Wild Food Girl

A puffball mushroom the size of my fist. Photo by Gregg Davis.

All this rain is making the mushrooms come out—a connection I never made before since I’m pretty much a beginner with edible fungi. So, when Gregg and I took a long, off trail hike above our house to an isolated beaver pond at 12,000 feet, crossing an above tree-line meadow to get there, I was beyond surprised to find three large puffball mushrooms the size of my fist growing there. 

Puffballs can grow to enormous sizes, so these were not necessarily all that big. According to coloradomushrooms.com, the Western Giant Puffball (Calvatia booniana), which is found in open fields at high elevations, can grow as large as a soccer ball. “Wildman” Steve Brill has a nice picture of a giant puffball at his website if you want to get a sense of their potential. Imagine eating one of those babies!  Read the rest of this entry

What I believe to be roseroot, or Sedum rosea.

I first noticed roseroot on a high-country hike above Fairplay, Colorado as Gregg and I were scrambling up a rock face, off-trail as usual. The plant is distinctive and attractive—tiny, blood-red flowers atop a fleshy stalk with spirally overlapping (Peterson, 1977) succulent, white-green leaves—and so I photographed it to look up later in Plants of the Rocky Mountains, a flora identification guide we obtained recently from The Printed Page bookshop in Denver.

Plants of the Rocky Mountains by Linda Kershaw, et. al. (1998) is not specific to edible wild plants, but when I found the plant in question in the picture index followed by the entry, lo and behold, I also discovered that our local roseroot is edible. (A quick perusal of the new guide revealed that edibility information is included for many of the plants, to my very pleasant surprise. Come to find out that Linda Kershaw also authored Edible and Medicinal Plants of the Rockies, a guide I have yet to obtain.) What luck!  Read the rest of this entry

Treating my wounded foot with crushed plantain.

Or so I read in “Wildman” Steve Brill’s book, Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places.  

The plantain to which I refer is of the genus Plantago, not to be confused with the banana-like fruit (Alisma species) that is good fried with brown sugar and cream. Plantagos include many different species and are common to lawns, fields, and disturbed areas. They were originally introduced to North America by early European settlers because of their medicinal qualities. Native people called them “the white man’s footprint” (Brill, 1994) because they are roughly footprint-shaped and seemed to spring up wherever the white man stepped.     

Noticing plantain in one my plant guides, my friend Olena from Ukraine exclaimed, “Where is that plant? I miss that plant!” before explaining how back home she would crush a leaf and apply it to a cut to stop the bleeding. 

“Externally, as a vulnerary, it sterilizes, reduces pain, promotes clotting and speeds healing” on account of the antihemorrhagic vitamin K, explain Kathryn G. and Andrew L. March in Common Edible and Medicinal Plants of Colorado. Simply bruise the leaves and apply to the injured area. Internally, they explain that an infusion of the leaves has been used by various cultures throughout history to treat coughs; urinary, gastric, and intestinal ills; and high blood pressure.  Read the rest of this entry

A field of red clovers next to the driveway, with small white clovers betwixt.

The come-down from my huge purslane processing of the other day has been harder than I imagined it would be, such that I have been remiss in processing the bag of plantain that Jim gifted me from Denver. I’ve been afraid to look but I fear it is decomposing in the refrigerator. I had some dandelion leaves in the fridge too—the ones that came attached to the roots I dug up for the purslane South Seas salad the other day. However, when I pulled them out yesterday to chop up and add to the salmon salad I was making, they were covered with disconcerting brown dots.

Compound these two unfortunate episodes with my less-than-successful experiences with red clover, and you get a somewhat disillusioned Wild Food Girl.

Here’s what happened with the clovers: We came home from our trip a week ago to find the side of the driveway, which last year was rife with pennycress, carpeted with beautiful red clovers in full bloom. Beneath those, a more subtle crop of small white clovers peeked out from behind the leaves of their larger cousins. Read the rest of this entry

Pennsylvania purslane

We went to the east coast for two weeks in July, and my sister met me in Maine with small bag full of New Hampshire purslane—that low branching succulent that many American gardeners throw in the yard trimmings without a second thought. She’d rescued it from her garden for me. It was really cool, as my sister is far from a wild food convert. I promptly boiled it up and served it with butter and salt to the extended family. My sister thought it was the perfect topping for the bratwursts. 

Two weeks later, Gregg and I headed to the Philadelphia airport with several pounds of purslane. (I can only imagine what the TSA folks thought when they inspected my baggage and found a cooler bag full of weeds, roots intact.) 

I kept the roots on the plants so that the purslane would travel well, and it worked. Thanks to Bill and Marnie in Ithaca and Gregg’s dad Frank in PA for the purslane bounty; I’m pleased to say that not only did the purslane make it home safe and sound to Colorado and into some delicious dishes, but also that the roots and attached shoots made it safely into the dirt in my makeshift garden off the end of the back yard. Read the rest of this entry

A cornucopia of Colorado wild edibles. From left to right, mustard, peppergrass, red clover, pennycress, white clover, wild strawberry peeking through, yarrow, and dandelions.

It’s a treat to be home to the quiet of the mountains again. I awoke today to the sweet, silent obscurity of the early morning dark followed by a sunrise of pale yellow behind bulbous, deep purple clouds left over from last night’s rainstorm. It must have rained hard while we were gone because the rains near washed out the driveway again. In exchange, however, they left us a cornucopia of lush wild edibles among all the other beautiful weeds, a warm welcome back to the house and to writing about wild edible plants after my long hiatus.  

Our wild discoveries started yesterday evening with tiny wild strawberries—not hanging from the strawberry plants in our yard (which in two years have yet to fruit), but from plants on the dirt roadside lining a short stroll around the neighborhood that we enjoyed in the dimming light in a misty rain under the shelter of Gregg’s Pop-pop’s red two-person umbrella. We picked 18 strawberries the size of my pinky nail (and I bite my nails) while ruminating on the decimation of the bird feeders during our absence by what we can only imagine is an errant bear in the neighborhood.  Read the rest of this entry

This thistle is too spiny for me to eat. I think this is a Cirsium but am not certain.

Thistles are a great trail snack. If you’re thirsty, just start chewing on one. After you prick yourself in the mouth, it’ll hurt so much you’ll forget all about being thirsty.       

Just kidding, of course. When enjoying thistles as a trail snack, the first thing you need to do is select one that’s not so extraordinarily spiny. The thistle pictured at right, for example, might be a poor choice. Once you have a good one, what you want to do next is to peel the thistle so it’s not spiny anymore. Then, consume.

Kinds of Thistles       

The common name thistle refers to several genera of plants:        

1. Cirsium: So-called “true thistles” belong to the genus Cirsium. In Best-Tasting Wild Plants of Colorado & the Rocky Mountains, Cattail Bob’s thistle entry pertains to any and all species of Cirsium, which he describes as having “spine-tipped leaves… rosettes the first year; flowering stalks after the first year. Flowers are round, spiny, and red, pink, or white.” In The Foragers Harvest (2006), Samuel Thayer has a detailed section on Cirsium + Carduus nutans, including information on regional variations, of which there are dozens of species in the U.S. and Canada, both native and introduced, and varying in palatability.  Read the rest of this entry

Young broad-leafted dock growing by a less-traveled roadway.

Dock. A common roadside plant of numerous different species in the genus Rumex. We tried two different varieties last summer, getting mixed but not altogether promising results. This summer, however, we changed our approach to foraging it, and then held a taste test between the two. Read on for the exciting conclusion.

But first, a little background:

Contestant #1: Broad-Leafed Dock

Some dock has big leaves. The Marchs refer to the big-leaved variety as Western dock (Rumex occidentalis). Euell Gibbons calls it “broad-leafed” dock in his fun wild food adventure book, Stalking the Faraway Places.

We tried broad-leafed dock mid-summer last year. The only plants we could find were growing alongside the dirt road that leads to our house, where people drive fast and kick up dust. You’re not supposed to eat roadside plants for health reasons, but we did it anyway. Dock washes easily, at least. I got really creative with it, adding it to a package of saag paneer and whipping up a whole Indian dish around it.

After all that, Gregg thought it was awful. “Slimy” he said.   Read the rest of this entry

Blooming yucca flowers, ripe for harvest.

My pantry is stocked with yucca flowers again, thanks to one intrepid boyfriend who took it upon himself to harvest some on his way home to the mountains from Denver. We often try to pick some up on our way back from parts lower, seeing as the yucca doesn’t grow up here above 11,000 feet. But usually the yucca-gathering is not a solo mission–so  Gregg deserves much thanks for coming home with some more of the sweet, fleshy goodies that I like to serve with eggs, in stir fries, soup, or fresh on salads.   

Know the Regs  

One of the difficulties we’ve encountered in foraging for wild food is what can seem like a lack of available grounds on which to do so. Signs announcing hefty fines for the removal of flora and fauna are common at the entrances to many public parks and land. (It is important, therefore, to keep an eye out for posted regulations and make sure to only forage where it is permitted).   

Read the rest of this entry

That’s right. Not everything you read in a blog—or a book—is true, a bit of mind-blowing advice that my dear friend Mark imparted to me back in college one day. I repeat it now to warn Wild Food Girl readers to:

1. Use common sense when it comes to wild edibles.
2. Identify plants correctly before trying them.
3. Cross reference accounts of a plant’s edibility among several guides.
4. Eat only a small amount at first.
5. Eat greater quantities only when you are 100% certain of the plant’s edibility.

I have to admit I was less uninformed than I am now (still wanting of information) when I started blogging about wild edible plants at etmarciniec last year. I wrote about plants I found and ate in the wild and the books upon which I based my plant identifications and preparation methods, but at that point I wasn’t aware of any controversy over the quality of existent wild food guides. Then I read a section in Sam Thayer’s The Forager’s Harvest where he calls out some prominent wild food writers for advising people to eat toxic plants. Yikes. Read the rest of this entry