Foraging for Fun and Dinner

[TheGreatleys]

Searching for wild food is one of my favorite activities while exploring around our campsites. There's more of it out there than you might think. A stroll through the woods quickly becomes a treasure hunt when you learn that the freshest gourmet ingredients are hiding in plain sight, and they're free.

Please don't use this thread as your sole guide for eating wild foods. To safely eat wild foods, you must be 100% certain of your identification, and 100% certain that the source of your information is accurate. Some internet stranger is not generally a sufficiently reliable source. Buy some books, get an experienced guide. Eating the wrong plants or fungus can kill you. Even eating too much of the right thing, or preparing it improperly, can make you sick.

If you decide to take up foraging as a hobby, please tread lightly. I believe that we're in a better position to protect and preserve our valuable wild spaces when more people know how to enjoy them and put them to use. I encourage you to practice sustainable foraging to preserve edible species and their habitats for future generations.

Let's get started in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Cedar Glades park allows dry camping for as long as you want.



Everyone is familiar with these trees. The showy pink blossoms appear in the Spring before the leaves, and they're a favorite of landscapers for that reason.



The tree is the Eastern Redbud, Cercis canadensis. The flower buds are delicious. They taste a bit like if a honeysuckle had a bean. I've only eaten them sparingly as a trail nibble, but I'm told that they work well steamed, stir fried, or pickled. If you harvest them in bulk, don't strip the tree bare. Take a little from here, and a little from there, always leaving more than you take.



Trout Lilies, Erythronium americanum, grow in abundance in these woods. The entire plant is edible. The young leaves are delicious, but the best part is the corm, a bulb-like structure at the root of the plant sized somewhere between a pea and a marble. Peeled, trout lily corms are delicious raw or roasted. This plant can be emetic (makes you throw up) if eaten in large quantities, so only eat in moderation.



Huge stands of mayapple, Podophyllum peltatum, grow on the low lying areas of the trails here. The two-headed stems will produce an egg-shaped fruit that will ripen, contrary to their name, in late Summer. The unripe fruit and the entire rest of the plant is toxic, but once the fruit turns yellow and drops to the ground, the ripe pulp with the seeds removed is safe to eat and delicious.



Higher on the trails, you can find brambleberries. It's hard to tell if this is a raspberry or blackberry at this stage. Wineberries (an invasive brambleberry) have stems that are more hairy than thorny. These will be a delicious trail snack when the berries come in the Summer.



And just outside of Cedar Glades, running up the top of the mountain in Hot Springs National Park, the Sunset Trail is where you can find these bushes covering the forest floor. These are either wild lowbush blueberries, or huckleberries—there doesn't seem to be a consensus on how to tell the difference, but they're both delicious. Mid- to late summer, these bushes will carry tiny blue or black berries, unmistakably similar in appearance to commercial blueberries, just smaller. Their taste is fantastically concentrated blueberry, as if someone put all the flavor of an enormous market variety blueberry into a package a tenth of the size.



Finally, a nice winter/spring green. Barbarea spp, wintercress, bittercress, or yellow rocket is a Brassica, a member of the mustard/cabbage family. The early leaves and flowers range from mild to pungently spicy. Here's a low rosette found on the mountain trail. Note the asymmetrical rounded lobed leaves, reminiscent of broccoli leaves.



And here is the flowering stage, found in a low lying area in the park. Note the 4-petaled yellow leaves, a typical mustard flower. This particular plant at this stage was blindingly spicy.



Happy camping to you all. I'll be updating this thread with more foraging photos as we wander around the country. Feel free to join in with your own wild food photos.

[Hittenstiehl]

Edible strawberry pincushion in AZ yards and desert.

[Outdoors4me]

I planted a redbud in my side yard. I never knew I could eat it!

[TheGreatleys]

Bailey Greatley here, with a special foraging report from Bolivar Flats, Texas.

This is a free beach next next to a seabird sanctuary. You can stay as long as you want, and there are plenty of pelicans to bark at.

The first thing you notice here is how much sand there is. There's so much delicious sand, you can just gobble it up by the mouthful when nobody's looking!

An there's no shortage of delicious treats that are free for the taking. Check out this great vertebra!

And here's some tasty crabby bits. Just lying on the beach for anybody to take, no need to sit or stay!

Free fishy bits!

And here's quite the delicacy. There were packs of enormous creatures on the beach all this week. They were pretty much the biggest dog I've ever seen. They never wanted to play no matter how much I barked at them, but they would always leave these piles of delicious treats behind.

And check this out. It's one of those things you get to shred when your people are out for the day and you're home alone.

Last but not least, these sneaky shells. Most shells are inedible, but these are different. You can tell because they run away. I haven't quite figured out the trick for eating them, but I inspected quite a few, and I can tell you there is definitely a food in there somewhere.

[Hittenstiehl]

Great report Bailey. Several years ago we took the Free State ferry (sans trailer) from Galveston over to Port Bolivar and absolutely were intrigued with the beach, the stilt houses and the beautiful area.

[TheGreatleys]

We're passing through Louisiana, and stopped for a week at Pearl River Wildlife Management area in Slidell. The camping area is actually just outside of the WMA, on the West bank of the Old Pearl River next to Honey Island Swamp Tours. Each camper needs to buy a $10 Wild Louisiana stamp to use the area (good for a year), but camping is otherwise free. We shared this field with a couple of other campers on the weekends, but were on our own during the week.



There is a water spigot located in the camping area, and porta-potties if you were inclined to use them.



The Route 10 rest stop (accessible through an unlocked gate a few hundred feet from the camping area) has a free dump station and free coffee.



Behind the rest area, you can find abundant wild grapes. The fruit will be in season around September to October, but you could harvest the leaves at any time for dolmathes. It's important not to confuse wild grapes with common moonseed, which looks similar but is poisonous. Moonseed has multiple seeds in each fruit and lacks tendrils, while wild grapes have one seed per fruit and a forked tendril that you can see in the picture below.



An excellent edible that is in season now (Spring) is bamboo. Bamboo is the fastest growing plant in the world, and while there are native North American bamboos, most species grown in North America are non-native invasive species.



The edible part of the bamboo is the young shoots. Look for them along the edge where the bamboo is invading the nearby grass. You can dig them up, but the bit underground is usually pretty woody, so I prefer to snap them off like asparagus.



Remove the outer leaves to expose the tender inner core.



Bamboo can be eaten raw, but it's typically chopped and boiled or stir-fried. It's a very widely used ingredient, so recipes abound. Processing takes a little labor, but you can gather a large amount of bamboo from the edge of a reasonable sized stand in just a few minutes. Boiled bamboo freezes nicely. so don't worry if you pick more than you can use right away.



See you all next time.

[urnmor]

My idea of foraging for dinner is to find a great restaurant and if they serve local food all the better.

[RandyNH]

Originally Posted by urnmor

My idea of foraging for dinner is to find a great restaurant and if they serve local food and beer all the better.

X2 (with edit)

[Lily&Me]

I think it’s a great thing, to be able to identify edible wild foods, prepare and consume them.

Our great grandmothers could do this, undoubtedly, and it was considered a necessary survival skill.

Most of we modern day humans would likely be hesitant to try this on our own, lest we pick up something poisonous, tho I have occasionally seen people along the bike path at home gathering greens in a plastic sack.

What is most popular seems to be harvesting morel mushrooms...widely considered a delicacy, and easily found in forested areas by those who know where to look and how to identify them.

I once came upon a young man walking on said bike path, with a paper grocery sack about half full of morels that he had picked up.

I asked him what he was going to do with all those, and he said “I’m gonna cook ‘em, and eat ‘em.”

There are probably classes taught on how to identify edible wild things, and it would be a good skill to know.

Maggie

[TheGreatleys]

"We live in a vastly complex society which has been able to provide us with a multitude of material things, and this is good, but people are beginning to suspect that we have paid a high spiritual price for our plenty. Each person would like to feel that he is an entity, a separate individual capable of independent existence, and this is hard to believe when everything that we eat, wear, live in, drive, use or handle has required the cooperative effort of literally millions of people to produce, process, transport, and, eventually, distribute to our hands. Man simply must feel that he is more than a mere mechanical part in this intricately interdependent industrial system."

Euell Gibbons, from Stalking the Wild Asparagus

[TheGreatleys]

Originally Posted by urnmor

My idea of foraging for dinner is to find a great restaurant and if they serve local food all the better.

Well, @urnmor, we decided to take your advice and check out a restaurant. The Cracker Barrel in Christiansburg, VA is conveniently located off I-81, and they offer free overnight parking.



Most of the uninitiated would think that the middle of a forest, or a tropical island would be some of the best places to forage for food. But you'd have much better luck finding wild edibles in areas near human habitation. The reason is that many of the best edibles are the first colonizers of "disturbed areas," and people tend to disturb lots of areas. This hill next to the parking lot might be a little closer to major roads than I'd like to eat from regularly, but it contains some great specimens of wild edibles.



Dandelions are easy to find and identify. There are lots of dandelion lookalikes, but they're conveniently all edible. The kicker for having found actual dandelion (aside from the flower) is that the leaf notches turn back toward the root. It's a little late in the season for dandelion greens, since they're too bitter for my taste. But the flowers are still harvestable for fritters or dandelion wine (if only I had a place to store it).



Chickory and wild lettuce tend to have notches that point outward from the center of the leaf, or forward away from the root. Here's wild lettuce for comparison. The kicker for wild lettuce is the line of spikes along the midrib, which is hard to see in this photo.



Something you'll find all over the place this time of year are peppergrasses. This one is field pennycress, but there are a couple of similar species. True to their name, peppergrasses have a pungent peppery flavor, and are fantastic additions to salads or other dishes as a substitute for spices. Both the seed pods and the leaves are edible, but use sparingly, since it's really peppery.



I know what you're thinking when you look at this plant. Rhubarb. It sure looks like rhubarb, but it's not. It's burdock, and its root is a staple of Japanese cousine, called Gobo.



Burdock has big, wide leaves with a ruffled margin, and a sort of heart shape, and they're white on the underside. Unlike rhubarb, the stem of burdock is hollow, which makes them fairly easy to tell apart.



Mustard is growing all over the place this time of year. It's in flower, so the greens are a little hit-or-miss as far as flavor is concerned, but all mustard greens, flowers, and seeds are edible, and frequently delicious. They're easy to identify with their distinctive four petal flower (two up, two down), 6 stamens (4 tall, 2 short), and 1 pistil. If you follow this thread for a while, I guarantee you're going to see LOTS of mustards.



Another Springtime staple of wild food is Cleavers. This slim plant isn't much but a stem with an occasional whorl of 8 leaves. The clincher for identification is how sticky the plant is. It's not slimy-sticky, but it has tons of tiny hairs that stick like Velcro. Chopped and boiled or sauteed, Cleavers makes a mild vegetable, and is good for mixing with stronger greens. You can eat it raw, but the Velcro thing makes the texture a little less than desirable.



Finally, lest you all think I'm just into eating weird stuff I found in ditches, I'll have you know that I stalked my first wild asparagus this past week. Sharp-eyed commuters on I-81 through Virginia will note the abundant asparagus ferns standing throughout the roadsides and medians. Most of them are too far gone by now, but they can be worth investigating, since stands might still have a few harvestable shoots.

[Hittenstiehl]

Have you been in my backyard again. 🍀💐🌿🌾🌱I swear we're going to mow this coming week. 😊

[A W Warn]

Originally Posted by urnmor

My idea of foraging for dinner is to find a great restaurant and if they serve local food all the better.

That's my idea too.
I forage among the wildlife for snacks at the bar during happy hour.

In my younger days, I would forage for edibles in the woods. When I was a child collecting nuts, hickory and walnut, was normal where I grew up. I picked wild grapes and berries, mom made preserves and jam. Wild black berry pie or huckleberry pie, yum!! Many times I made muscadine wine from our wild grapes. Wild cress is really good if picked when tender. (locally called creasy greens) Polk salad is not one I like. I could go on and on....

I've skinned animals and scaled a lot of fish, and ate them too. One of my favorite things to harvest wild was oysters from the tidal creeks. 50 years ago I would stand in the water and eat raw oysters. Now that is dangerous, because they are polluted.

Living off of the land is not easy. It's a lot of WORK!

[A W Warn]

This thread got me to thinking about some things I ate from the wild when I was a child, things that I have not seen growing wild for years.
We would eat dew berries, similar to a blackberry or raspberry. It grew low to the ground on a vine.
We would eat maypops, the fruit of a passion flower.
We would eat pawpaws. a yellow fruit the grew on a small tree/shrub.
We would eat wild plums, yellow and red.
Where did these things go?? Population/development took their spaces. I guess they still survive somewhere, but not where I am.

Mom used to often make persimmon pudding. Have not had that in years.

[Too tall]

Great stuff. I want to hang with the TheGreatleys

[TheGreatleys]

Originally Posted by A W Warn

This thread got me to thinking about some things I ate from the wild when I was a child, things that I have not seen growing wild for years.
We would eat dew berries, similar to a blackberry or raspberry. It grew low to the ground on a vine.
We would eat maypops, the fruit of a passion flower.
We would eat pawpaws. a yellow fruit the grew on a small tree/shrub.
We would eat wild plums, yellow and red.
Where did these things go?? Population/development took their spaces. I guess they still survive somewhere, but not where I am.

Mom used to often make persimmon pudding. Have not had that in years.

Those are wonderful memories. And all that stuff is all still out there if you look in the right place at the right time.

I think we all tend to spend more time exploring as children. Maybe if you're in the right place at the right time, you can get a bite of pawpaw again, and it'll all come rushing back.