How to Gather and Use Edible Wild Plants and Herbs in Early Spring

An excerpt from Shoots and Greens of Early Spring in Eastern North America
by Naturalist "Wildman" Steve Brill

How does early spring foraging compare to hunting for wild foods at other times the year? Certain principles apply to all seasons, while other situations are unique to each season.

You must always identify anything you're going to eat with 100% certainty before you eat it. Collect edibles where they're plentiful. If someone else has already thinned out a stand of wild edibles, you can probably collect the same species elsewhere, while the first stand of plants regenerates.

Avoid collecting within fifty feet of busy roads, where the plants will be contaminated by lead. Also, avoid railroad right-of-ways, where herbicides may have been sprayed. (It's illegal to spray pesticides in New York City parks.)

Pay attention to what you're doing while you collect. Make sure you're collecting only the plant you want Several times I've had to remove poisonous nightshade leaves, inadvertently included with other plants, from a student's bag.

Treat the earth with respect. Never take more than you need. If you've been digging, refill any holes. Take such a small percentage of the plants so that anyone following your path wouldn't even notice that anything has been removed. Of course it's always good to share what you've learned with any friends or acquaintances who may also love nature, and it can only be beneficial to introduce children to supervised foraging.

When you begin to eat wild vegetables, start slowly. You can have an allergic reaction or intolerance to any new food, wild or cultivated. About one out of 100 people, for example will get nauseous when they eat day lily shoots or bulbs. If they eat only a few, they'll feel a little queasy. If they eat a large portion, on the other hand, they'll throw up or get diarrhea. When you're certain of the identity of a wild food, begin by eating it in small quantities, then slowly increase your portions.

In early spring the outdoors is as close as ever to a blank canvas, waiting to be filled by the seasonal succession of plants going through their life cycles. When you arrive at your locations of study, most of the plants lack the fully developed leaves or flowers that so facilitate exact identification later on Often, however, the dead, overwintered remnants of last year's plants can help you, as with Japanese knotweed.

At other times, the roots may be distinctive, as with the day-lily. Otherwise, you can synchronize your pace to that of your environment: Wonder about the plant's identity, and try to return to it when it flowers, even if it can't be eaten then. (Sometimes, flowering and immature plants grow side-by-side, so you may still get your meal.) Then return for a harvest the following year. The alternative, eating wild plants carelessly, can be disastrous.

I recently spoke to a man who had been identifying and eating wild mushrooms for years. He had followed all the rules and procedures for proper identification and had eaten many a delectable meal with no problems. One day he came upon a root that looked interesting. He pulled it up, bit into it, and spit it out without swallowing any of it. Since you can't be harmed by poisonous mushrooms you don't swallow, he reasoned, the same must be true of other wild plants.

This was the man's lucky day. Only one out of about l,000 local wild plants is dangerously poisonous. (Many wild plants you can't eat are too tough or woody, or unpalatable), but the plant he chose may have been poison hemlock or water hemlock. He wound up with severe vomiting and diarrhea for days. The reason this was his lucky day was that if he had swallowed any of his root it could have killed him.

Wild greens are leafy vegetables often suitable raw in salads, and nearly always good cooked. Shoots are vegetables where you eat the stem, such as asparagus. Sometimes you eat the stem and the developing leaves Then the artificially imposed distinction between shoots and leaves loses much of its usefulness.

When I call the day-lily a shoot, I remember bicycling to Alley Pond Park in Queens to collect spring water at the end of February in 1985. I stopped at the site of a foundation of a house that had been demolished long before my time, and, to my surprise, this naturally warm, sheltered area already had countless day-lily stalks, already over an inch long, bursting out of the soil.

Early spring is also a good time to collect root vegetables full of stored food to support rapid spring growth. These foods, and the seaweeds, in season all year, as well as purely medicinal herbs, will be covered in future publications.

When is early spring? In general, it begins when the temperature starts to rise above freezing regularly and the ground thaws out. This usually occurs in early March in New York.

Sometimes, early-spring conditions may prevail for over a week during the winter. At those times, some of the hardier plants, such as wintercress, chickweed, and garlic mustard, undergo rapid growth. Occasionally, cold weather persists much longer than usual. Often, the plants that have come up prematurely will survive brief periods of frost, while plants that have not yet come up will delay their appearances.

Early spring blends into mid-spring by the beginning of May in New York City. Many of the plants covered here become too bitter (dandelions) or tough (Japanese knotweed) to use anymore, and other plants, not covered here, arrive for the first time.

Even though the mid-spring plants are more numerous, there's here an unmatched quality to the early spring foraging experience. Sometimes the weather is mild, but often you're hiking under more invigoratingly chilly conditions searching far and wide for the first wild foods you've been able to collect in months. You'll find yourself studying your local environment much more carefully at this time of year. With a little patience this intense search will be rewarded by spectacular discoveries.

One beautiful day in mid -March of 1986, for example, a group on a four-hour tour of Central Park. We first explored the center of the park and the Ramble, studying dead, overwintered plants, collecting twigs from sassafras trees and spicebush shrubs for tea, and packing away an abundance of Kentucky coffee tree pods to make caffeine-free coffee.

We got a taste of garlic mustard, collected as much field garlic as we could use, but couldn't find a single meadow where the dandelions had already come up, nor were there any other greens. Only after we headed downtown through the park's most populated area, to look at the quince shrubs near the downtown lake, did we make our major find: In one tiny area, we found an abundance of sheep sorrel, wintercress, and longleaf plantain. What made this discovery even more spectacular was that I had never before found the first two greens in Central Park.

There were root vegetables as too -- burdock, common evening primrose; and wild carrots. It had rained for days before the walk so the roots came out with just a tug. It's these kind of experiences fences that make foraging so exciting even after years of hunting for wild foods.

Of course, we examined our surroundings to determine why there was so much here. First of all, we were near water, which benefits the plants directly while retaining enough heat at night to give the plants a head-start.

Also, it was a depressed area. No, I don't mean it was full of winos and junkies, it was at a lower elevation than its surroundings. This is provides protection from the cold and wind. Many of the plants were also growing on a south-facing slope, where they would receive extra sunshine as well. If I were a plant enduring the conditions of early spring in Central Park, this is where I'd want to grow.

In every season, nature provides you with a detailed curriculum of study. Explore your local parks and uncultivated areas in early spring, learn what they have to offer, and you'll come back with an abundance of vegetables at the height of their goodness, as well as an education in ecology unavailable in the confines of the classroom.