About a decade ago now, I was walking through a park looking for mushrooms, not finding much. I knew a plant or two, but mostly everything that wasn’t a mushroom seemed to be part of an undecipherable wall of green. I remember coming across a giant, handsome colony of plants, with beautiful toothed leaves and…
Leafy Greens | Basic Profiles
Solomon’s Seal Shoots
Solomon’s Seal shoots (Polyganatum biflorum and Maianthemum racemosum covered here) have to be one of the most under-appreciated wild vegetables out there. If you like fiddleheads, asparagus, or just tasty green vegetables in general, you owe it to yourself to find this plant if it grows near you and give it a try. I read…
Goldenrod Shoots and Tips
For a lot of people, Goldenrod probably conjures up images of brilliant yellow blooms in the middle of summer. I like seeing goldenrod flowers too (for their color-not culinary purposes as the flowers are tough, with the exception of the well-known goldenrod tea) but the shoots and young growing tips are actually a vegetable that…
Dandelion Hearts / Crowns
About 7 years ago while I was playing disc golf, I came across an elderly women digging up dandelions near the parking lot of the course. I’ve always been fascinated by traditional recipes and preparations, so, of course I had to walk up and ask what she was harvesting, and how she was going to…
Virginia Bluebells
There are lots of spring ephemerals I love, but, Virginia Bluebells might just be the prettiest of them all. As you’re probably gathering, you can eat them too, and, they’re delicious! They’re one of the very first ephemerals to come up in the spring, and one of the most beautiful harbingers of the green landscape…
Toothwort
Cutleaf toothwort is a beautiful little plant I love seeing around my ramp patches in the spring. There’s a number of toothworts, but for this post I’m only referring to Cardamine concantenata/dentata, since that’s the only on to have experience eating. Like some other edibles that enjoy the same habitat (hardwood forests with rich soil,…
Trout Lily
Trout lily is a delicious, beautiful, “edible” plant to know, with a couple important caveats. A spring ephemeral, along with other plants that enjoy the same habitat like ramps and toothwort, trout lilies, also called fawn lilies, are common and often widespread in forests with rich soil where I harvest ramps in Minnesota and Wisconsin,…
Spring Beauty (Midwest Miner’s Lettuce)
“Well that’s a cute flower, too small to eat though—where are the rest of those ramps?” was how I regarded spring beauty for, oh, a good eight years. I knew of spring beauty, a small ephemeral wildflower that loves the same maple as everyone’s favorite spring onion from reading Sam Thayer’s first book The Forager’s…
Guide to Milkweed
Common Milkweed: A Traditional Food The various edible parts of common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca is the only species I’ve eaten in quantity) were traditional foods for indigenous peoples of North America. In Native American Food Plants, Daniel Moerman mentions multiple parts of the plant being harvested and consumed. My friend Linda Black Elk, a Native…
Angelica Blossoms (Zavirne)
“These angelicas grow wild near abandoned ruins and damp places. In February the Salentines go feverishly in search of them. This is the moment when the incipient flower-heads are still enclosed in their sheaths right up against the greenish-purple stem. You cut these sheaths with a knife”. –Patience Grey, Honey From a Weed. I love…
Garlic Mustard
When I walk through the maple hardwood forests of Minnesota and Wisconsin in the Spring, saying hi to all the plants I haven’t seen for a year, the nettles, cress, waterleaf, ramps, spring beauty, sochan, and all the others, I get excited–finding them is like seeing an old friend. Not so with garlic mustard. Unlike…
Creeping Bellflower
Creeping bellflower, also known as rampion bellflower, like a lot of edible wild plants that I like to eat, is a weed. A transplant from Europe and Siberia, it was apparently popular as a garden plant (like many weeds in the United States) and, as weeds will do, it rapidly spread from gardens to yards,…
Dames Rocket / Hesperis matronalis
In the early spring, and I mean early, before the nettles, before dandelions, ramps and sochan, there’s dames rocket, or Hesperis matronalis, although it also goes by: damask-violet, dames-wort, dame’s gilliflower, night-scented gilliflower, summer lilac, sweet rocket, mother-of-the-evening, winter gilliflower, dame’s-violet, and queen’s gilliflower, and more. Whatever you call it, it’s a fantastic edible spring…