Tag: carrots

Know Your Herbs: Queen Anne’s Lace

Queen Anne's Lace flowers

A tall delicate looking flower has made its appearance in recent years here in northern New Hampshire. Known as Queen Anne’s Lace, it is a non-native biennial plant said to be a progenitor of the garden carrot. Some states designate it as ‘invasive’ but it’s an attractive enough flower that it can make a nice addition to wildflower bouquets containing other ‘invasives’.

The flowers consist of umbrels of tiny white blossoms with a curious minute purple flower directly in the center which is said to be vestigial. They have no perfume that I can detect (other than a faint musty odor) and the only pollinators I have seen upon it are flies and ants. At first I thought the ants might be herding aphids but close examination of the blossoms showed no sign of aphids. Some garden carrots I planted a second year to see what they would do, produced identical flowers to the Queen Anne’s Lace and had the same visitors.

An alternate name for this plant is Bird’s Nest. When the blossoms go by, they begin curling inwards producing a cup-shaped seed head.

Queen Anne's Lace seed head

The ‘nest’ has small seeds around the edges with burr-like bristles which can catch on animal fur or clothing and so disperse the seeds.

Commercial carrots do exactly the same thing which is why Queen Anne’s Lace is also known as Wild Carrot. If you dig up the root of Queen Anne’s Lace, you will find a long narrow yellowish tap root with a carroty odor. They are edible but no where near as flavorable as the supermarket carrots. Also it is recommended that only first year plants be used as second year roots will be bitter tasting.

This, of course, brings us to the issue of identification. Queen Anne’s Lace has several toxic look-alikes such as Fool’s Parsley and Poison Hemlock. Various field guides will explain the minor differences which will help you distinguish between them. I use the Peterson Field Guide to Wildflowers but there are many others which are useful. Make sure you can safely identify them all before you begin experimenting with wild edibles. Gathering plants should be a fun project, not a one-way trip to the hospital or morgue.

In addition to its edibility, Queen Anne’s Lace has medicinal properties. It can be used as a diuretic for removing excess water from the body. In addition to being an anti inflammatory, it is helpful for the digestion and is thought to have anti-cancer and contraceptive properties. While little or no research has been done to confirm all the possible benefits of Queen Anne’s Lace, its reputation at least as a diuretic and digestive aid, can make it worth your while to add this to your personal pharmaceutical collection. If you have a garden, you can acquire the seeds of this interesting plant to grow yourself.

Have a happy August!

Commercial Carrots grown in garden
Queen Anne’s Lace’s modern day commercial descendant

Summers’ End 2023

As summer draws near its end, I like looking back at the season gone by. The biggest impression I have of it is the rain. Rain,rain,rain,rain,rain…etc. You get the picture. For almost a decade now, the summers have been abnormally dry, creating moderate to severe drought conditions in New Hampshire. Now the pendulum has swung in the other direction. For the month of July we received nearly 10 inches of rain in the northern half where I live, about triple what the average rainfall usually is. While I didn’t measure the rain in June, it seemed to be a similar amount. Flash flooding in the southern half of the state was severe, with many roads getting washed out and farmers getting their fields too soaked for anything to sprout. August has been drier with about four inches as of the 21st, but there’s still a few weeks to go.

The plants of course have been loving it. You can almost hear a collective green sigh: Finally some decent rain! After the freak hard freeze of mid-May, oak trees quickly rebounded with new growth, though I see no sign of acorns. Mosquitoes, after a noted absence during the dry years, have experienced a renaissance, back in full force and as ferociously hungry as ever.

I expected to see a bumper crop of mushrooms this year but was surprised to see they are in no more abundance this summer than last. Still, one type of mushroom popped up in the back yard that I haven’t seen for a couple years; the morel.

morel mushroom

I’m not a mushroom eater, so I left this specimen to run its life cycle and drop its spores for the next round of morels.

ghost pipes flowers

I spotted this patch of ghostpipes about a month ago. Many people, unfamiliar with the plant life in their neighborhoods, confuse these with mushrooms but they are actually a vascular plant, a flower in the same family as heather. Ghostpipes are parasitic, feeding off certain fungi in the soil. Because of this, they have no need for chlorophyll, hence their white coloration.

mullein plant in early summer

Mullein is an herbaceous biennial, preferring roadsides and waste areas. This particular plant is in its second year, going from the rosette above in late spring to this in late summer….

mullein in full flower, late summer

Just over four feet in height, it will drop its seeds in late summer and early fall, sowing the next generation. I’ll be collecting a few seeds and see if I can get this plant to grow on the bank in front of my home.

My garden loved the drenching rains as well.

echinacea flowers

The echinacea is quite tall this year at over four feet (you can see some beebalm in the background).

pink and white phlox

Phlox, both pink and white, are blooming profusely.

black-eyed Susans

Black eyed Susans are doing well. I have both a domesticated version as well as the wild form. This is the domesticated flower.

I’m trying a experiment this year. At the beginning of the growing season, I found I still had several carrots which I had grown last year, in the bottom of the refrigerator drawer, unused. They had bright green leaves sprouting from their tops, so on a whim I planted them to see if they would grow.

carrot flowers

They quicky took off with great gusto as the above picture shows, obviously ready for the second half of their life cycle. Carrots are biennials. The roots we see in the stores are the first year growth. The second year they produce flowers looking much like Queen Anne’s Lace, which isn’t surprising since Queen Anne’s is a wild ancestor of the store-bought carrot. They will hybridize quite freely, producing their ancestral form rather than the carrots we’re fond of.

Since there’s no Queen Anne’s Lace growing nearby (that I know of), the carrots I’m using, a Yellowstone and a Chanteray, should have each other to cross with. Yellowstone is open pollinated but I’m not sure about the other as the seed packet is long gone. Any seeds I collect, will be planted next year. What will grow, if anything, is anyone’s guess. Stay tuned!

Hope you all had a happy summer.

Dippy Hippy

Peace, man.