Yellow Dock Herb: Identification, Benefits & Best Uses (2024)

Last Updated on April 24, 2024

Yellow dock is a useful wild plant that can be foraged for nourishing food all year round. Also known as curly dock, it’s a plant to know if you ever experience skin irritation or digestive issues. Here’s what to know about identifying, harvesting, and working with yellow dock.

Not familiar with yellow dock (aka curly dock) as a wild foraged food or medicinal plant? This valuable wild plant grows in much of the world and has numerous benefits and uses as both food and medicine.

Herbalist Kara Swenson, owner of Thistle Patch Wellness, explains how to identify and use this outstanding edible and medicinal plant.

WHAT IS YELLOW DOCK / CURLY DOCK?

Yellow dock is a perennial wild-growing herb that can be spotted year-round in most places. The entire plant – leaf, stalk, root, and seed – is edible and/or medicinal.

Also commonly known as curly dock, yellow dock’s botanical name is Rumex crispus (Rumex meaning sour, crispus meaning curly). Yellow dock is a wild, weedy plant that can be found growing along roadsides, on edges of paths or fields, in waste areas, or in other open areas.

Even though it tends to be weedy, it isn’t very well known, probably because unlike dandelions, yellow dock doesn’t grow quite as prolifically in urban settings.

But yellow dock is a great plant to get to know because throughout the year, it offers us both food and medicine.

YELLOW DOCK HERB BENEFITS & YELLOW DOCK ROOT MEDICINAL USES

The root of the yellow dock plant is the part used medicinally. One of many wild herbs you can forage, yellow dock root has many medicinal uses.

Yellow dock root is a bitter and alterative herb that tends to have an affinity for the liver, gallbladder, bowel, and skin. Let’s break this down a little bit to learn more about how yellow dock works in the body and to understand the plant and its medicine better.

Bitter herbs such as yellow dock root increase digestive secretions of all kinds (saliva, acids, enzymes, and gastrin) which all help the body to better break down and process food. They are also supportive of peristalsis, the movement of the bowel. Bitters work on the salivary glands, stomach, pancreas, and gallbladder/liver.

What is less commonly known about bitters, however, is that there are bitter receptors in our respiratory system, as well as in our skin, brain and reproductive organs. This means bitters can benefit and work on all of these organs, not only the digestive system.

Alterative herbs, including yellow dock root, are herbs that are sometimes considered tonic herbs. According to David Hoffman, “alteratives gradually restore proper body function, increasing health and vitality. Some alteratives support natural waste elimination via the liver, kidneys, lungs, or skin. Others stimulate digestive function while others are antimicrobial, while others just work and we don’t know why.”

Herbalist jim mcdonald uses the analogy of a wood burning stove to describe alteratives. A wood stove is only efficient if it’s able to burn the wood efficiently and the ash gets emptied out regularly. Alteratives help the body with absorption (wood burning) as well as elimination (ridding the ash). Yellow dock is an alterative that has an affinity for the liver/gallbladder, digestion, and skin.

In my own practice and those of other herbalists, such as Lise Wolff and jim mcdonald, yellow dock root often helps with conditions such as inflamed and dry itchy skin, gallbladder symptoms, slow moving bowel/slow peristalsis, colitis, rheumatism, liver congestion, asthma, and tickling coughs.

Research suggests that yellow dock root may be helpful against MRSA, an antibiotic-resistant staph infection. Other studies have looked at its usefulness for colorectal cancer, “the fourth leading cause of cancer death and the third most common cancer diagnosed in the United States.”

According to William Boericke, a well-known twentieth-century homeopath, yellow dock root may be indicated when there are “pains, numerous and varied, neither fixed nor constant anywhere. Cough caused by an incessant tickling in the throat. … Chronic gastritis; … Intense itching of the skin,” as well as several other symptoms.

Yellow dock herb was also used by a number of Native American tribes for various ailments.

Yellow dock root may make iron from the food we eat more bioavailable, which can help certain types of anemia. For this benefit, yellow dock root is most commonly made into a syrup. You’ll find a recipe for yellow dock syrup toward the end of the post.

Interested in using wild plants to support health? Books like Wild Remedies and The Backyard Herbal Apothecary will inspire you to put numerous plants to work in your home remedy toolkit.

It’s just one of many fantastic herbalism books to add to your home library.

FORAGING YELLOW DOCK ROOT, LEAVES, & SEEDS

Before diving into identification and harvesting yellow dock, let’s review some basic but important points of foraging wild plants:

1. Always positively identify any plant before harvesting or consuming using multiple sources and multiple features of the plant.
2. Never harvest the first plant you come across. Make sure the plant is abundant in the area you’re foraging and can be harvested ethically and sustainably.
3. When harvesting, it should not look like anyone has been there. This means only harvesting a small percent of what’s growing and doing it in the least disruptive way possible.
4. Harvest with the intention of helping the plant. Harvest only a few leaves from each plant, dig a sustainable amount of root from a patch, and spread some of its seeds if they’re present.
5. Harvest only on land you have permission to forage, and also consider chemical usage, proximity to roads, etc.
6. Harvest in gratitude.
7. If it isn’t too weird or woo-woo for you, try connecting with the plant before harvesting.

Most importantly, always consult a thorough and trustworthy foraging guide. The most comprehensive foraging book every forager should have is Sam Thayer’s Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants. It covers hundreds of plants, which makes it a bit heavy to haul on foraging expeditions, so you might also want lighter foraging books to bring along when you forage.

Not able to forage yellow dock where you live? You can find dried yellow dock online as a chopped root, powder, or tincture.

The best place to find top-quality herbal products is Mountain Rose Herbs. They carry numerous yellow dock herbal preparations, including herbal blends. You can find them all here.

Amazon also carries yellow dock in a variety of forms from Starwest, Frontier, Herb Pharm and other herbal companies.

HOW TO IDENTIFY YELLOW DOCK PLANT

Like dandelions, yellow dock is a prolific self-seeder and has spread throughout the globe.

Yellow dock herb can be found growing as a single plant, but often several plants can be found growing near one another. They can grow in full sun to part shade, and in both poor and rich soils.

Yellow dock is a perennial herb, which means it’s able to come back year after year from its root. So even if the top gets removed but the root is left intact, it will regrow itself. It may even be able to regrow from just a part of the root if some gets left behind in the ground.

Leaves

Yellow dock herb will begin growing new leaves in the early spring. The leaves emerge out of a thin papery sheath, called ocrea, and as they open up and unfurl you will see that they are lance- to oblong-shaped.

The edges of the leaves are wavy or curly and can get up to about 12 inches long while staying only about 2 to 3 inches wide. The leaves grow in a basal rosette which simply means the leaves are close to the ground and radiate from the base of the stem. Some yellow dock plants will grow basal rosettes for several years without producing flowers or seeds.

As the plant becomes larger, it may begin sending up a stalk from the center of the plant. Off of the stalk, the leaves alternate, getting smaller and smaller as they near the top of the stalk.

Flowers

Yellow dock will start to branch out toward the top of the stalk, and these branches are where it will produce whorls of tiny flowers. The flowers, which can be yellowish to greenish or even slightly pink, bloom around June/July with each flower becoming one single seed later in the season.

Seeds

The seeds are formed by late summer but will hang onto the stalk through winter. The tiny seeds are encapsulated in a papery husk which turns a reddish-brown color in the fall as the aerial parts of the yellow dock die back.

Roots

If you were to dig up a yellow dock plant, you would find that it has a long, sometimes branching taproot that is yellow underneath the reddish-brown paper-thin coating (hence its name, yellow dock). As the plant gets older, the root will become larger.

HARVESTING YELLOW DOCK

The timing for harvesting yellow dock greatly depends on which part of the plant you are hoping to collect.

LEAVES:

If you want to harvest yellow dock leaves as food, early spring is the best time, as it is with so many wild greens. The young, recently unfurled leaves will be the most tender and delicious.

Some folks liken the taste of young yellow dock leaves to spinach, though I think yellow dock leaves are even better than the spinach you find on the store shelves.

Like other members of the Rumex family, including rhubarb and sorrel, yellow dock stalks and leaves have a sourness to them that’s really nice when they’re young and tender. Leaves can be enjoyed raw or cooked as sauteed greens, or in a spring green soup.

Yellow dock leaves past the prime edibility stage can still be harvested for medicinal purposes. At the base of mature leaves, there will be the papery sheath, the ocrea, which will turn brown as the plant ages.

Underneath the ocrea is mucilage, which has a texture similar to aloe. Knowing this will come in handy the next time you find yourself stung by a nettle or bit by an insect. The mucilage at the base of the leaf can offer some soothing relief, one of many home remedies for bug bites.

STALKS:

If you are interested in harvesting yellow dock stalks, the best time for this is going to be early summer or whenever the stalk is still tender and bendable and flowers have not yet started forming at the top.

Similar to asparagus, the less bendy the yellow dock stalk is, the more woody, so be sure to harvest stalks when they are young if you would like to eat them.

Tender yellow dock stalks can be eaten raw or cooked like you would cook asparagus or green beans. If the stalk seems a bit stringy, you can peel it and enjoy the tender inside.

SEEDS:

Come late fall and into winter, the mature seeds of the yellow dock can be harvested. Although yellow dock produces thousands of seeds per plant, be sure to leave plenty for the birds and maybe even spread some seed during harvest.

Yellow dock is a relative of buckwheat, and foragers often use the seeds to make flour, which can be used in baked goods like crackers, cookies, and even cakes. You’ll find many yellow dock seed recipes available on the web.

In order to enjoy the seed harvest, some people go through the laborious task of removing the papery husk around the seed, but others have found there’s no need to separate them and simply grind them up together.

Ground yellow dock seeds can be added to baked goods or made into porridge. Forager Chef has an excellent explanation of how to make yellow dock seed flour if you want to give it a try.

ROOT:

For herbalists, the root is the part used medicinally rather than as a food. Like other medicinal roots, we harvest yellow dock root when the energy is still in the root.

This means both fall and early spring are great times to harvest the root because in the fall the aerial parts die back, pushing the energy into the root, and in the early spring, the energy hasn’t had the chance to fully leave the root and go up into the aerial parts.

Each herbalist has their own preferences on when to harvest. I tend to harvest yellow dock roots in the fall.

The easiest way I have found to harvest the long taproot I learned from jim mcdonald, who uses a shovel or spade to loosen up the soil all the way around the plant/root before pushing down on the base of the plant to pull it up. This method is much less messy and disruptive to the land compared to digging a big hole with a shovel.

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CAUTIONS

There are two primary situations in which yellow dock root should be used with caution or avoided. One is when there has been a history of kidney stones. The other is if there is a gallbladder obstruction present. Bitter herbs are ok if gallbladder stones are present but not if there is an obstruction.

USES FOR YELLOW DOCK ROOT

There are a couple ways that you can work with yellow dock once you’ve either harvested some or purchased some from a reputable source.

The root is the part of the yellow dock herb that I have worked with most. Below are a few different ways you could use it after harvesting.

Yellow dock root is typically dried before using in medicinal preparations.

YELLOW DOCK ROOT DECOCTION

It’s quite bitter on its own, but you can combine it with better-tasting herbs in a blend to get the benefits of yellow dock in a more pleasant-tasting drink.

Roots like yellow dock are typically simmered on the stovetop rather than steeped to make what’s known as a decoction. You can simmer chopped roots — whether yellow dock on its own or combined with other roots, such as dandelion and licorice — in water for 15 to 30 minutes, using roughly 4oz water for every teaspoon of dried root.

Yellow dock decoction, once cooled, could also be applied topically to itchy, irritated skin (including psoriasis or eczema) to provide some soothing relief.

YELLOW DOCK TINCTURE

The primary way that I work with yellow dock root is as a tincture. Tinctures are shelf stable, and simple to make. They’re a perfect way to extract and preserve medicinal compounds you want to have at the ready, whether it’s nettle tincture, lemon balm tincture, or some other herb you turn to often throughout the year.

The simplest way to make a yellow dock tincture is to follow the folk method of tincture making. To do this you will need a clean and dry jar with a lid, scrubbed and chopped yellow dock root, and vodka (or other alcohol of choice). Add the root to the jar so that it is about ⅕ filled then fill the jar with vodka.

That’s it! Be sure to label the jar with the date, alcohol used, herb, and where the herb was foraged or purchased, then let it sit in a cool, dark place for 4 to 6 weeks before straining.

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YELLOW DOCK ROOT SYRUP

As described earlier, yellow dock root syrup is another way to work with this herb- especially for those who are iron anemic or are pregnant and wanting to support their energy, blood, and bowels.

The basic recipe is as follows: take about 1 cup chopped yellow dock root and simmer in 4 cups of water on low until the liquid is reduced down to about 2 cups. Strain and stir in up to 1 cup of blackstrap molasses. Take 1-2 tablespoons per day with meals. Store in the refrigerator.

This basic recipe can be modified greatly depending on preferences or needs. Other roots such as dandelion, burdock or sarsaparilla may be added and simmered with the yellow dock. Fruits such as rosehips, hawthorn, or goji berries may also be added/simmered. Other herbs and spices such as raspberry leaves, nettle leaves, cinnamon, or cardamom could also be added.

A long infusion of nettles and raspberry leaf would be lovely in place of some of the water to get even more nutrients. Date syrup could be substituted for the molasses depending on flavor preferences and some folks will add a splash of brandy to the finished product to help lengthen shelf life.

Some people also infuse yellow dock root in oil for external use.

Now that you know these wonderful benefits of the yellow dock plant, grab your foraging guide and go harvest some of this useful herb.

Save this info on yellow dock benefits and uses for later!

Kara Swenson, owner of Thistle Patch Wellness, is a practicing herbalist and integrative nutritionist who offers one-on-one consultations, leads plant walks and offers educational workshops to local, southern MN communities. She has her Bachelor of Science in Integrative Nutrition through Huntington University of Health Sciences, is trained to the professional level in Nutrition Response Testing through Ulan Nutritional Systems. Kara has completed over a year-long apprenticeship with herbalist Lise Wolff, has studied under herbalist jim mcdonald in his year-long program, has learned from other herbalists such as Matthew Wood, Phyllis Light, Margi Flint, Nicholas Schnell and others, and has of course learned much from clients and the plants themselves.

Follow her on Instagram and Facebook.

All photos by Kara Swenson except dried yellow dock root in cover collage (credit: marilyna)

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Disclaimers: Though HealthyGreenSavvy and EcoSavvy Writing LLC always aim to provide thorough and accurate information, we assume no liability or responsibility for any consequences, health issues, or symptoms that arise from ingesting or touching any plant described on this website. It is always the reader’s responsibility to ensure accurate plant identification and use multiple reputable sources to confirm. If you have any doubts about the identification of any plant, do not eat it.