University Place

Introduction to Foraging: 15 Common Wild Edibles

– So today I’m gonna talk to you about an “Introduction to Foraging Through 15 Common Wild Edibles”. But the first thing I wanna tell you is that learning to forage isn’t really a thing. It’s not really a skill, okay. It’s an umbrella term for an interrelated set of independent relationships. So I like to explain it this way. That learning to forage is like making friends; you do it one at a time. You don’t go learn foraging. You don’t go make friends. You make one friend, you learn one plant. The only way to do this rationally and safely and reasonably is one plant at a time.

And when you got that one, you got it down good, you move on to the next one. And if it’s a good plant or a good friend, hopefully you’ll have it for the rest of your life. You’re not gonna have to remake that acquaintance. So, in this program, I wanna introduce you to foraging and 15 of my friends, like 15 awesome plants. And that’s a lot to meet at once, you know, so you might not be totally ready for all of these plants, just ’cause I talked about ’em, you know? The best I can do in this 50 minutes or so, is give you the acquaintance, and that’s your job to build that relationship and you’ll know when you’re ready to eat that plant. So I perseverate over this list for a long time, ’cause I like to talk about plants, right. And I’m like, “Only 15?” Well, I can do it, I can do only 15. And so I wanted stuff that’s common, accessible to almost everybody. I want things that are easy to identify, like none of these tricky plants that I’m gonna worry about you maybe making a mistake; stuff for beginners. Stuff that’s practical to use.

I eat a lot of wild rice and I love wild rice, but you need some specialized skills and equipment to do that. I’m gonna stick to simple stuff that everyone is ready to do this as soon as the plants are ready for you. And stuff that’s delicious, you know. I’m not gonna tell you about something that I’m not really excited to eat. Now, some people think foraging is about, you know, emergency situations, emergency food, food you eat if you had to. For me, it’s about food that I really wanna eat because I love to. And that’s what I’m gonna talk to you about. And a variety, not 15 leafy greens that are almost the same. You don’t need 15 lettuces necessarily. So I’ve got some root vegetables and some nuts and some fruits and some greens and some shoot vegetables, a variety of stuff.

And before we go, just some introduction to foraging stuff. But what I’m not gonna do is try to convince you to be interested in foraging. Because everybody’s already interested in foraging whether they know it or not. People just inherently love foraging. And why? Because this is the economic essence of being a human being. Like, foraging collectively and intelligently and thoughtfully, this is literally the crucible from which our species came. Our ancestors foraged for millions of years. And I mean, it’s our birthright. You know, a lot of us, a lot of people have angst and they crave and pine for foraging, and they just don’t even know it yet. They haven’t figured that out yet.

I know that you’ve all figured that out and that’s why you’re here. So I don’t need to make you interested in foraging. So I’m just gonna remind you of some of the reasons that you already are interested. So there’s that you know, that deep desire to not die in a food emergency. Everybody wants to not die in an emergency, but most of us are not gonna experience that food emergency. And, you know, I don’t want to eat my favorite food only during emergencies. Can you imagine how bad that would be? I wanna eat my favorite food all the time. So for me, like, I wanna forage all the time. And this is the best food in the world. You know, you’ve had wild blueberries, wild strawberries, morels, wild rice, maple syrup; these are delicacies.

And there’s always been this association between, with foraged foods and poor people and royalty. So they’re free food and they’re delicacies. That’s a pretty awesome combination. And all these foods you’ve heard of, these foraged delicacies, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Because to be a well-known edible, that is, you know, something you might be able to buy at the farmers market or in a store or be served at a restaurant, it has to be available in a huge quantity. You know, fiddleheads are available like by the acre. I could take you to 60-acre patches of fiddleheads. And it has to have a market-friendly shelf life. Now this limits it to a very small percentage of the wild edibles. Most wild edibles are a little bit more scattered and they are especially not very well keeping.

I mean, you might have to eat them within a day to get the best quality from a lot of fruits and vegetables. And those things are, you as a forager are the only person who’ll get to eat that. A non-forager can never have it at any price in any way. To me, that’s exciting. You’re like, eating is exclusive food. I like to eat a variety of stuff. Nutrition. If you look at comparisons of wild edibles to similar domestic vegetables, it’s pretty astounding how much more nutritionally dense the wild foods are. Like, I’d say a reasonable, across-the-board kind of average assumption is two to five times the micronutrient density. That’s profound.

And also, if you choose carefully, foraged foods should be generally pesticide, herbicide free, and that’s important. And also, you know, foraging’s gonna make you live longer. Everybody wants to live longer. And I would argue, not totally facetiously, that if you’re not foraging, you’re not fully living anyways. But just like the mathematical part of this, you know, longevity, life expectancy, foraging is gonna increase your life expectancy. We have so many dietary and exercise-related health problems, and foraging addresses both of those simultaneously in the most holistic, wonderful, satisfying way. So you’ve probably heard of the Mediterranean diet, but you’ve probably heard the watered-down, Americanized, market-friendly version of the Mediterranean diet. Back in the late ’70s and early ’80s, anthropologists discovered a really interesting thing in a number of villages around the Mediterranean, that poor people were living longer than wealthy people and men were living longer than women. And both of these things don’t fit it normal trends, and so they set out to figure out why that is. And what they found was not that they were eating pasta and olive oil.

I mean, not that they were refusing those things, but the real big difference in those people’s lifestyles, dietarily, the people that were living longer, was foraging. And this just wasn’t something anybody could make money off of so it didn’t get talked about a lot, but a huge variety of wild vegetables, particularly leafy greens, often fried, often in pork fat, sometimes in olive oil. And a lot of like free, cheap seafood that you could gather, and sea vegetables. And, of course, the Mediterranean diet was only half about diet; the other half was about exercise. They found that men that worked hard, physical, outdoor labor jobs were living longer than their wives who were not working those kind of jobs. And they didn’t find that trend in rural areas where both genders were working outside, hard, physical labor, and they didn’t find it where, in wealthier classes, where nobody was working outside. So what does foraging do? It gets you outside. It gets you active and getting the healthiest, best food in the world. And it’s something that a 100-year-old and a five-year-old can do together and both enjoy it and both participate in almost equal terms. There’s not a lot of stuff like that.

It’s timeless; it’s awesome. And there’s really no health problem, mental or physical or spiritual that being outside isn’t gonna help. So foraging is it. And it helps that it’s free. You know, I’ve saved a ton of money over the years by eating the best food in the world. I think it’s a pretty good deal. And one thing we often address and are asked about, those of us who teach foraging, is this sustainable? Foraging is the most sustainable land use system that humans have ever engaged in. And there are some people who believe that foraging is destructive and, you know, it’s too crowded in the world to forage, and foraging is unsustainable. Those people are well-meaning and I speak to a lot of them, but they are wrong about that. We need more people foraging.

Now, foraging can be done irresponsibly, but it’s usually done responsibly because when you get out there and you get your hands on the plants and in the dirt, you experience something called gratitude, and gratitude is a really big part of most Indigenous traditions as far as how we relate to the land. And this process of foraging, like just makes this deep gratitude that kind of seeps into you, especially through your digestive system. It just seeps into your blood. And the gratitude is like permanent, and it’s really hard to even think about nature without gratitude when you eat it. You know, the people that we touch on a daily basis gently and caringly are the people we care about the most, and nature’s the same way. If you wanna care about nature, you need to touch it gently and caringly on a regular basis. And the way that you do that is through eating it and managing it and interacting in that most fundamental way. So to be a forager is to be a caretaker. And I’m not gonna, you know, lecture on that too much more because I know that when you get out there and start doing it, you feel all of that. Your heart and your brain, your mind goes to the right places.

But gratitude’s not the only foraging instinct we have. We have this other one; it’s the safety instinct that says, “Don’t eat something if you don’t know what it is. ” And that’s really good advice. It’s as ingrained as our fear of the dark, or our fear of fangs or growly noises on large mammals. We’re just, inherently we know there’s something to worry about there. And you’ve probably heard about stories of plant poisonings that have happened. They are virtually always the result, not of misidentifications, but of nonidentifications. People eating a plant, having no idea what it is, and having made no attempt to figure out what it is. That accounts for virtually all the serious plant poisonings that happen. By emphasizing that, I don’t wanna scare anyone into thinking that these plant poisonings are common because serious plant poisonings are very rare.

I’ve been keeping track of them for a long time. I’ve been collecting medical documentation and, you know, people send me cases that they hear about. Two or three a decade in the last 70 years is about what I have been able to find of, like, what I call “Edible wild plant poisonings,” right. It’s really, really low. You guys seem, everyone here seems, you’ve got pretty good common sense. Don’t eat a plant if you don’t know what it is, think you’re probably gonna be good. You eat something when like, you know what a banana is, you’re ready to eat it. You know what wild lettuce is, you’re ready to eat it. It’s the same process. Why is everybody that doesn’t forage so kinda scared of foraging? Well, it’s actually not about wild food, it’s about unfamiliar food.

So the way that humans relate to food is simply this. If it’s part of our food tradition, we see it as not scary. If we were exposed to it as a food before the age of six or so, it’s food. And if it’s not, we’re scared of it, like automatically. I have been able to prove this many times. I’ve had people out with me on plant walks that, maybe they were a drag-along spouse, they didn’t wanna come, but their spouse brought them, and they said, “I’m not, I wouldn’t eat wild stuff. I’m not comfortable with that. ” And I’ll say, “Well, what about these blackberries?” And they’ll just reach over and start eating blackberries. Like, obviously you’re not afraid of wild stuff. Blackberries are in your, they’re in food.

So by asking you to forage, I’m just saying, “Hey, you can step outside that boundary a little a bit. “I know it’s scary. “Just acknowledge it’s a little bit scary. And then all of a sudden, it’s less scary to do it. ” Because all these foods are traditional for somebody, somewhere, or have been. They’re all robust parts of food traditions from around the world. So they may not be part of your diet already, but you can add ’em in. So with that, I’m gonna talk about some specific plants, plants you can find pretty easily. Not in February, but it’s coming up soon. Mulberry.

How many of you have eaten mulberries? Wow, I don’t know if I’ve ever had so many hands go up. That’s great. So I don’t know what to tell you about mulberries. I mean, I think they’re delicious. I like ’em dried. I like mulberry juice. I like to just stuff my face with mulberries. [audience laughing] I got in trouble a lot of times as a child at Tenney Park for climbing a certain mulberry tree, you know, and eating mulberries. I guess I wasn’t supposed to climb that tree. We do have non-native mulberry that is predominant in this part of the Midwest, and that is the white mulberry, unfortunately named.

So because on the left here, you’ve got white mulberry with the normal color fruit, which is purple, you know, for white mulberry. And up in the upper right, you have a white, white mulberry. So unfortunately, the first specimen of white mulberry that was seen by science was a cultivar from China, brought to Europe. And so when Linnaeus saw it, it’s, “Oh, look, it’s a mulberry with white fruit. ” And they knew about mulberries in Europe, they just didn’t have the Chinese species. And so he called it white mulberry and scientific names are not allowed to change, period. If you called it white and it’s not supposed to be white, it’s gonna be called white forever, that’s the rule. And so it’s Morus alba, white mulberry, but actually, white mulberry’s normally black. So around Madison, you see these dark purple mulberries, those are white mulberries. You see the white mulberries, occasionally.

In my research, 6% are actually white. Those are both white mulberries; they’re good. Down on the lower right, we have our native mulberry, Morus rubra, which is not as dark as the white mulberry. They tend to be larger and longer and a little bit more sour, tangy of a flavor, more raspberry-like. I really like white mulberries and I love the red mulberries. But something you might not have known about mulberries. Well, here’s just a close-up to show you the texture of the leaf. See how much rougher the leaf looks on our native mulberry compared to the Asian mulberry or white mulberry? They’ve got much smoother upper surface to the leaf. It’s very distinct when you get to know it. But also, mulberry leaves are delicious.

So, you know, in China, you can buy mulberry leaf flour. You can occasionally find it in United States in Asian markets, but just like that, they’re excellent. They’re a little bit rough in that stage, so I usually cook them, but they taste shockingly like nettle greens. And mulberries and nettles are not in the same family, but they’re in closely allied families, they’re fairly closely related. So mulberry greens are awesome. Either species, the Asian or the American mulberry, both have good greens. So there’s some more to look forward to when the mulberries leaf out this spring, because you can start eating those leaves April, and you can eat them on, if there’s a stump sprout where mulberry gets cut down, even in July, they’re gonna send up really nice shoots. There are reports in the literature that mulberry shoots or greens are hallucinogenic. I’ve eaten a lot of mulberry shoots, I have never experienced anything like that. I think it’s baloney.

I wouldn’t worry about it. Another great plant. This is salsify, or salsify, sometimes called goat’s beard. This is a relative of dandelion. When I was a kid, we called it giant dandelion. Has those big, fluffy seed balls, which if you look at ’em close up, they’re golden. This would be a more popular wild edible if it didn’t look so much like grass. Look at the lower right there, that’s a young rosette. It looks like grass. How would you know it’s not grass? If you break the leaf, it has a milky sap that turns orangish brown.

No grass has milky sap. Of course, no grass has flowers like that either, but in the young stage, you can always tell, you can always check a salsify plant by breaking the leaf. Now, these are not native. There’s two really similar species that are common in the Midwest with yellow flowers. You can see the difference in the flower structure, but they taste almost the same. And this is a plant that basically every part is edible as long as it’s tender. If you know where some of this grows, anytime of year, go out and check and see, is there a tender part? It could be the flower buds, the young leaves, or my favorite part on the left here, this is the stalk before it blooms. So that would be usually early to mid-May, about two weeks before the first flowers show up. And I chop it, strip off the lower leaves, and that’s what I have on the cutting board there. And that’s probably the best vegetable I’ve ever eaten.

It’s like, if you crossed sweet corn and asparagus, but a little bit more towards the sweet corn side, it’s just really good. So someone asked how I prepare it. I steam it or simmer it briefly. It’s good raw. It’s great when it’s briefly cooked. And this is also a root vegetable. So those are salsify roots up there on the upper right. Those are really big ones. I wanted to impress people, you know. But, you know, more commonly they’re like my pinky size and those are like thumb-sized, but it’s also called oyster plant because some people claim that those roots taste like oysters, you know, sauteed.

I like oysters, I like salsify roots. There’s a very minuscule similarity, but I just say they taste like salsify roots. They’re great. So there’s like two fantastic vegetables on there that are bulky, you know. And then there’s these little flower buds just before the flower opens. And one plant could produce 100 or 200 flowers over the course of a seven-week period. So a lot of buds are gonna show up. If you find a patch of these, you’re not gonna get a handful from one plant. You’re gonna get three to six buds from each plant. But if you know a place where there’s a lot of them, you can get a nice palmful like that and throw ’em in a stir fry.

These are vegetables that the shelf life is short. You’re never gonna be able to buy that. But man, those are good. And here I have a close-up of that’s what it looks like on the plant. So anyone here have a garden? [audience murmuring] Yeah, I thought so. And if you have a garden, you’ve seen this plant. Probably in the top five most common agricultural weeds in the world. So this is amaranth. There’s several species of amaranth. There’s at least five native to the upper Midwest.

And I’m gonna be honest here, at this stage of growth, I can’t say with absolute certainty which one this is, but it’s not the redroot pigweed, which has a hairy leaf even at this stage, but all the amaranth are good. They’re a little bit nondescript like, I just say, you know, it just looks like it’s a leaf, it’s just a plain old leaf. There’s not a lot to say about it. It gets a little bit bigger. So you can see the leaf has no teeth on it, it’s not compound, there’s no milky sap, there’s no easy feature, but it’s so kind of plain Jane and normal, and you’ve all seen this. The one thing that is distinct about the amaranth is these spiky clusters of non-showy flowers. They have three, I believe three, little tiny sepals, and, but there’s really nothing showy on them. And they’ll ripen into a single small seed. So you can gather the grain and process it, like, you know, amaranth grain that you would buy in the store and it’s good. It’s just as good, but that’s labor-intensive and takes some specialized skills.

But amaranth greens are fantastic. Now that’s the seeds. They’re really small, [chuckles] but they are good. But this is the stage for greens. This is what as your typical gardener, this is the stage where you want to find your amaranth. There’s none of the spiky flower clusters have shown on the top, the stem is still tender. I would pinch that thing off about 2/3 of the way down from the top, 1/3 of the way up from the bottom, and you’ll know ’cause it’ll pinch easily and it’s gonna cook up tender. I steam it. So we have amaranth as a weed in our garden at home, but it’s also a vegetable we grow on purpose. So at the end of the growing season, like in October, we’ll grab a few amaranth plants and we’ll scatter the seeds over the whole garden.

So that the next year, we don’t get a whole bunch of weeds; we just get one weed, just amaranth. Well, we mix lamb’s quarters in there too. We get tons of amaranth though, mostly amaranth, and it’s a solid carpet, so it prevents other weeds from growing, like weeds we don’t want. And so late spring, early summer, when it gets to about that size, we go through and we just cut the tops off all the amaranth and we can it. It’s like the easiest harvest we get from the garden. Like we fill five-gallon buckets full, like multiple five-gallon buckets full, and then we can it. And I know a lot of people go, “Canned greens is boring. ” But telling you, it was good for Popeye, it’s good for me. I like canned greens. And throughout the winter, we have canned amaranth greens whenever we want them.

I mean, they’re great fresh, but it’s also nice to have ’em canned. And then after we snip all the tops off, then we go through and we weed them out. They’re an annual, so they’ve got a small root system, easy to pull out, and then we pile of those as mulch around our squash plants and our beans, and then they quickly rot away. And it’s like we never had weeds to begin with, but we just got to eat half of the weeds. How many of you have eaten amaranth in here? Well, that’s a third of you or so, so that’s pretty good. I don’t like it raw. It’s not gonna hurt you raw, but it’s just, it’s not very good raw and it’s a little bit, a little bit tough raw, but it gets super tender when it’s cooked briefly. This here is wild plum. I can’t say enough good stuff about wild plums. I have 210 apple trees.

I also have about an acre of wild plums, some of which I planted there, some of which was growing naturally when I bought my property, and the wild plums just produce incredible amounts of fruit. I mean, a single bush, I might get five or seven gallons of fruit from, and they make really good jelly. They make really good wine. They make a great fruit leather; it’s on the tart side, so I mix it half and half with apple sauce. Fantastic fruit leather. My kids love wild plums. Like during plum season, they will eat 50 or 70 wild plums a day. You just, when they’re fully ripe and plump, just bite in to ’em, suck the nectar out, and then just get rid of the pit and the skin. The skin is pretty tough and kind of astringent, but when they’re fully ripe, that juice inside is so good. I mean, I can just sit there and I can go through 50 of ’em in one sitting.

Also, they make a great vinegar. So there’s a lot of cool things you can do with wild plums. And I don’t think I’ve been to any municipality in Wisconsin where I have walked around for more than a mile or so without seeing a wild plum bush or thicket. This is accessible to virtually everybody. I used to live in Ashland and there’s like miles of wild plum thickets in Ashland. In Birchwood, Wisconsin, along old rail trail, just plum after plum after plum after plum. When I was a kid living on the east side of Madison, I knew where all kinds of plum thickets were within walking distance of my house. I mean, wherever you live, you’ve got some wild plums near you. So about August 20th, start looking for ’em to drop. I mean, they’re loaded.

I found a great one in a ditch in northwestern Wisconsin. I transplanted a root cutting, and five years later, I had that. These are just wonderful, you know, this particular one has got that nice red color. Some of them, they ripen into a more orange, like the first one I showed you. We do have a second species of wild plum, it’s less common, the Canadian plum, but this is the American plum, which is the one that’s most common statewide. Dandelion. Everybody knows dandelion. When I was 10 years old, my mom said, “You know, you can eat dandelions, Sam. They’re not very good, but you can eat ’em. ” So I went out and I picked some dandelion leaves and I boiled ’em, I put some salt on ’em and they were not very good, but I ate ’em.

And I kind of thought dandelions weren’t all that good. It took me a long time to realize that they’re fantastic because I wanna give you a three word sentence to remember as a forager: eat fried greens. We don’t eat enough greens in our culture. We need to eat more greens. It’s good for us and they’re good. I, just looking at that picture, I’m just craving. I’m just thinking about, “Oh, dandelions, I think six weeks, maybe, dandelions. ” So fry some bacon and onions in a wok and then put in a heap of dandelion leaves, like, so it’s almost spilling over the wok and burning. And then they’ll start to wilt down, and keep stirring ’em until they’re completely wilted. And when they’re totally wilted, we put a sauce on that is maple syrup and soy sauce and apple cider vinegar and just salt and pepper.

And my kids love dandelion greens that way. But you don’t wanna get ’em when they’re at this stage. I’m gonna track back to that one, just like that. So a dense cluster of leaves before any flowers have appeared, I like to stick my fingers into that and then cut the leaves with scissors, cut ’em at the midpoint. That’s one of the tricks with dandelion, cut ’em at the midpoint and take the outer half of the leaf, not the lower half. The lower half has most of the bitterness and won’t be as tender, and they won’t cook uniformly. Take the outer half of the leaf; that’s an important trick. In fact, I did a taste test. I fried up the outer half and the inner or lower half in two different frying pans and had people taste it, and universally everybody, it was only a group of 12, but everybody thought that the– I didn’t tell them about this, this was a kind of blind taste test. They were like, “Wow, these are way better than those.

” They were the same plants, same leaves, just a different half of the leaf. So this is another cool part of a dandelion that’s not so well-known. This is what we call the crown. And dandelions, individual plant can live for decades. They can live very long. I have individual plants where I’ve popped these crowns outta the same plant for like 9 or 12 years running now. So if you find a robust plant, you take a spoon, and I just gouge ’em out to make sure you don’t get any dirt, and you get these things that are kinda like artichoke hearts and you can steam them or fry them. You can throw them in soup. Really cool little vegetable. And I love dandelions.

So if you go get dandelions when they’re overgrown, too old, post blooming, at best, they’re gonna be mediocre. But if you get ’em when they’re young and you take just the outer half of the leaf, they’re fantastic. And cattails: everyone knows cattails. Everyone’s heard of cattails. Euell Gibbons called cattail the supermarket of the swamp. And it’s not actually like a supermarket, it’s more like a produce stand. This is early June cattails. They have not quite produced their spikes yet, but shortly at this point, after this point, when they’re gonna reach about chest high, you’re gonna see the spikes start to appear. So if you look on the right there, well, on the far right is the male pollen head and you can collect that pollen, add that pollen to flour. And I just tip the plants over a bucket and just shake it.

And some of the pollen will blow in your face and some will blow away, but 2/3 of it will fall into your bucket. I also have a little contraption I made with a hole in the side of a milk carton, and I put it over that and then shake it. And that works a little bit better, but if you don’t have that made up, just use a bucket. But before that, you have these flower buds before they go to pollen. And as we see on the left of the two that are side by side there, and the one on the left is probably, yeah, two or three weeks earlier, the top part is male, the bottom part is female. Now that female part on the bottom, not that good to eat, but the flower buds on that male part are really good. And luckily, you can just take that male part and snap it off from the female part, and then you can scrape it off with like the back of a butter knife, and you end up with this. I don’t, it’s this strangely textured little chunks of stuff that are pretty good tasting, and you can throw ’em in a soup or a stir fry, or you cook ’em with rice. They’re really versatile and mild flavored. And that would be true of every part of the cattail.

They’re mildly flavored. What else can you eat? Well, on the upper left is a rhizome. So that’s the underground stem that the cattail spreads by. When the rhizomes are mature like that, I like to just take ’em and set ’em on a fire, a campfire and roast ’em, flip ’em over maybe once, and then peel the outside. They have a spongy outer layer and a starchy inner layer, and that starchy inner layer when it’s roasted, kind of has a sweet potato flavor. Excellent. But it’s like sweet potato with string in it. So you gotta chew on it and then pull the string out and then throw it in the fire. And once you’re used to the idea, it’s no longer uncouth. It’s just sweet potato on a string.

It’s pretty good. [audience laughing] But before that rhizome is matured, when it’s growing sideways, we have what I call a lateral shoot, the rhizome shoot. That’s what we have in bottom left. And you can see that towards the right side of each one of these shoots, it has started to mature and turn brown, but the white part is super tender. This is the best part of the cattail, in my opinion. Nobody can try that and not like it, unless they’re a totally anti-vegetable person. And even some anti-vegetable people will be converted. So those are just excellent. You can eat ’em raw, wash ’em carefully, slice ’em, put ’em in salad raw, they’re great. You can put ’em cooked in virtually anything where you want a vegetable.

They’re so mild, they can go with basically everything. And then on the far right, we have the, sometimes it’s called the heart or the base of the leaf cluster. And you would pull that out of a clump of cattails like that round cluster of leaves, peel the outer tough leaves, and take the center. It’s kind of like peeling a leek. And all of what’s over there on those is not good to eat, just the white part. So you could break it or cut it off. Now that part, if you eat it raw, it tends to irritate people’s throats about 10 minutes later. Like not like bad, but like, [clears throat] I don’t know what that’s from. And I’ve had people actually call me and say, “I ate cattails, at least I thought they were cattails, “but it made my throat hurt. Like, do you think I ate irises?” Like, “No, you ate cattails.

” Cook ’em; they won’t do that if they’re cooked. And some people eat them raw and are like, “I don’t care if it scratches my throat, I like ’em raw. ” Then you can have ’em raw, fine. But I just wanna give you the warning. Don’t get scared, don’t get worried that you ate the wrong thing. They give you a scratchy feeling in the throat, raw. So that’s pretty awesome to have five different vegetables from one plant. And all of them are excellent. Anybody recognize this? [audience murmuring] This is a black locust. Black locus is native to North America.

We don’t know exactly what its native range was. It has spread because of human disturbance and spread on purpose because people really like this tree because the wood is rot-resistant. I don’t know how it’s such a well-kept secret that these flowers are like one of the most delicious things in the entire world. Sometimes people ask me, “If I’m just gonna learn one wild edible, what is it?” I was like, “Why would you wanna learn just one?” I have no idea, but if it’s gonna be just one, black locust flowers. So the time that you have to eat the flowers on any one tree is only like five to nine days. But multiple, you know, trees will ripen a different times, so you have a season of about two and a half weeks. But the flower, the upper petal has a spot, like a yellow zone, it’s not like, it’s kind of a blotch, it should be pure yellow. Once it starts to turn a little orangey, you’re too late. So the individual flowers should be about to open or have just opened. And I just peel the flowers off, I eat ’em raw.

I eat a lot of them raw. When they’re in season, I can hardly stop eating them. I make this thing I call the triple black locust salad, where I have black locust flowers raw, and well-cooked, and barely cooked mixed with coconut oil and raspberries and sliced apples. It is like, it is a dessert with no sweetener that’s like, to-die-for good. It’s, you know, it’s fantastic. But this is how versatile these are. I like to put ’em in hot cereal, like I’m gonna make buckwheat and wild rice with black locust flowers in it, or oatmeal with black locust flowers in it. Chicken soup with black locust flowers in it. I made ice cream with black locust flowers in it. That’s how good these are.

They taste like a pea that’s extra sweet. Like imagine, you know, snow peas, but extra sweet with a little bit of a vanilla flavor, that’s black locust flowers. I mean, it’s, you’ve gotta try it. And they’re so fragrant when they’re at the peak stage, you can actually smell them from sometimes a block away. I’m like [sniffs], my window’s down, it’s June, it’s 84 degrees out, and I’m like, “Oh, there’s a black locust flower, I smell it. ” So average ripening time here in Madison is probably about May 25th to June 10th or so, maybe May 20th to June 5th, around there. Brief season, enjoy the season while it lasts. Here’s a tree I love, my favorite nut in the world, shagbark hickory. So on the left is a very shaggy shagbark, but I don’t want you to think they’re always this shaggy. This one was just super shaggy; I had to get a picture.

On the right, it’s a little bit more normal. Those are both shagbark hickories, one that is normal shaggy and one that is not very shaggy at all for a shagbark. But in any case, shagbarks have shaggy bark. They have these nuts that are round like a walnut, but they split into sections by these predetermined cut lines, and you end up finding these angled nuts inside. And when they’re fresh, like you just pick ’em, they have this smell. It’s like pecans with honey, and it’s just, it’s outrageously good. But when you first pick ’em, they’re hard to get outta the shell. You wanna wait about three weeks, let ’em dry a little bit so they shrink back a tiny bit in their shell. And of all the plants I’m talking about today, this is the one that takes a little bit of skill and equipment, like a hammer and a nut pick. [audience laughing] A lot of people are intimidated by the hammer.

You can use a vice, but you wanna crack it on the narrow end and get this sort of X-shaped, you know, cracked there, and then you pull those parts away and you can end up with large chunks like that. Now some shagbark hickory trees have a shape that isn’t going to be very conducive to separating. And just don’t pick those then. Look for a tree with a better shape. This is a particular tree, I’m not gonna tell you where it is, but I’ve been picking off of it since high school. And now I go back, and it doesn’t have a good crop every year. It didn’t this year, but really good cracking shape. I love hickory, I mean, okay, wild rice, maple syrup, and hickory nuts for breakfast. Like if I knew it was my last day, that’s what I would have for breakfast. I mean, this year was actually a good hickory year around here, I got like 30 gallons of shagbark nuts.

And so this was a staple food for Native people in eastern North America. Hickories were really important, the shagbark was sometimes cracked out, but more often, they were pulverized and made into a milky liquid that was drank as just a drink or a soup base. And the word hickory is actually originally the word for that drink. Also hickories were used for oil. Mostly it was the bitter nut, the thin-shelled hickory used for oil. So each of the hickories had their own purpose. They were all really important traditional foods. Stinging nettle. I know they sting, okay, so you need equipment here too, like gloves, you might have those. This is a mature stinging nettle.

These are the, you know, dangly flower clusters, very unshowy flowers. But in that stage there, young shoot, now that one’s probably like a foot tall or 10 inches tall. I would take the top half of that. Again, you don’t wanna eat ’em raw. They’re gonna sting your mouth, nobody wants that. Saute it for just a few minutes, it’s not gonna sting. So the stinging capacity is very rapidly destroyed by any kind of cooking. And these are just high protein, mild tasting, filling, hearty leafy greens. I love stinging nettles. And I would say that stinging nettle is probably like in the top 10 most eaten leafy greens in the world.

It was never domesticated only because it grows itself on every farm, and I mean that literally. Nobody ever had to domesticate stinging nettles because every farm already had them. So there’s no point in growing them, but it was a part of traditional peasant food culture everywhere in the world that had stinging nettles, which is most of the world, you know. So great food to learn. I just like stinging nettles fried with a little bit of onion, plain, or just steamed and salted. That’s as plain as it gets. And I could eat that every day in the month of May. Like maybe not every meal, but one of my meals each day. I love stinging nettles like that. But you know what’s even better? Wood nettles.

Wood nettles at a glance, they don’t look a lot like stinging nettles. The flower parts do, but stinging nettle, the leaves are in pairs, see that? Opposing pairs, long, narrow leaf. Wood nettle, a broad leaf, and they alternate on the stem and they’re much bigger, and they’re concentrated towards the top of the stem. Wood nettle has all the same qualities of stinging nettle, but I think I like it even a little bit more. You want it in this stage. I’d snip above the upper half of those stalks, again. Steam ’em, you know, the stinging nettle is mostly a leafy vegetable. With the wood nettle, you get a leafy vegetable mixed with kind of a sweet stalk vegetable, and it’s somewhat more tender and even milder in flavor. I like ’em both, but I like wood nettle even more. It’s supposed to be 15 plants, but I snuck a extra one in here ’cause I lumped the two nettles together.

[audience laughing] And this, this is the plant that you’ve all seen in your gardens: this is lamb’s quarters. There are multiple species of lamb’s quarters. There’s native and non-native populations to North America. They’re very high in calcium. This is an incredibly nutritious leafy green. You can eat these raw. I prefer them cooked, usually briefly cooked. We usually wash these and then steam ’em with the, like, adhering wash water, just put ’em in a pot with that little bit of water. And when steam starts coming out the lid, I let it go for another minute and turn it off, salt it, maybe a little bit of butter. And you know, I guess I like some simple food, but I love greens, just steamed greens.

And what’s great about if you learn lamb’s quarters, you can go basically anywhere in the world, there’s lamb’s quarters. It’s fairly closely related to the amaranth, we talked about earlier, used similarly. I actually like amaranth a little bit better than lamb’s quarters, but you don’t want to, as a beginning forager, you don’t wanna miss out on either one. Because almost everybody has both of them in their yard. Both of these plants, amaranth and lamb’s quarters, get called pigweed. Often the lamb’s quarter is also called goosefoot, which is kind of a collective term for everything in this genus Chenopodium, which is a Latin name, which means goosefoot. And serviceberry, also called shadbush, also called juneberry, or in Canada, saskatoon. This is one of the only edible wild plants that we have a Canadian province named for. Saskatchewan is literally named for this fruit. This was a very important staple food for Native people on the Great Plains, and it’s now a minor industry in Saskatchewan.

There’s not a lot of commercial growers in the United States, but there should be. The one problem they have compared to blueberries is that they are more fragile, so they get damaged and they spoil a little faster after picking. We gather a lot; some years, we gather as much as like 30 or 40 gallons, some years we don’t get as many. But most of them we dry; I love them dried. They are so good. Probably my favorite fruit in the world is a really good serviceberry. Now, you can find a serviceberry bush with bad fruit every now and then, just like you can find an apple that’s lame. So don’t give up because you had one that wasn’t very good. I know of a really bad serviceberry in Michigan I could bring you to, for example. But I also know of some really great serviceberry bushes that I pick from year after year.

So the time for serviceberries, the earliest ones in southern Wisconsin tend to be early June. So juneberry’s kind of an apt name here. In northern Wisconsin where I live, they first ripen in late June. We have a lot more serviceberries up north. They like poor soil, they like sandy soil, and we have a few additional species that you don’t have down here. So we get our peak production of serviceberries probably mid-July. And sometimes, I’ve picked them all the way into early September, especially along Lake Superior. So they can have a long season, especially with a bunch of different species. The species are hard to tell apart. Don’t worry about it.

If you know it’s a serviceberry, it’s fine. So they have this cluster, elongated cluster called the raceme where the ones at the base of the cluster have much longer stems than the one towards the tip. Can you see that? The ones at the base, in fact, the stems might be four or five times as long as the ones at the tip of that cluster. They’re soft and juicy. They have usually about five soft seeds. They have that five-lobed calyx at the end, like an apple or a rosehip. The simple tooth leaf on a tree with smooth bark, it’s really an easy plant. There’s like, there’s nothing I’ve ever seen anyone confuse serviceberry with. Someone will probably surprise me someday, but that’s a pretty easy one to recognize. In a lot of places in the Midwest, your best serviceberry picking is gonna be in an urban area where it’s planted for landscaping.

And part of the reason is because the bird to berry ratio is lower. Like you’ve got birds in the city, and you might think you have a lot of birds, but not compared to a rural place that has a lot of brush. Like the bird, the catbirds just appear out of nowhere, dozens and dozens of catbirds. So if you try to grow serviceberry bush in a rural area, they often get picked clean. There’s not enough birds around a hospital in Madison to pick all the serviceberries that the hospital planted in their landscape plantings. And so often, that’s like the best place to go. And if you’re gonna put in some landscaping, and you want something native and something that’s delicious, put in a serviceberry, beautiful, also. This is a thistle. This’ll be cool. So this is a pasture thistle.

We have native and non-native thistles, sometimes this one’s called prairie thistle, but that name gets thrown around at a lot of different thistles. All of the thistles are edible. But what part do you eat? Well, I’ll show you. This is the pasture thistle flower and on the right here, we have a young stalk of a pasture thistle. And my friend here is peeling off the leaves while it’s standing, because why pick it first and handle it, right? Take your knife and cut the leaves off while it’s standing and you’ll end up with just a stem. And you can peel the stem, and all of a sudden this prickly thing turned into a vegetable. So I love thistle for converting foraging skeptics, because there’s this magical process where something that is a weed and it’s scary and dangerous turns into a vegetable and people try it, and it’s delicious. So this particular one is a bull thistle shoot. So it’s not the same one that we were peeling here, that’s a pasture thistle shoot. They’re all good, and each thistle species is slightly different.

Like bull thistle, for example, those are for eating cooked. I like those in like a stew or a pot roast or a stir fry, but we have a couple species that are delicious when they’re raw. Like one, I know you’re gonna think this is crazy, but we have one that tastes like honeydew melons when it’s raw. It’s that good. So try your various thistles, and thistles have root. So this is a bull thistle root, and bull thistle’s not my favorite of the thistle roots, but this was a perfect specimen to show you the form and the size. They can be bigger or smaller than that, but that’s a typical good-size thistle root. The pasture thistle that I first showed you has a delicious root. We have another native one, woodland thistle, which the root is excellent raw, like a carrot. So these are really, really useful food plants.

What about this? Anybody know what that is? – Audience Member: Elm seed. – Sam: That is elm seeds. So, you know, back in the ’70s, when Euell Gibbons was popular, someone wrote this comic making fun of Euell Gibbons and it was a comic about eating an elm tree. And of course, he said that they probably found the one thing they thought was definitely not food, which is hilarious because there’s so many edible parts to an elm tree, but the best part is this right here. This is a Siberian elm. This is a non-native elm that is found in basically all urban areas in the Midwest and is considered a weed tree. But these young fruits in early spring, mid-spring are fantastic. They’re kind of like I described the black locust flower, that they can be used in virtually everything. They’re just mild, innocuous, and easy to harvest in huge quantities. So that’s Siberian elm.

This is slippery elm, which is a similar fruit. When I say a fruit, it doesn’t look like a fruit, it looks more like a leafy green, but that actually is the fruit. It’s a winged fruit and it’s flat and it has a flat seed in the middle. If you wait ’til it’s mature and it falls off the tree, it’s all tough, it’s not good anymore. You want it when it’s nice and green like this. This is our native slippery elm, which is very closely related to the Siberian elm, and they actually do hybridize. And slippery elm is pretty common around Madison also. And I was walking with a friend last spring and I said, “You know, look at all those slippery elm samaras, “and I can climb up and pick ’em, but I can’t climb up and bring my camera. ” And so he said, “Hey, look, there’s one. Squirrel must have cut it down for you.

” So I got a picture. So that’s the Siberian elm or the slippery elm. If you look at the winged part, it’s not hairy. An American elm, which is also pretty common, has a similar winged fruit, but that wing part is hairy. Now that’s not gonna poison you or anything, there’s nothing wrong with eating American elm fruits, but they’re just, they aren’t as good, they’re not as tender, they’re not as sweet. So the Siberian and the slippery elm. And everybody has one within walking distance of their house, rural or urban. Got a couple more plants to go, if you wanna hear about ’em? [audience murmuring] All right. Oh, you’ve heard of slippery elm. .

. – Audience Member: Bark. – Bark, right. So I can’t mention slippery elm without mentioning the bark. You have to kill a tree to get the bark. Well, usually you have to. This tree blew down in a windstorm, and I was like, “Hey, look at 50 pounds of slippery elm bark. ” So I peeled it there and I stripped that bark off, and that was an awesome experience actually. Slippery elm bark is full of starch and it’s highly digestible and it smells like maple syrup, and it tastes delicious, slightly sweet, but more just starchy. And if you want something to soothe a sore throat, chew on slippery elm bark, or, you know, you can buy slippery elm throat lozenges.

Thayers slippery elm throat lozenges. No relation to me. [audience laughing] Or you can just take strips of bark and boil it in water, and it’s the best thing for a sore throat. It’s also highly digestible. Hospitals used to give slippery elm flour to people that couldn’t keep other food down in small amounts mixed with water. They probably don’t do it today ’cause the flour’s too expensive. How to tell a slippery elm for sure. They can be hard to tell by the leaves, but the bark is totally different than the American elm. So American elm bark isn’t poisonous; it just doesn’t have the starch in it. So the slippery elm on the left is layers of brown, the American elm is layers of brown and white.

It’s really easy to tell even in the middle of winter. Plain as day if you can remember that fact. Purslane. So purslane is native, but it’s a common garden weed and I think it’s delicious. When I learned this at about the age of 12, I was like, “How come I didn’t know this earlier? “I used to weed this out of the garden. I love this. ” It’s great to nibble raw, but it’s also great as a vegetable in soups. It’s somewhat mucilaginous. You can fry it; you can put it in kimchi. Now I haven’t made kimchi myself, but several people have given me kimchi that had purslane in it that I thought was excellent.

It’s super high in iron, and it’s probably super high in other things. That’s just all I remember off the top of my head right now. Purslane is found all over the world. It’s native in the Americas, it’s native in Australia, it’s native in Africa, it’s native in Asia and Europe. It also produces an edible seed. I don’t have pictures of the seed here, but the seeds have been an important food, and there’s pretty good research showing that purslane seeds help lower blood sugar. So maybe it’ll become something that people start growing and just eating; it’s great when your food is your medicine. And purslane is just, it’s so easy to incorporate into your diet. Another interesting thing about this plant is it uses what’s called CAM photosynthesis or C-A-M. And it photosynthesizes kind of in a unique way that conserves moisture.

During the day, when the sun is shining on it, it’ll produce crassulacean acid, I believe it’s called, and it’ll store that, and then during the night, it’ll convert that into glucose. And the reason it does that is because at night there’s less moisture, there’s less heat, so there’s less moisture stress. It has a different flavor based on when you harvest it and based on the temperature. So it can photosynthesize in different ways, and it doesn’t always use that crassulacean acid metabolism to photosynthesize. So sometimes, especially when it’s hot out, between like 8 and 10 in the morning, it tastes a lot tangier than it does in the afternoon. So it’s kind of fun to mess around with it. It’s always pretty good, though. So if you want it sour, get it in late morning. And finally, I’m gonna talk about a really maligned plant. This was listed by the FAO, I think as like the fourth worst weed in the world, maybe it was the second, I don’t know, one of the worst weeds in the world.

They weren’t talking about flavor. So this is shepherd’s purse. And these triangular seed pods supposedly are shaped like the purses that shepherds used to carry. And I’ve never seen a shepherd, actually, I’ve never seen one, much less a shepherd carrying a purse. So I don’t know anything about what their purses look like, I’m just trying to take ’em at their word. I guess that’s what the old shepherd purses look like. They were triangle, almost heart-shaped at the base, but that seed pod is distinct. You’ve all seen that in your garden. You see that seed pod, you know you are too late to get your shepherd’s purse. When do you want your shepherd’s purse? When it looks like that, lush.

It kind of looked like dandelions. In fact, I talked about making fried dandelion greens. It’s even better is take your bacon and onions and fry a mixture 50/50 of shepherd’s purse and dandelion greens. So shepherd’s purse is a mustard. We have about 40 good, edible mustards just in Wisconsin. There’s a lot of them. And that doesn’t include the ones that I think are kind of lame, not worth eating, but shepherd’s purse is my top, my favorite. It’s mild, it’s not very hot at all. If I fed it to you, you might not realize it was a mustard. It’s not very pungent at all, especially when it’s young and lush like this.

It’s a plant that loves cool weather. So in March, you’re likely to find it around here or into early April, but once it gets, even May, it’s not as good. That is the stem just before it blooms; that’s my favorite part. So foraging is about paying attention to details. If you get it when it’s old, it’s lame and tough. If you get it at either of those two stages I just showed you, shepherd’s purse is one of the best vegetables on Earth. So that was my 15th plant, well 16, I snuck one in. And thanks for listening, and thanks for coming. And I hope that I’ve inspired you to get out and try at least one of these this spring. [audience applauding]