Lots of miners lettuce here in CA. I used to pick and eat it in my hiking days. Very mild tasting.
Posted on 04/18/2017 1:54:35 PM PDT by nickcarraway
"Wildman Steve Brill" served the audience dandelions, chickweed and onion grass during his presentation on edible weeds at the Scarsdale Public Library on March 31. Steve Brill has been foraging, or gathering wild foods, for over 35 years. Early on he was arrested and handcuffed by undercover park rangers for eating a dandelion in Central Park. Subsequently, after his educating the New York City Parks Department, they hired him to give public foraging tours in Central Park.
We dipped corn chips into a delightful pesto made with garlic mustard. Garlic mustard (scientific name Alliaria petiolata) came from Europe and parts of Asia and is invasive, aggressively taking over our forests floors by outcompeting the native forest plants that support our local ecology. Perhaps our eating non-native invasive plants can be part of a strategy to garlicmustard
Garlic mustard is great raw in salads, mixed with more mild greens. It's also good steamed, simmered, or sauteed.
help control them.
Steve's daughter Violet provided parts of the presentation with surprising knowledge and poise for a seventh grader. She has her sights on becoming an ornithologist as well as an expert forager.
The Bronx River-Sound Shore Audubon Society brought this delicious presentation to Scarsdale.
For recipes and information about foraging, his website is at www.wildmanstevebrill.com.
The common Violets (eastern U.S.?) with the purple flowers are edible. Both the young leaves and the flowers are edible. My wife likes the flower buds from Black Locust trees. She just barely boils them. They are sweet.
This reminds me that I have to go check on a couple stands of bamboo to see if the shoots are coming up. We used to get a few hundred pounds a year.
I read that Purselane was edible and gave it a try, since I had a patch of it growing in my garden. Thoroughly delightful! Mild flavor with a consistency like spinach.
And yeah, it might become VERY important to know this stuff. You can never be sure of your food supply during an emergency, so having a Plan B, a Plan C and a Plan D is always wise. Remember Ukraine.
I had cooked milk weed once. It was edible.
I’ve never much liked dandelion greens, but I sometimes eat soup made with the roots.
I do like violet greens, and purslane. And I harvest quite a lot of grain from wild amaranth and lambsquarters, although I need to be better about using it. I think I have about 4 pounds of it stashed away.
FYI, you can also freeze it. Just stuff a quart-size freezer bag with it and throw it in the freezer. Then you can chop some up to add to soups etc in the winter. Good vitamin A and vitamin C content, and a good source of minerals.
Nasturtium leaves are quite tasty.
When I was a Boy Scout, we ate all sorts of wild plants.
All plants are weeds if they are growing where someone doesn’t want them to.
I enjoyed the flavor and texture of Purselane, more than I expected. Weeds sometimes have unique flavors (I know dandelions are bitter) but I had no complaint with Purselane.
Then again, my weeding chores just got easier. ;)
The roots of the common slough Cattails are a good substitute for starch potatoes.
Yeah, I was pleasantly surprised when I first tried the purslane a couple of years ago too.
I had some dandelion greens the other day. Very early in the year they haven't started putting the sticky white sap into the leaves yet. They aren't the least bit bitter at that point.
If you have some around there, chickweed tastes like cornsilk. And pineapple weed, oddly enough, tastes like pineapple. Borage tastes like watermelon, but it's doubtful you'd find that in your garden unless you planted it at some point. It's worth growing, just for the bees it attracts, and it self-seeds but not to the point where it becomes a nuisance.
For nutritious greens (lots of vitamins and minerals) without a strong flavor, I prefer lambsquarters, pigweed, stinging nettle, and the young leaves from shepherd's purse. I guess in general, the young leaves of ALL of these are better. The shepherd's purse probably has the strongest flavor of those. Not as strong as some lettuces that people grow for their salads though.
I also make a meal of dandelion blossom fritters once a year, but that's probably more just for something to do. Just for an experiment, you can take a blossom, pull all the green parts off and eat what's left and you'll see what the flavor is.
Where’s the BEFF?
Edible weeds, and foraging in the park , and in your own backyard.
Weeds are both a spring tonic and a supplement to your diet (as well as medicinally beneficial).
Guerilla Foraging ' au naturale '
Weeds are 'GMO free' !!
Roadsides and parks are both areas that get sprayed a lot.
Actually it was quite tasty ..sweet...He talked alot about picking them at a certain time and how he checked daily until they were perfect to harvest. He was very proud of “winery”..lolol
Purslane is quite good.
Hard to get enough to eat, though.
I garden quite a bit and grow golden purslane.
Dandelions are suppose to picked at a certain time...before they get bitter I understand.
Lots of miners lettuce here in CA. I used to pick and eat it in my hiking days. Very mild tasting.
Yeah. If you aren't careful the stuff you pick might have as many pesticides as the food you buy in the store. Probably not though. People put the chemicals on their commercial crops in order to make the food prettier and increase yields. If you avoid picking your weeds out of farm fields, your risk of those chemicals is pretty small.
City parks are usually sprayed as well.
There is plenty of good areas to forage but most are outside the city the exception being trees that are "ornamental". You can find them in people's yards if you know what to look for.
Knock on the door and ask politely if you can (carefully!) harvest the seed, nuts or fruit. Usually they will say yes as they regard the mast as useless stuff they have to clean up every year.
I’ve read most of his books including the one on edible plants but I’m afraid I didn’t keep up with my reading enough to utilize it. Always wanted to attend his school. I did have a tracking box in my garage for a few years. Fascinating skill......
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