How to Plant and Grow Miner’s Lettuce (Claytonia) Claytonia spp.
As a teenager out on a hike on a cloudy March day, I came across a plant that had strange round leaves, each with a stem sticking right through the middle and a tiny white flower at the top. I was out hunting for ghost towns, but I’d found something much more exciting.
I’d heard about the fabled “miner’s lettuce,” a plant that prospectors carried with them into the gold mines during the days of the gold rush in western North America to help them avoid scurvy.
Now, let’s be clear. While we don’t have any clear records to confirm as much, I’d bet my last dollar that these laborers learned about the plant from the native people inhabiting the area.
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Native people had been eating the plants for centuries before prospectors started tunneling into the ground.
Anyway, here I was, a teenager looking at those legendary greens, and I was so excited that my companions wondered if I had discovered literal gold. In my mind, it was even better.
The distinctive leaves made it easy to identify my first foraged greens. I munched tentatively on a few leaves, and I immediately had the foraging bug.
I enjoyed them so much, and since I couldn’t always count on finding them in my suburban neighborhood, I figured I’d need to grow my own.
Cut to a few years later and me begging my mom to stop pulling up the seedlings I’d surreptitiously planted among her ornamentals. She insisted they were weeds, but I knew better.
Now that I’m an adult with my own garden, I can and do grow this plant every winter and spring in my garden, and year-round as microgreens on my windowsill.
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