Dandelion (Cultivated)

Starting about 4-6 weeks before your last frost, scatter seed on the soil surface or barely cover it, and keep the bed moist. Expect germination in about ten days once soil reaches 55F. Thin or set plants 6 to 9 inches apart in rows 12 inches apart, and count on 85 to 95 days to a full-sized plant. Dandelion seed germinates from the surface or under only the barest cover, so a deep sowing is the usual reason a bed comes up thin. Give it moisture and about 55F soil and it runs in roughly ten days.

Lift the taproots in early spring, when they eat much like a turnip and roast into a chicory-like coffee substitute. Dig when the soil is moist, and expect to go down some way - the root usually runs 6 to 12 inches and can reach 3 feet. The root is at its best dug in early spring, and its depth is exactly what lets the plant shrug off drought and competition the rest of the year.

Pick fully open blossoms early in the day while they are still full of nectar, and use them the same day for fritters, wine, or jam. Leave a good share of the patch unpicked. Cut blossoms close up quickly once off the plant, so they do not hold; and the flowers are sweetest early in the season. The early bloom is also a first nectar and pollen source for honey bees at a point when little else is open.

As soon as the yellow fades and before the head opens into a white puffball, snap or cut the flower stalks off at the base. Do this every few days through the bloom flush, and bag the heads rather than composting them loosely. A single plant can throw up to 20,000 viable seeds, each on a feathery pappus that carries it well beyond your bed - and if you ever want to move the patch, note that the plant also regrows from broken pieces of taproot, so a half-dug root is not a removed one.

Dandelion can be sown any time from early spring through late summer. Put in a second surface sowing in late summer, on the same 6 to 9 inch spacing, to bring fresh rosettes on as the spring planting turns bitter and goes to flower. Leaf quality is tied to the plant's flowering state rather than to the calendar, so a younger cohort of plants is the only reliable way to keep tender leaves coming through autumn.

Take the leaves while they are young and tender, and get the main cut in before the first flower buds appear in the rosette. Older leaves are still worth having, but treat them as a cooking green rather than a salad green. The leaves are at their most flavorful in early spring before the plant sets its first buds; once it shifts energy into flowering, the leaves turn markedly more bitter.