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…
Leafy Greens | Basic Profiles
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…
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…
Artichoke, Rice, and Mallow Soup
Along with nettles, mallow (numerous varieties) is one of the most widely used foraged greens in the Mediterranean and surrounding areas, and a Google search using words like “Malva soup” will show you what I mean. It’s a very traditional green. Most of the time when you see a recipe for mallow or malva soup,…
Cryptotaenia canadensis / Mitsuba / Japanese Parsley / Honewort
If you’ve ever wondered if there was a plant to forage as a parsley substitute, and from there, if it would be worth picking, the answer is yes, and yes. And to sweeten the deal, the plant is widespread, at least around me. It’s goes by the name of Mitsuba, wild Japanese parsley or Cryptotaenia…
Hedge Mustard
2018. It was early Spring, and I was at a new spot, hoping to get a morel or a hundred, but I hadn’t been planning on bringing home any mustard greens, especially big, juicy leaves like I’d expect in early Summer. Big juicy leaves are what I saw though, and they made me hungry. All…