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All About Miner’s Lettuce: How to Forage Miner’s Lettuce

Written by MasterClass

Last updated: Mar 22, 2022 • 2 min read

Tasty, nutritious, and relatively easy to identify, miner’s lettuce is a great plant to forage from the wild or cultivate in your backyard. Learn how to identify and prepare this wild edible.

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What Is Miner’s Lettuce?

Miner’s lettuce (Claytonia perfoliata) is an herbaceous, edible annual plant from the family Montiaceae. Miner’s lettuce, also known as winter purslane, grows in shady areas of the western mountains and coastal areas of North America, where Native Americans have consumed it for generations. Miner’s lettuce gets its common name from the California Gold Rush miners who sought a source of vitamin C to ward off scurvy. It remains a widely popular plant for foraging, as it is healthy, tasty, and easy to gather.

What Does Miner’s Lettuce Look Like?

Miner’s lettuce begins growing from small, bright green cotyledons, which are succulent and narrow. The leaves grow in a rosette pattern from the base of the plant, and several stems terminate in tiny white or pink flowers. At the bottom of the flowers are two rounded leaves that meet, giving the appearance of a single, lily-pad-like leaf.

5 Tips for Foraging for Miner’s Lettuce

Miner’s lettuce grows in shady, cool areas beneath trees and alongside waterways. If you’re hiking in the woodlands of coastal or mountainous California, you can forage for miner’s lettuce if you keep the following things in mind:

  1. 1. Know your plant. Miner’s lettuce is easy to spot. Look for rounded upper leaves, which encircle the entire stalk, with tiny white flowers growing at the center. The plant’s other leaves grow in a basal rosette pattern and are heart or fan-shaped.
  2. 2. Look for fellow edibles. Miner’s lettuce will often grow in ground cover stands alongside edible wild plants such as chickweed and dandelion. Nettles, another excellent wild edible, also grow along creeks and bodies of water. You can harvest these plants to make a wild mixed salad (although nettles, which have stinging hairs, need to be cooked first).
  3. 3. Consider the season. In its native climate, miner’s lettuce emerges in early spring after a good rain. As summer progresses and the temperatures rise, you’ll have to look closer in stands of trees and along streams and creeks. Eventually, the plants will dry out and lose their appeal as food.
  4. 4. Bring a bag for foraging. When going out to forage, it’s good to bring along bags to keep your foraged items safely contained.
  5. 5. Only take as much as you need. Miner’s lettuce grows abundantly in its natural habitat, but it’s good practice to forage moderately.

Preparing for Wilderness Expeditions

Certain outdoor activities carry an elevated risk of serious injury. Wilderness scenarios require extensive survival gear, including but not limited to food, water, maps, protective clothing, and first aid, along with mental and physical fortitude. This article is for educational and informational purposes, and is not a substitute for hard skills and expertise.

Ready to Explore More of the Great Outdoors?

Prepare for any outdoor journey by grabbing a MasterClass Annual Membership and committing Jessie Krebs’s wilderness survival course to memory. As a former United States Air Force Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape instructor, Jessie can teach you everything you need to know about packing for a trip (neon is the new black), purifying water, foraging (crickets: the other white meat), starting a fire, and signaling for help (forget SOS).