What have you been foraging recently?

This thread is for sharing photos and stories of whatever you're currently foraging in your local region! Wild plants, cultivated plants, fungi, medicines, fibre anything goes. Could be from a natural area, roadside, abandoned farm, gleaning, weeds, public park, tree overhanging a fence -- wherever you do your foraging.

I've started this thread in part because the PEP Foraging Badge includes only plants that grow in Montana, and so misses out on a huge diversity of delicious forageables available throughout the rest of the world.

I'll start us off: last weekend I found wood ear growing on a downed willow, nearly ripe macadamia nuts from a tree in a vacant lot, cape gooseberries from the same lot, swan plant (aka milkweed) seed down to be used for stuffing, and several slightly under-mature avocados that fell from a local tree in the recent wind. These will ripen up and become ok, but not amazing avocados, but free calories are free calories!

It's the end of summer here, so looking forward to foraging for chestnuts, walnuts, persimmons, feijoas, mushrooms, and low-tannin acorns.

What are you foraging?

It's officially autumn and heaps of things are getting going! My favourite oak tree has started dropping its large acorns, I found a patch of wild invasive ginger along a river gully (Hedychium gardnerianum aka Kahili Ginger), and the choko vine along the cycleway has loved all the rain we've gotten and is really giving it a go this year! I've since harvested another lot about the same size as this first one -- good thing chokos go well in just about everything (pastas, soups, stir fries and curries so far)

Some apples are going now as well, and this astringent variety is not popular with the locals -- heaps were on the ground being eaten by rats/birds. Fortunately for me, I like a tart, slightly astringent apple for baking. Might be some strudel in my future!

Last spring we had so much rain we couldn't mow the front yard for at least a couple of weeks. One morning the sun was just right and I saw hundreds of wild onion plants that were budded out and about to bloom. I popped them off by the handfuls thinking I could make capers from them. I had enough to ferment one pint and pickle another pint with a spicy, sweet brine. They didn't taste like capers, but they were delicious and a true delicacy, even causing a chef friend to gush about how he would use them. The pickled ones were everyone's favorite and didn't last long at all, though the fermented ones were excellent as well. Rain or no rain, that onion patch is staying! I can't wait to do the same this year.

Always happy when foraging season begins! Especially when I can finally add some yellow to my dishes. LOTS of Chickweed outside here and in the neighborhood. Nettles popping up on all the trails I go to where they thrive.
Oh, almost forgot Bittercress too is up, and was the first I found on trails last month already.

It's persimmon season!!! My favourite foraging time of year is persimmon time. Slightly more than half of these are from a local gulley and the other half from a neighbour's tree (they said they don't care for persimmons and I could have as many as I liked). Also collected apples, heaps of chayote (chokos), macadamias and some more cape gooseberries this month.

Hopefully with this many persimmons I'll have enough to dehydrate. I harvested about half this many last week (didn't take a photo), and as I can happily eat 2-5 a day as they fully ripen, it's surprisingly easy for me to just eat them all, haha!

Hopefully I'll have a persimmon tree of my own in the garden this year -- they have been extremely difficult to source since 2020 and I haven't managed to get my hands on one yet.

Today I was able to gather dandelion greens and flowers, cleavers, and purple dead nettle and hung them up to dry.  Also gathered some miner's lettuce that I sprinkled on a dish of turkey noodle soup.  Wonder what I'll find tomorrow.

Yesterday fried up some Hosta shoots, last week had my first Cleaver soup!

We finally found some mushrooms this year!  I was quite excited.

Christopher Shepherd wrote:We finally found some mushrooms this year!  I was quite excited.

Color me green (with envy!)!! I always seem to miss them. Or... maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places, lol.

I don't have any pictures, but I have been foraging clovers and dandelions lately.  Most of my foraging happens in August.  Some years I get to spend  a few weeks in the mountains just collecting plant allies for my apothecary.

I'm a huge fan of Thomas Elpel, who wrote Botany in a Day.  It really helped me on my foraging journey and I still look back at it sometimes.  Did you know he taught at a PDC?  Here's an excerpt:  

My current foraging consists of violas, biscuitroot, lambsquarters. Two weeks ago I foraged glacial lilies.

Last night, I put in some fiddeheads and stinging nettles in the soup. They were delicious! We are also using the stinging nettles for sore muscles. Unfortunately, the ferns have turned up and I think the fiddlehead season is finished.

Today I had ora-pro-nobis leaves (Pereskia aculeata) for lunch.

My husband came inside to get me last night. "Does our daughter know what she can eat outside? She's just sitting there munching away."

It was sheep sorrel. I just taught our 2-year-old to recognize the leaves, and I think it's her new favorite. She acts like she would eat it by the handful if I'd let her, but I stop her after a few leaves with the deal that she can eat more the next day.

It's late spring here now, and that means avocado and bamboo shoots! A wind storm knocked a bunch of avocados on the ground, which meant I got a few this time. Other people have been harvesting this tree mostly -- times are tough and more folks are taking advantage of the abundant free citrus and avocado of winter and spring.

Bamboo is invasive here and in many of the local gulleys. Harvesting the shoots is therefore doing the environment a service as well as filling up the pantry. These shoots are not as large as the ones typically harvested in SE Asian countries, but they are big enough to have a worthwhile amount of material inside. All these filled up half a stockpot with prepared shoots. The bits just a little too old and tough for human use can be fed out to grass-eating animals or composted.

WARNING: bamboo shoots contain toxic levels of cyanogenic glycosides -- some species contain more than stonefruit kernels (meaning that you can get cyanide poisoning from eating raw shoots!). They need to be heated for an extended period of time to neutralise the toxin -- please do your homework here and do not eat raw shoots!

Prepared, the bamboo shoots are delicious, and don't have some of the lead contamination issues of material harvested in SE Asia.

We had another windstorm, and the result was a huge pile of avocados! Haven't seen this many from this tree since last year. Maybe whoever was harvesting them other than me went on holiday for the summer.

I harvested a tote bag of small bamboo shoots also (not pictured), but found these honking massive (for this locality) shoots from the other side of the gully!

Going to trial drying the several litres of shoots I got yesterday; wish I had a pressure canner as these are low-salt-low acid things and taking up a bit of freezer space at the moment. Hopefully they'll be amazing dried -- our solar dehydrator is chugging along now that we've finally got some sun. Very keen to see what these big bamboo shoots look like on the inside -- I'm excited!