• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
Forager | Chef
  • Home
  • About
  • Recipes
  • Interviews
  • Partnerships
  • Contact
menu icon
go to homepage
  • Home
  • About
  • Recipes
  • Interviews
  • Partnerships
  • Contact
    • Facebook
    • Instagram
    • YouTube
  • subscribe
    search icon
    Homepage link
    • Home
    • About
    • Recipes
    • Interviews
    • Partnerships
    • Contact
    • Facebook
    • Instagram
    • YouTube
  • ×

    Home

    Foraging Edible Wild Plants

    About

    Here you'll find posts on different wild plants I eat and enjoy, with plenty of images and descriptions as well as  harvesting and cooking techniques.

    Favorites

    • Wild Fruit | Leafy Greens | Ramps | Milkweed | Hickory Nuts 
    • Black Walnuts | Wild Caraway | Sweetfern | Angelica | Spruce Tips
    a large mix of wild edible plants and flowers

    Variety is the spice of life.

    I harvest a lot of things on this website. Foraging can be intimidating, and often guidebooks only have one or two small images of plants.

    It's a big leap of faith from thinking you know what something is to putting it in your body or serving it to others.

    One tool in a kit

    I've designed this website to be a culinary companion to other resources you may already have. Think of it as one tool in a set of tools you can use to learn about different wild ingredients.

    I try to cover: what it is, how to identify, look alikes (if any) when and where to harvest, and what you can do with it in the kitchen.

    The Forager's Harvest by Sam Thayer

    Sam's books are the gold standard in foraging.

    Other Resources

    Other tools in your plant identification kit I recommend are:

    • Foraging guides, especially Sam Thayer's.
    • Going on forays and plant walks with local experts in your area.
    • Social media groups on Facebook. Joining a group specific to your area can show you what people are picking. It's like having eyes and ears in the woods.
    • Despite what many of my peers will say, Identification apps like INaturalist and others have a pretty good success rate of getting plants to genus.

    Moderation and Safety

    Once you've found a new plant, mushroom, or anything, make sure to only consume small amounts when you start. Start with eating 4 oz of cooked leafy greens, or 2 oz (raw weight) of mushrooms if it's your first time. 

    • Sea Beet
    • Oxeye Daisy
    • Lampascioni: Edible Hyacinth Bulbs
    • Black Locust Flowers
    • Swamp Saxifrage Shoots
    • Elm Samaras
    • Golpar (Cow Parsnip Seed)
    • Sweetfern (Comptonia peregrina)
    • Green Kentucky Coffee Beans
    • Foraging and Cooking Dandelion Hearts or Crowns
    • Virginia Bluebells (Mertensia virginica)
    • Hackberries
    • Fresh Horseradish
    • Prairie Turnips (Thíŋpsiŋla)
    • How to Cook Angelica Blossoms (Zavirne)
    • Garlic Mustard: A Dangerous Invasive Edible
    • Mitsuba / Japanese Parsley: Harvesting and Cooking
    • Eating the Whole Spinach
    • Smilax Shoots / Carrion Flower
    • Horseradish Leaves
    • Water Pepper (Persicaria hydropiper)
    • Green Butternut Squash
    • Rau Ram
    • American Burnweed / Erechtites hieraciifolius
    • Meadowsweet: Uses and Benefits, Cooking and Recipes
    • Wild Plums
    • Milkweed Flowers
    • Common Amaranth: Amaranthus retroflexus
    • Wood Nettles
    • Milkweed Silk / Milkweed White
    • Dames rocket buds / raabs
    • Sochan (Coneflower Leaves)
    • Hosta Shoots
    • Wild Fennel: Identification, Harvesting and Uses
    • Cedar Cones
    • Milkweed Pods
    • Cow Parsnip: Identification, Edible Parts, and Cooking
    • Day Lily Shoots
    • Common Lamb's Quarters / Wild Spinach
    • Chickweed

    Posts navigation

    1 2 Next page

    Primary Sidebar

    Chef Alan Bergo

    HI, I'm Alan: James Beard Award-winning Chef, Author, Show Host and Forager. I've been writing about cooking wild food here for over a decade. Let me show you why foraging is the most delicious thing you'll ever do.

    More about me →

    Get The Book

    the forager chef's book of flora
    The Forager Chefs Book of Flora

    As Seen On

    Footer

    BACK TO TOP

    Privacy

    Subscribe

    Be the first to hear what I'm doing

    Contact

    As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

    Copyright © 2022 Forager | Chef®