How-Tuesday: Foraging for Lunch

Great article. Gets my creative nerves thinking.

There's an easy middle ground between the two extremes of either buying pre-packaged food or hiking off into the wilds with "dainty shears" to snip away at greenery - foraging at a local farmers' market might be just as productive and delicious for most of us.

Superb article! Can't wait to try this salad :)

I've been adding edible wild greens to my salads for a few years now. It's delicious! Great blog!

really happy to see a post about foraging!

Yum, nothing better than fresh.

Wow so creative salad! I definitely have to try it on my own :D http://www.petiterobe-elenoir.blogspot.com/

Who knew! Cannot wait to try the salad. Thank you for a very informative article.

All these wild greens are very easy to grow in your garden if you don't fancy a miles-long hike every time you want to eat. The seeds can be gathered from the wild, or if you live in the country you probably have most of them already, they are "weeds" after all!

Ah - no thanks. Pass the nachos please and top off my margarita.

Man, this just reminds me of the movie "Into the wild" ...anyone else?

Great blog. Thank you for sharing.

Nice... don't get a chance to wander in the wilds much, but it was a beautiful article. :o) Blessings, Hannah Jasmine

I am headed out to my 2 acres to see what I can forage up for dinner!

Wow that makes for such a pretty salad, I've never heard of Miner's Lettuce before but it sounds tasty. I always worry about foraging though since I have heard that caution should be taken with plants next to roads as they tend to absorb the toxins from car exhausts.

This salad is definitely wild! Looks great! Thanks for the healthy recipe!

i love this article! the illustrations are so easy to use. i can't wait to try this on my own :)

fantastic post - thank you!

I used to love to eat Miner's Lettuce in Northern Calif.

How fun and sounds delicious ! Great article :-)

Sound's great, cannot wait to try :)

Foraging is fun and interesting!

i love foraging... especially for the easy to pick stuff like lettuce, flowers and berries. www.dirtygirlgarden.com

Good work - I love pointing out "wid" foods to my co workers. Its helped them not look at me like I'm crazy when I start mumbling under my breath and pulling "weeds". For anyone interested in this - see if there is a local forager you can hook up with. A lot of plants look like other plants and you don't want to make yourself sick. Also be careful where you forage - make sure the area doesn't get sprayed with chemicals. :)

yay for wild foods! happy foraging!

We're going to pig out on plums and apricots in our yard later today! Free food tastes the best!

I think that "Wild Salad" needs to be in my belly STAT! Great blog guys, just the reading break I needed ;)

Fantastic article! My husband and I have a very Paleo (no processed foods) lifestyle, so this was right up our alley! Thanks for sharing!!

These greens, as well as red clover and chickweed, are favorites of my pet rabbits, too. I love connecting to both nature and my neighbors during my daily urban foraging walks.

Great article!

I also enjoy wild spinach or "lamb's quarters".

Yum! I want a wild salad!

♥♥♥ I give this article an A+++! I am off to look for Jamie & Sarah's book! Many thanks!

Great idea!!! Looks yummy.

Awesome! Coincidentally, I picked up The Locavore's Handbook today at the library.

I am greatly interested in urban foraging, but I really worry about toxins and animal excrament. Looking forward to the upcoming article for those of us trapped in the concrete jungle!

Eeek...please be careful gathering wild watercress! It can harbor certain types of parasites. I echo some of the hazards others have mentioned. If you would like to gather wild foods, do so in the presence of an experienced forager. Make sure you don't have allergies/possible drug interactions to compounds in the plants you consume. Don't mess with mushrooms - it's really not worth the cost if you make a mistake. And never ever ever harvest plants in a way that they can't renew their populations.

Wonderful article! What a lovely salad!!

Every time I go hiking I munch on Miner's Lettuce!

Our 'salads' have included native plants for years, but my Mother still laughs when she sees me in our yard picking weeds for lunch. Typical fair for us includes arrowhead sorrel, wild mint, dandelion, oxalis, black berry leaves, with a wild berry dressing!

yum yum. wild edibles. i love how tuesday

Hello delicious! I need a back yard of edible goodness (sans the pet poop and chemicals).

Great article! Foraging sounds like fun!

When my son was in the second grade, quite a while ago, I put nasturtiums we grew in a bag for him to nibble on. The flowers were gorgeous and tasty but the teacher freaked. Many years later and she still mentions the time one of her students ate a bouquet for lunch.

That looks delicious! I may have to give it a try! Thank you! =]

Gotta love flower salads.

Beautious salad! It almost looks too pretty to eat! (almost)

This is an awesome article! Go back to how it was at the start! Not sure I have the guts to pick my lunch, but it will be alot of fun trying to look out for edible plants!

Healthy wealthy and wise!

Wow, those kinds of plants are new to me.

So cool! I didn't know you could eat dandelions. I might have to start eating from our patch of woods now. :P

Love this - thanks!

This is awesome! My boyfriend and I would find the Miner's Lettuce on our spring walks and wondered what they were, and to find them edible is just great. On one of our journeys we were resting in a meadow and he said he wanted a wild salad, I thought it was funny, but the idea stuck. I was trying to have him try a manzanita berry (no go). Hope to pick up this book!

So cool! There's nothing better than a fresh salad in the summer. :)

Awesome to see this and the book looks great! My husband and I love to forage when we hike, and always come home with things for the fridge. The best resource we found for proper identification was a local Adirondacker who lives in the woods and shares some of the best spots he knows. We've been on the hunt for some wild asparagus we found last year, but haven't been able to locate it again. Also looking forward to the edible sumac being ready for making 'lemonade', super sweetened for me. :)

I've been pulling lamb's quarters, chickweed (your miner's lettuce) and amaranth out of my garden for years. My son just came home and started using all of them as meals. I'm like, huh! Why am I working so hard to grow spinach when I can just eat the lamb's quarters that grows in its place? Then I'll have more time to make my Etsy projects. Yes!

very cool. I've been obsessed in finding a way to get away from all the packaged stuff. this seems like a fun and interesting place to start.

Thank you :)

some of them look like flowers? eating flowers is new to me.

Here in rural Maine, many of the wild greens you mention must be here. But I haven't searched out any of them because I am so busy avoiding poison oak, poison ivy and small sumac trees (all of which grow every where, including way too close to our house!) Contact with any of these will ruin you for foraging for a while!! So, on our porch, we grow container plants! I have a whole pot of pansies and nasturtiums, both of which are edible (as you have shown pansies in the salad). We also grow herbs (a hand-ful tossed into a salad is yummy) and next year, I intend to grow leaf lettuces (very short growing season this year, so it wasn't worth it to plant them. My cilantro is still in the teeeny tiny stages!) But I do look forward to your urban foraging article as I used to wonder what might be edible growing around me when I lived in DC!

Take a look at my shop - Meadowsweet Flowers - English Edible flowers crystallised - they look beautiful and can last several months - no flavourings or colourings added. It's amazing what you can eat !!!

Wild salad is great, hopefully we'll pick the right greens!! :)

awesome! i do this all the time. here is my blog: http://good4youtea.tumblr.com/ <3333.

yummy!

Looks like it came right out of martha stewarts kitchen, looks very delicious and yet pretty! Thanks for the recipe!!

This is so wonderful to read... I have done this on occassion... living near the forest in Washington State. :D

Wonderful salads and fresh greens. We love growing herbs and arugula. It's so expensive in restaurants. Better to grow your own.

That sounds so good right now! Nothing like a fresh crisp salad! Yum!

Great article!

What a pretty salad!

I would never have the courage to pick my own salad. It looks yummy though.

Loved the article, Thanks!

Super innovative article. Let's get back outdoors!! And have a tasty picnic.

This article was so interesting - I can't wait to look around for these plants on my next walk! Salad looks delicious! Thank you!

One of my favourite subjects! Nutritious, delicious, wild & free~ Win win win WIN! Thanks, love it~ Heidi

Very informative! Our favorites are the sorrels and purslane- a number of weeds are probably already growing in your backyard and some are actually edible, and very very tasty. Just don't use any weed herbicides in your backyard if you intend to eat them.

Woooww,I want a wild salad too! Great article ^__^

What a great guide! There is a plant called poke salad or pokeweeds, the plants with the purple/redish berries. You boil it like you would turnips and never eat it raw. Some people say that you shouldn't eat the plant at all because the ENTIRE thing is poisonous but boiling it for 20-30 minutes removes some of the toxins. I don't really know but my grandparent have eaten it for years and their still alive and I'm sure I was given it as a child and I'm still here, so who knows.

My mouth still waters when I think of some of the 'weeds' my mother used! My favorite was lambs quarters, although it was served cooked. Wish I could find some where I am!

As a vegan, I'm all about the greens, but those dandelion leaves mess me up. Ugh.

Reminds me of the "forest tea parties" I used to have with my best friend...Eight years old, we were. Out for a walk in the woods. Feasting on wild strawberries and honeysuckle blossoms, sitting in the sunshine in a woodsy clearing...LOVE the idea of the "wild lunch"!!!!!!

very cool

Coincidentally just before reading this I posted my first listing for Edible Flowers - they aren't wild but it is part of a movement I support toward becoming more comfortable with eating what is at hand. I think Bastyr in Seattle had an urban foraging day recently and I have read about someone in LA doing them so you may check and see if someone is offering local classes. I'd also add nettle to the list. It makes a delicious tea as well as flavoring for soups and pestos.

Salad for a Rabbit? :p interesting, a little out there for me, but great to read about wild greens :)

It doesn't surprise me that the earth is full of edible things that we haven't yet discovered, and it wouldn't surprise me if many of them actually had medicinal values - perhaps even for diseases we've long sought to cure.

I love forging! It's so exciting to just gather and eat what the earth provides and plus, it's kinda cool having a secret that most other people don't know. I would like to find some wild arugula, that's a new one to me.

Mm! This reminds me that there's a whole row of fresh, bright mixed greens in my garden waiting for me!

I should get a field guide for those. We hike all the time and I should learn to recognize those greens. We did eat some wild blackberries and strawberries recently.

Pansies on a salad! What's not to love? pxxxx

Fiddleheads, Pansies and Dandelion's Oh MY... Absolutely Great Read

Absolutely wonderful! Time for a some greens hunting!

Great article. I went on a green picking excursion through town last year and it was amazing.

Super feature! I love salads and can't wait to try this. This will be great to print out and bring with the kids on the next hike and they can try to find some of flowers/plants.

I had to print this out. Thanks so much. I love dandelion leaves!

One of the many things I enjoy about living in the Great Pacific Northwest! I remember filling myself up as a kid on blueberries, and wild blackberries, then coming in from playing outside all day with stains all over our mouths and fingers! Thank you for the wonderful memory.

One of my favorite parts about summer is topping my salad with nasturtium flowers. Eating them makes me feel magical.

Sounds like a delicious recipe, thank you for sharing!

I want to eat a flower! this article is so cool! Bravo!

Wonderful post, I am living within a forest now, and only one year provides a plethora of Mushrooms, berries, grapes, acorns, kudzu (if you are in the south) I found I can spend the entire year harvesting, planning, picking, pickling, canning, and eating. Now with a greens guide, it takes up a whole different healthy, fresh look. Always something to find in the woods.

I love it when a photo makes me go OO OO on first glance. Your tutorial is a delight. TY.

Superb!!!!!! love it ! Thanks for shared :-)

Great informative article.. I enjoy eating the dandelions in my yard & avoid mowing them.. when I cut the grass. I have purslane that pops up in a lot of places ..I will have to try them now ! Thank You

i've been foraging for a spell & discovered it greatly improved my health & disposition! o how idream of a secret garden with unlimited year-round fiddleheads & dandylion buds

I'd love to go on a local foraging outing w/a pro. I'm sure there Sacramento is plentiful in good wild eats. I'm just concerned about where I find them, what they've been sprayed with. I suppose I could grow weeds in my own yard. They do like to come up on their own. :-)

I have loved Lambs Quarters since a child, they taste just iike spinach. Wild asparagus, wild mushrooms, crises, sheep sorrel all wait for us all free.

lovely, valuable post!! also extremely important aspect is the amazing vitamin and mineral content of these native, prolific plants. a wild salad with home made herbal vinegar contains huge amount of daily nutrition!! and the nutriion is more bioavailable in food form in place of capsuled, processed supplements. much love from an aspiring wise woman and community herbalist. eat your weeds!!

This is such a delicious topic! I recently moved to the country and have been learning about what has been growing here, ready to eat and enjoy. One of my childhood friends takes it all a step further, and you can read about it here: http://www.salon.com/author/felisa_rogers/index.html Felisa is a true scavenger! Enjoy!

This is delightful. I have been yearning to carve out the time to learn how to better forage my area for edible delights. Methinks your article may have been just the kick in the pants I needed. Thank you.

This is such a lovely, fantastic article! I live in the city, LA to be exact, and it would sure be nice to be able to just enter a forest to pick fresh greens. I do need to warn you advanturous pickers hunting for greens in the bigger cities like mine though -- you should pick them from deep inside the forests because the ones near the hiking trails sometimes are full of pesticide. Like the author had mentioned -- our governement agency refers to these yummies as 'weeds.' Also, Pansies are great on salads, and they make your dish look so pretty! But remember to pick them up in the herb section at your nursery, not in the garden section as these are served as ornamentals and they probably contain pesticide. Your recipe would make a fabulous summer salad. Thank you!

My husband introduced me to lamb's quarter. It has become my spring time treat. It lends itself to a spinach omelet better than spinach. I introduced the grandchildren to nasturtium flowers last year. Back yard gardens and locally grown are healthful choices.

Although we grow many, many things in our gardens we also wild harvest herbs and other plants for food and medicine. In the spring we forage for wild blueberries, tender grape leaves, lambs quarters, amaranth, young cat briar shoots (tastes remarkably like asparagus) and so much more. At one time we started a log of all the wild medicines and foods around us and had quite a long list!

A work of art from nature Awesome Thanks

My husband and I were just on a trip down the length of the Washington coast which is brimming with various species of edible plants and tons of wild golden raspberries and huckleberries to add to your salad! We are so fortunate to live in the Pacific NW where a bounty awaits every season. Thank you for sharing this article.

I'm totally there with you regarding the bounty of the Pacific Northwest. I don't know anything about edible wild greens that grow around here but we love picking wild blackberries around this time of year. Also huckleberries.

It's true! Nearly everything that grows wild is either edible or medicinal I'm actually going back to school to learn foraging & wildcrafting medicines - it's opened my eyes to what's all around us! Wild food has the highest mineral content of any other food - leaps and bounds above hybrid and cultivated varieties. Wilds surpass everything else in the amount of alkaloids and overall energetic vibration / chi of the food. Chances are, regardless of where you live, you can make entire meals just from what grows in your own back yard! Here's my absolute favorite quote from one of the all-time best authors on wildcrafting & foraging... it's so true: ""One of our greatest fears is to eat the wildness of the world. Our mothers intuitively understood something essential: the green is poisonous to civilization. If we eat the wild, it begins to work inside us, altering us, changing us. Soon, if we eat too much, we will no longer fit the suit that has been made for us. Our hair will begin to grow long and ragged. Our gait and how we hold our body will change. A wild light begins to gleam in our eyes. Our words start to sound strange, nonlinear, emotional. Unpractical. Poetic. Once we have tasted this wildness, we begin to hunger for a food long denied us, and the more we eat of it the more we will awaken. It is no wonder that we are taught to close off our senses to Nature. Through these channels, the green paws of Nature enter into us, climb over us, search within us, find all our hiding places, burst us open, and blind the intellectual eye with hanging tendrils of green. The terror is an illusion, of course. For most of our million years on this planet human beings have daily eaten the wild. It's just that the linear mind knows what will happen if you eat it now." --Steven Buhner

Love everything about these wonderful greens! I'm going hiking tomorrow and will enjoy finding delicious goodies for my salads. Saw a ton of all different kinds of mushrooms on a recent hike,but that is another world to Identify carefully before eating...

Great Article!! Wild green are wonderful and much more full of nutrition than anything from a "garden" or mono-culture farm. Besides salads, try making a "GREEN DRINK" with a few wild greens, perhaps some parsley, spinach or kale too. You don't need toomuch, just maybe a cup or so, add a cup of water, blend on high speed until liquified, then add some frozen fruit and blend somemore. First couple sips may taste completely strange, but somehow it becomes addicting after the first little glass. I drank these every morning or many months, picking greens from the yard. I could go hours before I needed "food" it was so nutritious and sustaining, it just gave me all the energy and vitality I needed to get through until lunch time. These drinks have been known to reverse diabetes and even some early cancers. Look into "raw foods diets" and you will see much talk of "green drinks" They are wonderful!!!! Thanks again for the great article, reminding us all to live well!!

Lots of info on the web about edible weeds! I learned that some things were edible that I would never have dreamed! Like smilax, also known as greenbrier, dogberry, razor vine, and other common names. The vine is a dreadful pest, here in the south, and can completely cover a tree in time. It has amazingly sweet flowers, though they are almost invisible, and now I know that the young leaves and shoots are salad material! Also, common plantain is excellent if you pick the leaves tiny, before they get stringy.

What a great article! So informative. I can't wait to try some of these in my next salad. (I know my family will be surprised to see flowers in their salad!)

This is a VERY cool article. Makes me want to tromp through the forest tout suite!

I just 'weeded' my neighbour's flower garden, and came back with a pot full of succulent purslane! Last fall, I made a big batch of wild grape jelly from the vines she'd been begging me to cut down off our shared fence all year :)

Love, love, love foraging! Sauteed dandelion blossoms are the best. You can prepare them like mushrooms.

Lamb's quarters are best in the Spring, when they first come up. Also a wild Violet, cream cheese Omelette is delicious, with a fresh brewed aromatic wild Ginger root tea.

Great article, thanks for spreading the word!

Lovely! Thanks for sharing!

interesting, never would have thought that the forest could be more than bugs and wood :]

Yummo & don't forget the chickweed

Lovely!!!! So incredible beautiful. xx

Awesome article! I was actually JUST reading an article about edible "weeds" just before opening my new "Lavender Fields" Etsy newsletter. What an amazing coincidence.^_^ (It's a sign.:) I WILL learn more and more and become a wise and friend-enlightening forager... hehe!) Check out the very informative article I was reading here: http://www.squidoo.com/edible-weeds-in-los-angeles Blessings!

Just a word of caution here: I used to work as a Natural Heritage Educator for Ontario Parks. Edible Wild hikes used to be a common and popular feature of park Interpretive programs, until we were asked to stop doing them for safety reasons. There's a number of problems with edible wilds. In addition to problems with misidentification and allergies there's also the concern that some edible wilds require special processing in order to make them edible. I once spoke to a woman who made her whole family sick by feeding them boiled milkweed pods. She didn't know that you have to change the boiling water on milkweed pods multiple times in order to get rid of the toxins. ( I for one, draw the line at any food that requires that much effort on my part to make it non-toxic.) I'm not saying that you should never eat edible wilds. Just make sure you know as much as possible about the plant that you are going to eat.

As far as watercress goes, I once had a German Biology student tell me that if you were in Europe, you shouldn't harvest it from places you don't know because it can harbour parasites like a liver fluke that usually infects sheep.

Just made a wish for the know how of wild edibles... thanks for this post!

i like how a lot of edible plants that are common for urban foraging have poison plants that look quite similar. that's the only thing that holds me back from trying this.