Edible hostas?

We have a small shady yard and one of the few plants to do well there is hostas.

I recently learned that hosta leaves are eaten as greens in Japan where they're called urui and I was wondering if anyone has any experience or knowledge about this.

I've heard that day lilies are edible too but only the wild/feral type and the domestic cultivars can cause varying degrees of stomach upset and I was wondering if the same was true about urui/hosta leaves since we have multiple kinds but don't know the cultivar names off hand (all green, green with white stripes etc)

Thanks!

The reason day lilies are not always good to eat when they aren't the classic wild variety is because they have been hybridized with inedible lilies. From everything I have read, hosta's are edible regardless of variety. I am not sure there are any sorts of Hosta that are hybridized with some other plant, but I somewhat suspect that there are not any hosta x whatever on the market that still have the full appearance and nature of the normal Hosta.

I had no idea that they were edible. It has to be one of the easiest no weeding green. It does well in partial shade.

Dale Hodgins wrote:I had no idea that they were edible. It has to be one of the easiest no weeding green. It does well in partial shade.

The opened leaves are a bit too stringy to make good eating greens. The tightly rolled shoots however are excellent! Use them pretty much how you would use asparagus. Once they stop being those tightly rolled bits, they have already started to get into the stringy phase.

hey guys thanks a lot! this is all awesome

heres a video of a new zealander in japan cooking some urui they bought at the supermarket. from the elegant white stems, it looks like they must be using some kind of blanching technique down on the farm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLSyEZv6ZMw

urui is considered Sansai, or wild mountain plant and it appears the species most commonly eaten in japan is Hosta montana, but other species can be eaten as well but may require different preparation methods depending on texture. ( Shizuoka Gourmet, wikipedia

i cant wait to try this out come spring and if its tasty as she claims in the video i can wait to start telling people about it. most people i've met who wont grow their own food usually give some variation on the argument "its too hard to grow stuff/vegetable gardens are ugly" yet this is an edible plant that most people already have growing

I have a few hostas growing in my yard and have known they are edible for a few years, but never could bring myself to cut off the new shoots for fear of doing damage... does anyone know what percentage of the new shoots you can harvest without harming the plant?  With asparagus you can harvest until the shoots get down to 1/4 inch thick.  Is there a similar rule of thumb for hostas?  

(Speaking of asparagus, I just saw my first tip breaking ground yesterday!  So excited for my first bite of the year fresh picked raw!)

I tried some of my hostas a couple of years ago. They were decent, but not super exciting. A good way to stretch aspargus, if you were running short but not as tasty on their own. I took only about 1/4 to 1/3 of the first shoots per plant and it didn't seem to gave any effect on them. They just regrew those ones.