Eating dandelions. (Foraging thread!)

Post Reply New Topic

If you can, find a copy of The Weed Cookbook by Adrienne Crowhurst it's awesome.My copy is old,published 1972.
She suggests harvesting the dandelions before they bloom as they get more bitter after flowering.They were once used as a cure for scurvy,they are high in protein,calcium,phosphorus,iron,riboflavin,niacin,vitamins A,C and B1.
The grape leaves are also good to add to pickles,and they look nice in the jar.
I harvest a lot of wild food for my Iguana,it's healthier than store bought greens,She loves Mulberry leaves and dandelion.
She also mention cooking the dandelion roots like parsnips,and roasting the roots for about two hours till they are dry and brittle and grinding for a coffee substitute.I tried making dandelion wine once but must have done something wrong because it was nasty.

So the only problem I'm having with foraging is ticks. I found 3 on me yesterday. Pretty much everyday I go out to that area I come back with a tick on me (or more than one tick.) This means I'm gonna have to wear my clunky desert boots with my pants tucked into them and an underarmor shirt and look all tacticool everytime I go out there if I wanna forage. Yay for real life being like Fallout in that small fashion as well. The reason why there's so many ticks? So many deer! Probably about 1/4-5 times I go out there, I see a deer in person. Too bad the state has a monopoly on the amount of deer that can be foraged. I think tags are too much money and I don't own any weapons to kill deer and traps aren't allowed. Otherwise I'd get one and have enough meat in my freezer to last me forever since I doubt my family would eat it.

Anyway for plants. I discovered wild garlic, like the legit big ones, not the crappy lawn garlic. Also the raspberries are coming in nicely now. Some are red. Grapes are coming in great, too. I love Concord grapes! Also, I probably should try the sheet idea for the mulberries, as it seems the winner with the mulberries is the ground, not the birds or me.

Carry duct tape with you,get a tick,stick the tape to it.We have LOTS of ticks here,it's too hot to dress covered,I find them better wearing shorts and light colored clothes.I don't know if you have "seed"ticks there,but when they hatch out (usually July)you will get a million in one cluster,they are small like black pepper.The tape works really good for them.Sulfur is suppose to keep them off,but I have my doubts about how effective that is.We have too many deer here,but tags are pretty cheap.Some towns have archery hunts because they are overpopulated.We made jerky a couple of years,better than any store bought.You can even do it in your oven.

something else you can eat is stinging nettles. You just steam them or blanch them and it gets rid of the poison.

So my mulberry pie seems to have turned out really good! Only 2 cups needed per 8 inch crust. I've not tasted it too too much yet, but it seems very very similar to blueberry pie. So much so if you were to give a piece to someone saying it was blueberry pie, they'd likely not know the difference. Up next maybe jam perhaps? But what a useful fruit mulberries are. Wow.

This is a tough decision over what I want in my yard. Mulberries or persimmons. Mulberries would give me crazy high yield and while the fruit isn't that that great raw by itself, processed into pie or jam or whatever it's awesome. Also, mulberries would be slightly antisocial. My neighbors might complain about the berries falling on the street or birds crapping purple. Which depending on how much I'm getting along with my neighbors would be great or would be terrible.

EDIT:
Oh my! This mulberry pie is absolutely spectacular.

My neighbor collects nettles and dries them,he then adds them to soup.
There are dwarf mulberries, and my weeping mulberry tree is about 10 years old and maybe 8 feet tall and about as wide,the berries are smaller than the wild ones.The oriental persimmons are nice,and the fall color is a bonus.

So I found actually a second mulberry tree. I read somewhere they're not self pollinating, most of them, so I figured "hmm, maybe there's another nearby" and sure enough there was. About 100 yards off, but no path to it. Also next to it was an apple tree. Basically crap apples, but some fairly big ones. I could probably juice those. Also I found out past where I can see from the path of the golf course, there's probably 10x more blackberries than I'm seeing. So the blackberries should be an interesting harvest. Raspberries are good and around, just not plentiful compared to the blackberries.

Ticks were HORRIBLE this time around, I found like 8 on me today after going off path. Gonna have to use DEET and underarmor unfortunately. And this is with pants tucked in boots, and shirt tucked in, too. Yikes.

If I get more adventurous off the path, I'm guessing there's a lot more hidden gems.

Mulberry trees are amazing. We have a bunch on our property, and just a few days ago my sister and I picked a bunch to dye some wool with. The wool came out a weird reddish-brown at first but after hanging it out in the rain, the brown ran out and it turned a purplish-gray.

Some of the things I've foraged and enjoyed are

Wild grapes-- you can make a really nice jelly out of them, but make sure you let the juice settle before you make it so the acid crystals fall to the bottom.

Lamb's Quarters-- basically like spinach, pretty good raw.

Daylily flowers-- most parts of the daylily are edible, but I like the flowers in salads and stuff. MAKE SURE YOU ARE EATING DAYLILIES AND NOT LILIES, regular lilies are poisonous.

Sassafras-- you can make a really nice tea out of the sticks/leaves, the roots are supposedly better but they have a higher amount of a chemical (safrole) that can cause cancer over time so I avoid them. Tastes like root beer. I made candy out of it once.

Chicory root-- chicory root tea tastes very similar to coffee. You have to prepare the root by baking it and powdering it, but it tastes pretty good!

Wild mustard-- kind of tastes like peppery broccoli. Haven't tried cooking it yet.

If you can find the Peterson's Guide to edible plants, it's probably one of the most comprehensive ones out there. A general guide to wildflowers and/or trees is also good for learning to identify things since sometimes edible plant guides don't have all the information to definitively ID a plant.

Eight ticks is not too bad,if you get on a deer trail you may get more.I don't know if you have wild gooseberries,those are starting to fill out here.I don't use any chemical bug repellant,I'm afraid of it and the smell of it bothers me.I think if you grew up with ticks it does not bother you as bad.I've seen people freak out over a tick.

I'm looking forward to blackberry season. There should be a huge crop of them this year. Real easy to freeze and to make jam.

I've made sassafras tea, but I'd really like to make true root beer from it one day.

A few years ago made about a case of real birch beer after tapping several black birch trees (also called sweet birch) while the sap was running. Didn't let it ferment long enough so the result was a tad sweeter than desired, but it sure had that birch beer taste!

Have made tea & iced tea out of black birch twigs. Just boil a bunch of them and strain. Use older branches with bark to get the reddish coloring. The thinnest twigs can be chewed on year-round to get the wintergreen flavor.

Staghorn sumac berry clusters (those pyramidal red spikes) can be boiled to make a lemonadey-flavored drink. Been a while since I've done this. Maybe this summer.

Birch does not grow here,sassafras does.The old folks believe you should drink it in the spring to purify your blood.I have a recipe for sassafras jelly but I have not tried it out.The main thing I should do is tap my sugar maples next spring,I have enough and I should flag them this fall and try it out.We have plenty of sumac and it does make a good "fake" lemonade.Pine needles also make a zingy tea,I keep a pot of hot water on my wood heater for humidity and sometimes I throw in some pine needles and it makes the house smell so good,just don't let the pot boil dry,yuk.

So I found out there's a bunch of parsley growing at my house, that I didn't even plant! So free parsley for my pasta and stuff! At first I thought "hmm maybe it's like a fern or something" but it looked really similar to the cilantro I planted, so I tasted some, and lo and behold, parsley! YAY!

Derp. It's actually this:
http://healingweeds.blogspot.com/2013/0 ... ervil.html

Either way, the young ones ARE really good. The older ones are kinda meh. Young ones are fantastic, though.

I thought these were ferns, but they're not ferns. It's just in the parsley/carrot/etc family. When they're big they look like annoying stupid weeds and don't really taste much better than they look, but when they're small...wow!

But I've got no idea on ferns...