Saturday, May 2, 2009

Foraging in my backyard

If you haven't done so already, I strongly recommend wandering over to Unstuffed to read all about the wild foraging course she is attending.

In her first class this week, she learned about fiddleheads (among other things). Apparently you can tell the edible ones (the Ostrich ferns) from the others by the deep groove they have in the stems.

I have always wondered if the ferns I have in my backyard were edible. So I had a look and, yep, deep groove in the stems. Woot!

Unfortunately most of them were too far gone:

However I found this one hidden under the fence (some of them were too small to pick but some were perfect). And I found a few others that were just right in bundles of ones that were too far gone.

I found enough in fact to make a small snack. Here's the end result after boiling and tossing in butter and some chopped chives (also from the garden).

They were delicious!

Thanks Unstuffed. Looking forward to learning more. :)

5 comments:

Amber said...

Yay! Super find. I've been harvesting day lily shoots and nettle from in and around my garden plot for the last couple of days. So much fun!

Anonymous said...

LOvely looking snack. I'm loving foraging for food at the moment. I recently collected some native Spinach and Stinging Nettle. I'm currently trying to grow or encourage some of these weedy/native foods in my back yard.

Cheers,
Tricia

Rachel said...

Hi Amber! I need to learn more about day lily shoots. I have lots of day lilies in my garden and picked a shoot tonight and ate it and it tasted good but do all day lilies produce edible shoots? So fun to learn all this stuff. :)

Hi Tricia, isn't foraging great? I'm totally hooked. Cool about your native spinach. That's a great find. Stinging nettle...this one I can't wrap my head around. I know Amber has been collecting a lot of this too and I know when it's young it doesn't have a sting but all I can think about how many times I got stung by the stuff when I was little! :)

Hannah said...

Hmm..fiddleheads! Ever made a pie with them?

Rachel said...

Hi Hannah,
I've never heard of fiddlehead pie! Is it good?