Green and Growing

Humans have always shaped nature to meet their needs. Each group here had ways of creating ideal conditions for food plants to grow. 

Meadow and Forest Gardens 

Esopus people thinned forests to bring sunlight into thickets and turned fallow cornfields into meadows, transplanting favorite edible plants, while leaving other areas undisturbed to allow natural growth. What looked to Europeans like wild foraging was really the result of planning and cultivation. Lacking awareness of Indigenous practices, European farmers often destroyed these food sources. 

• Common Milkweed (pihtookŭnam) A favorite cooked springtime green for the Lenape to this day.
• Goosefoot (waxkanúsak) A relative of quinoa, its shoots and leaves serve as a spring cooked green. Before the arrival of corn, goosefoot seeds could be used to make mush.
• Ramps Wild leeks, rich in oniony flavor and vitamin C, grow in shady, undisturbed forests.

“This is a Native way of learning: We learn about the [plants] from being part of a family, growing up around them, talking about them … learning how to dry them and preserve them for use throughout the year, and how much to use at a time to the person who is going to take them. This was all done through conversation and oral tradition.”
—Misty Cook, Mohican herbalist and author, Medicine Generations

Kitchen Gardens 

Europeans built garden beds, or potagers, a few steps from their homes, considering them both ornamental and functional. Vegetables and herbs brought from their home countries played a central role in their diets. 

• Cabbage Versatile, bulky, and calcium-rich, a daily mealtime staple
• Chervil With other aromatics, gave fresh, licorice-y flavor to “pot-herbs”
• Carrots Crisp, gingery Dutch carrots were purple and yellow (orange carrots were bred later)

Missing Ingredient: African Greens 

West and West Central Africans ate more than 150 species of wild greens, from bitter-leaf to jute mallow. Missing spinach-like amaranth, displaced Africans identified local amaranths eaten by Esopus people and added them to soups and stews. 

American Groundnuts 

Esopus people dug and boiled these starchy tubers. Africans may have found them similar to cocoyam (taro), a tropical starchy root.