Foraging in the Midwest: 10 Easy Edible Plants for Beginner Foragers
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.
Introduction to the Foraging Walk
Food and medicine is growing right outside of our doors. Our food doesn’t have to come from the grocery store. Foraging for me is 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 am about to lead a plant walk to share how food and medicine is growing freely and abundantly right here in a city park. This is what we experience in much of the midwest and 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 percent of my food and medicine. Today is Day 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 our food doesn’t have to come from the grocery store. I’m here to help with critical thought, questioning our societal norms and societal structures, and I’m here to serve, to be honest, to radicalize you, to help you to really shake up and wake up a little bit from some of the sleepy states that we’re in and just really 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 connected, 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 a gateway into questioning everything and looking at the world in a different way.
Basswood
Tilia spp.
Oh my. What a great first plant! Who knows what we have here? 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. If you pull them, they’ve got a bit of a stretch to them. What that is 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’re 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. I may have just broken a rule. But it counts, as long as we’re together. [laughter] One of the easiest ways to identify basswood is you look around the edges, 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 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. These can often be 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 a base of salads. This could be like your lettuce. Instead of lettuce. So this could make up like 50 percent of your salad. And these young, tender stems? You can eat these whole stems as well. Raw. You can saute the greens of basswood. You can dehydrate them to make a green powder that you then add to soups and your smoothies and have them through the winter. That’s how you can make your own super green powder with many of these greens today. Dehydrate it and then have it during the seasons when you 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 sedative. 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. [aside] Thank you. 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 a whole leaf and the flowers connected 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 has 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 and it has a lot of different gifts to share with us and it’s in my top three edible tree leaves. You’re at home putting all this energy into growing your kale when 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 younger trees or these circles around them. And sometimes these circles will have enough leaves, [aside] thank you, to eat, to store away for a family of five just from one tree. So. Questions about basswood?
Dandelion and On Bitters
Taraxacum officinale
Here we have dandelions, of course. Dandelions are 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. And the Standard American Diet avoids bitters. Bitter is medicine. It’s really important for help in aiding 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 readjust your palate to bitter. There’s things that you can do [aside] thank you … to sort of bring the bitterness level to something that’s manageable for you. The flowers are a way to do that. If you want the least bitter, you actually remove these green parts on the outer and you eat just the yellow flower. 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 forty 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 saute them, you can blanch them or boil them. You can juice them. Any way 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 fats. That could be olive oil, coconut oil, bacon fat, 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 really 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 large quantity. Most traditional cultures were not salad eaters. They were cookers of greens. So that’s the way that it has been. Salad eating is a much more modern thing. And then, the roots … when they have larger, more tender roots, you can just cook them up and eat them with other roots, or you can roast them in an oven and they’ll turn brown and brittle and you can make what some people call a coffee substitute. Roasted dandelion roots is a popular 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 make a roasted root blend of the three.
Shepherd’s Purse
Capsella bursa-pastoris
This is shepherd’s purse. And the reason that this is called shepherd’s purse is … [aside thank you … these little seed heads, actually, when you turned them upside down, were the shape of a shepherd’s purse. This is a very easy to identify plant with these seeds and flower heads. Why knows what plant family shepherd’s purse is in? Brassicaceae. This is the same family as what would be a broccoli or cabbage, et cetera. So this is a great family to get to know because, what I’ll say is, there’s dozens of Brassicaceae family plants that grow in our region that are edible and very easy to identify, including wild radish and mustard. So, this is a really great plant to know. And the Brassicaceae family is a pretty safe family. Carrots? The carrot family includes poison hemlock, and that is a more advanced family. The Brassicaceae 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 eat them just like that. Add them to salads. Add them to your sautes, et cetera. You can eat the leaves as well. You’ll often find this in a more primal stage before it has gone to seed and it’s in this basal rosette stage and that’s when you’ll get larger leaves that you can 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 peppergrass, or pepperweed, or …. [aside] Hello, Friends! 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 what … alright, I’ve got one for each of you. Let’s see what flavor you think ….
[Child:] Kind of a radishy taste.
[Robin:] Okay, radishy. Yep, that’s the same group. That’s in the Brassicaceae family, so ‘radishy’ is a pretty accurate way to describe it.
[Child #2:] Tastes like kale.
[Robin:] Kale? Same family. Yep.
Mulberry
Morus spp.
Who knows what we have here? Mulberry! So this is another edible tree leaf. And if I were 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 probably 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 probably a window of two months or so. And you can dehydrate this into a powder and be eating it year around. This is a really, really wonderful resource here. You can also chop mulberry back. You can compass them or pollard them. And they’ll put out branches. And that way you can actually get more leaf production. Mulberry is the food of silkworms. So a lot of the mulberry history goes back to silkworms. As far as the fruits, so we have flowers on this. There are male and female mulberries. Also, we have a few different species of mulberries and some of them are also hybridized. 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 like just one single lobe. The easiest time probably for beginners to begin 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 are … they do look like blackberries, but they are sweet. Blackberries are … tend to be more, what would 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 fruits to be available. Generally, by about June or July you could be eating these. And one note, if you want mulberries growing in your yard, you can take cuttings of the tree. So you can literally 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, et cetera, because you can compass it or pollard it to produce a lot of really nutrient-dense feed.
Burdock
Arctium minus
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. This is a wonderful food. In Japan, this is cultivated and it’s called gobo, g-o-b-o, and this is a pretty important root vegetable in Japan. At many of the health food coops 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. It’s 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, which if any of you don’t know of Sam Thayer, and you want access to the most effective foraging knowledge that exists, his four books, The 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 burdock, to eat a lot of burdock. But basically 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. It 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 or rocky soil is 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-sized 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 knot. This is also one of the few roots that you can harvest any time of the year, not just during dormancy season. These are a biennial that sometimes takes three 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 stalks 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 the stems are coming up that are going to put up the seeds later, you can break those stems off, peel them and 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 can start eating these here. The leaves are not edible. This is not rhubarb. Rhubarb has shiny surfaces with no fuzz. This has fuzzy hairyness. There are people who talk about peeling and eating … I believe you can peel and eat this petiole. This is the stem of the leaf. But you’d have to read Sam’s book to confirm that, or just look at my face in a couple of seconds. [laughter] This is my first time doing this. Mildly bitter. I am not 100 percent 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
Viola sororia
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 really 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 mottled between purple and white, and there’s even ones with yellow flowers, which kind of, to me, is 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 “Buy Now,” that answers the first question of, “Can you eat food growing in this part of …?” 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 medicinally, these are worked with in that way. Any herbalists here who would like to share their knowledge of how violets are worked with medicinally?
[Audience member:] They do bring hydration to the body …
[Robin:] Okay.
[Audience member:] if you’re, like, experiencing dryness or even if you have, like, a cold or itchy skin, or whatever, it can come in with that mucilaginous effect and sort of coat everything, rehydrate everything. Yeah.
[Robin:] Okay. Hydration.
Ground ivy and On “Weeds”
Glechoma hederacea
[Audience:] Creeping Charlie!
[Robin:] Okay. So, Creeping Charlie is one name for this plant. Other names?
[Audience:] Ground ivy.
[Robin:] Ground ivy. 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?
[Audience member:] Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
[Robin:] If I smell that, and I’m walking through a yard, it’s going to be ground ivy. It has a very unique smell. It’s called a weed. Just a little note. There is no such thing as a weed. That’s a human-made 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 times it is ground cover. These are covering this recently excavated ground, helping to reduce erosion and helping to protect the soil. Some of them are nitrogen fixers that help 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 really into the flavor. It’s very unique, but once you start to like it, it’s got something really 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 palate. You’ll get experiences with plants 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 maybe 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 particularly planning on harvesting a lot of this because I have high mercury levels that came back from my bloodwork, and one herbalist told me that this actually is one of the plants that is known for its, in some way, helping to remove the mercury. And for me, this plant is exactly the gift that I’m needing from Earth. And see 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 some 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 a 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
Leonurus cardiaca
Here we have motherwort. And this is one of the plants that people who 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 because the dominator society was afraid of powerful women and powerful human beings who had deep relationships with the land. So the relationship with 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 motherwort or mugwort, the books that I recommend are Midwest Medicinal Plants by Lisa Rose. That’s a great book to start. It’s got 109 medicinal herbs that I would be willing to say you probably could find 70 of them growing within 20 miles of here. And a lot of them are very common, easy to identify ones. That’s a great one to start with. And I also like the beginner herbalism book by Rosemary Gladstar. 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 who teach in this area that you’d like to give a shout out to, so that people know about herbalism classes they could go to or herbalism schools? Matthew Wood is someone you could look up.
[Audience member:] Emily Pearson Ryan.
[Robin:] Sonja Casey. Lease Wolf. Many herbalists in our communities who can teach you all about motherwort and mugwort and many of the other abundant herbs.
Umm. I just smelled the next plant that 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 and Notes on Mints
Nepeta cataria
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 is on one side, then there’ll be a leaf on the other side, and then the other 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 square stems, opposite leaves and a very fragrant smell, most definitely, I can’t say with 100 percent certainty, 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 percent certain that you have proper identification. 100 percent certainty. That’s the key rule for safe foraging. I have experienced many plants – probably 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, “Alright, that’s probably catnip.” Now, as a beginner, I’m not telling you to stick it in your mouth. It’s got a mintiness, but it’s got its own 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 woke 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 really 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 worth using medicinally 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 and stimulates them. You want to know why? This is mimicking the pheromones of a cat. So basically, what you’re doing is just torturing it, saying, “Here, look, sex!” And, like, 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 grow this just by cutting. And the nice thing about mint: when you harvest and you break off the stem, what will happen is this will produce two branches and you’ll actually create a patch that has more plants, more branches, which means more flowers. So, you can harvest mint 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 to the pollinators.
So, anybody that tells you that foraging is bad for the Earth, is someone who is indoctrinated 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.
Foraging Deep Thoughts
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 from 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 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 who have indoctrinated us with the belief that modernization and civilization is advanced and that this is what is often called ‘savagery,’ but really these are the people who lived in a much more harmonious, non-savage way, but truly in a 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 really get us critically thinking about the land which we are on, our way of relating to the plants. The idea of mindfulness is to come here and say, “How can I harvest you in a way where there will 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, really wonderful plant to talk about in that regard is going to be garlic mustard.
Glossy buckthorn
Frangula alnus
Ooh. Who knows what this is?
[Audience:] Buckthorn.
[Robin:] Buckthorn. Which this, green dye is buckthorn. So if you hate buckthorn, a way to start to love it is by dyeing your wool and getting this beautiful green.
Garlic Mustard and On “Invasives”
Alliaria petiolata
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 is 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 in speaking about it in that way, rather than calling it ‘invasive.’
So, the really wonderful news is … for people out there who say, “You shouldn’t forage!” … I have people 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 obviously 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 the 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, if I lived here, I could easily eat 20 to 30 pounds of garlic mustard. This is in the Brassicaceae family as well. So you can eat it fresh. My favorite way to eat this though would be sauteed in olive oil, added to soups and stews, et cetera. This is a biennial, and the basal 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 really great plant in that way. There’s a lot of other greens that aren’t available, but this has a really long season for when 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 supposedly what? 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 in this nation, that is not the case. This is a country that was founded upon genocide, that was founded upon the enslavement of seven 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 in this nation that’s primarily white people and especially white men. In our Constitution, women have not had the right to vote until very, very recently. That was a law. Black people haven’t had the right to vote until 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 wellbeing of the Earth, for the plants and animals and our greater humanity. The research that I’ve seen shows that these laws were actually formed to prevent indigenous people from practicing their life ways and to prevent people who had recently been 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 interests and government interests at the expense of the vast majority of people. Knowing that, that changes my likeliness of following these laws. So what I practice when it comes to foraging is Earth Code. I’m going to actually 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 if that’s the case. But, if they’re ignorant, if they actually don’t know really about how these plants work and the ways that we can work with them 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 is imperative of our time to practice that civil disobedience and make those decisions. Another thing that I’ll say is that a lot of times these are just blanket codes that are 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 said, “This lawn that is getting mowed here … do you really 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?” And they’ll say, “Oh yeah, harvest all of that that you possibly can.” Even the people who 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, very important.
Speaking to Plants
So, to the question of asking permission to harvest the plants: Robin Wall Kimmerer, who wrote Braiding Sweetgrass, her most recent book is The Serviceberry, she talks about asking permission. She’s Potawatomi, so it is common in many native American Indigenous cultures to ask permission before taking from the plants. For a lot of people, I would say, 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 is, at the absolute very least, when we ask permission it means we’ve slowed down and we’ve taken time to be there. To actually acknowledge the plants. To actually 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 overharvesting 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 it’s in my authenticity. That’s not my way, but what I do is I get to know the plant and I know that if it’s a plant that would be detrimental to harvest … ginseng? I don’t have a relationship with ginseng. I don’t harvest ginseng, for example. That’s like my relationship with that plant for knowledge: not harvesting that plant. Getting to know it more.
Herbal Medicine and Preventive Healthcare
I do get sick occasionally. I practice preventive 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 ten 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 percent 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 life to sharing this knowledge with people, people are going to help me to make sure I have very basic things. That was a sidetrack, but it’s all interconnected. As far as getting sick, I practice preventive 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 in a very non-systemic root 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 an immune system that has 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 preventive healthcare. And, of course, that’s our mind, that’s our body, that’s our spirit. All of this together is preventive healthcare.
So, I would encourage people to learn one new plant per month for the rest of the year, and that’s twelve plants. Do that for the next five years, and that’s sixty plants. And just incorporate more and more wild foods into your diet. Not just wild foods. Foods from the garden. Foods from the local farmer’s market as well.
Foraging Resources
Join the foraging revolution!
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
