Purslane kicks ass, and you can find it everywhere.
don't get it confused with spurge, spurge sucks ass
Purslane has fat succulent leaves.
Spurge has flat leaves, and leaks a white sap when you break the stem.
Purslane is kinda lemony tasty? It tasted a little salty to me, too, but it's definitely tasty. It's fucking everywhere. I found some in the parking lot of s grocery store last week.
Wild rose petals are my favorite forageable where I live, they can be eaten raw or brewed in to rose water / tea but I believe they really shine when used to flavor desserts or when prepared in to a jam or jelly. If dried they store well and lose very little in the process.
Be aware that roses attract a significant number of hungry insects and as such also are home to camouflaged spiders who sit in the center of some of the flowers, harmless but they have startled me more than once when not paying attention. Shaggy manes are a good starter mushroom if one has an interest in foraging for fungi. They are quite distinct in appearance and have no real look-alikes toxic or other wise that I am aware of and are quite common. One small thing to keep in mind with shaggy manes is that you need to prepare and eat them as soon as possible after picking, they very rapidly melt in to a puddle of black ooze after picking, so planning in advance is important. picture from linked article
Finally the common chokecherry should also not be over looked, if you have the patience for picking and processing them they are a tasty additive for home made sauces and drinks.
For my first post on this thread, I would like to be an apologist for a plant too many people hate to see in their yards and gardens: the dandelion. It’s the perfect “foraging 101” plant, because it’s really easy to identify, and unlike a lot of foragables, there aren’t any deadly toxic lookalikes. I think it’s underrated because you can use every part of the plant for multiple usages, which I will suggest here.
I would like to give my +1 for dandelions. When I still had my garden I had little reason to buy many greens as the simple act of weeding after a shift provided a nigh inexhaustible supply of dandelion. I recommend cooking or steaming the older / larger leaves, I found that they made a rather nice addition to filling for dumplings.
Dandelion wine made from the flowers is also a treat if you are in to home fermentation.
One of my favorites is the Mallow (Malva genus). Fast-growing and crawling, these Eurasian weeds grow on the edges of farm plots, a misunderstood headache of home farmers.
Fig 1: Alkali Mallow (Malvella leprosa, a relative to Malva), a hardy noxious weed present from the West coast to Texas,
Easily recognizable by their round-shaped leaves (giving them the common names buttonweed and cheeseweed), mallows are completely edible, from root to seed. The mild, almost-tasteless flavor, and strong antioxidant properties (1) makes the greens a welcome side to any dish.
Malva and Malvella are two different things, as are alkali mallow and cheeseweed.
Malvella leprosa (alkali mallow) is native to the western states. Malva parviflora (cheeseweed and little mallow) is an Old World plant/weed that's been introduced to North America.
The latter has some of the edible qualities you report, the former I am unsure of and I wouldn't necessarily risk it. By which I mean you can most assuredly find cheeseweed where you live, but be sure to distinguish it from alkali mallow.
(Also the antioxidant properties you link to are from a report about Malva sylvestris, aka the common mallow, which is the most edible of the mallows.)
If you like fish get a cast net, catch bait& big fish. just wade in where you gon cast it at to make sure there is no shit to catch on an ripit up. and for game animals do the opposite of the law..
electro-fishing
sink pipes with one opening for catfish to inhabit, noodle them out or cover the end and lift it out.
If you like fish get a cast net, catch bait& big fish. just wade in where you gon cast it at to make sure there is no shit to catch on an ripit up. and for game animals do the opposite of the law..
electro-fishing
sink pipes with one opening for catfish to inhabit, noodle them out or cover the end and lift it out.
I dont even hunt . as if the guys dont know about laws. you've brought division to this thread as kikes always do... with assumptions. .feigned concern ... malodorous vapors & eminations ... will you marry me ?
For my first post on this thread, I would like to be an apologist for a plant too many people hate to see in their yards and gardens: the dandelion. It’s the perfect “foraging 101” plant, because it’s really easy to identify, and unlike a lot of foragables, there aren’t any deadly toxic lookalikes. I think it’s underrated because you can use every part of the plant for multiple usages, which I will suggest here. I think it’s unfairly considered a weed and is a more useful thing to have on your lawn than the lawn itself.
All true. It is mentioned in the recipes you mention, but worth repeating. There is one thing to be cautious of, and that is pesticides. Since dandelions are commonly considered an annoying weed, they are commonly sprayed with pesticides in areas where someone is trying to grow something else, like a lawn. If the dandelions are growing on or near a patch with those "TruGreen" signs, best to move on and find a patch growing wild in an un-managed area, or take them from the property of a neighbor whom you know doesn't spray their lawn with chemicals.
Finally the common chokecherry should also not be over looked, if you have the patience for picking and processing them they are a tasty additive for home made sauces and drinks.
Damn, ninja-ed. I had a draft of an effortpost with lots of pictures, and a bunch of text totally not plagiarized from Wikipedia and other websites. Oh well. I'll still dump all the info I was compiling, but forgo the fancy formatting.
Yes, have my for chokecherries. They are native to the northern half of the US and the southern half of Canada, and have been introduced elsewhere as an ornamental tree by people who like the flowers in the late spring. Depending on your climate, July to August is about the time to harvest them.
Like most other stone fruit, the leaves, stems, and seeds are poisonous, containing compounds which turn into cyanide when ingested. The skin and the flesh of the fruit itself are safe to eat. The berries are particularly bitter and astringent before fully ripe. The flesh of the fruit, once fully ripened, has a somewhat sweet-tart flavor, somewhere between that of a cherry and a plum, with the remaining bitterness and astringency concentrated in the skin. The seed, pit, or choke, takes up about half the total volume of the fruit, so it would take a large volume of them to make a snack. They would do best turned into juice to be enjoyed as itself, fermented into a wine or vinegar, or preserved as a jelly.
As seen in the pictures below, chokecherries can grow as a suckery tall shrub, or as a large tree, depending on their growing conditions, variety, and if they've been cultivated or managed, or allowed to grow wild. Their leaves are more oval than pointy when compared to the leaves of a peach or cherry tree, and have a very finely serrated edge. Flowers, and consequently fruit grow in large vertical clusters (racemes, for you botany spergs). Foliage can be either green or dark red, depending on the variety. The berries themselves range from a very dark red/almost purple to black when fully ripe. Identification will probably be easiest earlier in the spring when the flowers are blooming, or middle of summer when the fruit is maturing.
I got a whole lil mental map of where to find the food in its season. The power line cut is a great spot to forage… the full sun helps a lot. We have raspberry canes all over the place, wild blueberry too is in season right now. Later in summer we will have wild grapes.
None of these taste very well, but you can bake them into things and they make good scones and pies.
1. Know your local area. I think 90% of being good at this is just noticing where plants are located and monitoring them as they ripen. Like I said before I keep a little mental map (of the routes we take to walk the dog) and make notes of edible plants along the way. Then you can return to them in their season and harvest to your hearts' content.
2. Where there's one, there's many. Many types of plants propogate laterally and it's worth it to look around and see if there is more nearby.
3. Look under boughs. If you find a spot that's been picked over, I like to flop the stems over. You can often find ripe fruit this way.
3a. Harvesting container. I recommend a paper bag or a wicker basket - something more permeable to air than a plastic bag, which degrades the fruit faster.
4. Storage - ripe berries do not keep long AT ALL. The modern Inuit solution is to wash and freeze ASAP, and I can't offer better advice than that. But I also sometimes like to immediately bake ripe foraging into pies or scones, and then freeze the prepared dough. This way you can have blueberry pie or raspberry scones ready at a moment's notice.
4a. WASPS AND YELLOW JACKETS. Fuckin watch out for these things - they are attracted to wild fruit (esp blueberries) and in the case of yellow jackets, their nests are actually buried underground, which makes it hard to perceive a nest until you’ve stepped on it and a dozen or more wasps are stinging your legs. My guidance go this is to be watchful not just for berries, but what insects are flying about. Stick to defined paths when possible. If you do get stung, do not panic, retreat from the area and go take an oatmeal and baking soda bath.
5. Check out these sweet photos.
Just found a really nice chicken-of-the-woods. It was growing right besides a well-trafficked path so I’m a little surprised it didn’t get got before I came along. Zone 6-ish folks, the time is now to collect delicious faux meat shrooms.
There's a field behind my neighborhood, owned by the apartment complex but left vacant and untended. A couple weeks ago, I found out that there are shitloads of blackberry bushes down in there. They were just coming into season at the time. I've picked shitloads of them since then, enough to make three pints of jam plus multiple quarts to just eat raw or with my morning oatmeal. I love blackberries. I'm also shitting purple now.
They're mostly picked over now, but it was amazing while it lasted. Never saw any of my neighbors out picking them. It was like my own private little score.
Also found an apple tree while I was wading through the field, which has some little baby apples on it. I'll have to keep an eye on it.
Where I am right now, it's the brief window of blackberry season.
These so-called "sticker bushes" serve no purpose 50 weeks of the year, but right now they produce the sweetest fruit you could imagine.
My local supermarket sells them for $27 per pound, in 4 ounce increments.
I brought home a nice haul tonight after dinner, about one pound. It was growing up the fence behind my pharmacy, but it's findable all over the place.
Turn the bottom of your t-shirt into a basket if you want.
Thought I would try my hand at sharing some short notes on lesser known forgeable fruits that can be found in the Northern Wastes:
First off, there is the Canadian Bunchberry. These are incredibly common and fully edible but have little to no flavor, no one will be writing any panegyrics about their taste but the seeds make a satisfying little crunch. They ripen in mid to late summer.
If you have ever shopped at Ikea you have probably seen products made out of lingonberry, also called bog cranberries. As you may have guessed, these are commonly found in wetlands / muskeg. The leaves are quite distinct and have a waxy sheen. They ripen in the late summer / early fall.
High bush cranberries produce edible fruit, the wild ones up here are never very productive but make a nice additive for home made ketchups. They ripen in the late summer / early fall.
Cloudberries are an other bog fruit, Newfoundlanders call them bake apples for some reason. The plants are incredibly common but fruit production is very sporadic: some years you can barely walk in the peat with out stomping on ripened berries but other years I barely see them. Did not see a single decent ripened cloud berry so I stole the third photo to show what the ripened berries look like. They ripen in the late summer / early fall.
Kamchatka honeysuckle, also known as haskaps, grow bell shaped blueberry-like fruits. Commercial varieties are becoming quite popular but they can be found quite commonly in wooded wetlands, the wild honeysuckles rarely get much taller than knee or hip height. Do not have any of my own photos unfortunately but I am including a couple stolen photos to show the berries, flowers and leaves. They ripen in the late spring / early summer.
Finally, for those interested in foraging for fungus: giant puffball mushrooms can be found this time of year. When fully grown and ready to start decaying they are pretty hard to mistake for any thing else but the linked article describes some possible toxic look-alikes. This one I picked up on a recent walk was not in the best condition but it gives you the basic idea.
If you live in the Eastern United States, right now is the best time of year for foraging; pawpaw season.
Pawpaw (Asimina triloba) is a tree that likes to grow in the understory of eastern woodlands in the continental US, from southern Appalachia all the way up to Minnesota and from the East Coast all the way to the prairies. Pawpaw fruits are round and green with black speckles and grow on short trees with smooth, ovate leaves that smell like bell peppers when you crush them up. Fruits are generally about three inches long and potato-shaped, but I have picked pawpaws that were over a pound and the size of baking potatoes. The fruits have the distinction of being the largest fruits native to North America and have a flavor that is something of a cross between mangoes and bananas.
This here is Allotropa virgata aka Candycane Allotropa.
This gorgeous specimen, despite resembling a swirling stick of candy, is completely inedible. However, its presence alone is worthy of celebration, for Allotropa is a parasitic plant, and its obligate host is the mycelium of matsutake mushrooms. You can use this plant as a marker either during the Fall, or in the off-season and know where to return.
I cannot recommend matsusuke enough, they are scrumptious. They bear the piney, spicy flavor of the conifers they thrive off of. They're also loaded with nutrients such as B3 and Vitamin D. Pick a bunch and then make Sukiyaki with it. It's one of the best Autumn meals you could ask for.
Somethings I’ve had to learned about foraging is know what you’re looking for, when it grows, when it propagates, and how it interacts with other species.
The real challenge isn’t your knowledge but Father Time and other foragers. I recommend doing scouting hikes and marking the locations of desirable plants on a GPS so you can return to check and harvest. Do not remove the plant from the dirt. Learn how to identify what you need off the plant and where it seeds so you can take some home to grow. Pay attention to the substrate so you can make your own.
A good rule of thumb for artificial propagation is do not take more than 10% of a colony’s seed or fruit.
Somethings I’ve had to learned about foraging is know what you’re looking for, when it grows, when it propagates, and how it interacts with other species.
The real challenge isn’t your knowledge but Father Time and other foragers. I recommend doing scouting hikes and marking the locations of desirable plants on a GPS so you can return to check and harvest. Do not remove the plant from the dirt. Learn how to identify what you need off the plant and where it seeds so you can take some home to grow. Pay attention to the substrate so you can make your own.
A good rule of thumb for artificial propagation is do not take more than 10% of a colony’s seed or fruit.
Good points overall. GPS isn’t necessary though unless you’re going way way back or if it’s an area far away from where you live that you only visit once a year. Learn to memorize landmarks and rely on your own sense of direction and you will be glad you did for the rest of your life.
And now, a bit less appealing but still perfectly edible: Jelly Ear fungus!
A friend introduced me to these; they have a very chewy, rubbery texture uncooked and taste very earthy. Maybe not your first go-to but if you're starving in the Apocalypse they're great because they grow all ear round!
