Pick Poke, a Wild Green, for Profit

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The most common way to gather the potherb in quantity is to drive a truck directly to the chosen site, usually along the edge of a "dozer-pile": those long, serpentine rows of logs left after someone clears a woodland area with a bulldozer. (Poke also grows beside fence rows, on roadsides, and in overgrown barn lots . . . but the plants are always most abundant along dozer-piles.)

The actual harvesting is simplicity itself . . . just give the stem a quick twist and it'll snap in two. Some people tote their gathered bounty in cardboard boxes or paper feed sacks, but the most efficient method is to spread an old sheet or blanket on the ground and carry armloads of poke to it . The pile, when it's sufficiently large, is transferred to the bed of the truck. (The pickup should be parked in the shade, if possible, to prevent the succulent greens from wilting . . . or a tarp can be rigged over the back of the vehicle as a canopy against the sun's rays.)

DOES IT PAY?

You can make more money on the plant than I expected . . . even at the current rate of about 5¢ a pound. It's possible for two people to pick more than a thousand pounds of poke stalks (from three or four prime growing areas) in one morning's time. And morning is the best time to harvest this plant, because it weighs more before the hot afternoon sun gets to it.

I know a family of four who who take a week's vacation in this area every year to cash in on pokeweed. They have standing picking rights with several landowners, and reap the same fields every year. A good day brings them between $100 and $125 . . . and the pickers still have time to visit the "ol' swimmin' hole"—or enjoy a canoe trip down the river—during the afternoon!

Some people fear (and many farmers hope) that the heavy annual harvest will lead to the extinction of the potherb, but there seems to be no danger of that. A plant that's cut to the ground in June will send up new shoots (from the many eyed perennial root) and produce viable seed by fall. And, contrary to popular belief, poke comes up readily from seed. (I've seen tiny seedlings in a mat "thick as hair on a dog" alongside our dozer-piles.)

SEARCH IT OUT

If you live in a poke-growing area (you can find the prevalent plant in eastern North America from Mexico to Maine, and on north into Quebec and Ontario) but are not familiar with the weed . . . you should plan to learn to recognize it between midsummer and the first frost. Because—although the newly emerging spears might be confused with other plants by the untrained eye—mature poke is hard to mistake for anything else. Fully grown specimens are bushy and tall (up to nine feet or more) . . . and they have large, alternate, elliptical, pointed, dark green leaves. Their stout stems are smooth, hairless, and purple ... and the small, white to greenish-white to pinkish flowers turn to long-stalked, slender clusters of blackish-purple berries (which have crimson-colored juice and tight-packed seeds).

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