The poke tree

August 05, 2018  •  Leave a Comment

The American Pokeweed, a.k.a. Phytolacca americana, is a native problem and opportunity. As is clear from this photo of my granddaughter Stasia hefting one of the monster plants, which can top eight feet in height and four feet in spread, P. americana can often get out of hand and become a problematic weed. It's a perennial, with a taproot that goes so deep you can almost never get rid of the plant by simply cutting it down. It'll be back next year, but that would be true even if chopping worked. Lots of birds, including Catbirds, Mockingbirds, and Cardinals, relish the copious dark berries that Poke produces, and when the gourmands poop out the seeds, the new plants pop up everywhere... again. One way to get revenge is to eat what singer Tony Joe White called "poke sallet," a southern traditional delicacy made by boiling the leaves and stems several times to remove most of the toxicity they carry. The properly-prepared leaves are supposed to taste like spinach, the stems like asparagus, but it's always struck me as too much work for too little return. I'll leave the Poke to the birds... except for the monsters trying to take over the vegetable garden. Those have got to go. Stasia can use them as umbrellas—no boiling required.


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