Foraging in Southern California: Easy Edible Plants for Beginner Foragers
Foraging in Southern California: Easy Edible Plants for Beginner Foragers
Food is growing freely and abundantly all around us in southern California, but many of us walk past this food every day without ever noticing. In this video, I share 23 easy plants to help you begin foraging in California. Of the hundreds of edible and medicinal plants that grow here, I have chosen some the easiest plants to identify, that are widespread and common throughout much of the southern California urban areas. I have also focused on many plants that can be harvested in large quantities. Each of these are plants that can change your life!
Plus, I have shared my suggestions on how to prepare some of these wild foods.
Transcript: The following is a transcription of Foraging in Southern California: Easy Edible Plants for Beginner Foragers.
For more foraging in California see: California Foraging Guide for Beginner Foragers
Introduction to the Foraging Walk
Food and medicine is growing freely and abundantly all around us, even in major cities like Los Angeles and San Diego. Today, I am going to introduce you to some of the most common and easy-to-identify plants growing here in southern California. These are some of the most nutritious and delicious and medicinal foods on Earth and they can truly change your life.
When a lot of people think of foraging, they’re imagining going deep into “nature” or into the wild. But, that’s not what I’m going to be sharing today. I am sharing the plants that you’re going to find in cities, in urban areas: basically where human beings are … a lot of disturbed areas. Why? Because I want to help you find the food and medicine that’s growing right outside your doors, that you’re going to be passing by on your commutes or your walks, your bike rides. This is what I’m going to introduce you to.
Also, I am not focused here on the native plants. I’m more focused on plants that are … many of them are considered invasive and the non-natives. The reason for that is when we’re harvesting these plants considered invasive, we’re doing an ecosystem service. We’re helping the ecosystem. And with the native plants in the delicate southern California, you want to have more knowledge and more of a relationship. So, I’m really focused more on these plants.
Wild Mustard
Hirschfeldia incana
A great place to start: your wild mustard. This is the plant that’s considered invasive that with every single bite you take you’re doing an ecosystem service. If you’re in southern California, there’s a really good chance you know it. It’s one of the most common plants growing all over the place and this is incredible food.
This is in the mustard family – Brassicacea, which is one of the most beginner families to work with because, although there are some mildly toxic plants, there are no plants in this family that can kill you, or you can die from eating them.
Now, how you work with the wild mustard. My favorite way? Just eat these tips. They’re wonderful on salads, fresh. Although they do have a spice that will hit you in the back of the tongue if you eat too many of these. And the way to eat a lot of them is to cook them. I like to saute them, especially in olive oil, add them into stir fries, cooked vegetables, soups, stews. So, that’s the primary way that I work with this. But, the other thing is, earlier in the year, you get the young and tender shoots coming up. You can harvest those whole shoots, like, they’re kind of like broccolinis or broccoli rabes, and those are really nice and tender, wonderful to saute up. You can eat those whole tender shoots. Once the seeds are actually … go from green to brown, you can harvest those and winnow them to actually make your own mustard.
So, wild mustard is an incredible one to get to know. I often have eaten a pound of mustard per day. So, we’re talking about some serious sustenance and for numerous months of the year here in southern California. You can largely live outside of the grocery store, the restaurants, even the farmer’s market or your garden with this abundant food source.
Wild Radish
Raphanus sativus
Now, here’s wild radish. This, for me, is very much a counterpart to the wild mustard. I work with them interchangeably, but there’s some differences between them. So, you can see all of these purple flowers. The flowers aren’t always purple. They can be white as well. There’s some variation there. But this is typical wild radish. Now, when a lot of people think of radish, they think of the radish roots. That’s not what you’re going for with wild radish. What we’re going for are these tender tips. Wild radish tends to be a little more forgiving in getting more of this bendiness. As a new person, you can run your finger along here, and you get to the point where it just snaps clean off. That’s what you’re looking for. Where the peel does not start to pull off. Where you get a nice clean snap. So, this is in its rapid growth stage, which means the cell walls have not fully formed, and you’re going to get a young and tender vegetable. This is what we’re really looking for with a lot of these vegetables, when they’re young and tender, before they’ve gotten really fibrous. What I do with the radish is, I come and I just … I put my finger on, and I can very … just by the eye, I can generally tell where it’s going to break off. And I’m just breaking it off wherever it cleanly snaps off. You can eat the tougher portion, too. It’s just not as desirable. So, it’s an easy way to get a pretty substantial amount of vegetable with the wild mustard and with the wild radish.
Now, one thing that’s quite different about the wild radish versus the wild mustard is these seed pods. These seed pods on wild radish can be incredible. You’re looking for the ones that are nice and tender. There you go. It’s got a nice crunch to it and no fibrousness. This one here is large. Let’s see. Still real nice. You can eat them at any time, but you’re really looking for them before they develop the fiber. These are wonderful as a garnish in your salads and your hot dishes, but also, you can pickle these, whether it’s lacto fermented or in vinegar. I like to cover my salads or cover my cooked dishes with these fresh flowers. They add an incredible amount of beauty. And, of course, what you’re looking for, because these are in the mustard family, Brassicacea, they’re generally going to look like a broccoli top. What broccoli is, is it’s unopened thousands of flowers. So, that’s what you’re looking for. Now, of course, the leaves are edible as well. These are in a pretty tender stage. We are at end of May here in Los Angeles. So, the peak time for harvesting your greens and your tender vegetables in southern California is going to be once it starts raining, which would be, you know, winter time, and then into mid-spring, late spring. We’re at end of spring, beginning of summer and there’s still tenderness. But, this food is really peaking in the springtime.
Rosemary
Salvia rosmarinus
This is a plant that you won’t find probably in any foraging books and there’s only one place that I would consider this foraging, and it’s southern California. Here we have rosemary. Generally a domesticated plant, but you find this growing as a landscaping plant all throughout southern California to the point that I think one of the most absurd things that we do is buy rosemary at the grocery store. And even more absurd is importing rosemary from elsewhere. This is a perfect example. Here we are in Griffith Park. This rosemary is grown as a landscaping plant. But, sometimes there are long hedges of this. I mean, we’re talking about rosemary to supply the needs of thousands of people from one rosemary hedge. I do consider this foraging. This is what I would call urban foraging. And eating the landscaping plants is a wonderful way to forage. This is, you know, these are plants that don’t get utilized very well.
So, how I work with rosemary is, I will harvest the tender growth tips generally. So, where it easily breaks off with my fingers is what I’m harvesting. You can harvest the more woody portions as well, no problem. But I like to do that. And when I’m harvesting these new tips, I’m actually helping this plant to become more full and more bushy, because when we harvest this plant in this way, it actually produces more branches. So, by harvesting the rosemary, we don’t result in less rosemary, we actually result in more rosemary. Now, of course, people commonly know of working with rosemary as a culinary herb, adding it into their … their cooking any way that they would. But what a lot of people don’t know about that has become really an important food and medicine for me is I make tea from the rosemary. For anybody who thinks there’s a lacking of free tea in southern California, they don’t know the rosemary. Because you could make rosemary tea basically every single day. It’s a wonderful basic medicinal tea. I love the flavor. I love rosemary and lemon together. I love to smell rosemary. You can also dry it and make burning bundles for smudging so you don’t have to harvest the sage for that. And, one last note. Something that I like to do with rosemary is what I call taking a rosemary bath. And I’ll get in here [shakes head in rosemary]. Yeah. That’s, for me, the rosemary bath. I actually think the rosemary likes that, too. The reason why? Rosemary can get a lot of dead … dead leaves in there. It can get almost like a dandruff. You know, and that actually helps to kind of shake that out and take care of the rosemary. So the rosemary bath is mutually beneficial. Ahh. Thank you, rosemary.
Mallow
Malva neglecta
Here we are with mallow, also called cheeseweed. And you’ll see this growing in many different stages. And it can look different in different stages. I’ll show a few of them to you. Here we have a really tall mallow with lush leaves. And it’s tall because it’s growing in the shade of this tree. I was actually leading a plant walk yesterday, and I broke off the tip of this already and ate it. But, what I’m going to do is harvest these tips. So, these nice, tender, bendy tips here? I’m going to go ahead and I’m just going to harvest each of those from this plant, wherever it breaks off nice and cleanly. And in that few seconds there, I got a pretty substantial amount of vegetable. I like to chew on these stems. Cooked or raw, that is a very desirable food for me. Now, when mallow is in its more young and tender stage, it’s desirable raw. You can add it to your salads. Just eat it fresh like this. But, a lot of times, once it gets to be older, it’s more a one that you would like to cook generally, because it can be a little bit on the tougher side. The nice thing about mallow is that it doesn’t get bitter or spicy or astringent, even in the heat of the summer. It stays this very mild flavor. It doesn’t have a strong flavor, but it’s very nutritious and you can eat a lot of it. This is also called cheeseweed. And the reason for that is because the seeds on this look like wheels of cheese. And you can eat those, too, when they’re young and tender. And when they’re old and they’re dry, you can also work with those, which I have not done before. You can eat the flowers on the mallow as well. So, let’s walk over here, and I’m going to show you …. Here’s some more mallow that is in the low growing stage. It hasn’t shot up. You can see the leaves growing here. And from this, I’ll harvest … any of these leaves in this stage would be good. But I’ll generally harvest the most … the more tender ones versus the older ones. So there you have mallow in this stage. Now, here’s mallow in its very developed portion of its growth stage. You can see that it’s gotten leggy. It’s got the brown, mature seed heads here. But you can also see we’ve got some of it in a little bit of an earlier stage than that as well. And you can see the flowers. And then you can see what we call the cheese wheels. So, these little seed pods. And you can break that open or pull that open, and that’s where you got the little cheese wheels here. And I will say that these are a delicious snack that I would like to eat in large quantities. And you can just eat it like that as well. [takes bite of mallow] So. Edible at this stage as well, but you’re looking for the young and tender for the best of the best.
Lamb’s Quarters
Chenopodium spp.
Here we are with lamb’s quarters. And this is one of my Top Ten, easily, edible plants to forage in southern California. But it’s also pretty close to a Top Ten all across the United States. It’s one of my absolute favorite greens. Easy to harvest in large quantities and very delicious. Most people compare it to eating spinach, but I would say it has a little bit more robustness to it, so it doesn’t get as mushy and it holds a little bit more of a form or consistency. So, you can see a large plant right here. And then we’ve got a smaller plant down here. And then we’ve got a smaller plant down here. What I’d like to do is show you how I very effectively and efficiently harvest lamb’s quarters. So. I’m going to give myself about 20 seconds here. And what I’m doing is just putting my fingers on here to the tender point and just pulling off the tender tips. So there you go. In a matter of … that was maybe 15 seconds. Come on over here. I harvested a very substantial quantity of this. Wow. I actually left the top, the most wonderful part. But I harvested, you know, probably 80 percent of what’s available in 20 seconds. And the rest of it, if I was just to go for the individual leaves, could take me three times as much time to harvest. So, I practice effectiveness and efficiency because that’s what helps you to really break free from the grocery store. I’ll eat all of these tender tips, along with the leaves. And generally with lamb’s quarters, because they’re very high in oxalates, or oxalic acid, I pretty much exclusively cook lamb’s quarters, although some people do eat it raw. And what I like to do is actually rinse it off, because these oxalates are right here on the surface. You can see that almost powderiness that I’m wiping off there. So, I’ll do a rinse and then I’ll do a blanch or a, yeah, basically a blanch. But honestly, they’re very good just sauteed just as is if oxalic acid is not a concern. Couple other notes. This is a plant that never gets bitter or spicy. So, even in the peak of summer, you can harvest lamb’s quarters. Even once it’s gone to seed, you can harvest lamb’s quarters and the flavor is going to be the same. It becomes less effective because then you have lots of … lots of seed heads, lots of fiber there, which is less nutritiously dense. But, this is closely related to quinoa. And you can eat the seeds as well as a grain. So you can easily eat all those … all those seed heads as well when they’re green, no problem.
So there you have lamb’s quarters, a Top Ten wild green that’s available by millions and millions of pounds in gardens, yards and public parks all over the country. Now, this is a weedy green that many people actually will weed out of their yards and gardens. So there’s certainly circumstances where it’s absolutely fine to pull these up. The seeds persist in the soil. However, if you want the lamb’s quarters to keep producing, the method that I just did of harvesting all of these tips will actually result in more growth. So, you can start having a rounds with your lamb’s quarters where you come back every couple weeks and harvest and continue to harvest from those same patches.
Nasturtium
Tropaeolum majus
Here we are with nasturtium and this is a wonderful one to forage in southern California. This is not a wild food, per se. Nasturtium started in gardens and escaped from gardens and now is an incredibly common green and flower that you can harvest in southern California, in areas that don’t get cold enough for freezing along the coast as well. A lot of people have seen this plant, maybe not realized that it’s edible, but it is an incredibly edible one. The flower is what it is most known for and this is one of the first flowers that was really embraced in the edible flowers movement. So, you’d find this in fancy restaurants, at farmer’s markets. It’s commonly grown in gardens and farms and something that you can forage in abundance.
So, the flowers you can eat fresh, just like this. You can add them to salads. If you’re stir frying vegetables, you could add them in there. You could add them to your soups and stews as well. Now, as much as people have eaten the flowers, less people know that the leaves are edible and these stems are edible as well. So, we’re talking about a pretty substantial food source. They’re very spicy. It’s a … it’s basically a wasabi-ish kick to it. So, clears out the … the nasal passage.
If you want to come over here, you can see the difference of some of these leaves. We’ve got this darker colored leaf here, and then we have the lighter color leaf with damage on it. So, what you want are the vibrant leaves that are the most fresh, tender versus the older ones. You can eat any of them. These are just much more desirable. And then, you can also eat the seeds. So, let’s look through here. Here we go. Here’s some seeds right here. These little green ones. And we can eat these seeds as well. They’re really nice, just like that. But you could add those in with salads. And I’ve talked to people who have made capers with them. Something I have not done yet, but I would like to do. You could experiment with lacto fermenting them. Actually, take a look at the seeds down here. You’ve got much larger and more of them. So, you can see, you can gather quite a few seeds in a short period of time. Now, you can learn about nasturtium in California Foraging by Judith Larner Lowry. This is a wonderful resource. And, I’d just like to read what it says of how to use: “Nasturtium leaves and flowers can be used in pesto, salads, stir fries and with pasta. Stuff the flowers and eat the immature seeds raw or pickle them. You can snack on the mature seeds. Also try them as a pepper substitute.” So, nasturtium, a wonderful one to know. It says it’s high in vitamins A, C and D. So, we’re talking about a really wonderful food source here with the nasturtium.
Purslane
Portulaca oleracea
Here we are with purslane, growing right on the crack here in the sidewalk. This is an abundant green that I find in urban spaces here in southern California and all across the country. It’s actually one of my favorite vegetables. The way that I like to work with this is … it’s a succulent plant. It’s got nice stems to eat. You can eat the leaves, the flowers, the seeds, the stems, the whole above ground portion. I saute it. I add it in with my cooked vegetables. And, I also really like … I’ve had lacto fermented purslane, and it’s a really wonderful one to ferment. Another really wonderful note about this is that it’s high in omegas – one of the few plants that are high in omegas. And this was, I’m told, Mahatma Gandhi’s favorite vegetable, which makes me love it even more.
Generally, this is a plant that I would harvest. We’ve got nice dark green, real nice tender stems here. But, of course, you don’t have to harvest it from the street. I often find this growing in flower boxes, in yards, in gardens. So, purslane. This is an incredible feral, wild green vegetable to enjoy.
Loquat
Eriobotrya japonica
Loquat grows abundantly in southern California all the way up into the Bay area and beyond, as well as in much of Florida. And this is a tree that is generally grown as a landscaping tree for its evergreen leaves, like the magnolia. And the vast majority of the loquat fruits are not eaten. In California, most of the varieties that I’ve come across have nice plump, juicy fruits and they are delicious to eat directly off of the tree, dehydrated, or made into different products like a jam or a jelly. Loquat is also called Japanese plum, and another wonderful thing about this tree is that you can make tea from the leaves. The most common place that I find loquats growing is in people’s front yards, often hanging over the sidewalk where there’s an abundance falling to the ground. If the fruit is falling to the ground on the sidewalk, I will also happily harvest what is either on the sidewalk or what is hanging over and is obviously not being harvested. This is a beautiful opportunity to get to know your neighbors and to expand your community. I tell them a little bit about myself and that I noticed that there’s a lot of fruit falling to the ground and I was wondering if you’re not utilizing it, if you would be happy for me to. You can also start a food rescue program to actually harvest this food, not just for yourself, but also to distribute to members of your community.
Strawberry tree
Arbutus unedo
The strawberry tree is a very common landscaping plant in many cities in southern California. But very few people eat the fruit or even know that it is edible. In fact, not only is it edible, but it is quite desirable. Some trees produce a bland fruit, while others are incredibly tasty. So, the key is to try the fruits from many trees. Wait until the fruit is so ripe that you can squish the berries right in your own hand. And there will be a nice orange, almost like jam, straight from the tree. You can spread this onto hot toast and enjoy it almost like a jam directly from the fruit. Santa Cruz is my mecca for the strawberry tree fruit. And, if this is a new fruit for you, I encourage you to give it a try.
Natal Plum
Carissa macrocarpa
Natal plum. This is a fruit that many people assume is toxic because of the milky latex, but, indeed, this is a wonderful edible fruit native to South Africa. This is incredibly common around southern California and is often producing fruit, it seems to be as much as 12 months of the year. It’s delicious. It’s nutritious. And, it is widely available to us along the coast. For all of you looking to shake up societal norms, this is a great one to start enjoying and eating even when people tell you that it’s toxic.
Elderberry
Sambucus spp.
Here we are with elder. Elderberry, elder flower. This is a wonderful medicine tree and I really can’t say enough about how much of a true gift this is. Now, most people who know elderberry know of it with elderberry syrup. That’s the most common way that it’s worked with. But, this tree has many gifts — many different ways we can work with this as food or medicine. You can see right now this is just fully loaded with green berries. Mostly green, but we’ve got some of the blue here as well. And then, we also have flowers over here. So we have it in numerous different stages. The green berries — you don’t work with. This is when they’re in a toxic stage. This is a plant that’s got a lot of toxicity in it. It has cyanide. When it comes to foraging, it’s not just identifying the plant, but it’s also knowing when and how to work with the plant. We’re talking about skills. We’re talking about knowledge. We’re talking about having to do your diligence. So, the number one rule of foraging is you only eat something if you’re 100 percent sure you have properly identified and you know how to eat it. It’s as simple as that. That’s what makes foraging safe. How you work with the elderberry. You can harvest these flowers just like this. I like to wait ‘til they’re fully open. With this, you can make tea with the elder flowers. You can also batter these and fry them and dip them in an elderberry jam. And, you don’t want to really have too much stem. The stem has a lot of cyanide. So, I would … I would remove the flowers when I’m doing that. So, that’s what I’m looking for … is the elder flowers. And you can use those fresh or dried as a wonderful tea. When it comes to the berries, what I’m looking for are clusters that are fully ripe. So, this cluster here has a few green ones on it, but is almost fully ripe. And the reason that I work with it that way is because then I can harvest the whole cluster and then I can easily remove all of the berries. What some people do is they’ll use a fork to remove them by combing through with a fork. But I just use my fingers generally, and just kind of tickle them off like that. And then I’ve got my ripe berries. Now, some of these are underripe. You want them to be a nice dark, black blue. That’s what you’re going for. But it’s okay to have a little bit of green ones in there. Now, some people will certainly eat some of these raw. When I do eat them raw, I don’t crunch the seed. So, it’s more like smashing it between my tongue and the roof of my mouth and not crunching up the seed. The seed is where the most cyanide is, I believe. So, it’s fine to nibble on some of the fully ripe ones raw. But most people … what they do is they cook this to make their elderberry syrup, to make jams and juices, jellies, et cetera, pies. And that’s how I would recommend working with them as a new person to the elderberries. But I will enjoy a small handful of them raw. Some people have reactions to that. So, start small with the raw ones if you’re doing that. And, I like to dehydrate these. Then I can store them long term or freeze them. And I’ll harvest them in large quantities. As you can see here, there’s an incredible amount of berries. The birds love these as well. So it’s a wonderful plant to share with the birds. And, one last note, you can take branches from this plant. So you can take branches from this plant. These are what we call ‘cuttings.’ And you can just go ahead and, ideally, I would have a pruners at this moment. That’s … you want to have a pruners for this moment. You can take this and you can plant this. This is what we call ‘live staking.’ They can be planted upright, at an angle or flat and these will put out roots and you’ll get a whole mulberry tree from one cutting.
So, if you’re looking to do riparian restoration and you want to grow a lot of trees, the elderberry is one of the ways to go. And we teach you exactly how to do this through our One Million Community Fruit Trees initiative. We’re looking for thousands of people to help grow trees and distribute them freely and abundantly in their communities. And the website for that is communityfruittrees.org.
Sow Thistle
Sonchus spp.
Here we are with sow thistle. And for a new forager, I’m sure this isn’t going to likely be the first choice. But I eat sow thistle in pretty large quantities. And I have shared this with dozens of people in my foraging schools and foraging classes, and generally people enjoy it.
It’s quite a bitter plant and, in what we call the “SAD,” the standard American diet, most of the bitterness has been bred out of our foods. But, when we breed out the bitterness, we breed out the medicine. There are so many different medicines associated with bitterness, and one of them is helping to stimulate our digestion. So, if you’re looking to add some bitter into your life, I like to harvest the tips of these sow thistle. Just crunch down on these raw and that’s a nice bitterness. Adding it to salads is another thing. You could always juice it if you like to juice. Or cooking it. With sow thistle, you’re generally going to get the more desirable food when it’s younger, in the springtime. But at this stage, what I’ll do is I’ll harvest these little portions coming out where the leaf attaches to the stem. And you can see the bright greenness of that. That’s going to be more young and tender and a little less bitter. And, this is a thistle, but it’s different from most of the thistles in that it’s not really very pokey. So, it’s pretty easy to handle and I can even eat it this way. But cooking it is going to reduce that pokiness. This is not a dandelion, although the flowers are dandelion-esque, but it’s in this group: the dandelion, thistle, and lettuce group. This is the Asteracea family, another really good family to get to know, to work with. And that’s a little bit of an introduction to sow thistle. And if you’re excited about this plant, you can explore further. Let’s give that a bite. [bites sow thistle] I think you’d describe it like a more … a more bitter romaine lettuce. It’s lettucey.
Wild Lettuce
Lactuca serriola
On the note of lettuce, here we are with an incredibly common and abundant plant of southern California. This is the prickly lettuce. This is quite easy to identify, because on the back of the leaves they have this single line of bristles. These bristles are not going to harm you. They kind of break right off, just like that. And you want bitter – this is a very bitter plant. This is wild lettuce and so it can be worked with like lettuce. You can add it to your salads. But because it’s so bitter, most people don’t do that. They more tend to cook it to reduce that. Or, this is worked with quite a bit as a medicine. As far as medicine goes, some of the wild lettuces are actually sedatives, others are painkillers. So, you can look into the lettuces to work with them as a medicine. But my food is my medicine. So, what I do with the wild lettuces is I’m going to break off the tender tip. And this lettuce in particular here is growing in a pretty substantial amount of shade. So, this has a nice big, tender tip. It’s got a nice milky substance
in there. All of the lettuce, the dandelion, the thistles — the milkiness is part of that. And then I’ll often eat — I’ll eat five or ten of those in a day, just as I’m out on my hikes. And the thing about bitter, the more you get accustomed to bitter, the more you start to love bitter and the more you start to crave bitter and what used to seem so bitter starts to become palatable. So, wild lettuce — a really, really good friend to know.
Watercress
Nasturtium officinale
Here we are with watercress. And you find watercress growing where there’s water. Generally along creeks and small rivers is where I find it, but I’ve even found this growing in the Los Angeles river. We’re talking about some real sustenance. I harvest and eat watercress by the many poundsful. And it really is an incredibly nutritious plant. It’s a real gift. And it’s not just southern California. I harvest this all across the United States and it’s common in many parts of the world as well. I like to harvest my watercress from clean water generally. That’s what I’m used to. When harvesting watercress, if it is coming from water that potentially has pathogens, then the answer is to cook it. You can eat watercress raw on sandwiches or in salads are common ways to eat it. But, if you are harvesting from an area where that’s a concern, then the answer would be to cook it so that you would destroy any of those bacteria, pathogens, et cetera. You can eat watercress at any time, but once it’s gone to flower and to seed, it develops more of a bitter flavor. I like to harvest it when it’s really nice and young and tender. This, to me, here is pretty ideal watercress. It does have flowers, so it’s a little older, but it is relatively in the tender stage. And if you’re harvesting small quantities, you can just use your hands, just like that. I do eat both the stems and the leaves, the flowers and the seeds. It’s all edible. And the stems actually make a nice vegetable. I can easily eat this in one sitting, but often I’ll eat two or three times this amount. This is a serious vegetable for me. The thing about wild greens is that when you break free from the grocery store and you’re eating wild foods, your vegetables become your greens. Your greens become your vegetables by eating very large quantities of them. I will also freeze watercress in bags and then when I take them out of the freezer, I can just crush them with my hands and they turn into flakes and I can just take out the amount I want and put them in a pot. You can also dehydrate these as well and turn them into a green powder. Watercress: an abundant food source where you find generally flowing waters and a wonderful one to get to know. If I’m harvesting a really large quantity, the answer is scissors, or some people use knives. I’ll also use pruners, but the scissors are really the most effective way.
Some people see a lawn and some people like me see a salad bowl. This little lush patch of grass here in Griffith Park has numerous foods and medicines. We’ve got dandelions, where you can eat the flowers and the leaves, as well as the stems and the roots. We’ve got some oxalis, also called sour clover by some, or wood sorrel, growing here. We also have actual clover, the white clover.
Plantago
Plantago spp.
And the plant that I want to talk about here that I sat down for is the plantago, or the plantain. A lot of people call these plants weeds, but weeds are just a human-made concept. There is no such thing as a weed in nature. And the reality is, is that most of the plants that they are trying to convince us to kill because they’re ‘weeds’ are wonderful foods and medicines. In fact, a lot of these are more nutritious, more medicinal than the very foods that we’re growing in our gardens and buying at the grocery store.
Plantago is a perfect example of that. This is the broadleaf plantain. And, in some websites, they’ve listed this as a top ten most medicinal plant on Earth. Now, I agree with that, along with about 10,000 other plants that that’s the case. There’s so many medicinal plants out there. A way to kind of easily identify this plant is that when you pull this apart, the veins often separate. They pull out from the leaf. That is a key identifying feature of the plantago or plantain. Those are two different names for this plant. How this is worked with is if you’re stung by a bee, you can chew this up, get the juices out, stick that on there, and that’s what we call a poultice. So, this is a very natural form of medicine. Herbalists say that it draws out the toxin. I don’t know exactly what it’s doing, but I know that when I’m stung by a honeybee and I do this, I generally swell up a lot less. And, it’s very helpful. It’s an astringent
green. So, most people that eat a lot of this will cook it, saute it. And one way to eat a lot of wild greens that are either bitter or spicy, like mustard or astringent like the plantago, is you make a dish called horta. In Greece, it’s called horta. And basically that just means a mess of wild greens, sauteed in a fat or an oil with a vinegar or lemon and salt. That makes it more bioavailable, easier for our stomachs to break down and digest and take in a lot of wild greens. Plantago: a weed to many, a wonderful food and medicine, as goes for so many of these plants that are growing right in our yards and our gardens.
New Zealand Spinach
Tetragonia tetragonioides
This is New Zealand spinach and, if you enjoy spinach from the store or your garden, there’s a good chance that you’ll enjoy this as well. This is a perennial spinach, which means it’ll keep on producing. It’ll keep on producing. It’ll keep on producing. And I find carpets of this! This is a bonus plant. I wasn’t originally going to include this in this video, but I’ve been seeing carpets of this throughout Ventura, Santa Barbara area. We’re talking about being able to eat pounds and pounds and pounds of this plant. What I like to harvest are the tender growth tips. So, I’m just pulling off the parts that come … come off pretty easy that are bendy. And I’m harvesting these nice tender tips. You can eat the leaves, the seed heads, the stems. And generally, I like to cook this just as I would spinach, but other people will also eat this raw. And that’s what I’m going to say so you get to explore your relationship with the New Zealand spinach.
California Bay
Umebellularia californica
This is a native to California. This is the California bay. And the only place that I have a relationship with this plant is right here in southern California. I really love this plant because it has its own unique qualities. It’s an incredibly unique plant and I get to work with it in numerous different ways. Right now, it’s late May, and we can see the bay nuts on here. They almost look to me like little avocados of sorts. And, I have to say, I feel a little bit of pain because I can’t eat these nuts. The nuts are in the fall. But once these nuts are ready, they’re roasted and some people say they’re the closest thing that you’ll find to a chocolate growing in the wild. They have their very own unique flavor and they’re strong. And I absolutely love them! The California bay nuts. Now, those are only available at a particular time of year. You can still harvest those off the ground into the spring sometimes. But the leaves and the twigs of this are available year round. And I work with this plant much more in that way.
Before I dive into my main way of working this … working with this … let’s talk a little bit about the leaves. So, the leaves of California bay you can work with as a bay leaf. But they are very unique from the bay leaves that you’ll get at the store. It’s a very, very strong flavor. I’ve worked with them with cooking a little bit, and it does give a unique flavor to the meal, but I don’t have a lot of experience with that. One word to … word of caution … before you work with this plant is that some people do get a headache. It’s a short-lived headache, but it can be a pretty strong headache. You can get a headache just by smelling this leaf or by chewing up this leaf. And I, myself, unfortunately, do get that headache. So, I’m not exactly sure what the best way for me to work with this plant is, because I love working with it.
Okay, so the leaf. Besides cooking with it, I use this as the mouthwash tree. So, I chew this leaf up. I’ll put one, maybe a couple in my mouth, swish it around, potentially add a little water, besides the saliva, swish it, hold it as long as I can. So, I’m feeling it. It’s strong. [chews and spits] So, I spit that out and when I breathe in, it’s like I have just taken a store-bought mouthwash. About as fresh as a mouth can possibly be. And this is growing right on a tree. And yes, I have the headache. It hit me right here in the front of the head, which is the downside of it for me. Not everybody gets that headache. And some people actually use this to get rid of headaches, too. But, I call this the mouthwash tree and it really, truly, deeply freshens the breath. It’s antimicrobial, antibacterial. Now, this is also what I would call the toothbrush tree. So, I’ll harvest branches and that, to me, is a pretty ideal size for the toothbrush. Oh, the sinuses right now. And then, what I’ll do … is just chew this edge. And that basically splays it out into a brush. And then I use this as a brush. And right now, I’m over a year into the experiment of not using a toothbrush, toothpaste or dental floss. And just using what the Earth is providing in this more natural way. And so far, so good. So this, of the many different twigs I’ve used as a toothbrush, is probably my number one favorite. And, you can harvest these twigs, cut them up into chunks, take them home. Again, this is a native tree, so it’s one you want to be especially careful with your relationship. Develop a relationship with this tree. That said, in areas where it grows in abundance, we can absolutely harvest leaves and twigs and bay nuts. So, get to know the California bay and, I would say, life will never be the same in southern California.
Stinging Nettle
Urtica dioica
Here we are with stinging nettle in Griffith Park of Los Angeles. This is a very quite common and abundant plant. Not as prolific as I find it in the midwest, but still quite common in southern California. Now, this is a plant that we can work with in many different ways as a food and medicine, both internally and externally. And I could easily talk for an hour about stinging nettle, but I’m going to summarize my key ways of working with stinging nettle.
First, there are only two plants growing in North America that will sting you: stinging nettle and wood nettle. And both of them can be worked with interchangeably. So, when it comes to identifying stinging nettle, there are other nettles and there’s similar plants that look like this, but one of the simple things you can do is you can actually sting yourself. And if you are stung, you’ve got stinging nettle. There are plenty of plants that can poke you, but as far as the actual sting, it’s just those two plants. Now, some of you are thinking to yourself, “What is he doing stinging himself right now?” Before I get into the food aspect of this, I’m going to dive right into that. This is a practice called urtication. And it’s the intentional stinging of the body for medicinal purposes. For people who have diabetes, it helps with bringing blood to the surface. For people who have arthritis, it’s been worked with for hundreds, potentially thousands of years, for arthritis. It’s also known that endorphins are released in our system when we’re stung by stinging nettle. And I think this is a wonderful plant for reconnecting to the Earth and for helping to alleviate depression. I think when our bodies are stung, our bodies say, “I’m alive!” And they break free. So, I encourage you to get stung by stinging nettle. Start with just a little bit at a time on the tougher portions of your skin as a place to start. Now, if you don’t want to be stung, you can simply wear leather gloves, or thick rubber gloves, no problem. But, I like to especially get stung in the fingers some as I’m harvesting.
And then, when it comes to eating it: three ways to prevent your mouth from being stung. First, you can cook it. That destroys the stingers. So, you can boil it or you can saute it, add it to your soups and stews. You can dehydrate the plant. And there still can be a little bit of stinging with the dehydrated plant, but pretty much it takes care of that. Or, you can blend it. So, a lot of people make pesto with stinging nettle. My main ways of working with this are to make stinging nettle tea. To do that, I boil it. The reason we boil it is because this is very high in minerals, and that pulls out the minerals. What I’ll do is I’ll bring it up to a boil and then keep it at a simmer for a minimum of 15 minutes. What I like to do then is just put the lid … keep the lid on, turn it off and let it sit overnight. And then you wake up in the morning with a very dark green broth. It’s a … it’s a brothy green tea. Or, I just add it in with my soups and stews, or I like to saute it as well. Those are the main ways that I work with it as food. And then, I like to dehydrate a lot of stinging nettle. Dehydrating stinging nettle is very easy. It’s very low in water content. So you can just lay this out on window screens and it’ll dehydrate. You dehydrate it until it’s crispy. ‘Til it’s breaking apart and it’s crispy. And then I have stinging nettle tea year round and just add that in with my wild rice, my … my soups, stews, et cetera. Now, some people say not to harvest stinging nettle once it’s gone to seed, but Sam Thayer did the deep research on this and sees no evidence, whether it’s modern medicine or deep, hundred years back references to this idea that you shouldn’t eat it once it’s gone to seed. So, I harvest stinging nettle any time, but if I’m eating it, I like it when it’s in this young and tender stage when the tops are bendy. And what I do is I just harvest the bendy tops. But if I’m making tea, then it doesn’t matter. I can harvest any portion of it.
I plucked the top of all of these stinging nettles. And what’s wonderful about this is that this is actually going to produce more branches and produce more stinging nettle. So, if you have a patch that you want to continue to produce through the summer, you can come back every few weeks or so and keep harvesting and continue to harvest. You can actually even take a scythe or even mow it back and continue to enjoy the abundance of it. And, if you want this growing, you can dig up some of these roots and actually spread the stinging nettle, grow it in your own yard as well. This is a very tough, resilient plant that can handle our harvesting.
American Nightshade
Solanum americanum
Here we are with the American nightshade. The black nightshade. There are actually four very closely related nightshades in this group. I’m incredibly familiar with this plant from my years of foraging across the country because I find this growing in Chicago, New York City, Georgia, Atlanta, all over the place. And it’s very common down here in southern California. Now, this is a plant that you’ll often be told is toxic and that you should not under any circumstances eat. That is because it’s being confused with the deadly nightshade which doesn’t even exist, as far as the experts say in the west coast, in southern California. So, it’s an interesting one, because this is basically a beginner plant. It’s easy to identify. It’s common. But it’s got a huge level of inaccurate information around it. The first 15, 20 times I ate this plant, I was a little bit scared. And finally, now I’m completely comfortable with eating this plant.
So, how do you eat this American or black nightshade? Primarily, the number one thing to do for beginner foragers is to harvest the ripe black berries. You want them to be fully ripe. You want them to be nice purple, black. The green is no longer on them. And that’s more of a fall time thing. You’ll get some of them. There’s been some of them around. Here’s one right here for example. But this one’s got a little bit of green on it still. So that’s not really ideal. So eating those fresh. Just enjoying them fresh, adding them to salads. People will cook them as well. That’s the number one way that people eat them. And I consider them to have similar flavor to a ground cherry or a golden berry. Sort of like a more fruity tomato. There’s other ways to eat these. Another way is to eat the young and tender greens. So, not the greens at this stage, the greens when they are young and tender. That would be more like in the springtime. That’s a little bit more advanced foraging, because you have to be able to identify this before there’s flowers or berries. And then, this has a rich cultural tradition of eating in many different ways. I’ve spoken to people in India who fry the green. They fry or they boil or ferment the green unripe fruits. But if you’re going to do that … I’ve never done that before … you want to deepen your knowledge.
This is a book … this is a plant that’s in Foraging California: Finding, Identifying and Preparing Edible Wild Foods in California by Christopher Nyerges, who I’ve had the opportunity to spend time with the last two times I’ve been in California. And you can just open that right up to page 193. This is one of the excellent resources for foraging in California to get to know this plant as well as dozens of other plants.
Black Walnut
Juglans nigra, J. california
Here we are with the black walnut tree, which I see a lot of these growing in the Los Angeles area. You have the native Juglans Californicae and then you have the one that we mostly have on the east coast, Juglans nigra, that I have a lot more familiarity with. On the east coast, it’s one of the most common trees there are and a food that you can eat in really large quantities. It’s also quite common here in southern California and it is a food source here.
There are numerous ways that you can work with the black walnut. So, you can see the walnuts here on the tree. And, at this stage, they are not edible yet. Basically nuts are a fall time food. Not a spring, not a summer, with some exceptions of some species, but nuts are a fall time food. So, we’re going to wait for these to get their largest, to fill out. And to harvest the black walnuts, generally you wait for them to fall to the ground. Or, you can use a throwing stick to knock the branches, and if they fall. You don’t generally pluck black walnuts off the tree: you
wait for them to fall. With the husk … if you really want to eat a lot of black walnuts, it’s important to learn the tips for effectiveness and efficiency. I hear from so many people that they’ve tried black walnuts but it just took so long. If that’s the case for you, then it means you don’t really know what you’re doing. The best way to learn in depth is Sam Thayer’s books. His books: Forager’s Harvest, Nature’s Garden, and Incredible Wild Edibles, as well as his recent field guide. These are the resources for really learning how to work with a lot of these plants. So, that’s where I would go to learn about harvesting the black walnut. But to give you a few things: you wait ‘til the husk starts to rot on its own and fall off to … to minimize the work of extracting the nut from the husk. Then you still have a shell and you need to remove the shell. For that, I lay it on its side and crack it with a hammer, holding it with my fingers. You don’t do that right away. You wait three-to-six weeks so that the nut has time to cure. That way it dries out and it shrinks, making it easier to remove from the shell and the flavor is more desirable at that time. You can keep black walnuts for multiple years that way. And it’s a staple food for me. If I just want to have black walnuts in my life but don’t want to dedicate a lot of time to them, what I do is just have five or ten black walnuts every couple days, every few days through the winter, and it’s a nice way to stay connected with the Earth.
Now, other ways that you can work with black walnut: these husks can be tinctured for a … working for getting rid of parasites. Some people, when these are in this small stage – they will pickle them, which I have no experience with. And then other people make nochino, an Italian liquor – alcohol – using the small nuts. And then lastly, for me, my main way of working with this besides eating the nuts is dyeing. These shorts are dyed with black walnut. This bag, also dyed with black walnut. It’s my number one dye plant that I work with. It doesn’t require a mordant when dyeing wool. So, it’s a very simple beginner one. And there is such an endless amount of dye material to be harvested. So we can dye our own clothes and break free from the system of toxic dyes and toxic chemicals on our clothes. One hundred percent of what I’m wearing is homemade, natural fiber and naturally dyed and that’s the way that I like to work. So, the black walnut is an incredible ally for that.
Horehound
Marrubium vulgare
This is horehound and this is in the mint family. When we’re looking for the mint family, we’re looking for square stems. You can see that as I twist this, it’s not round. It’s very square. And then you have what are called ‘opposite leaves.’ So the leaves are directly opposite from each other, compared to ‘alternate,’ on the alternate sides. The mint family is one of those beginner plant families to work with. Many of them have a strong smell, but there’s all sorts of smells. It’s not just when you think of your spearmint. There’s bee balm, or monarda, for example. As far as horehound goes, this is not a minty one. This is quite bitter. And this is one that is worked with in many different medicinal ways, including for coughs and sore throats, I believe. This is another one you want to refer to the medicinal herb books. I’m so glad to have these books because they share this knowledge. I don’t know a lot about horehound, but it’s so common that I really want you to know that this one exists.
Pineapple Weed
Matricaria discoidea
I’ve just been taken back to my childhood with the pineapple weed. This little gentle yet tough plant, growing right here in the rocks along this path is quite common. It’s a gentle plant, so you find this in the springtime and in the winter, not in the summer. It can’t handle the extreme heat, but we have one that’s holding out here. And I love this plant as a sleepytime tea. Besides the name pineapple weed, it’s also called wild chamomile. And you can prepare it just like you would chamomile. What I do is I harvest the leaves, the stems, the flowers — that whole portion. And then, I will just steep this. I’ll boil water and steep this for anywhere from a few minutes to 15 minutes, depending on how strong that you like it. And it’s a wonderful, relaxing tea to have in the evening or any time you’re looking for relaxation. You can easily harvest this and dehydrate it so that you can store it for the off season, or work with it fresh. The smell of pineapple weed is a very unique smell. And the reason that I said I can feel my childhood in this plant is because this is a plant that you’ll often find growing in alleyways and dusty, gravelly areas like this. And I remember stepping on this plant and the smell wafting up, never realizing that I was stepping on a wonderful medicine. So, this is pineapple weed or wild chamomile and a really wonderful medicine to get to know.
Wild Fennel
Foeniculum vulgare
Here we are with fennel. And this is a real problem in much of California. This is what many people consider to be an invasive. And this is another one of those plants where the problem is the solution. We can eat fennel and, unlike fennel from the grocery store where you eat the bulbs, wild or feral fennel — the bulbs are just very woody and undesirable. So, what I’m harvesting from the fennel is I look for any of these bright green tips. And then I pull it back, and then I just break off this nice bendy portion inside. This little portion here is going to be the most primo. And then this portion here, you can peel and eat like that as well. You can eat it raw, you can cook with it. There’s many different ways you can explore fennel. Fennel is wonderful for helping with digestion. And sometimes you can get pretty large shoots. Here you’ll see last year’s seed heads. The seeds are already off. You could eat these seeds. You could eat the flowers when they’re yellow and enjoy those in a different way. Or, once the seeds are dry, you can also eat those dry seeds as well or use those as an herb. So fennel’s a wonderful one to get to know where you can turn the problem into a solution.
Abundance in a California Park
Now, when a lot of people have come outdoors into ‘nature,’ they think that most of the plants are going to result in their death if they eat them and that we’re supposed to be afraid of most of these plants. But as I’m looking out here, the vast majority of this green is edible. There are, in this park alone, three … four dozen plants that I can recognize as foods and medicines and there’s more than that. And I’m not even a California resident. So, we’re talking about serious abundance. We’re talking about food and medicine that is available for us to be able to harvest … harvest in a safe and sustainable way. And, I look at this, and I am just incredibly grateful and excited for this opportunity that we all have.
Conclusion
Well, there you have it, Dear Friends. Food and medicine is growing freely and abundantly all around us, even in major cities of southern California. We’re talking about a lot of the most delicious and nutritious and medicinal foods growing on Earth, and they’re really growing right outside of our doors in the places that we walk by every single day without noticing.
This is just an introduction to show you the possibilities. And I have … I’m so happy to say that there are so many resources beyond this video to help you plug in. The foragers who teach in this area, the books, the online resources.
I have shared these in detail at robingreenfield.org/californiaforaging. So, let this be the beginning of your foraging journey and let’s go a lot deeper together to break free from the grocery store, break free from the systems that no longer serve and reconnect to the Earth through a relationship with the plants.
Foraging Resources
Join the foraging revolution!
California Foraging Guide for Beginner Foragers
My beginner’s guide to foraging
Find a forager to learn from in your region
Read my book, Food Freedom
The 1 Million Community Fruit Trees Initiative