Learning to Love Dandelions (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Learning to Love Dandelions (2021)

baynature.org

22 pointssome-guy20 comments

People who don't rejoice in a riot of dandelions blooming yellow across a yard either live in a place that doesn't have winter, or don't have souls. Seriously, what could be more joyful than the brilliant, saturated yellow of dandelions coming up as a celebration of spring?

I would also add that dandelion wine is probably about one of the easiest wines to make at home. You use a lot of sugar, so you've got a pretty predictable must, and you let it do its thing. You'll want to ferment it in something with a lot of headspace. The petals trap the escaping carbon dioxide and rise up bringing the mist with them. It'll messily overflow if you haven't made an allowance for this.

My partner and I are pretty lousy brewers, but we've made a couple outstanding batches of dandelion wine. It's got a little bit of bitter and a little bit of pepper, and on a winter evening, it's a reassuring reminder that spring will return and bring its celebration of life and color.

Roll the head between your thumb and finger to separate the petals from the green sepals.

Nope, dandelions suck, they're nearly impossible to kill, hard to pull out (without breaking), and flood out everything else.

I love plants and wildflowers are great, but dandelions are a pest. Winter is depressing, yes, but if you want to celebrate spring, just plant some pretty bulbs in the fall. They're not that expensive and they also don't aggressively grow to fill all space. (Though I do wonder about daffodils)

Reading essays by Aldo Leopold [0] really changed my perspective a bit. He has an essay from 1943 called "What Is a Weed?" [1], and I don't think before reading it that I'd ever contemplated that question in any depth.

He argues that it is a false premise "that every wild species occasionally harmful to agriculture is, by reason of that fact, to be blacklisted for general persecution [1]." He also argues that it's backwards to focus so much on weed control rather than weed prevention--many times weeds are the effect of some underlying cause (land misuse, etc.).

Anyway I really dig Leopold and his philosophy, if you've never heard of him give A Sand County Almanac [2] a try.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldo_Leopold

1: https://books.google.com/books?id=-StPpe04gS8C&pg=PA306&lpg=...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sand_County_Almanac

The whole disdane for this plant, is rooted in the lawn mania.

It should be noted that most sod grasses are also an invasive species in most places. And in the western US, where water is not as available as it is in South Carolina, sod lawns also require a lot of water from the Colorado River that could go to much better use.

They also, uinlike sod, don't require mowing since they don't grow to multiple feet in height if left unattended.

The US concept of a sod grass lawn as a standard home feature is another example of the US's arrested development in Happy Days.

Go mow the lawn Richie!!!

The story of taming the Sonoran Desert includes people from the northerly, Midwest areas of America who suffered various respiratory problems, and whose physicians recommended or prescribed visits to the dry desert air. Just like birds flying south for the winter, there are “snowbirds”: humans who migrate to Arizona during the wintertime.

However, Arizona has plenty of dust and sand and fungus hiding therein. Personally, I was afflicted with Valley Fever when I first arrived here.

The snowbirds who permanently settled here brought most of their hobbies with them, including golf and luxurious bluegrass lawns.

The ground vegetation often necessitates flood irrigation here. Water does not soak into the earth very far, and there are drainage problems. There are Palo Verde trees which generate a “yellow snow” of delicate flowers spreading pollen in certain seasons.

Since COVID-19 made dust masks acceptable and ubiquitous, I wear one anytime there's a risk outside of blowing dust or low air quality. I also cultivate a full beard for natural protection.

I wonder if this is like clover?

I read somewhere that clover was a part of lawns, until "somehow someone" decided it had to go and chemicals were designed to eradicate it.

now lawns are philosophically grass, without clover.

Clover isn't fun to deal with, it really likes to migrate off the lawn into my flower beds, and hide under plants until it's substantial.

Clover is a great nitrogen fixer.

So if you buy products to remove it but then apply other chemicals to add back nutrients, you're simply making the chemical industry happy.

> “Back in the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, it was intentionally included in lawn seed mixes,”

wow, things went further than I thought. Not just allow it, but include it.

I don't use any chemicals on my lawn anyway. I just weed out the clover when it grows into my flower beds. My plan is on removing as much lawn as possible.

Apparently the shift happened around mid-century: https://gazette.com/life/clover-lawns-colorado-expert-shares...

I can say that in the early 1960s, the understanding was that dandelions were weeds, clover was just clover. Or maybe that was just the understanding in Ohio. My wife grew up in Pennsylvania and doesn't like clover.

But I should say that my mother-in-law did make dandelion salad now and then, with bacon-and-egg dressing, the bacon cooked but the eggs raw.

Note that in the author's area (San Francisco Bay) dandelions are an invasive species.

iirc the Dandelions we know are are native to Eurasia and are considered invasive across the US. They were brought over by early settlers for their health benefits

i have heard they were a garden plant but i dont know if that was an informal "spread the seeds and harvest where they pop up" or more of a row crop kind of thing...

My understanding is that they aren't nearly as problematic as some other non-native plants though, like veldt grass, pampas grass, English ivy, sourgrass (African wood-sorrel), ice plant, Himalayan blackberry, cotoneaster, periwinkle, etc.

dandelion flowers are eddable and good with fish fist soaked in vinegar water, and then fryed with fish, and along with forced rhubarb and spruce bud tea, were part of the early spring diet.After long winters of root vegatables and preserves, the first fresh plant foods were litteral life savers as they provided nutrients absent from foods availible in winter. And in the profligate way of nature dandylions stand up and say ! there is nothing you can do! eat me ! more !punny humans, you have eaten none of us!

>dandelion flowers are eddable and good with fish fist soaked in vinegar water

Is it still a fish if it has fists?

no. but if wishes were fishes all men would cast nets

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