"Indian Bread" and cattail propagation.

COUNTRYSIDE: We love your magazine! We are ordering the books, Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants, and The Dandelion Celebration from the COUNTRYSIDE Bookstore. We have long been interested in foraging.

When I attended grade school in Kansas at a little one-room country school, we foraged in the school yard for something we called "Indian Bread." It tasted like bread and had white roots, the edible part. We may have unknowingly contributed to its extinction, though it may have survived in protected prairie sites somewhere.

Does anyone know how to propagate cattails? The Boy Scouts have used them for various things, but we don't know how to grow them, if one doesn't have them already.

We also have "foraging trespassers" here. They even dig roots as well as hunt anything they happen to want, especially the week before deer season. "No Trespassing" signs are removed and taken.--D.E., Missouri

Propagating cattails has never been a problem, for us! One wet year a cornfield on low land didn't get plowed, and by midsummer there were cattails growing amidst the previous year's cornstalks. How they got there we don't know.

This seems to suggest that if you have marshy or wet land, and cattails nearby, they can appear by themselves, or could be transplanted. Without that moist environment you're probably out of luck, although we have seen people transplant a few into small decorative garden pools.