Forage Fellows 🍄🌱

Fruit from Moquilea tomentosa

Every spring in Vancouver was marked by pink rain. I collected bags of cherry blossoms to candy, pickle, turn into syrup, and grind into a powder for seasoning.

Well, I prefer foraging.

Finally, after YEARS of trial and error failures, today I've made Thicket Beans palatable and not poisonous! I went whole hog, 24 hour soak with 2 changes of salty, alkaline water. Boiling in another change. Pressure cooking after. And then boiling AGAIN. Lastly stewing with some sauce as a faux baked beans. It's pretty good! The process could certainly be optimized but now I know it IS at least doable. #foraging #nativeplants @foraging@slrpnk.net #technicallynotforagingigrewthis

It is an odd fruit and not too widespread but boy is it good. Wiki

Not my photos.

So, I planted some American Spikenard years ago despite very little (and conflicting) information online about it's edibility. You can read that it is edible, it's not, it is but tastes horrible, and/or it's tasty. Well finally, I am here to confirm that it is in fact DELICIOUS and tastes like root beer!!! 😍 Unsurprising for this genus I guess, but there you have it. #nativeplants #berries #foraging @foraging@slrpnk.net #technicallynotforagingigrewthis

They were tiny and sparse, but they were there and sweet. Supposedly they can produce fruit all year. From what I have observed individual plants do not produce all year, but one may produce one month and the plant next to it will produce three months later.

There were a half dozen or so around loaded like this one.

A Meadowview, Virginia, research center spearheads the effort, and more than a dozen experimental, large-plot plantings on state public lands have not only survived but reached maturity. Lesesne State Forest in Nelson County, for instance, holds about thirty acres of natural, second-growth woods anchored by seventy-foot-tall American chestnut trees that are more than sixty years old—and produce delicious wild nuts that few living people beyond foresters and researchers have ever tasted.

First, I located some trees with white or yellow resin. Don't use the liquid fresh stuff, the hardened one isn't sticky and smells better.

Sort of like a River Cottage. I liked it and am in Tasmania.

I've had an abundance of chanterelles recently and decided to share what I've been doing with them.

I can't remember what we found, but we concluded from various cutting/bruising and reading through pages and pages of mushroom keys that none of them were sadly edible.

I have long thought the birds were beating me to the ripe currants we pass on our morning hike. But yesterday I was close enough to my dog to catch her foraging them!