Foraging in the Midwest: 10 Easy Edible Plants for Beginner Foragers

Food and medicine is growing freely and abundantly all around us in the Midwest, but many of us walk past this food every day without ever noticing. On this Foraging Walk I share 10 easy plants to help you begin foraging throughout Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, Indiana and more of the Midwest. I also share key concepts to support you on your foraging journey and encouragement for critical thinking and reconnecting with Earth.

Transcript: The following is a transcription of Foraging in the Midwest: 10 Easy Edible Plants for Beginner Foragers.

Food and medicine is growing right outside of our doors and that our food doesn’t have to come from the grocery store. Foraging for me, it’s a gateway into questioning everything and looking at the world in a different way.

Hello dear friends. I am in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is mid May, springtime here and I’m about to lead a plant walk to share with you the foods and medicines that are growing freely and abundantly right here in a city park. This is what you experience in much of the Midwest and much of the country. I’m going to share about a dozen plants, how to identify them, work with them as food and medicine, how to safely and sustainably forage, and you’re going to join us on a plant walk. I’m in the middle of my year of foraging 100% of my food and medicine. Today’s 212. So, come along for the journey, friends. I have my pantry here that shows many of the different foods and medicines. I’m really here more as a gateway just to help you see that food and medicine is growing right outside of our doors and that our food doesn’t have to come from the grocery store to help with critical thought questioning our societal norms and our societal structures and I’m here to serve to be honest to radicalize you to help you to shake up and wake up a little bit from some of the sleepy states that we’re in and just start to move down the path in life that we really want to be on to live the lives that we truly want to be living. Which for me, what I’m passionate about is living in a way that doesn’t destroy this earth, the only home that we have, and living in a much more connective, harmonious way with all the life that we share this home with. So, that’s my bigger objective. I do love foraging, but foraging for me is it’s a gateway into questioning everything and looking at the world in a different way.

Basswood

Oh, wow. What a great first plant. Who knows who we have here? bass… Wait. Yeah, basswood. I almost thought this was cottonwood for a minute. The basswood leaves are some of the best leaves on earth for eating. This is the time of year to eat basswood leaves in the spring and early summer. You can technically eat basswood leaves at any time, but you enjoy them most when they’re young and tender. So, at this stage, you can kind of see through the leaves. You’re looking for the leaves to be a little bit stretchy. You pull them and they’ve got a bit of a stretch to them. What that is the cell walls have not really solidified. They haven’t built that strength. Why? They’re in a rapid spring growth stage where their job is to get large to be solar panels to take in the energy of the sun. So, they’re rapidly growing at this stage and they’re not building their cell walls, which means that they are much more tender and palatable for us to eat. In the spring, you’ll find lots of that. In the summer, you have to work harder to find that more tenderness. With basswood, that’s what you’re looking for. And oh, a dandelion flower. That might be our next plant. Thank you. I don’t know if I technically foraged that and then I just broke a rule. I think it counts as long as we’re together. One of the easiest ways to identify basswood is you look around the edges of the rings of these large trees and they will have these shoots coming up all around the edge. The city maintains these. They will be cutting these back. Even in the summer, you can be getting flushes of these young leaves because they will come and cut these back and the tree will put out more of them. And these can often be like all the way up to here. They can be tall. And I’ve harvested large quantities of basswood in July. And then of course you can learn it by the bark. The leaf shape of basswood is kind of heart-shaped. That’s what you’re looking for. It’s got the serrated edges. Okay. How you eat basswood? Eat it fresh. This is something you can use as the base of salads. This could be like your lettuce instead of lettuce. So, this could make up like 50% of your salad. And these young tender stems, you can eat these whole stems as well raw. You can sauté the greens of basswood. You can dehydrate them to make a green powder that then you add to your soups and your smoothies and have like through the winter. That’s how you can make a your own like super green powder with many of these greens today is dehydrate it and then have it during the seasons where we don’t have greens. I would say those are the main ways that I eat it. I probably prefer this more as a raw green than as a cooked green. And this is a perfect example of that nice stem. In the summer this will put out flowers. Those flowers you can make tea from and they’re a mild sedatives. They’re relaxing. They’re a nice nighttime evening tea blend. They’re in my along with valerian and pineapple weed. That’s my evening tea blend. You know that the flowers are ripe and ready because it’s buzzing with bees. When the bees are foraging on the basswood, that’s when you want to be foraging on the basswood. And so you just harvest the flowers. The flowers are very unique. They have a single leaf that’s called a bract. It’s a specialized leaf. It’s sort of long like a tongue. You can take that whole leaf and the flowers connect to it. That whole cluster and dry that and make tea or fresh. Either one is totally fine. Also, you can harvest the seeds in the fall. That I don’t have experience with. But Alexis Nicole Nelson does have a video that shows about roasting them and making something that tastes like chocolate and it can be used as a seasoning. I still have not gotten around to that. I’ve nibbled on the seeds some. So, this is a wonderful tree. It has a lot of different gifts to share with us and it’s my top three edible tree leaves. You know, you’re at home putting all this energy into growing your kale. Well, you’ve got this giant kale tree right here. And again, so that’s hard stuff to reach, right? So you’re looking for these either younger trees or these circles around them. And sometimes these circles will have enough leaves to eat, you know, to store away for a family of five just from one tree. So questions about basswood.

Dandelion

Here we have dandelions. Of course, dandelion is edible from the tips of the flower petals to the tips of the roots. The entire dandelion is edible. This is one of the really premier plants to forage in this region, especially in the springtime. First of all, my favorite thing to do is eat the flowers in the springtime, especially coming out of winter. This is one of the first plants to pop up in the spring. One of the key things about dandelion is it’s bitter, which is one of the main reasons that a lot of people avoid dandelion. We have what’s called the SAD, standard American diet. In the standard American diet, it avoids bitters. Bitter is medicine. It’s really important for it helps with aiding in digestion as well as many, many other things. At first, a lot of people don’t like bitter, but over time, your body starts to crave it as you re-adjust your pallet to bitter. There’s things that you can do in order to bring the bitterness level to something that’s manageable for you, the flowers are a way to do that. And if you want the least bitter, you actually remove these green parts on the outer and you eat just the you eat just the yellow flour. that’s going to be more sweet and less bitter. These stems when they’re the most young and tender are less bitter. They get bitter when they’re older. The leaves, I can only say this because Sam Thayer taught it to me and many others and I trust his 40 years of experience. The top half is a lot less bitter than the bottom half. I eat the whole dandelion. If you want to reduce the bitterness, what you can do when you harvest the dandelion, you hold the leaves like this and then you just snip the top half. And that’s a way where you can fill up a salad bowl pretty quickly. A pair of scissors, a bag, and then you just take the top half like that. That helps to get less bitter. You can eat them raw. You can add them to salads. You can sauté them. You can blanch them or boil them. You can juice them. You could do any way in which you can consume a green. You can eat dandelion greens. They’re very versatile. When you cook them that reduces the bitter heat reduces bitterness. So the way that I like to eat my wild greens is sauteed in a fat that could be olive oil, coconut oil, bacon fat, you know, a lard of any sort, whatever fat that you want to use, plus an acid. So either vinegar or lemons and salt. In Greece, there’s a dish called horta and that means a mess of wild greens with olive oil, lemon, and salt. The fat and the acid helps to reduce the bitterness and it makes all of this more bioavailable. The nutrients within the plant. Some people say, “Why would you cook your greens? You’re destroying the vitamins.” Some vitamins are destroyed, but you’re able to take in so much more and eat such a larger quantity. Most traditional cultures were not salad eaters. They were cookers of greens. So that’s the way that it’s been. Salad eating is a much more modern thing. And then the roots when they have larger, more tender roots, you can just cook those up and eat them like you would other roots. Or you can roast them and in an oven and they’ll turn brown and brittle and then you can make what some people call a coffee substitute, roasted dandelion roots, coffee or tea. And that’s a wonderful liver tonic, wonderful medicine, but also I just enjoy it thoroughly. I don’t drink coffee, but I wake up and that’s what I like to have in my mornings. You can also do that with chicory and with burdock. And what I do is I make a roasted root blend of the three.

Shepherd’s Purse

This is Shepherd’s Purse. And the reason that this is called Shepherd’s Purse is these little seed heads when you flip them upside down are the shape of a shepherd’s purse. This is a very easy to identify plant with those seeds, these flower heads. Who knows what plant family shepherd’s purse is in. Brassicaceae. This is the same family as what would be it? Broccoli, cabbage, etc. So, this is a great family to get to know because what I’ll say is there’s dozens of brassica family plants that grow in our region that are edible and very easy to identify including wild radish, mustard. So, this is a great plant to know and the brassica family is a pretty safe family. Carrots, the carrot family includes poison hemlock and that is a more advanced family. The brassica family is a great family to start for beginners. You can eat the shepherd’s purse at any time, any stage. You’ve got the flowerheads and the seeds. These seeds are still green and undeveloped. You can just eat them just like that. Add them to salads, add them to your sautés, etc. You can eat the leaves as well. You’ll often find this in a more primo stage before it’s gone to seed and it’s in this basil rosette stage and that’s when you’ll get larger leaves that you can easily harvest in larger quantities and it’s probably going to be less strong of a flavor. This is in the realm of a group of plants that sometimes are labeled as pepper grass or pepper weed or also called poor man’s pepper which my friend Eric Joseph Lewis calls rich man’s pepper because this doesn’t make you poor. In fact, this makes you rich. This enriches your life to be harvesting wild foods. So, this is a group of different plants. The pennycresses to get to know many of them look similar. If you’re expecting black pepper when you hear pepper, you’re going to be disappointed. But if you just go in with whatever it’s going to be, you’re more likely to be satisfied. Some of them have more of a wasabi kick to them, like a stronger kick. I’m not really getting any strong flavor with this one. Would anyone like to taste this in front of everybody and tell us? All right, I got one for each of you. Let’s see what flavor you think.
[Kid;] Kind of a radishy taste.
[Robin;] Okay, radishy. Yep. That’s the same group. That’s a Nebraska family. So radishy is a pretty accurate way to describe it.
[Audience;] Like kale.
[Robin;] Tastes like kale. Same family. Yep.

Mulberry

Who knows who we have here? Mulberry. So, this is another edible tree leaf. And if I was to come up as a plant, it would be the mulberry. There’s something about this plant that I feel a very strong relationship and connection to. I love that you can eat both the leaves and the fruits of the mulberry. So, it has gifts at numerous different times. What I shared about basswood applies to mulberry. You can work with mulberry leaves in the exact same way you would basswood. If you want to eat it directly off the tree and practice your inner giraffing, I welcome you to I would say if you want to get the most out of this, you’re going to wait another week. These leaves will be much larger then. It’s going to be much more time efficient. In some areas, I would say like one in every seven trees around this city is a mulberry. This is one of the most common trees. It’s scrappy. It’s weedy. You can easily harvest a very large supply of mulberry leaves. You can eat them fresh for a window of 2 months or so. And you can dehydrate this into a powder and be eating it year round. This is a really wonderful resource here. You can also chop mulberries back. You can coppice them or pollard them and they’ll put out branches and that way you can get more leaf production. Mulberry is the food of silkworms. So that’s a lot of the mulberry history goes back to silkworms. As far as the fruits, so we have fruits, we have flowers on this. There are male and female mulberries and also we have a few different species of mulberries and some of them also hybridize. The mulberry leaves can be in numerous different shapes, including a hand like this, a hand more like that, and like a mitt. There’s numerous different structures they can be in, or more just like one single lobe. The easiest time for beginners to identify mulberries is when they have fruit on them. I’ve had people come to me and say, “I found a blackberry tree.” Blackberries don’t grow on trees. Those are mulberries. Mulberries do look like blackberries, but they are sweet. Blackberries tend to be more I guess what do you call it? Sour. They can vary. Some mulberry trees are pretty bland and undesirable and others are absolutely incredible. So if you don’t like mulberries on one tree, try from another tree. That’s the case with a lot of fruits and a lot of foods. And mulberries are one of the first berries to be available. Generally, this is going to be about June, July, you can be eating these. And one note is that if you want mulberries growing in your yard, you can take cuttings of the tree. So, you can just take branches with your pruners, cut that off, take a branch, and you can plant that and get a mulberry tree. This is one of the easiest plants to propagate from cutting and to spread. So, it’s a wonderful one to start propagating and spreading. It’s also great for feed for chickens and goats and etc. Because you can compress it or pollard it to produce a lot of nutrient-dense feed.

Burdock

So this is burdock and most people know burdock for the burrs on it. The round burrs that stick to your clothes. They curse this plant. But this is a wonderful food. In Japan this is cultivated and it’s called gobo And this is a pretty important root vegetable in Japan. At many of the health food co-ops, you can buy burdock root. Most people, I would say, are mostly making a tea from it rather than eating it. So, you can do both. You can eat the root as a vegetable or you can make a tea from the burdock root. The root is not the most beginner only because the top third of the root is very woody and not what you want to eat. It’s the bottom two-thirds. So you have to dig down far enough and get the bottom of the root. what Sam Thayer teaches with which if any of you don’t know of Sam Thayer and you want the access to the most effective foraging knowledge that exists his four books; forager’s harvest, nature’s garden, incredible wild edibles and his field guide are the absolute go-to I have the books over at our little meeting spot which you can take a look at and he will teach you exactly in the burdock chapter everything you need to know in order to effectively work with bock to eat a lot of burdock. But what you want to do is you want to dig next to the burdock plant and then you want to pull the intact root sideways into the hole. You don’t want to pull up because you’ll break it and you’ll only get the non-desirable portion. You dig next to it. You pull it sideways and you get that whole root. They can be over 18 inches deep. So they can be pretty deep. If you want to be effective with burdock, you want to harvest it from rich, easy to dig soils. In the springtime when the soil is super saturated, that’s a great time to do that. Sandy rock or rocky soils going to be much harder. And then as far as the roots go, you can roast them, you can boil them, put them into soups, cook them in many different ways like you could a carrot or potato, but it’s its own unique vegetable that you want to get to know how to work with. So, pretty simple. It’s just a little challenging to dig them up sometimes. What you’re looking for with burdock when you’re wanting to dig up the roots for eating them are medium size leaves. If you have small leaves, you’re not going to have big roots, but I’m told that the really big leaves don’t tend to be the most ideal plants. So, this to me is a pretty ideal burdock. I would expect this to have a nice root on it. This is also one of the few roots that you can harvest any time of the year, not just during dormancy season. These are biennials that sometimes takes 3 years. You only harvest from this stage, not the ones that have the seed heads. Those have already taken the energy from the root to produce the stocks and the seeds. So, you want to harvest from this stage. This is a primo burdock I would say for harvesting. The other thing that you can harvest is the stems. When these stems are coming up that are putting up the that are going to put up the seeds later, you can break those stems off, peel them, eat them raw, or cook them, and they are a wonderful vegetable. I just ate them for the first time last year around mid June in northern Wisconsin. So, I imagine in a few weeks time, you could start eating these here. The leaves are not edible. This is not rhubarb. Rhubarb has shiny surfaces with no fuzz. This has fuzzy hairiness. There are people who talk about peeling and eating. I believe you can peel and eat this pedial. This is like the stem of the leaf. But you’ll have to read Sam’s book to confirm that or just look at my face in a couple of seconds. That’s my first time doing this. Mildly bitter. I am not 100% sure that you should do that. I’m only sure that I could do that in a limited quantity in this moment. So, look that up as a beginner forager.

Violet

Violet. Wow. Look at the nice tenderness of this violet. Springtime is primo violet time. You can harvest violets in the summer and fall, but spring is really violet time. They are a tender plant. They don’t deal well with a lot of hot sun. They like to have some moisture and some shade. You can eat violet leaves and you can eat violet flowers. There are many species of violets and some of them have white flowers or modeled between purple and white and there’s even ones with yellow flowers which kind of to me is just not cool because it’s like how do I know if it’s a violet for sure? It’s supposed to be violet. But my favorite way to eat violet is just fresh right off the ground. Has anyone seen by now the answer to the first question of can you eat food growing in this park? My answer is a very thorough yes. And so the leaves edible. These are what are called mucilaginous like okra and also basswood. Mucilage. It’s almost like a slime that kind of coats the throat. And so medically, these are worked with in that way. Any herbalists here that would like to share their knowledge on how violets are worked with medically?
[Woman;] They do bring like hydration to the body. If you’re like experiencing dryness or even if you have like a cold or like itchy skin or whatever, like they can come in with that mucilaginous effect and sort of coat everything, re-hydrate everything. Yeah.
[Robin;] Okay. Some hydration.

Ground ivy

[Audience;] Creeping Charlie!
[Robin;] So, creeping Charlie is one name for this plant. Other names? [Audience;] Ground ivy.
[Robin;] Any other names? Gill over the ground. Runaway robin is another name. It’s got many different names. I mostly use the term ground ivy. Can anyone smell it? The smell of it.
[Audience;] Absolutely.
[Robin;] If I smell that and I’m walking through a yard, it’s going to be ground ivy. It’s got a very unique smell. It’s called a weed. Just a little note, there is no such thing as a weed. That’s a humanmade concept. Nature does not have that. Every plant is a plant and they all have their gifts and every single weed has a gift. Many at times it’s ground cover. These are coming and they’re covering this recently excavated ground, helping to reduce erosion and helping to protect the soil. So some of them are nitrogen fixtures that help to add nitrogen to the soil and make that available for other plants. So all weeds have their own purposes and their own benefits. This here is a plant that very few people eat, you have to get past the flavor to then get into the flavor. It’s very unique, but once you start to like it, it’s got something going for it. Let’s take a moment. Anybody who wants to try one of these right now, this is the practice of rewilding your pallet. You’ll get experiences with plant, with flavors, and experiences on your tongue that you would never get from the grocery store. How you work with ground ivy for most people is you ignore it for many years and then you try a little bit of it and then you continue to ignore it and then eventually you’re like, “Okay, I kind of like that.” And then you eat a little bit of it, but you never end up eating a lot of it. Very few people do. I am actually right now planning on harvesting a lot of this because I have high mercury levels that came back in my from my blood work and one herbalist told me that this is one of the plants that’s known for in some way helping to remove the mercury and for me this plant is the gift that I’m needing from earth and see look how bountiful it’s growing. This was also worked with many years ago as a common plant in brewing beers. This strong flavor was used in some of the alcoholic beverages. The leaves are edible, the flowers are edible, and the stems are edible. You can dehydrate them and turn them into a powder. They are worked with as a seasoning for a unique flavor on food that I still have not gotten around to doing that I hope to do. You can make tea from them as well. You can just nibble on them a little bit every day. I’ll put the guarantee on it that if you nibble on these a little bit every single day for the rest of the season, your life will be different.

Motherwort

Here we have motherwort. And this is one of the plants that people that would have been labeled witches would have been killed for because they had relationships with plants like motherwort. The reason why, as far as I know, is it’s because the dominator society was afraid of powerful women and powerful human beings who had deep relationships with the land. So, the relationship of humans and motherwort goes back a very long time. This is a wonderful medicine. This is incredibly common around Minneapolis. I don’t work with motherwort as much as I do mugwort. Mugwort is a very bitter tea, so I’ll make some bitter tea with mugwort. If you want to learn about motherworts or mugwort, the books that I’d recommend are Midwest Medicinal Herbs by Lisa Rose, that’s a great book to start. It’s got 109 medicinal herbs that I would be willing to say you could find 70 of them growing within 20 miles of here. And a lot of them are very common, easy to identify ones. So, that’s a great one to start with. And I also like the beginner herbalism book by Rosemary Gladstar. I there’s so many herbalist books that you can learn from, but that’s a nice easy beginner book for herbalism. That’s what I’m going to say about motherwort. I’m going to say if you want to learn about motherwort, you now know that motherwort is here, that motherwort exists, and you now have the opportunity to explore that relationship. Look it up. Go to classes. Are there any herbalists that teach in this area that we’d like to give a shout out to so that people know about herbalism classes they can go to or herbalism schools? Matthew Wood is someone that you can look up.
[woman;] Emily Pearson Ryan.
[Robin;] Sonia Casey, Lee Wolf, many herbalists in our communities who can teach you all about motherwort and mugwort and many of the other abundant herbs.

Oh, I just smelled the next plant we’re about to talk about. Did you get a smell of it? Wow. So before we talk about this next plant, I would like to take a moment of mindfulness.

Catnip

This is catnip. So catnip is in the mint family. And the mint family, what you’re looking for are plants that have a square stem. So, watch how when I rotate this, it kind of chunks along like that. It’s not a round stem. It’s a square stem. And then it has what are called opposite leaves. Alternate leaves are where the leaf on one side, then it’ll be on a leaf on another side and another side. So opposite versus alternate leaves are one of the basic botanical ways that you’ll use to identify different plants. Mints have square stems and opposite leaves. If you find a plant that has a square stem, opposite leaves, and a very fragrant smell, most definitely. I can’t say with 100% certainty, but most definitely that’s going to be in the mint family. The mint family is a very beginner family, a very safe family with minimal toxic plants and a lot of medicinal plants. Catnip is very unique. You never identify a plant by one feature. That’s a key thing. And of course, the number one rule of foraging to be safe is you only ingest or put any plant into your mouth if you’re 100% certain that you have proper identification. 100% certainty. That’s the key rule for safe foraging. I have experienced many plants, in the realm of 400 plants that are growing wildly outside of domesticated settings. And I have found no plant that smells like catnip. I know catnip as catnip. But what I’ll say is if you smell this, get to know this smell. This is a great way to say, “All right, that’s catnip.” Now, as a beginner, I’m not telling you to stick it in your mouth. It’s got a mintiness, but its own unique mintiness, as many mints do. And how you work with catnip is this is a relaxing herb, mild sedative. I used to make a lot of tea from catnip and then I stopped because I wake up really groggy. So, it’s more than a mild sedative for me. And it doesn’t end by waking up in the morning. It lasts for hours in a very unpleasant way. So it’s a stronger one for me, but it’s different for different people. But the good news is if I eat it, I don’t get that grogginess. It’s only when I make tea in my experience. So it’s a nice one to add a little bit to your salads. I’ve never actually talked to people about eating it. I’m confident in eating it myself, but generally it’s worked with medically as a tea. Now, the other way this is worked with, of course, is with cats. With cats, it has the opposite effect. It riles them. It stimulates them. You want to know why? This is mimicking the pheromones of a cat. So, what you’re doing is torturing it, saying, “Here, look, sex.” And it’s like, but no, there’s no sex to be had. whatsoever. The mints are easy to propagate, so you can easily dig some of this up and grow it in your garden. It proliferates. You can actually also grow this just by cutting. And the nice thing about mints, when you harvest and you break off the stem, what will happen is this will produce two branches and you’ll create a patch that has more plants, more branches, which means more flowers. So you can harvest mints in a way where you can increase the flowers for the bees, for the pollinators, and you can be doing something that’s beneficial for the plants and animals that we share this home with. By doing that, you’ll have flowers at different stages, increasing the times in which there’s pollen available for the pollinators. So anybody that tells you that foraging is bad for the earth is someone who is indoctrinated but by a society that over hundreds of years has tried to destroy every culture of people that lived in close connection. This country what we often call the United States was founded upon the genocide of hundreds of Indigenous cultures. And one of the main ways in which that genocide was imparted was the intentional separation of people from the plants because the relationship with the plants is what creates human cultures that can thrive and exist independently of the dominator culture. So we are a society that has intentionally done this to hundreds of cultures. But what most people don’t realize is it’s being done to every single one of us so deeply that most of us don’t even know it in the slightest. But that’s the real reason that we’re afraid to forage. And that’s the real reason that so many people say that you shouldn’t forage because it’s bad for the earth. It’s because it’s a product of a society of people that have indoctrinated us with the belief that modernization and civilization is advanced and that this is what is often called savagery. But these are the people who have lived in a much more harmonious non savage way but a truly in relationship way with the earth. My plant walks are definitely about connecting you with the plants, but obviously catnip brought us into a much deeper realm. And that’s what I’m talking about with the plants are a way to radicalize you. It’s a way to get us critically thinking about the land in which we are on our way of relating to the plants. The idea of the mindfulness is to come here and say, “How can I harvest you in a way where there’ll be more of you, not less of you? How can I harvest you in a way that is beneficial to you, not in a way that takes from you? And a really wonderful plant to talk about in that regard is going to be garlic mustard.

Glossy buckthorn

Oo, who knows who this is?
[Audience;] Buckthorn.
[Robin;] Buckthorn.
Buckthorn, which this green dye is buckthorn. So, if you hate buckthorn, a way to start to love it is by dying your wool and getting these beautiful greens.

Garlic Mustard

This is garlic mustard. Tens of millions of dollars or more are spent on pesticides to eradicate this plant. This is a plant that’s called invasive. And if you’re concerned about harvesting and foraging, one of the simplest places to start is with plants that are considered invasive. Because every single time we harvest them, we can be doing an ecosystem service. What an invasive plant is, I don’t use that term invasive. What I say is it’s a plant that was introduced from one ecosystem and in this ecosystem, it’s growing out of balance and doing harm to the native plants of this ecosystem in this place. When we call a plant invasive, we don’t take responsibility for the fact that most of the time it is the way that it is because humans took it from its home and put it into a place that it wasn’t used to growing in. I take responsibility for it and speaking about it in that way rather than calling it invasive. So, the wonderful news is for people out there who say you shouldn’t forage. I have people yell on me, yell at me on the internet. You shouldn’t forage. Leave it for the animals. There’s already not enough for them. They have no idea about this concept of becoming what we call an invasivore. You have herbivores, carnivores. Well, invasivores are people who focus on eating invasive plants. And what you do is you work to eradicate the plant as you’re eating it. So with garlic mustard, you pull it up by the roots. You have to pull it up by the roots. Then you harvest the parts that you’re wanting to eat and take home. So that’s going to be the flowers, the bendy stem. So where the stem is nice and tender and the leaves, the primo is in these nice tender stems. That’s the primo vegetable, but you can eat the leaves at any time. Genuinely, there’s dozens of plants that you can harvest in this region that are considered invasive that you can harvest all that you possibly can and that is a beneficial thing, not a detrimental thing. That’s a great place to start. I read that this is one of the most nutritiously dense plants that we know of. So, this is an incredible plant to know. It’s growing prolifically around the city of Minneapolis. And I consider this to be one of my top five wild edible greens. I can eat large quantities of this in this spring season. I if I lived here, I could easily eat 20 to 30 pounds of garlic mustard. This is in the brassica family as well, so you can eat it fresh. My favorite way to eat this though would be sauteed like an olive oil, added to soups and stews, etc. This is a biennial and the basil rosette will often be present all through the winter or earliest in the spring and latest into the fall. So, this is a plant that you can still be harvesting into the heart of winter often. It’s a great plant in that way that there’s a lot of other greens that aren’t available, but this has a long season that it’s available.

Legality of Foraging

The legality of foraging. Every single person here is a free human being, and we each have to decide which rules, which laws we follow and which we don’t. The purpose of a law is to protect us. to create a safe society that benefits everybody. But you don’t have to think too critically or go very far to see that this nation, that is not the case. This is a country that was founded upon genocide, that was founded upon the enslavement of 7 million people stolen away from Africa. Our laws are not built for the protection of humanity and the earth. They’re built for a small percentage of the people. And in this nation, that’s primarily white people. And it’s especially white men. In our constitution, women have not had the right to vote until very recently. That was a law. Black people haven’t had the right to vote until within a recent generation of our time. When it comes to the laws around foraging, the reality is that those laws are not designed for the well-being of the earth, for the plants and animals, and of our greater humanity. The research that I’ve seen shows that these laws were formed to prevent Indigenous people from practicing their life ways and to prevent people who had recently been you know liberated from slavery from being able to have deep relationships with the land where they could get the foods they needed. Thus, if they didn’t have that, they were forced into really poor working conditions after they were no longer able to be held as slaves. As far as I know, most of the laws around foraging were never designed to protect individual people. They were designed to protect corporate interest and government interest at the expense of the vast majority of people. Knowing that that changes my likeliness of following one of these laws. So what I practice when it comes to foraging is earth code. I’m going to ask is harvesting this detrimental. Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes these city codes, these government codes are truly designed to benefit the earth and the people. And I will happily follow any of those codes when that’s the case. But if they’re ignorant, if they don’t know about how these plants work and the ways in which we can work with them and that are mutually beneficial, that’s where I’m going to follow Earth code first and foremost. Every single one of us has to decide our relationship with these codes and laws. Only we can decide that for ourselves. I think it’s an imperative of our time to practice that civil disobedience and make those decisions. Another thing that I’ll say is that a lot of these times these are just blanket codes put into place but there’s nobody who is going to be implementing them. There’s park rangers that I’ve walked up to and I’ve said this lawn that’s getting mowed here like do you not want me to harvest these dandelions that are being mowed? and they say, “Of course you can harvest the dandelions.” And I’ll say, “What about this garlic mustard that’s considered invasive?” They’re like, “Oh, yeah. Harvest all of that you possibly can.” Even the people that are there to enforce these laws often know the absurdity of many of them. So, you get to decide how much you want to follow them. I do recommend knowing the laws. That way, you know what you’re talking about. like going into it and knowing what you’re talking about are very important.

Speaking to Plants

So the question of asking permission to harvest the plant. So Robin Wall Kimmerer who wrote braiding sweetgrass her most recent book is the service berry. She talks about asking permission. She’s Potawatomi. So this is common in many Native American many Indigenous cultures to ask permission before taking from the plants. For a lot of people that sounds ridiculous. plants can’t talk. Why would I ask permission? It’s like some sort of ridiculous idea to a lot of people. The way that I would put it, at the very least, when we ask permission, it means we’ve slowed down and we’ve taken time to be there, to acknowledge the plants, to be mindful, and to be present. So my opinion is that you can’t possibly go wrong with a practice like that. You’re less likely to get into this over harvesting mode. When I look at a lot of Native American practices, they have their spiritual element, but they have a very practical application at the same time. I don’t personally ask for permission. It just isn’t something that has felt like in my authenticity. That’s not my way. But what I do is I get to know the plant and I know if it’s a plant that would be detrimental to harvest ginseng. I don’t have a relationship with ginseng and I don’t harvest ginseng for example. That’s like my relationship with that plant for now is not harvesting that plant and getting to know it more.

Herbal Medicine and Preventative Healthcare

I do get sick occasionally. I practice preventative healthcare. Of course, health insurance, I believe, is in many ways quite detrimental because when we have insurance for something, we can abuse it because we’ll just cash in on this insurance situation. So, I don’t have health insurance. I haven’t for over 10 years. And I have no life savings. I’ve made a lifetime commitment to earn less than the federal poverty threshold. A lot of people look at my life and they would have an incredible amount of concern and fear for their future. I don’t have any fear for that. And the reason why is I feel with 100% certainty that if I dedicate my life to being of service that my basic needs will always be met for food, for water, for a bed to sleep in. If I dedicate my whole life to sharing this knowledge with people, people are going to help me to make sure I have those very basic things. That was a sidetrack, but it’s all interconnected. As far as getting sick, I practice preventative healthcare. Every single food in here, whether it’s the wild rice, the pears, the venison, or more like really medicinal things like the medicinal mushroom tea, it’s all medicine. every food that I put in my body is helping my body to thrive instead of putting toxins and pollutants into my body that then require me to be dependent upon pharmaceuticals because I’ve already weakened myself so much. I’m not against pharmaceuticals. I’m not anti- it. But the vast majority of it is not necessary. Some of it is truly beneficial, but the vast majority today is all based on just wrecking our bodies in the first place and then just trying to pump them full of chemicals in order to deal with the issues at a very not systemic brute way. I get sick sometimes, but the number one thing for me is to say, “What is sickness?” And to say sickness is being human. It’s not bad to be sick inherently. So when I get colds or I’ll get like a flu or even something like COVID, it’s like this is being a human. The number one thing I do when I’m sick is I rest. We have immune systems that have developed over millions of years and they do a lot of the work just by letting our body do the healing and then I have many of my herbal medicines. But first and foremost, I practice preventative health care. And of course, that’s our minds, that’s our bodies, that’s our spirits. All of this together is preventative health care. So I would encourage people to learn one new plant per month for the rest of the year and that’s 12 plants and do that for the next 5 years and that’s 60 plants and just incorporate more and more wild foods into their diet. But not just wild foods, foods from the garden, foods from the local farmers market as well.