No Salad for Supper, Please

Pretty poison in the soybeans.

If you visit a farm in southern Iowa in late July and go for a walk around a large soybean field, you might just welcome a vibrant pop of unexpected color in the dense bushy green canopy.   

Phytolacca americana, a wild native perennial also called pokeweed, pokeberry, even *poke salad, is a visual stand out alongside the soybean field. This ungainly plant with bright magenta stems and tightly bundled green flower buds stands 4-6 feet tall and offers a burst of color in an ocean of green.

"Down in Louisiana Where the alligators grow so mean Lived a girl I swear to the world Made the alligators look tame. Everyday before suppertime She’d go down by the truck patch And pick her a mess of Poke salad And carry it home in a tote sack."

Tony Joe White

Late in summer the buds will mature into dark juicy purple berries and feed just about any bird that comes along. Mockingbirds, brown thrashers, eastern bluebirds, crows, cardinals, starlings, woodpeckers and mourning doves will gobble up pokeberries, and so will migratory birds on the way south to their wintering grounds.   

But, please pay attention! All parts of the pokeweed – berries, roots, leaves and stems – are poisonous to humans (and dogs, cats, horses and livestock) so in spite of folklore and swamp rock songs from the 70s, don’t make a salad, Annie.

*Poke Salad Annie (Tony Joe White)