Wild edibles: how to identify and eat field garlic
The onion smell that rises when a lawn is mowed in spring often comes from field garlic. It is edible, but it has look-alikes that are not.
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Wild edibles
Plants from lawns, ditches and woods, and the ones to leave alone.
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Plants that grow wild across much of North America and can be eaten once they are known for certain. Some are weeds most people pull without a thought: dandelion, with a page each for the flowers and the greens, field garlic in the lawn, and Japanese knotweed along streams and roadsides. Others take work. Acorns have to be leached of their tannins before they make flour, milkweed is cooked before it is eaten, and cattail offers something useful in nearly every season. There is a cold drink made from the red berry clusters of sumac, a page on the parts of a pine tree people have eaten, and one on the daylily. An early piece argues that four groups, grasses, oaks, pines and cattails, are worth learning before any others.
The foraging pages name the poisonous plants that can be mistaken for their subjects, such as dogbane beside young milkweed and death camas among wild onion and garlic. Eat nothing that has not been identified beyond doubt, and ask a county extension office or an experienced local forager when unsure. If someone may have eaten a toxic plant, call Poison Control at 1-800-222-1222.
How to eat common milkweed, season by season
Old field guides called milkweed bitter and insisted on three or more boilings. Foragers who actually cooked it found the reverse: one short boil and a mild, slightly sweet vegetable.
Wild edibles: how to find and eat Japanese knotweed
One of the most invasive plants in North America tastes like tart rhubarb for a few weeks each spring. Learn it in summer, harvest it in April.
Wild edibles: the daylily, a year-round food plant
The orange daylily grows along roadsides and in old gardens all over the country. Some part of it can be eaten in every season, once you know it well.
How to eat dandelion flowers: pickled buds and fritters
The leaves get most of the attention, but the buds and yellow blossoms of the common dandelion are just as edible and far milder.
Dandelion greens, the first wild food of spring
The weed every lawn owner fights is one of the easiest wild greens to recognize, and one of the first to show up after winter.
How to eat a pine tree: nuts, needle tea, pollen and inner bark
A pine looks like the least edible thing in the woods. Four different parts of it are food, and one of them is there all winter.
How to eat cattail: digging the rhizomes and making cattail flour
In the cold months the food value of a cattail marsh is underground, packed as starch into the rhizomes. Here is how to get it out.
The fantastic four: grass, oak, pine and cattail
Anyone who learns only four wild food plants should start with these. They are common, easy to recognize, and between them they offer food in every season.
How to make acorn flour, from gathering to leaching to drying
Raw acorns are too bitter to eat. Ground and leached, they become a rich, slightly sweet flour that stores well and bakes into bread and pancakes.
How to make sumac lemonade from staghorn or smooth sumac
The red cones on staghorn and smooth sumac are coated in a sour, lemony acid. Cold water pulls it out in a quarter of an hour.