What type of things do you find? (Fruit or vegetable.)
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Ditch asparagus. My wife and I both love it
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Mushrooms, berries, greens. I find a lot of oysters and chicken, tons of autumn olive, crabapple, black rasberries. Garlic mustard, asparagus, knotweed, ramps, wild garlic, etc.
I forage a lot of invasives, the woods across the street is full of them. I was foraging before I started gardening.
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used to pick wild strawberries, raspberries and blueberries as a kid. my mother would pack us a lunch and we would go picking for the day. when my kids were little i did the same with them. i still forage a wild patch if ui come across it but i have so much different stuff growing here i just take my grand daughter out in the food forest to let her do her thing. she likes to hide in the bushes.
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Wild Grapes, Blackberries and Blueberry/Huckleberries are just stupidly available here. Cattails, Lambsquarter and Groundnut are very available and harvested. Sunchoke and wild sweet potatoes are common but not on our menu.
There are many others but either they are less common, a pain to harvest or like Persimmons; to bug bitten to bother with.
Normally we pick up pecans from abandoned properties we are allowed to use. But oddly the price of Pecans are being held down by the Pecan Kingpins despite lower production from storm damaged orchards and much higher retail prices. It is BS.
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Probably not on the same subject but im a hobby fruit hunter and wildflower hunter. I have my eye on some figs and mulberries and an Asian persimmon that i saw growing at some businesses public properties and abandoned places now.
I found a yellow black raspberry last year and a new to me cultivar of blackberry growing in a boggy area.
Urban foraging i guess… i spy most everything from my window and then do walkabouts… my junk pruners and hand digger go with me everywhere.
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I get apricots and prunes from neighbors’ trees. Sometimes I give them a jar of jam or pick fruit for them or help with cleanup. I often give away apples to others doing the same kind of thing, but I insist on picking them myself.
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I get loquats from a parking lot and when I go to South Florida I get cocoplums from every parking lot. I plan on collecting some elderberries and black cherries this year as well.
I do forage wildflowers. I collected lyreleaf sage, some sort of yellow wild flower, poor man’s pepper and green shrimp plant. Had to save them before they got mowed over.
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Lambs quarters and purslane
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Heard it was edible…how do you use it and when is best time to harvest? thanks
Didn’t know they were edible. I just collected them as ornamentals. Once they get mowed down, they don’t really pop back up, so I planted some where they can grow in the butterfly garden.
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I just planted asparagus for the first time this year. it produced four very thin asparagus.
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Tried planting Rhubarb for the first time. And was pleasantly surprised what a fast and strong grower it is.
Then my bad 6 y.o. grandaughter broke it…lol
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glad to hear it was doing well for you. most on here from the south that have tried just to have the heat kill them.
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Wild blackberries, black cherry, persimmons, elderberry.
Hickory nuts… shag and mocker
Mushrooms … morels, chanterelle.
Wood sorrel… pink and yellow. Spicy lemony flavor. Dandelions… .mostly just eat the yellow part of flowers. The green part is bitter.
Ginseng… the whole plant is edible… the blossoms are very strong … most eat the root and I do that… prefer 25+ year old roots… small bulb type. I chew the stems while hunting… gives you a little buzzz and burst of energy. Leaves make good tea.
Redbbud blossoms… taste like sweet peas… good add to a salad.
I also forage for (hunt and fish)… largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, black perch, brem, crappie, bluegill, catfish… deer, squirrel, rabbit, turkey, dove, quail.
TNHunter
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Wow, reading these posts I want to say “All of the above.”
When I was a kid, I would attack any wild/feral food source I could. Maybe I wasn’t fed enough??? That included stealing apples from a neighbor’s trees on the walk home from the schoolbus stop; eating blackberries and rhubarb that had survived the abandonment of a nearby farmhouse; harvesting pears with my grandfather from a nearby abandoned tree; eating dewberries growing wild in the meadow near my house; eating hickory nuts from a huge tree in my backyard (had to knock them down before the gray squirrels got them) . . . .
Now I grow much of what I like best, but I’ll still grab wild grapes and blackcaps, wild mushrooms (wine cap, hen, chicken, Dryad’s saddle, oysters, and anything else tasty that I can identify with certainty), feral pears and apples.
I take some greens, but admittedly not enough – I’ll eat purslane, lamb’s quarters, violet, mint. Some ramp.
Yeah I “forage” whitetail deer too. I can’t convince my wife to eat wild rabbits or squirrels.
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I went after anything I knew was edible too; gooseberries, mulberries, chokecherries, wild blackberries, wild plum, wood sorrel (we call it sheepshire), blackcap raspberries, morrels, walnuts.
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I’ve made Wineberry pies the past two years. The local blackberries are #@%*ing awful. I found patches of local black raspberries I’m going to visit this year to see if they’re any good.
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Sometimes we find wild blackberries with little dried out patches caused by stink type bugs. Those will turn your mouth inside out they are so bad.
80% of our wild ones are Allegheny. They are great for jelly.
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Yeah, I’m big on foraging wild asparagus, morels, saskatoons, strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, and currants.
If I’m looking to make some jam, the wild pincherries and chokecherries also come in handy.
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