The foraging thread - No such thing as a free lunch?

[Orange Rhymer]

I've been reading a lot of foraging books lately since I tried Scribd and have access to lots of books. On my daily walk today I started looking and realized there are a variety of fruits around. There were juniper berries and firethorns (berries), though those are questionable to me. However, I found two large patches of chiltepins (tiny capsicum peppers) and southern dewberries. They're along the fence of the property I'm living at so I plan to go back and pick a few tomorrow. Perhaps I'll pickle the peppers and eat the berries (or make jam if there's enough).

I'd love to go on more foraging/nature hikes but I'm wondering about the legality of just tromping through random places picking the plants. Does it matter? Not like they're using the wild plants anyway.

I got a couple apps to identify plants and they're decent for the most part so far. One almost feels like Pokémon go for plants.

Different states/counties have different foraging laws. If you have property-owner permission, its always ok (unless endangered)
Public land - well, depends. Some states have 'foraging permits' just like fishing.
I doubt any cop or forestry official would give a fuck. Unless you are filling a car.

 

[cuÞbert]

Last year I decided as a project to harvest and process black walnuts. They were edible, but if I was going to try again I would try making them candied.

Here's a tip: Make sure you wear rubber gloves that aren't going to rip when you're tearing the rind off. My hands were pitch black for months.

 

[Coffee Druid]

Different states/counties have different foraging laws. If you have property-owner permission, its always ok (unless endangered)
Public land - well, depends. Some states have 'foraging permits' just like fishing.
I doubt any cop or forestry official would give a fuck. Unless you are filling a car.

Yeah. I plan to look up any regulations in my region and any available hiking locations. Maybe sometime I'll put together a set of foraging gear.

Update on my finds. I did not actually find dewberries. They were actually a smilax (greenbriar) variety. Both have clusters of red berries and spines so I got them mixed up. The berries are still viable for jelly though. I found some abundant prairie tea plants (you can smell them before you even see em) so if I figure out if they're the kind I want I'll pick some of that too.

 

[Hongourable Madisha]

I've started learning mushrooms now. I picked up Roger Phillips's book, "Mushrooms", the one Shroomify recommends. So far I've only found wood ear mushrooms, but I found loads growing on some elder trees. They're great trees for foraging, elderflowers in the spring, elderberries in the summer, and then wood ears in the late autumn. They're used in a lot of Chinese food, you have to blanch them first but then I'll make them into a cold dish or hot and sour soup.

 

[Coffee Druid]

I've started learning mushrooms now. I picked up Roger Phillips's book, "Mushrooms", the one Shroomify recommends. So far I've only found wood ear mushrooms, but I found loads growing on some elder trees. They're great trees for foraging, elderflowers in the spring, elderberries in the summer, and then wood ears in the late autumn. They're used in a lot of Chinese food, you have to blanch them first but then I'll make them into a cold dish or hot and sour soup.

I'm jealous of the elderflower tree. I recently read up on making cordials from flowers. Elderflowers are a common one. But I have some wisteria vines at my parents' house I could try making a cordial with in the spring.

Mushrooms are another thing I'd like to get into. I'm not sure what can be found in my climate but who knows. Maybe there's some cool ones somewhere.

 

[Ira the Weatherman]

Not sure if this really counts, but combing the shoreline for food is a really fun and rewarding activity if you live somewhere relatively close to the sea.

Most countries have very relaxed laws on what and how much you're allowed to gather, and if you bring a pot and sone firestarting equipment you can enjoy the fruits of your labour within half an hour. Cockles and winkles are especially easy to gather. Limpets and razorclams are fucking amazing. Even if you don't like seafood, a suprising number of coastal plants are perfectly edible, even ones quite far from the shore.

One thing to be aware of is that filterfeeders like mussels can accumulate nasty shit from algae and industrial waste. Algae blooms are seasonal and you can easily check if there's heavy industry upstream from your location, so some basic research will often be enough to determine if you're safe to snack on them. It's still best to err on the side of caution if you're unsure, because polluted mussels can fuck you up good for the rest of your days.

 

[paint huffing shaman]

now days this is no

Yeah like I'd trust commie jew academics about something that might kill me. They'd probably say that a poisonous mushroom is perfectly safe just to rid the world of another cisgender hetero white man.

longer a troll but a real life consern

 

[Hongourable Madisha]

There's tons of wood ear mushrooms in the woods near me at the moment. They look like funny ears growing on the trees, and they really feel cartilaginous, like rubbing your ear lobe.





I got a good haul yesterday and blanched them and put them in the fridge. This one looked even more like an ear, you can see where they get the name.

Today I turned some of them into moo shu pork (minus the pork, plus extra wood ears).

They're good in moo shu rou, in hot and sour soup, and in salads and cold dishes. They don't have much flavour but they have a crunchy jelly texture that's nice if you like it (can be off-putting to some people, depends on your personal taste) and they absorb marinades and dressings really well. A good mushroom for beginners (like me), they don't really look like anything else. There's a couple of kinds of wood ears (cloud wood ears too) but both are edible and pretty similar.

 

[KiwiFuzz]

Foraging in California

Miner's lettuce is out in California right now. (Leafy green foothill plant.) There are also a lot of small streams where you can find wild watercress.

If you have a pair of needlenose pliers, ghost pine/gray pine/digger pine nuts are edible and massive. All acorns are edible but there's wide variation in tannin content.

I know people who swear that coffeeberries and salal berries are good but I think they're gross. Wild grapes and cherries/plums are edible but need processing. Ditto for manzanita berries. If you find a good blue elderberry patch, you're going to need a bucket. Anything resembling a blackberry or raspberry is edible and yummy but don't get run over on the road.

Especially around old homesteads, you can often find feral fig trees, prickly pears, and olive trees. Figs are a weed so don't worry about taking them.

Wild onions are fun. Chia is very common but a pain in the ass to process.

Never eat anything that has carrot-like foliage. Poison hemlock is dirt common here.

All of the seaweed species here are edible except for one that contains sulfuric acid, and you will know it when you nibble it. Don't eat shellfish from May-October.

One thing to mention: a lot of times after fields have been harvested there are imperfect fruits and veg just sitting there for the taking. It's probably technically illegal but nobody is going to stop you.

Foraging in National Parks is illegal.

This site has recipes for wild North American foods.

Edible Wild Plants and Mushrooms - Recipes and Guides | Hank Shaw

Hank Shaw's guides to edible wild plants and mushrooms: recipes, plus guides on how to safely gather and cook edible wild plants and mushrooms.

honest-food.net

 

[wunhunglo]

Termite pancakes? If you find a line of these little critters marching up to a nest on a tree (looks like a tumor on the bark) you can just let a few march into your hand and pop them in your mouth. Like sesame seeds with a hint of pine-sol. I'm told mixing them in batter makes good protein pancakes while camping.

 

[Hongourable Madisha]

Wild garlic and few-flowered leeks are everywhere at the moment in the UK. Few-flowered leeks are another of the invasive foreign species, so you can pull them up and take as much as you like. They're a lot like spring onions, use them pretty much anywhere you'd use spring onions.
Wild garlic is a milder, more garlicky taste, that's not invasive but they do grow in huge clumps, so you can take quite a bit before it even looks like anyone's been there. It's like spinach and garlic, it's very good in saag curries, pasta sauces, pesto and salads. The flowers are also edible and nice to decorate food with too.

 

[ShortPoppy]

Here are some sloes I found near a roadside with that dust on, you can see the dust in this picture (though sloes look a bit like that anyway). I soaked and rinsed them in cold water a few times and they were fine, made a very nice jelly to eat with meats or cook in casseroles.
View attachment 1583020

Those are sloe berries? Cool, I didn't know that. I picked a few growing just outside a farm's boundary fence last summer and ate them raw, thinking they were a kind of plum (which I suppose they are). Maybe I'll try cooking them next time.

There are no more berries now as winter's just begun down here. Time to look for dandelions and milk thistles, wild fennel and water dock. The latter has a nice tangy taste rather like sorrel, but the leaves wilt quite soon after picking. Will see if they last longer in plastic containers rather than bags.

There are a lot of useful plants growing near my workplace too (as long as I can get to the good stuff before our gardener hacks everything off). I'm currently brine-curing a small jar's worth of olives from a tree near one of our storage sheds. Also, I need to learn more uses for lavender flowers, we have several beds that produce probably a good few kilos of flowers per year.

 

[Hongourable Madisha]

Sounds like really good finds! If leaves wilt a bit, I like to cook them; wild garlic does that too and it disintegrates really fast when cooked, like spinach, so I use it to make saag curries, soups and pasta sauces. I've seen sorrel soup on some hipster menus round here before, usually hugely overpriced considering the ingredients are free, so that might be a good option for a homemade treat.

Sloes are often used to flavour gin or vodka too, they have a really strong plum flavour so it goes well in them. I don't drink so I make them into jams and jellies, but flavoured spirits is probably the most popular use for them here.

Lavender's used in a lot of southern French food, herbes de Provence is a classic herb mix that includes lavender. Nice in casseroles. They're also nice dried around the house, lots of things are lavender-scented.
I've seen people add them to cookie or shortbread dough and bake them, make lavender sugar by keeping the dried heads in a jar of sugar, or boil them into a tea, which is an indicator: it's bright blue when it's boiled, and if you add acid to it, it goes bright pink. Very nice served cold, mixed with lemonade, it makes a pink lavender lemonade.

 

[Spasticus Autisticus]

We're getting into huckleberry season here. We have three kinds: red, black and blue. All of them are tasty but the reds are the easiest to find. Last year I found a trail that has a ton of them about a mile in, so I'll definitely be hitting that up again. I think a lot of people around here think they are poisonous so they don't get picked out as much as the blackberries, which is fine by me. Salmonberries are also out now, but I find them to be kind of tasteless.

Then in late summer/early fall, it's blackberry and thimbleberry season. Our native blackberries aren't all that great, but the invasive Himalayans are fantastic. As abundant as the invasive blackberries are, it can be hard to find bushes that don't get immediately picked out. Thimbleberries are a little harder to find, mostly deeper into the mountains, but I love the taste of them.

I got into razor clamming a couple years back. It's loads of fun and the razor clams here are big and meaty. Unfortunately almost all of last season was closed because of toxic algae blooms. I've always wanted to get into mushroom hunting but the local mycological society has not been meeting because of the Wuflu.

 

[Coffee Druid]

We had dewberry season a month or so ago. There's a lot of patches on my property, but they're all small so it's like going hunting. The few ripe ones I had were delicious, but I swear they went straight from red to being inside a bird's gullet in no time flat.

I'm sad the agarita bushes didn't fruit this spring, but I guess the unusual freeze we had messed with them. I'm looking forward to the late summer when the Mexican persimmons and bird eye chilis will be ripe.

Those are sloe berries? Cool, I didn't know that. I picked a few growing just outside a farm's boundary fence last summer and ate them raw, thinking they were a kind of plum (which I suppose they are). Maybe I'll try cooking them next time.

There are no more berries now as winter's just begun down here. Time to look for dandelions and milk thistles, wild fennel and water dock. The latter has a nice tangy taste rather like sorrel, but the leaves wilt quite soon after picking. Will see if they last longer in plastic containers rather than bags.

There are a lot of useful plants growing near my workplace too (as long as I can get to the good stuff before our gardener hacks everything off). I'm currently brine-curing a small jar's worth of olives from a tree near one of our storage sheds. Also, I need to learn more uses for lavender flowers, we have several beds that produce probably a good few kilos of flowers per year.

Lavender is great in foods, like lemonade and cakes/cookies. It's not for everyone, but I like it. I wish we had more dandelions. That's a weed I'd actually love more of. We had a metric ton of thistles though (I think bull and milk). Supposedly you can peel the outer stem and cook the insides, and do something with the flower bulbs. But they're a prickly pain in the butt to work with.

There's tons of wood ear mushrooms in the woods near me at the moment. They look like funny ears growing on the trees, and they really feel cartilaginous, like rubbing your ear lobe.

View attachment 1753699

View attachment 1753701

I got a good haul yesterday and blanched them and put them in the fridge. This one looked even more like an ear, you can see where they get the name.
View attachment 1753707
Today I turned some of them into moo shu pork (minus the pork, plus extra wood ears).
View attachment 1753696
They're good in moo shu rou, in hot and sour soup, and in salads and cold dishes. They don't have much flavour but they have a crunchy jelly texture that's nice if you like it (can be off-putting to some people, depends on your personal taste) and they absorb marinades and dressings really well. A good mushroom for beginners (like me), they don't really look like anything else. There's a couple of kinds of wood ears (cloud wood ears too) but both are edible and pretty similar.

That reminds me of something I found in my yard recently. Patches of fleshy green stuff. Pretty sure it's a variety of nostoc algae, possibly nostoc commune. Stuff looks nasty, but apparently varieties of it are eaten in some Asian countries like a vegetable. I'll be leaving it alone, personally.

Spoiler: Looks like this

 

[Un Platano]

I've got a dry riverbed near my house that all the water in the area drains into due to it being a low point, and as a result it's swampy and perfect for blueberries to grow in, and they're everywhere there. Only problem is, the ones that do grow there are completely flavorless. There's not even an acidic taste to them like wild blueberries tend to have, they're just little lumps of nothing.

 

[VIPPER?]

at basic people made fun of me for eating wild blueberries. that's my foraging story. thanks

 

[OrionBalls]

There's tons of stuff around here. We are right off a major trail known for its avid hikers, and some of them have transplanted plants from the area near the trails, themselves. And, i think there used to be an orchard up yonder, because there's a bounty of morels every spring. Good eating, and good selling to local chefs.

 

[Hongourable Madisha]

I found an enormous chicken-of-the-woods the other day, for the first time, and have about a pound of it in my fridge. I was certain of the ID but I still cooked and tried a piece yesterday to make sure I'm not allergic to it; apparently some people are. My tongue felt a bit tingly but otherwise fine, a while later it went away, so I'm planning on making my very own tendies with it. Apparently it isn't a good idea to eat loads of it in one go, so I'll go easy with it and spread it out in different meals this week as I use it up.

 

[Helvítis Túristi]

I found an enormous chicken-of-the-woods the other day, for the first time, and have about a pound of it in my fridge. I was certain of the ID but I still cooked and tried a piece yesterday to make sure I'm not allergic to it; apparently some people are. My tongue felt a bit tingly but otherwise fine, a while later it went away, so I'm planning on making my very own tendies with it. Apparently it isn't a good idea to eat loads of it in one go, so I'll go easy with it and spread it out in different meals this week as I use it up.

I would look up cooking instructions for the specific type of wild mushrooms. Some are ok, but other's need to be cooked thoroughly to degrade the toxins. There was some mushrooms I saw on a bike path that looked like ones in a grocery store, but I'm not mushroom expert so I didn't mess with it.

I'm still debating on if I should forage for raspberries this year, I never find a whole lot in my area.