Favorite springtime things to forage?

Good Evening Permies,

I wanted to consult and see what are some of the favorite things that people forage for in the springtime. Any good recipes or uses?

This could be edible or medicinal, I just want to learn from everyone.

A classic spring tonic is chickweed. Early tasty veg, full of vitamins etc. that folks in the past would have been wanting after long winters. But not too much at once, though, unless you want the trots.

BTW I scraped some chickweed seed and dried it a few years ago. Just found it in my garage. I thought I might seed it in a sun-facing pot and see what happens. If nothing else, my neighbour's chooks will be happy -- I deliver pails of accidental chickweed and they come running!

The very first thing we always pick and eat is nettles.

I have lots of plantain.  A leaf or two is good for what ails you ...

I have lots of sticky willy, you know them as cleavers.  I hate them other folks make tea from them and use the seeds for ....

I have lots of burr clover, I hate them I have heard animals love them as fodder ...

I do love all the pretty wild verbena ....

fiddleheads

My favorite was just mentioned!

I'm a sucker for fiddleheads. It is such a unique foodstuff that really welcomes in the spring.

I prefer a simple sautéed recipe, the flavor stands on its own but garlic always is a welcome addition. - https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/106735/sauteed-fiddleheads/

Mushrooms!
First warm rain in March for morels...still waiting

And also the green things mentioned above, chickweed, plantain, cleavers, along with chicory and yellow dock...

Have not ID'd fiddleheads yet...maybe this year as we have a variety of ferns.

I love wandering the yard for a 'wild' salad.

As mentioned above, nettles is also my favorite, followed by dandelion's young leaves.  But now, my field is awash with yellow dandelion flowers so here is what I make.

Dandelion Flowers Beer

   Pick up a 100 dandelion flower heads
   Boil 2 litres of water with 100g of light brown sugar, until the sugar has dissolved
   Allow to cool until tepid
   Pour over the flower heads in a large container
   Add a lemon finely sliced
   Cover the container with a clean cloth
   Set aside in a cool place for 3 to 4 days, stirring occasionally
   Strain and put into tightly corked bottles
   It will be ready to drink in a few days

Enjoy, but keep an eye on the bottles, it does get sparkly!

I’ll list a few:

Staple foods

- Ramps (mostly pick the leaves, some bulbs, and set aside the best looking ones to replant in forests that need them) These are excellent in pesto along with garlic mustard, ground ivy, seeds/nuts, and oil. They are also good stir fried, either alone or with various foods like eggs.
- Ostrich fern fiddleheads. We blanch them and then pan fry them, very delicious.
- Dame’s rocket. The leaves, flower buds, and shoots are very tasty and flavorful. I prefer them cooked to raw, and are good mixed in stir fries with the other greens.
- Milkweed. Also a major food plant and tasty. They are best either in smaller quantities pan fried, or boiled in some way. I have boiled together nettles, milkweed, and other plants to the consistency of a porridge, and it turned out well; or they could be used in soup. I prefer to not discard or drain off the boiling water, because most of the flavor goes away along with the water.
- Wood nettle. I like nettles, and prefer these to stinging nettle because they taste quite as good, are more abundant, and don’t sting as badly, especially early on. They tend to live in moist forests, preferring wet, partly shaded, gravely or sandy soil next to mountain streams. The stinging is the major reason I don’t collect more stinging nettles; the wood nettles do indeed sting, but the sting goes away more quickly, doesn’t just sit and cause a throbbing pain for the whole day the way stinging nettles do. But sometimes, especially in the shade, there are stingerless stinging nettles that I will collect happily.
- Wild parsnips can be hard to get at the right time in spring but they are delicious in fall or early spring, before they have really gotten their leaves. Maybe it’s different this year with the weird winter, but they’re perfect for gathering now in my region.

Others that aren’t staples

- Chickweed, dandelion, plantain, lamb’s quarters (later on)—the usual
- Toothwort, a spicy little forest plant that likes moister soil (broad leaved) or rich forest loam (narrow leaved)
- Wild bittercress, which really isn’t bitter (I think Cardamine pratensis
- Cuckoo flower
- Dock
- Self heal
- Ground ivy / gill over the ground, good for seasoning
- Monarda fistulosa, a very good thyme- or oregano-like spice but has a purer, brighter flavor for me
- Spikenard shoots (with discretion, were abundant) which are very very delicious. There is a traditional Potawatomi spikenard soup that I’ve read of, and so once I made a greens soup with spikenard and it was good.
- Maple sap of course!!
- Young willow leaves, which I haven’t eaten very often but hope to use more this year as a salad green (Salix ericocephala)
- Basswood leaves, very good raw or cooked
- Mugwort young leafy tufts. I once made a mugwort rice cake with dates which was tasty. Otherwise as a minor green.
- Mallow! For some reason I love slimy foods.
- Salsify is one of my favorites! I wish I found them more often.
- Goldenrod shoots as a seasoning
- Cleavers, cooked like other greens
- Wild ginger occasionally
- Morels! I wish the loggers didn’t get rid of patches of them with such vigor.
- Oxeye daisy, tasty and available through the winter. I grow them in the garden for greens, pollinators, and soil building (for all of which they are excellent)
- Spruce and hemlock tips as seasoning and in the ice cream recipe
- Evening primrose greens occasionally. I do like them but don’t find them in abundance.
If I think of enough others I’ll make another post.

A recipe that I use is a greens soup, by boiling together greens, usually adding a staple root or grain, and often miso if it’s not very flavorful on its own. I only boil for about 10 minutes or so for regular tender greens, just until they have a cooked texture, but will add tougher or less digestible greens like milkweed earlier.

Fiddleheads, as others have said, from my ostrich ferns. Spring greens, which I my yard means Virginia bluebells, prickly lettuce, dandelion, and goldenrod.  

One that my father and I have foraged for salad greens is minor's lettuce, its the one I like that hasn't already been mentioned yet.  Speaking of which my friend's parents have a bunch in their yard that they didn't plant it grows wild, maybe we should go pick some since they don't use it.

favorite: morels!
my favorite that i can actually usually find: nettles, mostly to dry and for tea (in my heart i don't think they're terribly delicious cooked fresh but if anyone has any suggestions for making them more tasty/less like hairy tough spinach please let me know!!)

Around here with the older generations, it's fiddleheads and morel mushrooms.

jess schueller wrote:my favorite that i can actually usually find: nettles, mostly to dry and for tea (in my heart i don't think they're terribly delicious cooked fresh but if anyone has any suggestions for making them more tasty/less like hairy tough spinach please let me know!!)

Hi Jess, Welcome to Permies! I find the same thing with our local nettles. When I lived further South the nettles were more tender, but up here they grow tough and hairy. A friend went so far as to try importing some, but they turned out just as tough, so we think it is a factor of out climate. You could check out the Nettle recipes thread for cooking ideas.
Spring shoots are just starting to appear here. I like to munch on Hawthorne leaves when they are still tiny and tender, straight from the branch. That reminds me - I was going to check my bigger fruiting haws to see if their leaves are equally palatable in spring - they are larger, but they all get tough later in the year. I don't think they have started opening yet.

Here in the low Sonoran Desert of Arizona, USA, traditionally the first food foraged enmasse for the year, from what I have read, are the buds of the cholla cactus. Anyone who is familiar with cholla cactus is most likely familiar with the teddy bear or jumping cholla varieties. The general rule is not to come within 10 feet of them less they spring to life and start tossing spiney clumps at you. However, there are many varieties of cholla, some of which are highly prized for their flower buds, which are harvested right before they open. The main varieties of cholla harvested from are the buckhorn cholla, staghorn cholla, and I've also heard of using pencil cholla however I have not tried these. The types of cholla listed are not nearly as spiney and with a pair of tongs you can easily access the buds and twist them off.

One things to be careful of is that the native stingless bees like to sleep in the flowers at night! As the flowers will close up once the sun goes down, it makes for a cozy little bed for a bee. So if you are harvesting at night and after the flowers have opened, beware! Although they don't sting, they are a critical part of our naural environment, and the main reason I grow cholla at my home.

Last year I learned to collect cholla buds from Brad Lancaster in his Dunbar Springs neighborhood. We went home with three cuttings which are doing great, but you have to be careful to make sure and keep them oriented in the same direction or else they can get sun scald. They build up a thicker layer on the side most exposed to the sun (south). He also taught us how to make a wonderful salsa with cholla buds, wolfberries (goji berri variety), cilantro and jalapeno. This year I am sharing this recipe with as many people as possible! I'm actually about to go collect some more buds right now because I dried my first two batches and already ate more than half of them. When they are fresh, they are similar to nopal. Mucilingous, a bit tart or sour, and people also describe them like artichoke I believe. Once they are dried, they taste very floral and almost fruity, like a freeze dried strawberry but with much less sugar.

In conclusion, cholla buds are amazing! They are my new favorite foragable in the Sonoran Desert. My goal is to collect enough to last me the year, but that is probably near impossible. Check out my blog post on the subject! https://fracti-cacti.com/2024/04/18/06-sonoran-foraging-cholla-buds/

I look forward to garlic mustard.  I've used it a bunch of different ways, but my favorite way is to ferment it/ make it into kimchi right when it's in the bud stage.  

I love elm seeds! Spring time for those.

I also love salsify!

Currants and Nanking cherries come on in the summer. My fav. Berry is serviceberries.

Crawfish/crayfish are also amazing in the summer.

Ground Elder, Aegopodium podagraria. Lovely flavour, bane of gardeners, and I can't grow it for slugs!
Winter mainstays - Babington Leek and Alexanders, Smyrnium olusatrum
My daughter helps in a school - she's got a fan for garlic mustard amongst the pupils! I reckon it changes from garlic flavour to more mustard later in the season.
Currently gathering a good dozen or so weeds and introductions from my garden as 'greens' to cook, helps make my 30 different plants a week, as recommended by Tim Spector (https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/may/15/go-with-your-gut-tim-spector-power-of-microbiome)

Lambs' quarters and dandelions are the first tasties we get here in CO!

Around here, foragers go mad for ramps and morels. I like to grab a mix of greens: violet leaves, nettles, young elm, grape, basswood, and maple leaves, very sparing dandelion or plantain (I don't tolerate much bitterness!), et al, and sauté them with eggs or simmer for a soup. Spruce tips make a nice tangy tea and I know of people who eat them, though I haven't figured out how to do it.

Some favorites are:
-wood nettles (gently wilted in olive oil with thinly sliced garlic and salt and vinegar added once almost done)

-Solomon's seal shoots (cooked like asparagus)

-morels (browned in butter)

-sochan (we actually grow it, haven't found any to forage, but others around us have; cooked like wood nettles but longer)

-ramps (also home grown, have not actually found any foraging; we generally combine the greens with butter to make compound butter and freeze; try not to harvest the whole plant to let them grow).

-pine pollen (late spring; Alan Bergo at Forager Chef has some ideas on how to use it; I like to combine it with honey).

One idea: take pictures which will serve as reminders of when to forage for next year.

Trout lily leaves! So tangy and the first on the scene. Wild chives, early sassafras and beech leaves, wild ginger, and white lettuce. Wild strawberries are ripening now.

Goji berry shoots. I cut my established bushes to the ground in late winter and numerous shoots appear in early spring. I break off the whole length of tender shoots when they are 4-6 inches long to thin out a bit. They are very tasty with licorice like bitter and sweet flavor. I harvest a second time when the slender branches get long enough to touch the ground. They will try to layer if left as it. I pinch the tips off to encourage lateral shoots, those will flower and bear fruits in summer.

It's not technically foraging.  Since I have plenty prunings to start new plants, I am thinking about sticking them in the easement where the area gets bushhogged every winter. Then I will have lots of young shoots to harvest in the spring time.

I discovered this forager this weekend, and she is very knowledgeable.  Melanaie Sawyer was on season 10 of the show Alone and does this wonderful interview with Peter Kelly of Woodland Escape:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmZWAR_dQ8U

Goosefoot
Garlic mustard
Stinging nettle
Ramps
Ostrich fern
Wild lettuce