sunflowers, goldenrod, gumweed, Tahokia daisy, sideoats grama; with rains, late summer plants began emerging including lamb’s quarter, new Russian thistles, clammy weed, purslane, ivy leaf morning glory and prostrate knotweed.

In my yard looking north: Miniature roses, blackberry lily, golden spur columbine, Harweig evening primrose, squash, nasturtium, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Parker’s Gold yarrow, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, anthemis, orange coneflower.

Looking east: Floribunda roses, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, coral bells, Jupiter’s beard, coral beardtongue, large-leaf soapwort, baby’s breath, pink evening primrose, Saint John’s wort, reseeded morning glory, garlic chives; buds on hosta, Autumn Joy sedum, cut-leaf coneflower; ripening everbearing raspberries

Looking south: Blaze and rugosa roses, Illinois bundle flower, sweet peas, tomatillos.

Looking west: Caryopteris, catmint, lady bells, David phlox, white spurge, blue flax, sea lavender, perennial four o’clock, calamintha, purple coneflower; Mönch aster.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, snapdragon, nicotiana, sweet alyssum, tomato.

Inside: Aptenia, zonal geraniums, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbirds in pairs, geckos, sulphur butterfly, bees, grasshoppers, black harvester ants, explosion of small red ant hills.

Weather: More bad air; rain last night; 13:59 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: When writers try to imagine the life of hunter-gatherers, they usually are more interested in hunting. This not only reflects their readers’ interests, but the technology of spears is something that can be described and the excitement of the chase dramatized. The resulting meal can provide the festive background necessary for other parts of the narrative.

The only person I’ve read who captures the challenge of gathering to survive is Julian Steward. The Shoshoni speakers of the Great Basin steppes lived in an environment where the fall gathering of piñon nuts was nutritionally more important than communal rabbit hunts that didn’t occur every year and more reliable than game animals so rare they couldn’t provide enough skins to keep them clothed and shod.

During much of the year, nuclear families roamed alone seeking seeds protected by hard shells and small animals like mice, gophers, insects and lizards. In spring, after nature had dispersed the seeds, they turned to greens. If they were near a stream, they could forage for roots.

The "what" and "how" of survival were learned early. Steward says there were less than a hundred edible species in their range. More difficult was learning "where" and "when" a plant might be available. When rainfall varied by place and year, and seeds lay dormant in the soil, each child learned to be observant and draw conclusions.

The Española valley is more hospitable than the intermontane west, but rainfall is still erratic. This year’s wet winter and early spring meant there were greens early. However, the high temperatures of the past few weeks, both in the early morning and afternoon, shortened the blooming periods of forbs and turned grasses and shrubs brown. Before last weekend’s rains, traditional people would have been anxious.

When I went out in the mist last Sunday, the first newly emerged plant I saw was lamb’s quarter, growing in the biological crust on the flat land above the arroyo. The smooth stems, with their wax covered green leaves were no more than 6 inches high. They usually appear in my drive in early May, but rarely get much taller. The ones outside my window in northern New Jersey were 6 feet by mid-summer.

Lamb’s quarter’s an old world plant that probably crossed the ocean multiple time in seed stocks. Even today, the Henry Doubleday Research Association reported the black seeds in lots of clover, carrots, lettuce and wheat from England, Canada and Denmark.

The member of the goosefoot family was adapted by tribes in every part of the country as a green, one that was usually boiled. The leaves contain vitamin C and calcium. The only ones who ate the seeds rich in protein and vitamin A were in the west, the Hopi, Navajo, Paiute and some in Montana.

The annual has been eaten as far back as we know. The first confirmed instance was a handicapped young boy who’d been stabbed and placed in a Kayhausen peat bog in lower Saxony that tanned his skin, ate his bones and preserved the contents of his stomach. He’s been dated to 300 to 400 bc in an area that traded with Rome but still used iron tools.

The earliest farmers in central Europe spread the Bandkeramik culture up the Danube, then across a belt of fertile loess soils where they grew wheat, peas and lentils between 5400 bc and 4500 bc. Lamb’s quarter probably increased. The taproots do better on nitrogen rich, cultivated soils. One reason they’re so nutritious is their hairs absorb trace minerals that are passed through to the leaves and seeds.

Corrie Bakels found parched, unripened seed in the wheat chaff from Bandkeramik sites in Germany, which suggest it was a field weed removed when the grain was husked. She also discovered reports from three areas in the Netherlands with soil samples that were almost exclusively lamb’s quarter seed, both ripe and unripe, which she believes came from people cleaning the greens to eat, not as a crop, but as a gathered familiar.

While Chenopodium album is a recent arrival in the Americas, related plants in the genus arrived earlier. Owen Davis found the closely related amaranth and chenopods marked the appearance of modern plant communities in the Great Basin in the Pleistocene periods when the glaciers were receding.

Uncarbonized Chenopodim berlandieri seeds have been found at Cloudsplitter and Newt Kash rockshelters in eastern Kentucky, suggesting the plant was being domesticated east of the Mississippi around 1400 bc.

In México, berlandieri subspecies were cultivated as were quinoa and ambrosioides. The first continue to be grown as chia and huauzontle; the second was introduced from the Andes and used in Aztec religious ceremonies; apazote is still eaten in Mayan areas.

In early southwestern settlements, Chenopodium seed remains are found that are difficult to isolate from the more common amaranths, and disappear after the adoption of corn.

In this immediate area the alien lamb’s quarter’s too fussy to become a staple, and was not mentioned by the Tewa in 1916. In Frijoles Canyon on the Pajarito Plateau, only a few plants are found each year in late July. The only years I’ve seen many here were 1999 and 2001. I saw more turning burgundy in the autumns of 2006 and 2007 where my neighbor kept horses. In England Dirty Dick’s known for colonizing manure piles.

Last weekend, this cohabitant with the earliest farmers was startling in its brightness, a surprise, even if I was only gathering wool when I found it.

Notes:
Bakels, C. "Tracing Crop Processing in the Bandkeramik Culture," in Jane M. Renfrew, New Light on Early Farming: Recent Developments in Paleoethnobotany, 1991; the early neolithic sites were Beek-Molensteeg (one area) and Geleen-Haesselderveld (two areas).

Behre, Karl-Ernst. "Collected Seeds and Fruits from Herbs as Prehistoric Food," Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 17:65-73:2008; on Kayhausen.

Bond, W., G. Davies, R. Turner. "The Biology and Non-Chemical Control of Fat-Hen (Chenopodium album L.)," Henry Doubleday Research Association website, November 2007.

Coile, Nancy C. and Carlos R Artaud. "Chenopodium ambrosioides L., (Chenopodiaceae): Mexican Tea, Wanted Weed?," Florida Department of Agriculture, Division of Plant Industry, Botanical Circular 33, 1997.

Davis, Owen K. "The Late Pleistocene Development of Sagebrush Steppe in the Eastern Great Basin," American Association of Stratigraphic Palynologists annual meeting, 1994.

Dunmire, William M. and Gail D. Tierney. Wild Plants of the Pueblo Province, 1995.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998; summarizes data from a number of ethnographies.

Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco. Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.

Smith, Bruce D. "Eastern North America as an Independent Center of Plant Domestication," National Academy of Sciences Proceedings 103:12223–12228:2006.

Steward, Julian H. "The Great Basin Shoshonean Indians: An Example of a Family Level of Sociocultural Integration," in Theory of Cultural Change, 1965, condensed from "Basin-Plateau Sociopolitical Groups," Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin, 1938.

Photograph: Lamb’s quarter growing on dark soil crust near the prairie arroyo, 25 July 2010.