Bitterroot Mts live up to their name.

The branching taproot of Bitterroot

A few weeks ago Katrina and I traveled to Missoula for the Northwest Scientific Association Conference. She presented her Master’s research and we both attended several great talks related to fire ecology, wetlands, climate change, and bryology. We made a point of leaving some time to explore the dry slopes around Missoula for early spring edible roots. In particular, I was keen to find Bitterroot (Lewisia rediviva), and a type of biscuit root called Cous Root (Lomatium cous), since both are traditional root vegetables of major importance to Native Americans throughout the dryland forests of Columbia River watershed.

The large Bitterroot flowers range from pink to white.

Wild onions

When we arrived in Missoula, the north slopes of all the surrounding mountains were still covered with snow from a late winter blizzard. I was worried that we were too early and the plants would still be dormant, but just like in the Cascades, the perennial roots had quickly sprung up after the snow melted. It even snowed a few inches one morning, but hastily melted in the afternoon, further coaxing the precocious leaves of Wild Onions, Camas, Bitterroot and Cous Root from their wintery reserves.

A small thick Cous Root

Both Bitterroot and Cous Root seemed to prefer to grow in rocky meadow soil. They take advantage of the moisture from snow melt and flower very early in the season, but I was even earlier. No sign of the huge pink Bitterroot flowers were visible yet and the plant's presence was only discernible by small tentacle like leaves. Cous Root produces leaves and flowers at nearly the same time, but both were still in the early stages of unfurling. Soil that probably becomes dry and impenetrable later in the year yielded to my digging stick and I pried out several starchy roots of both species, quickly realizing why Indigenous harvesters of these roots employed narrow tipped digging sticks that easily pierce tough soils and slide between rocks. These roots were smaller than I had imagined, but they were also more abundant than I thought they would be.

Cous Root Distribution (CPNWH)

Emerging flowers and leaves

Cous Root is a sparsely leaved yellow flowered tap rooted herbaceous perennial. Blue-green Tri-pinnately compound leaves arise basally, or from the bottom of the flowering stalk; leaflets are elliptic and up to 15 mm long; the base of the leaf petioles are broad and flattened, red or streaked with red, and wrap around the flowering stalk. Yellow flowers emerge in a compound umbel with or shortly after the leaves on a 10-35 cm long stalk; each umbel is comprised of 5-20 rays (stalks) that are 1.5-10 cm long at maturity. Well-developed involucel bractlets that are 2-5 mm long subtend each cluster of flowers, but an involucre (bracts below the larger compound umbel) is absent. The short taproots often have tuberous enlargements. Cous Root grows in open dry meadows in rocky soil in southeastern Washington, eastern Oregon, Idaho, western Montana, and northern Nevada.

Cous Root line-up

Rehydrated Cous Root

Native Americans throughout the plants range peeled and ate Cous Roots fresh or dried. Dried roots were often pulverized into flour or meal and later boiled to thicken and flavor soups (Moerman 1998). The common name and species epithet “Cous” comes to us from the Sahaptin word x̣̣awš, which is also written coush (Hilty et al. 1980; Hunn 1990; Ettinger and Harless 1995). Eugene Hunn writes that Native Americans living along the Mid-Columbia traditionally harvested as much as 60 bushels or Cous, Bitterroot, and other spring root vegetables every year. Some, such as my friend Heather, still harvest Cous and Bitterroot every spring. Cous is dug after the seeds have formed in late March or April at lower elevations and as late as June at higher elevations. At this time the bark is easy to peel from starchy roots (Hilty et al. 1980).

 

Bitterroot Distribution (CPNWH)

Bitterroot prior to flowering

Bitterroot is a very small herbaceous perennial with a proportionately large flower. Small linear leaves arise in the early spring in a basal rosette; each leaf is 1-5 cm long and 2-3 mm with a thick fleshy consistency and blue-green color that makes them resemble sea anemone. In May or June large white, pink, or purple flowers emerge singly or in clusters of 2-5 on short stems. Branching taproots 5-10 cm long reach into the gravely or rocky soil that they inhabit. Bitterroots grow in sagebrush plains and open forests in the mountains east of the Cascade Crest in southern British Columbia southward to California and eastward to Montana and Wyoming.

A small but stout Bitterroot

Peeled and dried Bitterroot

Like Cous, the roots of Bitterroot were universally eaten by Native Americans wherever they were found. The skin of the roots is exceedingly bitter thus leading to the common name, but traditional harvesters deliberately harvested the roots in the spring before they flowered when the skins easily slip off yielding a starching root that only has the slightest hint of bitterness.

I've transplanted both species into pots in my back yard so that I can continue my experiments with these tasty roots without having to drive over the mountains.

References

Consortium of Pacific Northwest Herbaria (CPNWH). http://www.pnwherbaria.org/

Ettinger, Marjorie L. and Susan E. Harless 1995. “Warm Spring Reservation of Oregon: Botanical Descriptions and Floral Checklist.” Kalmiopsis. http://www.npsoregon.org/kalmiopsis/kalmiopsis05/ettinger_harless.pdf

Hilty, Ivy E. Jean H. Peters, Eva M. Benson, Margaret A. Edwards, and Lorrain T. Miller 1980. “Nutritive Values of Native Foods of Warm Spring Indians.” Extension Circular 809, Oregon State University Extension Service, Corvallis Oregon. http://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1957/24929/ECNO809.pdf?sequence=1

Hunn, Eugene S. 1990. “Nch’i-Wána: ‘The Big River’, Mid-Columbia Indians and Their Land.” University of Washington Press, Seattle WA. http://books.google.com/books?id=2Nx1guRPcu8C&q=Lomatium+cous#v=onepage&q&f=false

Moerman, Dan. “Native American Ethnobotany” database. University of Michigan, Dearborn MI.

http://herb.umd.umich.edu/

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Bigleaf Maple sap- running strong

It snowed 8” in Bellingham on Feb 23^rd and for the last week, the Bigleaf Maple taps have been running copiously. February 26^th was the best day of the year so far and I collected 66 gallons of sap. Stiff shouldered and sleepy, I am beginning to learn what it means to work on a "sugar bush": repeated trips through the forest hauling 40-60 lb containers of sap in each hand over rough terrain, followed by late nights tending the evaporator. I can’t even keep up! With so much sap, I’ve had to fill every large cooking pot in the house in addition to 50 gallons of storage capacity in the form of carboys and plastic buckets. If this keeps up, I might have to upgrade to a 55 gallon drum. 

  

 

The homemade evaporator has been performing admirably. With a backlog of sap, I have been boiling for 16 hours a day at an average rate of 1.5 gallons per hour. I have experimented with a pre-warming container to try to improve my efficiency, but it I haven’t yet worked out a system to keep the condensation that forms on the outside of the container from dripping back into the evaporator tray.

It is snowing again and I expect another few days of sap flow before the season comes to a close. With luck I will end up with more than a dozen quarts of syrup this year, five times more than last year, and enough to replace sugar for most of our sweetening needs this year. Some may say it is too much work for so little syrup, but the labor is its own reward. My shoulders are getting stronger and I always smell like maple steam and smoke - manly perfumes that draw Katrina closer when I crawl into bed after midnight.

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My Bigleaf Sugar Bush

A dripping tap. CD Lloyd Photograph

The sap is running! For the last few days we’ve had the sweet combination of freezing nights, above freezing days, and ample soil moisture that are needed to produce Bigleaf Maple (Acer macrophyllum) sap. The forecast looks very promising for the next week, so with luck we will get enough sap for several gallons of nectar al a Ent.

 

Up until now, this has been a pretty pathetic winter for maple syrup, but for strange reasons. Our first hard frost was October 29^th, which is about normal. Then three weeks later winter came on strong with a major Fraser outflow event from November 19^th through the 26^th followed by one day without frost and another 13 days of consecutive frost. What should have been three perfect weeks of weather (during a period that on average only has 2 frost days) hardly yielded a drop, a fact that I attribute to the dryness of the ground and perhaps temperatures that didn’t get far enough above freezing (usually we have the opposite problem). The weather then turned warm and wet from December 11^th to the 18^th and when the next cold snap hit I got more sap in two good days than I did the previous three weeks. January only had nine days of frost (compared to an average of 21), but hardly any sap flowed, this time perhaps on account of the temperatures that weren’t far enough below freezing, or the ground being too dry again (as any skier will tell you, we haven’t received much precipitation this winter).

Here is a graph I made from data recorded at the Bellingham Int. Airport

However, last week our luck turned and we got a good soaking of rain that was immediately followed by freezing nights. Yesterday, when I installed a few new taps, I was rewarded with immediate flow, and today my dad and I rounded up 8 gallons of sugary tree water. Oh Joy!

I've noticed needle ice on some of our best maple sap days. CD Lloyd Photograph

Last year Katrina and I had so much fun making our own maple syrup that we decided to scale our operation up considerably this year. That meant finding more trees, purchasing more taps, and building a larger evaporator. Naturally, this was all done in my frugal forager manner, so aside from the taps and hosing, everything was built myself from recycled or scrounged materials.

Bigleaf Maple tap kit

I don’t camp out at my sugar bush, so my tapping equipment must be large enough to hold a few days of sap and tight enough to keep out rain, insects, and debris. I use 5/16” Tree Saver brand taps and connect them in pairs to a ¼” barb tee with about 6” of 3/8” OD vinyl tubing (both available at any good hardware store), and then connect another 12” of tubing to a plastic 5 gallon cooking oil jug that I scavenge from a local restaurant and wash thoroughly. The rig looks a little like a stethoscope, but works well. This year we tapped all of my dad’s maples, and his neighbor was kind enough to let us tap his as well, so all told, we have about 2 dozen taps (a modest operation). We certainly would like to expand. The presence of Bigleaf Maples is high on the priority list of our “perfect” piece of property.

My worn out mini evaporator and the nearly finished replacement

Scaling up meant saying goodbye to the hole riddled woodstove that my brother salvaged from a sunken boat, and hello to something larger. But what? It is difficult to pick up a used evaporator here in the Pacific Northwest, and I learned last year that setting a pot on top of a wood stove is terribly inefficient. For a while I hankered over professionally constructed evaporators build specifically for commercial scale sugar bushes, but sticker shock finally brought me back to my senses; I’m not ready for an evaporator that is rated for 5+ gallons an hour and costs $3K. Rather, I redirected my energy towards designing and building an evaporator better suited to my needs. 1-2 gallons an hour is more than sufficient, and cheap is best of all.

Door latch

I designed my evaporator around a 21 quart (full sized) stainless steel steam table tray- the kind you see in buffets and salad bars. For $5 at the scrap yard, I had myself an evaporator tray that didn’t require any welding. The stove box, however, was another matter. From the same scrap yard, I purchased a 4’x8’ sheet of 12 gauge steel and about 10 feet of angle iron for another $50. My stove dimensions are 12” wide x 25” long x 18” tall, so I started by cutting a 12” x 86” rectangle using a ferrous metal blade in my circular saw. I carefully laid out my corners, and then kerfed out ¾ of the metal thickness in each corner and bent the sheet into a cube. I cut the angle iron into four 24” long legs, and tacked them onto the corners. Then I cut a 12”x25” base and welded it to the bottom, and welded a small piece of steel to the back end of the stove top with a 3” hole and a short piece of 3” pipe for the stove pipe junction. The door was the biggest challenge, but I found a perfect oval of steel at the scrap yard, and coaxed my dad into cutting out the same shape with a cutting torch. We fastened the door to the stove with weld-able hinges, and I made a little latch out of a bolt, a strap of steel, and an old spring. Next I drilled two air ports in the front of the stove, and welded on short sections of 2” pipe. I bricked the inside, welded up a grate, and painted the entire thing with stove paint. The evaporator tray slides down into the firebox where the flames can hit it directly, and a stove gasket is glued to the rim of the evaporator tray to seal in the heat and smoke. This was my first welding project, so the first few were terrible, but by the end, I was in the flow and I am very pleased with the product. It didn’t hurt the pocket book either- my entire evaporator cost me less than $100.

The sugar shack ready for action.

I will probably replace the 3” stove pipe with 6” stove pipe when I get some, and have plans of eventually hooking up a fan to turbo charge the burn. If I don’t use a fan, I will install some perforated pipe just under the evaporator tray to add extra oxygen. My evaporator took a while to get going with a pan of cold sap, but once it was burning hot I evaporated 4 gallons in about 3 hours on my first try. The fire box is big enough that it will burn for an hour or more between refueling, which is a nice interval for working on other projects.

Usually I only evaporate my sap to about 50 percent sugar concentration and put it in canning jars or in the freezer until I have enough to “finish” a large batch. However, Bigleaf Maple syrup has been so long anticipated this winter that I just had to finish the most recent batch. Now, ¾ of a quart of amber syrup glows brightly from the pantry. How sweet it is! I can’t wait to check the taps again.

A nice boil

Liquid gold. CD Lloyd Photograph

 Special thanks to Christian Lloyd for three of his excellent photographs. You can read about his sailing adventures and see more of his work at Life on Water.

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