Lana White

gani et se wrote:Make sure you know the difference between water hemlock and anything else. It can be confused with wild carrot, I hear.
Miner's lettuce is tasty in the early spring. Fern fiddleheads too, if you cook them.

Not really...the hemlocks and wild carrot are quite different. You just have to make sure that you NOTICE the differences.
Get a good foraging book or two for your area. Don't just identify the plant from the picture, although that's a good start. You have to read the description carefully and make sure the plant you are considering meets the description in every way. Hemlock has a smooth stem and often the stem is splotched with purple and smells rather foul. The wild carrot has a hairy stem and SMELLS like a carrot. There are other differences, but please don't try to make the plant fit the description you want because that could very well get you poisoned. If it has a smooth stem, it isn't a wild carrot, no matter how it looks otherwise. All foraging books have a good description of the plant for a reason.

You don't have to know all the plants there are to know...there are too many for most of us amateurs to know. You just have to absolutely know the one you hope to eat! That's easy...you already know more than you think. You know dandelions, mints, day lilies, sunflowers, clover, cattails, stinging nettle maybe, chicory maybe, maybe wild onions, acorns and other nuts, many fruits...a whole lot of foods already familiar to you. Start with them and learn how to prepare them so they taste good...some are truly delicious, others good but not so special, and others you won't want to eat except in a time of real emergency. But emergencies do happen, and it would be helpful if you've already prepared them once before the emergency so you don't have to try to remember what you've read. Then spread out from there, learning first of all the plants in your own yard and garden, and later take more far ranging field trips. Observe these plants through all the seasons so you can recognize them as they grow. Then you will be able to find them from then on. Plants don't move like animals do, if they are perennials they will be in about the same place every year. Look for those same plants later in a similar environment...most have definite preferences.

I go to amazon.com to read the descriptions of wild plant books and what the customers say about them. Often you can take a look at the pictures inside and table of contents. You might also want to see if the local library has them or can order them for you before you buy them. My favorite authors are Samuel Thayer, Linda Runyon, Euell Gibbons (for his humor and inspiration as well as good recipes but he has no field guides to identify plants), John Kallas, Darcy Williamson, and Linda Kershaw. There are many, many more, and some might be better for your area. If you live in New Mexico, no sense buying a book for the Eastern US., but many plants are fairly universal throughout the nation. Get a book with the best detailed pictures, preferably more than one photo each.

Wild plants may never make up your entire diet, but they can help fill it in. (One thing I like about the author, Linda Runyon, is that she does indeed live entirely on wild plants, and she lists far more plants than others do. You will still need a field guide though with better photos.) The economic picture is not encouraging at the national level, and we all see what is happening in Venezuela and other places. Food here may also be in short supply. You cannot rely on wild game to be available, as they would be quickly harvested. Learn the edible plants and you at least might survive!

Not all wild carrot flowers have the dark tiny flower near the center, but it is definitely a wild carrot if it has one. One thing that DOES identify it as a wild carrot is the "birds nest" as the drying flowers fold up to form a cup. No other plant does that.
The roots are not orange but white and woody in the center...a cultivated carrot is much preferable to the wild ones! But in a wild stew, it does add the carrot taste.

#1 looks more like chicory to me or maybe curly dock.

#13 is the seed head of curly dock, looking very healthy, not dried or chemically treated. The dock sends up the seed heads beginning the second year and every year after that. It's easy to find the plants from a distance after they send up seed stalks, and young leaves can still be harvested then. Burning off the chaff makes the seed less bitter if they are then ground into flour. I love dock leaves cooked like spinach or stir fried, and it is far richer in nutrients than most other plants. A few can go raw into a salad to give it a little character. Like spinach, it has oxalic acid which can be neutralized by dairy products.

Still have not tried it, but burning the husks off in a pan and winnowing them out might be the easiest way to get rid of them.

That's interesting...thanks, Darren! The dairy product might neutralize the sourness.

I imagine something that is strongly flavored, like a molasses bread for instance, could also have the husks with it without it being noticeable.

I have prairie turnip, yampa, and camas roots planted...will see what they do by spring (they should flower but will have to wait about 3 years for good roots). We have some wild camas growing here, but I ordered some of my own roots, just to spread them around. I have not tasted the root plants yet because I don't want to kill the plants unless it is necessary due to food shortages.

I am planting mostly a wild garden this year (mostly roots that also are attractive plants) and spreading seeds in a meadow in back of us...guerilla gardening!

The whole plant of silverweed is edible and good, not just the roots.

Do you know if hazelnuts would do okay there? I have read that they have the HIGHEST protein and fat of any other nut. They will probably grow there as bushes rather than trees and have lots of suckers that can be transplanted as well.

How about growing buckwheat? It is one of the few grains that contain all the essential amino acids, and it has starch. Grains do have some fat, though usually not much. Buckwheat is a short season grain and can be grown in cool weather. It also helps fix nitrogen, so it is good for the soil also.

You may not have oaks there, but acorns are high protein, high fat and absolutely delicious when fixed right. I think most hazelnuts are cold hardy if you mulch them heavily in winter. Beachnuts are good, and you might be able to grow black walnuts (although they take years to grow).

Silverweed is a good perennial root crop and maybe you can grow yampa there. Evening primrose has edible roots. Biscuitroot, camas, balsamroot, prairie turnip, breadroot, edible lilies like daylilies, salsify...all might be grown there. Root crops don't usually mind colder weather, even cool summers.

Nearly all edible leaves are better when young, and dock is no exception. The leaves get bitter and tough later in the season, like in most plants. Some of this bitterness can be simmered out, though, if you are going to use it as greens. If you use it raw in a salad, it will have a bitter tang to it if they are older leaves, but that can go okay in a salad if you want some interest from otherwise bland greens.

Just like spinach and sorrel (which dock is related to), the leaves have oxalic acid which makes it bitter or sour to some. Some like to boil it twice after changing the water once and draining it well the second time. This to me is unnecessary and wasteful of water-soluable nutrients, but I do like to simmer it until it is tender, then stir fry them a few minutes in butter and seasoning, by itself or with other ingredients. I also cream the greens sometimes or melt cream cheese with them, just like I do with spinach. Another good use is in a cream soup. It is a better spinach than spinach any day! It also is a nutritional powerhouse that spinach and most other greens can't match.

Anything with oxalic acid, even Popeye's spinach, as well as rhubarb and beet greens, can be too much of a good thing if eaten in excess. It can interfere with calcium absorption. The sourness or bitterness is from the oxalic acid, so if it isn't bitter, the oxalic acid isn't strong. Moderation in all things is the key, in any case...even an excess of plain good water can be bad for your health, lol.

What I've found easiest is to divide the acorns into two and dry in a 200 degree oven for a short while, then coarse grind them, then leech them. The drying makes the hand grinder work easier.

I leave some coarsely ground acorns for a nut in bread and grind the rest of it fine. I prefer it all fine, but some of my friends ask for "acorn nuts".

I too prefer to use a regular pliars to crack the shell. We have more small nuts here that the nutcracker doesn't work on. I don't see much difference in taste between larger and smaller nuts, but it's hard to tell. Once you have cracked the shell, you can just peel it off.

I like cold leaching better. It makes for a lighter color of meal and is easier to remove the tannins, I think. Hot water leaching makes for a dark meal and takes more work. The cold water leaching takes more time, that's all.

In either case, you keep changing the water until it remains fairly clear.

I put the shelled acorns into an old pillowcase, so all I have to do when changing the water is take the pillowcase out and dump the water. It will stain the pillowcase, so don't use a good one!

When the tannins are all or mostly all out, the acorns are surprisingly sweet in acorn bread. My recipe comes from Euell Gibbons...three tablespoons of sugar makes a sweet dessert bread. Everyone loves that bread and the cookies too, also from Gibbons.

The tannin water, by the way, sure does leave the skin on your hands feeling soft.