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After listening to Elvis play a live version of “Poke Salad Annie” about 10 times after my last post, I thought poke salad it deserved it’s own, special post. At least it deserved a picture or two.

Although it can look a bit like a turnip green, poke salad can get huge. Here are a couple of recent pictures. The first one is a rather small sprout. The bigger one is my dog’s favorite place to hang out – under the giant poke salad canopy. The big problems arise once the berries get ripe and the dogs get in it and look like they’re wearing war paint.

Now, here’s how big and unwieldy the poke salad gets. I quit fighting most of it.

Bruce sporting the Braveheart look with his poke salad war paint.

The year has been one of the lightest years of gardening I have had since planting my first ’solo’ garden in 1993. My raised bed is full of poke weed, although we always referred to it as poke salad, which was also the name of one of my favorite childhood songs, “Poke Salad Annie.” And I’m not even going to lie, Elvis did it best.

At any rate, I did manage to dig a little plot for some potatoes. And I put a few peppers and a single pumpkin in my flower garden. And, aside from a couple of emergency waterings when we were desert dry in Atlanta, I didn’t do anything to the potato plants. And sometimes that’s best.

I was out in the yard with the dogs yesterday and noticed a potato on top of the ground. And then I saw several of them. Apparently they were done. I dug around and grabbed a couple of pounds and cooked them for breakfast. It doesn’t get more fresh than that.

From the looks of it, I’m going to get about 30-40 pounds of potatoes from a small plot no bigger than 10 square feet. My pepper plants are over 3′ tall and have more peppers than I can pick and my lone pumpkin is just starting to thrive. Maybe next year I’ll have more time for a vegetable garden and Molly can help me with the planting.

My broccoli, kale and spinach seeds will be here soon and I look forward to digging up the poke salad and planting my fall garden.

Several years ago I was studying Native American herbalism when I learned about Pennyroyal. As a member of the mint family, Pennyroyal got a bad rap because it has a history of being used to terminate pregnancies, and often had harsh side effects. It has even been known to kill when taken in large doses. But my herbalism teacher told me that Pennyroyal would repel fleas.

So I looked it up. The Latin name for American Pennyroyal is “Hedeoma pulegioides”. Pulegioides looked a lot like the Spanish word for flea – “pulga”. Upon further research I found that first century herbalists wrote of Pennyroyal’s action to repel fleas. They probably knew a little something about how plants worked, so I decided to give it a shot.

Due to its toxicity, I had a difficult time finding pennyroyal for sale. But I was lucky enough to find a patch of pennyroyal growing in a field behind my house (in San Francisco) so I helped myself to a nice-sized cutting.

At the time, I kept my two dogs in a fenced dog run in the back yard while I was at work. So I transplanted my newly discovered Pennyroyal along the edge of the dog’s fence. Within a month, the dogs didn’t seem to need a their regular dose of the chemical flea treatment, so I skipped it. I went another two years without having to give doses of the flea-killing compound.

When I moved to Atlanta, I brought my pennyroyal with me (as well as my echinacea and a few other prized plants). But I was sorely disappointed when I moved into a new house and my fresh pennyroyal plantings didn’t seem to keep away the fleas. I had to start using the chemical stuff again as the dogs were getting attacked. Apparently the plants have to be established and it takes time to drive the fleas away (it doesn’t actually kill the fleas, it just makes them want to leave.)

I made several cuttings last fall that over-wintered well and really took off this spring. Now I have several batches of pennyroyal growing in the yard, most notably in an area where my dogs like to hang out in the shade. There have been no signs of fleas. And I haven’t given my dogs chemical flea treatment in months and my house and yard remain flea-free.