WILD food
Anybody forage for wild food here?
I learned some and did some foraging a little late in the season last year and promised to do more this year and I am already on it. I have been collecting dandelion greens and flowers for my sandwiches just about everyday as well as cleavers every so often. I have also harvested some garlic mustard greens and wild garlic for a potato mush. I just finished off some steamed cattail shoots which were really really good, can't wait to have more tomorrow. I want to try the roots as well. I also saw tons of wild strawberries back around the lake with the cattails they should be coming in a few weeks from now and hopefully I can get to all the other wild berries before the birds get to them (I always get to them too late). And mayapples should be ripening the middle of May and I scouted out tons in the woods. I am so fortunate to live near so much nature in the city!
i mostly forage fruits.
stuff i have around me:
loquats
apples
apricots
peaches
figs
feijoas/pineapple guavas
cherimoyas
oranges (and all other citrus)
.. there are plenty of other things that grow around here, but none i have found trees of (yet)!
Every time I read the subject heading I think WILD is an acronym. Before I opened the thread I decided it meant With-In Local/Limited Distance, which it kind of does.
I don't wild harvest. I used to be really interested in it to the point of having an autographed Euell Gibbons book.
Great idea for a thread!! :)
I want to learn more about wild local plants, but so far I'm into harvesting nettles, amaranth, and purslane. I think it's amazing what is right under our noses as far as healthy superfoods. They're all around us (and half the time are considered weeds)!
I picked dandelion greens for a coworker last week. I tasted them, but didn't keep any for myself. I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing.
I can't believe you guys live by so many different yummy things(berries and fruits and such). I gather-pinon, dandelion greens, amaranth(greens, not grain), and I was just reading about nettles, so I'd like to try to find those and chickweed.
;D one of my favorite things to do!
I gather lots of different stuff, some for food, some for medicine:
dandelions, ramps, wild carrots, wild celery, wild parsley, lead plant, purple poppy mallow, morels, black walnuts, hopniss, lambs-quarters, yucca, buffalo gourd flowers, ground plums, plantain, calendula, New Jersey Tea, cattail tubers and prickly pear fruit...I know there are more but I am only 1/2 way through my first coffee.. ;D
I can't believe you guys live by so many different yummy things(berries and fruits and such). I gather-pinon, dandelion greens, amaranth(greens, not grain), and I was just reading about nettles, so I'd like to try to find those and chickweed.
OOOH! Be careful with the nettles! I did an ecology research project a few years ago, and our official slogan of the summer was "fuck nettle." We're creative, I know. But we got those little suckers everywhere in our whole body and JESUS it can hurt after a while! Wear dishwashing gloves and jeans!!!!
Revvie, you're too cool--doing your own meds!
Thanks VR, ;D there are so many simple things I can't take like tylenol or allergy relief meds that I turned to an herbalist friend of mine, and she taught me a bunch of cool stuff.
Of course then you get people who don't know you well coming over and getting this funny look when you take a dropper bottle out and spike your tea with vodka-based tincture... ::)
I gather lots of different stuff, some for food, some for medicine:
Wildcrafted herbal medicines were big in Humboldt (California's North Coast). Oregon was about an hour away and we could get 190 proof Everclear there with which to make good tinctures.
Just be careful where you forage...some parks take a dim view of harvesting Nature's bounty and you could get in trouble with the law. Even some "common land" plants are legislated. As I was told once, "That fruit is for the wildlife, not you."
Does anyone know a good book for looking into foraging? I want to make sure what I'm picking is safe and not going to kill me "Into the Wild" style. If it could be specifically for the Midwest, that would make for zero effort on my part! :)
This one is my fave http://www.amazon.com/Edible-Wild-Plants-Prairie-Ethnobotanical/dp/0700603255/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271794222&sr=1-1
And here's one for Indiana specifically! http://www.amazon.com/Wild-Plants-Indiana-Adjacent-States/dp/1425969976
There are also plenty of websites to get you started. I found http://redundancy.org/wench/wildflowers/ that has lots of info, and your local colleges/universities usually have horticulture program websites too!
For anyone else in Kansas...http://www.kswildflower.org/ everything listed by color, time of flowering, habitat, etc. LOVE this site!
Also, feel free to pick my brain. ;D I will be happy to use what little is there to help!
Right the moment, I am not foraging wild food. But my future plan to forage wild mushroom. For this, I am studying deeply.Beyond mushroom other which type of wild food can I forage. If you know about it than please reply to my post.
Depends on where you are, laxman, and what kind of mushrooms you are looking for.
I just found a good amount of nettles growing in the woods and when I found them I almost died I seriously have been dreaming of finding nettles ever since I started getting into foraging. I feel like a nerd for dreaming that. I harvested some the other day for a green smoothie and I just harvested some right before sunset and I am now dehydrating them to preserve them. I didn't find as many as I hoped but I will have to look deeper. I harvested them bare handed too because the gloves were bugging me and I had no trouble I just held onto a leaf and went snip and threw it in my bag.
I also spotted literally thousands of raspberry bushes around the far side of the lake so I cant wait for those. And maybe a couple of wild apple trees!
I think I spotted a ton of lambsquarters coming up in the woods all around which gets me excited as well.
I love free food!
Nettles make nourishing soup, WAE. In fact the English Order of St Benedict usually makes nettle soup on Founder's Day. They call it "Saint Benedict's Soup." The young shoots are best.
My mom used to get in trouble with the City where she lived for letting her nettles grow up about 5 feet tall all around her veggie garden. There was an open tennis court next to it and she said it kept kids out of her garden "looking for stray balls" (ie trampling her plants.)
Please, everyone, I know we're all pretty smart folks around here, but PLEASE be careful and make sure you know what you are grabbing when you forage. Just had my neighbor come to me with a basket load of "wild Onions" which were Death Camas.
hespedal,
wow I would love to be able to forage for those fruits let alone any fruit besides berries. But I take you mean forage around in other people's places for those since all those things really don't grow too natively around you. If you count that foraging well I foraged some pears from people's yards (one person just let them all almost rot - how stupid!) and I spotted an apple tree in someone's yard.
irreverent,
I am super careful with foraging I mostly just get the common stuff like dandelions which is a no brainer and cleavers, cattail, wild garlic, garlic mustard, plantain, and other stuff.... I am still new to this and I always like make sure a few times it is okay I examine the plant then look it up and find pictures and read its profile on pfaf.org and so on, my drug days have made me a pretty paranoid person to say the least! Also thanks for your reference to death camas I do believe that is the plant I saw growing in this big patch back in the woods and I hoped it was edible - guess not but it sure was pretty. Also thanks for the book suggestion I just put in on hold at the library.