Foraging

Today I went to a class on foraging for food and medicine at Hartley Nature Center. A young naturalist led our group. We looked at burdock, Golden Alexander, daisy, valerian, cat tails, ostrich fern fiddleheads, basswood, June berries, and mustard. She recommended some books too. We tasted a few plants. If you pull cattails out by the center leaving the outer two leaves intact, you can pull the stem out. The tender inner leaves on the stem taste a little bit like cucumber. Cattails clean up the water so be sure to pull from clean water. Cattails in a ditch along a busy road might have high lead content. Tea can be made from raspberry leaves, strawberry leaves, and valerian. Milkweed can be edible. In the spring you can eat the shoots raw like in a salad. The seed pods can be eaten when they are newly formed and they taste like a combination of green beans and asparagus. While looking at the milk weeds we found 7 plants with Monarch butterfly eggs and first stage instars.