Most people curse the dandelions that pop up in their lawn in spring, marring the carpet of green with their fluffy yellow heads and toothy leaves.

Not Rose Giles.

Sure, she goes outside and plucks them out of her yard. She even tries to get the roots. But rather than throw them in the trashcan, she throws them in a big enameled pot, soaks them overnight to get the dirt out, and cooks them up for dinner.

“I don’t like them after they blossom, so I pick them before they blossom,” Giles said during an interview at her home in Town Hill, a village in the town of Bar Harbor. “They get bitter. Some people like it that way, but I don’t.”

Some say dandelion greens are an acquired taste. Giles’ daughters, Pat Burns and Betty Walls, can’t stand them. But Giles has been eating them for more than eight decades, and she’s not about to stop now.

“We always had dandelion greens when we were kids,” said Giles, who is 88. “We were brought up with them. We always had dandelion greens when it came time.”

The greens come up in early spring, and the sooner they’re picked, the better they taste, Giles says.

“They’re kind of tarty, but if you pick those buds off, they’re good,” she said.

The leaves have a slightly bitter taste, and can be used raw in salad mixes or cooked. When cooked, they take on a spinachlike texture. Some people use them in jellies or sauces or stir-fry, but Giles likes to keep it simple.

“If you have ham hocks, they’re a lot better, but I don’t have ham hocks, so I put in salt pork,” Giles said. “That flavors them, makes them better, but I’ll eat them anyway. It doesn’t take ’em very long to cook. You just have to keep watching ’em. Every once in a while, pick ’em up with a fork. … Just then, when they get real tender, they’re cooked [after] probably about 15 minutes of boiling.”

She doesn’t like them raw, but she will eat them right out of the refrigerator if she has leftovers.

“I like the dandelions even if they’re cold,” she said. “Sometimes, I’ll get up in the night and get me some.”

Over the years, as a child growing up in Otis and later at her own house and her daughter

Pat’s home, Giles has perfected her digging technique.

“I have special knives that I use,” she said, pulling out a slender blade. “See how thin that is? You dig down in the dirt and cut the roots off in the ground.”

Giles has already cleared all of the dandelion greens from her garden, and few remain in her sloping back yard. But she has a keen eye, and can spot one pretty quickly.

“There’s one there,” she said, stooping to dig one out. “They’re hiding on me.”

She slides the knife into the soil, and cuts a deep circle. Then she pulls out the greens, with a dirt-encased, nubby root at the bottom.

“That’s how come they have to be cleaned out so much.”

She takes it inside, to her kitchen, and dirt sprinkles on the linoleum floor.

“Man, that is dirty,” she said as she peels off the roots. “But as they say, it all comes out in the wash.”

Then, she pops them in a little aluminum pot, covers them with water, and leaves them to soak. On the front steps of the house, she has a whole kettle full of them soaking. And there are three big zip bags full of greens in the fridge.

This year, she has only picked enough for herself. She and her daughter Pat used to dig the greens every spring from Pat’s yard, but this year, they got there a little too late.

“This year, [Pat and her husband] let the hens out, and of course, the hens love them, so they picked them off,” Giles said. “I got some. There were some growing up in the garden. I did dig those. I couldn’t see them going to waste. I don’t like to see nothing going to waste as far as that goes.”

For years, the dandelion greens stand in front of Giles’ house was a sure sign of spring on Mount Desert Island.

“Somebody said, ‘You ought to sell them,'” Giles said. “I didn’t think anybody would buy them, but they did. I couldn’t keep ’em. … I could sell every one I got. Oh, lord, some of them would take four, five bags, you know. One man used to call. He’d take everything I had. I said, ‘That’s no fun.’ I’d work hard all morning and he took them all.”

Giles knew she liked dandelion greens, but she never would’ve guessed how popular they’d become. At $3 a bag, Giles and her daughter sold enough greens to build a camp on family property beside Beech Hill Pond.

“Just put a sign out there and they’d come like a flock of hens,” Giles said. “So we’d sell them, and that’s what we had to build our camp on.”

This year, she’s content just to have enough for herself. The weather’s been too warm for Giles to stay outside and dig many more than what she has, and it gets a little dirty. Sitting in a blanket-covered armchair in her living room, with her two cocker spaniels hovering nearby, Giles looks down at her hands and reaches for a pair of scissors to scrape away the dandelion dirt from under her nails.

“Last night, my hands were so black, I had dirt all in the wrinkles where I cleaned them,” she said. “My fingernails! My gosh, they’ve got half of the ground under them.”

Giles had been so busy digging, she hadn’t had a chance to eat any greens yet, but that was about to change.

“I haven’t gotten around to cook me any yet,” she said. “I think I’ll have to cook me some dandelion greens for supper, before they get bad.”