Definitely pick a month. Maybe one that is coming up and prepare yourself for what's coming available. Sumac is done, black caps are probably done . Wild grapes are coming up, rosehips are my favorite after the first frost. All the seeds from spent flowers like echinacea. Tons of goldenrod. PawPaws are coming. Wild apples.
The best time to forage is in the spring. It has the the best edibles. Fiddleheads and ramps, morels. Young Wild grape leaves can be used for dolma and in the fall I process the grapes and make jelly and juice. Takes a long time to process and filter the crystals out but makes the best juice my family has ever tastes. It makes some pretty great jelly and dyes fabrics a pretty nice color.
Most wild edibles taste great just fried in butter.
There's also mullein and wild lettuce coming up as well as thistle seeds if youre into medicine. St. John's Wort was probably just harvestable.
I have tons of wild bergamot where I live so I will have to get creative and use that.
Up north , where you know the water's clean you can forage cat tails. The roots are edible and taste like cucumber. The goo in the leaves is like aloe.
You can scoop up mussles from the lake.
I just read another comment where someone said that.You can't eat wild grapes... You can't eat them off the vine but like a lot of wild things once they are cooked they have a lot of possibilities. Once wild grapes are boiled down and the juice is extracted and the crystals are separated the juice can be diluted and sweetened to your taste you can do anything with it.
Same with wild apples. Once they are boiled down and the juice is extracted, you can dilute it and sweeten it into juice or make a jelly.
I also don't generally f*** with berries or mushrooms but next year I might.
I follow a lot of people on tiktok. Mostly the black forager and I get a lot of recommendations that way but I love buying herb bibles and books.
My grandmother is south american/carribean and believes in Obeah so I knew for a long time that you can heal stuff with plants because she swore by it. She thinks western medicine is trying to kill her.
She might be doing something right because she is ninety four and only takes Tylenol and blood pressure pills.
I have a big poke weed growing in my backyard. I don't have the heart to pull it because God damn it... i'm gonna cook it one day.
You can also eat burdock when it's young. You can eat hosta shoots. We use the plants as decoration but where they are from they grow everywhere , and people eat them when they first come out of the ground.
I think Chinese people grow burdock as a crop for its root and they use it in stir fry's.
A lot of stuff that grows here as weeds and became invasive was originally brought here as food or medicine or decoration.
So as a general rule if it's pretty it's not edible.
If it's got spikes on it and it's prickly , it's probably entirely edible.
If most people walk by it and don't know what it is it's probably useful.
If it looks delicious... It's probably toxic.
I don't know how many exceptions to this rule there are , but echinacea would be an exception. It's beautiful and medicine. I think goldenrod is pretty and it's useful.
There are exceptions to everything , but generally when i'm out looking at plants , that's what i'm thinking in my head.
I’ve decided to try my hand at foraging. Probably not actually picking things to eat and cook with as of yet, kinda just trying to learn the ins and outs and get better at identifying types of plants and their uses first.
I think being able to be a liiiiiitle bit more self sustaining can never be a bad thing, right?
So just starting a thread for tips and tricks - some obscure knowledge, or helpful books or apps or websites any of you may have found, or online groups that don’t suck. Maybe even recipes or uses for plants that you’ve actually found applicable to life.
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rude…
