Does anyone else like to forage for wild foods?

I can recognize a few edible plants so far.
Dandelions, blackberries, roses, pecans, pine needles, thistle, Florida Betony.
Florida Betony and blackberries are my favorites so far. ^_^

I want to find some wild raisins. They're supposed to taste like a mixture between dates and raisins and you can just eat them off the plant.

Florida Betony tubers taste like delicious radishes and you can use their leaves for tea.

I feel like spring-time is a good time to forage.

My neighbor forages for mushrooms across various properties she's gotten permission for... I don't know if I could ever be confident enough to eat wild mushrooms though, there's so many chances for messing up.

My daycare when I was young had various wild berries at the edge of their land, they were usually really delicious! I can't forage where I live now because there are too many deer that eat everything they can reach... though I do have some fruit trees that are relatively safe from deer, but I don't think that counts lol

I hope you manage to find those wild raisins, they sound amazing

Oh, definitely.
Cattails, of course, all the time (as in "all year long" as well as in "frequently"). I regularly go through and thin them at the nearby streams and rivers and ponds and lakes, it's a free source of food and nearly everyone in the family likes most of the parts, so....

Nettles are another spring one, but my father always complains that it "tastes like grass" so mostly I only bother with that if a patch of it comes up somewhere particularly convenient to harvest.

Daylillies, of course. I adore daylillies. I've got those planted all over because I love the taste of the daylilly flowers almost as much as squash blossoms. They're only semi-foraging though because I planted them initially, even if they do spread to the nearby undeveloped lands where anyone can eat them.

Fried clover roots, though those are often more trouble than they're worth.

Spring shoots off some of the evergreens, but you can't eat too many because they'll leach certain minerals from you even as they give you others. I mostly just sometimes will browse through and eat a few when I'm walking by them on my way somewhere.

Various others... it's the sort of thing where you are heading somewhere and spot something and stop on your way home to harvest some rather than the sort of thing where you make a "shopping list" in your mind and go out looking, you know? So it's harder to think of them off the top of my head.

A lot of people in the neighborhood let me take their rose hips, since they don't use them, so I do go out looking for those in late summer.

Mushrooming; some of those are worth hunting down.

There are a number of berry varieties around here, and some places that used to be orchard or farm lands and have gone fallow where you can head in and find stuff available for the taking.

I don't do ferns much, but the fiddleheads are yummy.... only I don't want to overtake, you know? So I don't do any of the ferns much.

Eh, I don't know. Whatever you wander by and see that looks good. Borrage is a common one all through here. People plant it in their gardens in the city for the flowers, and then it escapes and ends up everywhere. It's pretty tasty, though, if you get it when the leaves are still young enough not to have too much of that fuzz on them. Kind of refreshing tasting, but without being as strongly flavored as mint.
Makes a good salad.

Akili Li wrote:Oh, definitely.
Cattails, of course, all the time (as in "all year long" as well as in "frequently"). I regularly go through and thin them at the nearby streams and rivers and ponds and lakes, it's a free source of food and nearly everyone in the family likes most of the parts, so....

Nettles are another spring one, but my father always complains that it "tastes like grass" so mostly I only bother with that if a patch of it comes up somewhere particularly convenient to harvest.

Daylillies, of course. I adore daylillies. I've got those planted all over because I love the taste of the daylilly flowers almost as much as squash blossoms. They're only semi-foraging though because I planted them initially, even if they do spread to the nearby undeveloped lands where anyone can eat them.

Fried clover roots, though those are often more trouble than they're worth.

Spring shoots off some of the evergreens, but you can't eat too many because they'll leach certain minerals from you even as they give you others. I mostly just sometimes will browse through and eat a few when I'm walking by them on my way somewhere.

Various others... it's the sort of thing where you are heading somewhere and spot something and stop on your way home to harvest some rather than the sort of thing where you make a "shopping list" in your mind and go out looking, you know? So it's harder to think of them off the top of my head.

A lot of people in the neighborhood let me take their rose hips, since they don't use them, so I do go out looking for those in late summer.

Mushrooming; some of those are worth hunting down.

There are a number of berry varieties around here, and some places that used to be orchard or farm lands and have gone fallow where you can head in and find stuff available for the taking.

I don't do ferns much, but the fiddleheads are yummy.... only I don't want to overtake, you know? So I don't do any of the ferns much.

Eh, I don't know. Whatever you wander by and see that looks good. Borrage is a common one all through here. People plant it in their gardens in the city for the flowers, and then it escapes and ends up everywhere. It's pretty tasty, though, if you get it when the leaves are still young enough not to have too much of that fuzz on them. Kind of refreshing tasting, but without being as strongly flavored as mint.
Makes a good salad.

Wow.. youre like an expert forager..
I wish I could find someone here to help me identify plants.
I knew a few people, one died, one moved away, and the other doesnt feel motivated to help me. [My dad knows about mushrooms.]

I do know what you mean by the grocery list. There are more that I know how to identify, I just cant think of them.

My boyfriend gets annoyed when I start looking for edible plants.. I always joke like.. I think this is edible. and he gets upset because he thinks I will die if I eat the wrong thing. but A LOT of plants are surprisingly edible.

I love the website called Eat The Weeds.

Ive never tried cattails before. I think I know where some are at. I will have to try them. ^_^

I guess my family is a little unusual in how much of this we do. That's probably not a bad thing or the surrounding areas would be picked clean, though.

(We've historically had some times when money was very tight. That's a pretty good incentive to learn this stuff and teach it to the rest of the family)

These days with the internet it's not too hard to learn on your own, though? I mean, you can even find videos of people foraging and preparing. And pictures are so common, it's super useful.
And let's be honest -when you don't have as many other foragers in your region, there's usually a lot more to find. Resource competition is a real thing.

I haven't foraged much at all. Mostly blackberries, wild strawberries, wild onions. My mom really likes poke. I'm not sure what the real name of the plant is but that's what she always calls it.

Akili is a master forager! She should teach seminars!

.... no. I really do come at it from a background of "we have been really and truly hungry", and I do NOT want to train up a bunch of people, in my area no less, who probably don't have an actual dire need but who might go through and harvest everything in the region so that if something happens and we're in need again there's nothing there.
I'm sorry, I really do have a scarcity-mindset when it comes to food availability. I can sometimes forget to eat, but only because I know exactly how much is in my pantry right at this moment. When I feel like it's running low, I'm constantly hungry.
I know there's a lot of studies that say an abundance mindset is far more healthy and all, but.... the emotional impact of need sets deep hooks into your backbrain. It's really hard to overcome that.
Talking about it on here is pretty easy, because there's not many users and we're spread over a wide geographic area -nothing I say here is going to have a huge impact on my direct ability to forage in my area.
But teaching a seminar? Yeah, my psyche is far too messed up for that.

Maybe you could do an online seminar for people in different areas that are also truly in need?

Or just email tips. That would be cool.

Do you ever go to food banks? They don't ask about your income or anything. They're nice to have just in case.
I would go but I can't carry food by myself and my husband works during the week, the only times they're open.

No.... we weren't living in a city during the bad years, we were way out in the country. Made things a lot easier in some respects, harder in others.