Transcription
This is the new and greatly improved wild lettuce identification guide. By the end of this video, you are going to be able to easily differentiate wild lettuce from similar-looking plants. You know, my first video on the subject, I released over 4 years ago, and since then, I've learned a lot and I've grown as a forager and an educator. So, in this video, I'm going to be covering how to recognize the flowers of wild lettuce, which we missed in the first one. And I'm going to show you additional, even closer lookalikes with a new key detail to distinguish them. Plus, I'm going to clear up some of the confusion that's popped up since my last video, like the toxicity of the lookalikes and the whole hair under the midrib detail.
But you may be wondering why, why are there so many lookalikes to wild lettuce? There's actually a really funny meme that kind of represents this. Wild lettuce is in the Aster family, particularly the Cichorieae tribe, where we just find a lot of extremely similar-looking flowers and plants. Here's the thing: they all exude a white latex when cut. That's important. This is not a distinguishing detail at all. However, within wild lettuce, whether the latex stains quickly or remains white is an important detail for another thing that we'll cover a little bit later. Despite all of their similarities, if you know what details to look for, they're actually relatively easy to recognize and tell apart.
Let's first start off with the characteristics of wild lettuce. What I'll show you applies to the three most common species in North America, which are three of the most common in the world as well. It's important to understand the biology of wild lettuce. This plant is an aggressively growing biennial, which means it has a 2-year growth cycle. In the first year, the plant grows as a basal rosette and builds up energy that's stored in a large taproot that it will use in the second year to send up a tall, robust stalk from which it will flower, produce seed, and then die, having completed its life cycle. By the way, even that taproot exudes a latex when cut. The plant will emerge at the rosette stage in early to mid-spring and then really start growing taller in the later parts of spring to early summer. Now, even timing can be used to differentiate it from some of its lookalikes, so remember that.
Another important thing to note is that as wild lettuce is something of a pioneer species, it really thrives in open, disturbed areas like fields or maybe forest edges. One of the biggest mistakes that you can make with wild lettuce and many other wild food species as well is looking for them in the woods. That is one of the worst places to find them because in a closed-canopy forest where there isn't much sunlight, that means that these plants don't have much resources to use in order to grow vigorously.
Let's talk more about those flowers, though, which personally I think are quite beautiful, but they can trick you. What we're looking at here that appears to be one flower is actually a composite flower head made up of many individual flowers. What looks like a petal is actually a single ray flower. This is a distinctive characteristic of the Aster family that wild lettuce and many of its lookalikes are a part of. Some asters, like sunflowers, have both disc and ray flowers, but lettuce only has ray flowers. The composite flowers of wild lettuce are usually less than half an inch across. The color depends on the species, but most are cream yellow, while some others are pale purple. Most species do not flower early in the year, but rather late spring to early summer. You can get a good idea of when wild lettuce and many other edible and medicinal plants will emerge and flower with my interactive forager's calendar. Here's a diagram by the Michigan Nature Guy that shows the whole compound flower head and then an individual ray flower. This was for dandelion, but it applies to wild lettuce as well.
The flowers give way to the seeds, and the seeds of wild lettuce are what I would describe as dandelion-like. They are wind-dispersed and consist of the viable seed part that connects to a little wind sail called the pappus. This plant and dandelions are both wind-dispersed. Speaking of the seed, I've been collecting some, and in a few weeks, I'll be doing a wild seed drop of wild lettuce for my Patreon members. So, if you'd like to receive wild-harvested seeds from me, be sure to join. They don't need cold stratification or anything; it's super easy. But let me know if you'd like to see a video on how to grow them.
The stalk that wild lettuce flowers from can grow quite tall, even over 8 feet in height. Before the flowers have opened up, the clusters will start out densely packed before spreading out and then opening up. If you cut the stem or break the leaves, the plant will exude a milky sap. This is perhaps one of the most iconic features of wild lettuce. I mean, it's the thumbnail of this video, after all. By the way, people ask me all the time if they could just buy wild lettuce extract straight from me. Well, I don't sell any herbal products, and honestly, I haven't had a lot of time to experiment with wild lettuce the way that I used to myself. So, even I've been getting my wild lettuce extract from Christian at wildlettuce.com. They are grown and processed by him in South Carolina. You can use the code FERAL if you'd like to get 10% off your entire order while supporting his small business and mine too. My favorite product of his is the classic wild lettuce tincture.
Okay, now let's look closer at the leaves. Now, these can come in many different shapes, shapes, and sizes. Sometimes they're deeply divided, kind of like dandelion leaves. Other times, they will be unlobed, but in both cases, they're much longer than they are wide. One of the most important characteristics is the presence of hairs along the underside of the midrib of the leaves, but there is a caveat to this that has caused some confusion from my last video, so let's clear this up. Every wild lettuce plant that I have ever found in the basal rosette stage has had these hairs present, but when the leaves are growing from the stalk, that may not be the case, especially if you're looking for those hairs on the upper leaves of a stalk in a species like *Lactuca canadensis* or *Lactuca virosa*. Very often, they'll be missing. If you do encounter that, check the very bottom leaves on the stalk, which will almost always have them present. I would say that about 95% of the wild lettuce plants that I find have midrib hairs present on at least some of the leaves. But what if you find one that doesn't have any? Sometimes those bottom leaves with the hairs, they'll die back, so you won't be able to see them well.
Here is a brand new detail for you that's going to be very important for the comparisons. Cut across the base of the leaf and look at the cross-section of the midrib. It will be distinctly triangular on wild lettuce. Triangular, not circular. Don't forget this one. You'll see why in a second, because now we're going to use all those details to compare wild lettuce to its lookalikes. If you know what characteristics to look for, this is so easy.
Starting with dandelion, all we need is two things. First, dandelion completely lacks any hairs on the midribs of the leaves. And second, dandelion has a circular midrib cross-section, not a triangular one. That's it. But a bummer for dandelion, because it is so common, is that it will never have a rigid, erect flowering stalk, and it flowers in early spring, way, way, way before wild lettuce does.
Second is sow thistle in the genus *Sonchus*. That's right, I am pronouncing it correctly now. With this one, if we try to use the triangular midrib trick, we'll run into trouble because it has one as well. But there are tons of different ways to differentiate them. First, sow thistle will shoot up and flower far before wild lettuce. That being said, they can persist for a long time and be found flowering alongside each other. So, what else? The hair trick works well here. Sow thistle will never have any midrib hairs on the top ones or the base. But in addition, the leaves of sow thistle tend to be far more deeply curled, more deeply clasping to the stem, and have sharp points on the leaves that are very painful if handled. Wild lettuce may have sharp points, but unless you're really pressing down on the midrib hairs of one of the species like prickly wild lettuce, they won't really poke you in a painful way. Finally, the composite flowers of sow thistle are way larger and far more densely clustered than wild lettuce.
Okay, so now for the new ones. First is a plant called false hawksbeard. This also comes out and flowers far before wild lettuce does. There are a lot of details that we can use to distinguish them, like the height or the timing, but I'll save you all the effort. The stem cross-sections are circular on false hawksbeard, not triangular. But in addition, the stems are densely haired, which is not the case for the vast majority of wild lettuce species. We'll talk about the toxicity of all of these lookalikes in a second, but there is one final one to cover, which is chicory.
At a glance, to me, this may be the closest lookalike to wild lettuce, but of course, with the right details, as you're going to see, they are easy to tell apart. Chicory does have a concentration of hairs along the midrib, but is also hairy parts that wild lettuce is usually not, like the stems and the rest of the upper and lower parts of the leaves. The flowers are larger on average with chicory as well. But if you're ever confused, can you guess what detail to use? That's right. All that you need to look for is the cross-section, once again, because on chicory, it's circular, and on wild lettuce, one more time, it is triangular.
There are, of course, some more lookalikes, but we've really covered the important ones and the main details that you would use to distinguish them. To sum all of this up, what I would tell you is, I don't know of any plants that look like wild lettuce with hairs concentrated on a triangular midrib. Any new lookalikes that are not covered in this video will always be added to my simple key for identifying wild lettuce, which is connected to my interactive foraging calendar that I mentioned earlier. *Crepis* or true hawk's beard is an additional one that's in there right now.
So, you may know that chicory is edible and has its own set of uses, as does sow thistle and dandelion and false hawk's beard. In fact, I don't know of any member of the Cichorieae tribe that is toxic. However, this is very important. That is not an excuse for lazily identifying wild lettuce. No matter the circumstance, we should always be 100% confident of the identity of what we're eating or consuming.
But there is one more thing. As I mentioned at the beginning of this video, I've grown a lot as a forager since my last video, and my relationship with wild lettuce has developed a lot further. I've done more experiments, which leads me to say that the vast majority of people are not only using this particular common species of wild lettuce wrong, but also that they are completely missing out on an incredible use for it where it really shines the most. This is where that detail about the staining of the latex comes into play. Check the pinned comment for that video, which I'm working on right now. But in the meantime, I think you'd be interested to learn about eating pokeweed shoots, shoots, not the leaves. This is the greatest vegetable that you have never had before. I think you're going to love that video, and I hope to see you there.