Why I Forage

Like gardening, my love of foraging came to me later in life— but unlike gardening, I did have some experience with it. As a kid I spent many wet spring days tromping through the woods with my brother Christian, ducking through thickets of bush honeysuckle and poking around rotted elm trees in search of morels. I never found any (unless Christian told me, “There’s one somewhere in these three square feet”), and I never ate any (I didn’t like mushrooms), but I enjoyed the quiet of the forest, the birds flitting away from us, the challenge of scanning the forest floor straining my eyes to pick out a pattern. 

As a kid I could identify a handful of edibles: our backyard had a mulberry tree, and we’d snack on the berries a bit in the summer (not too much, though; they weren’t very sweet). I liked to chew on sassafras twigs, which have a root-beer-like flavor, and occasionally the blackberry brambles would yield a berry or two. Other plants— like dandelion and stinging nettle— I knew were edible but didn’t care to try. As I grew up, I didn’t bother searching through the woods because I wasn’t likely to find anything, anyway. Aside from a mulberry snack here and there (and, whenever I visited the Northwest, blackberries), I gave up foraging.

Over the past year, I was determined to learn more about foraging, as a way to expand my palate, identify more plants, and get a sense of what kind of useful plants were growing for free in the nearby woods. Through the year, we worked our way through dandelion, stinging nettle, garlic mustard, elderflowers (the birds got all the wild elderberries before we could), mulberries, oyster mushrooms, and spruce and pine needle tea. I learned about a lot more edibles, too, although I only got a taste of each: violets, redbud blossoms, and purslane, to name a few. Goals for next year include more mushrooms, cattails, sassafras leaves (you powder them to make filé for gumbo), wild grape leaves, beechnuts, pawpaw, and persimmon (we found persimmons but they were underripe, even after the tree lost all its leaves).

Throughout these experiences, I’ve come to appreciate foraging a lot more, for several reasons:

1. Foraging is a fun angle for approaching the woods. I love hiking, but foraging encourages me to slow down and scan every plant, searching for a pattern that matches what I’m after. Once we find a good patch of nettle or cluster of oyster mushrooms, we can either gather it then or come back later, enjoying the process of gathering, carrying, and cooking the food.

2. Foraged foods are an excellent source of nutrients. Most wild greens are much more nutrient-dense than cultivated plants! This is one of the reasons Zach likes foraging: he hates to spend money on greens that he doesn’t consider “real” food, but will gladly eat greens he gets for free. 

3. You learn a lot about plants. Identifying plants always seemed overwhelming to me. However, when you need to identify something you’re going to eat, you have to be absolutely sure you know what it is, so foraging attunes your eyes and senses. Once you start getting a sense of what plant is what, you can spot similar species nearby. The more you learn, the easier it is to identify like plants.

4. It helps you see the abundance all around. After foraging dandelion all spring, I now feel almost offended that people buy poison specifically to kill this incredibly useful plant. This is free hardy greens, available to anyone— assuming that it’s growing in a non-contaminated area. The same goes for any foraged plant. Garlic mustard is an invasive plant, so all this free pesto material grows all over. Literal pounds of oyster mushrooms grow on trees, offering free nutrition to anyone who can identify them. Once you start to see how the forest can feed you, it’s staggering.

Have you ever tried foraging? If not, what are your hesitations or fears about trying?

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