Urban Foraging

With recipes, photos, stories, and more

Urban Foraging
David Craft

Copyright © 2010–2011 by David Craft
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by anymeans, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or by any information
storage or retrieval system, without the priorwritten permission of the author.
Produced using open source software
OpenOffice and Gimp.
Published by Service Berry Press
ISBN 978-1-4507-0751-0

Printed in the United States of America

Disclaimer
This book is not a field guide. Field guides describe thehabitat and physical characteristics of plants in great detailso that careful readers can identify plants with nearcertainty. While identifying common wild plants is notoverly difficult, the practice should be taken seriously bypeople who are planning to eat them. When identifying
plants for the first time, more than one source should be
consulted, and you should be careful not to force a plant to
fit a description, which is tempting for a forager keen on
finding particular plants. The easiest way to learn plants is
to be taught by another person, and therefore it is good tobe always on the lookout for anyone who might know abouta plant, such as a homeowner tending to his or her garden,
or local foragers, botanists, or herbalists giving tours.
Most of the plants that I come across are not poisonous.
Growing up, I was told that every berry that was not theobvious blueberry or raspberry was poisonous. This is far
from the case, but the myth persists: people are nervous
when they see me eat some red berry unknown to them.
This book deals with wild plants that are edible, common,and found in urban areas. Between edible and poisonous
lies a set of plants that I group together as “survival food.”
Survival food plants are edible but they are not too easy on
the palate and so I do not include them in this book
(example: the inner bark of the white pine). Thus, this bookis neither a survival guide nor a field guide. Instead, it is astroll through the seasons, along the city streets and in theparks, hunting for tasty, overlooked edible plants. The goals
are simple: to inspire people to find and prepare edible
plants and, by doing so, to reawaken a sense of gratitude
and reverence for the earth and the life it produces, even
within the city limits.

Acknowledgments

More than once I have heard that writing a book starts off
fun but soon becomes tedious and frustrating. I am happy toreport that this never happened during this one (except
maybe when I was fighting to get the page numbering tobehave). I guess because I have enjoyed foraging so much,
writing about it has always been a pleasure too.
The first people I’d like to thank are those that got me
into foraging at the start. My mother had her stone-lined
herb gardens and taught me that I could eat nasturtium
flowers, a little fact I still enjoy pulling out on garden tours.
On fishing trips, my dad pointed out that lily pad flowers
were edible, something that fascinated me for some reason(but not enough to make me wonder what other plants werealso edible). But many years passed between these earlymemories and when I first did something about it.
On my 33rd birthday, a few friends, unbeknownst to
one another, bought me two foraging books: I guess thetime was right to turn this “I should really get into
foraging” idea into reality. Lorena and Adam gave me Sam
Thayer’s book Nature’s Garden and Elizabeth bought me
Tom Seymour’s Foraging New England. My birthday falls
in December, and after poring over these books, I could
barely wait to get out into the New England spring.
I thank all the people—Brian DePasquale, Jordan
Sachs, Rob House, Corina Bucora, Carsten Botts, Aliza
Waxman, Sarah Braga, Sarah Ehrich, the Craft family,
Elizabeth Reardon, Adam Gregor, Andrew McCombs,
Lorena Levesque, Julie Fins, Stef Lynch, Kayleigh Boyle,and Anna Drinnenberg—who have ever indulged myforaging habit, in particular those friends who came out
with me on my early trips when I would slow down hikes,
force people to try weird bitter greens, and frighten large
gatherings with giant pots of mushroom soup (on one
occasion, waivers were signed).
And finally, great thanks to my readers: Rob Riman,
Stef Lynch, Eleanor Marks, Sarah Ehrich, Paula Craft,
Shannon McDonough, Angie Littwin, Steve Brill, Didi
Emmons, Noah Rolff, Annie Newbold, and Ellen JacksonMead. These folks combed through early drafts and pluckedout many errors, inconsistencies, and run-on sentences, andmade the book a whole lot better.

Contents

Chapter 1

City Life................................................................1

Chapter 2

The Linden: A Tea Tree and a Salad Tree............5

Chapter 3

Hearty Spring Weeds: Knotweed, Pokeweed,
and Milkweed.....................................................11

Chapter 4

Spring Roots.......................................................25

Chapter 5

Urban Popeye: Spring and Summer Greensand Such..............................................................33

Chapter 6

The Variety of Life: Early Flowers and Early
Berries.................................................................43

Chapter 7

Road Trip to the Country....................................59

Chapter 8

Cattails: Some Personal Issues, Some Prospects,
and Some Tastier Contemporaneous Plants.......77

Chapter 9

City Fruits...........................................................91

Chapter 10 Going After the Acorns, Maybe a Little Nuts. .109
Chapter 11 Mushrooms.......................................................117
Chapter 12 Fall Roots and a Brief Reappearance ofSpring Greens...................................................129
Chapter 13 Wintertime........................................................137

-Chapter 1City LifeAs of 2008, for the first time in history, the numberof humans living in cities exceeds the number not
living in cities. The life of the urban dweller
proceeds without much connection to nature, except for the
daily news about the weather, or the occasional fallen tree
branch obstructing the way. Modern living is in constant
struggle with nature: rather than accept the temperature as itis, we burn fuels made from the nature of millions of years
ago to keep ourselves in a 72°F environment. And rather
than walk down the street—humans are well-designed
walking machines—we hop in our cars for a two-mile trip
to the grocery store. Of course, this is all perfectly natural,things are the way they are. Life in the city, like life in thewoods, involves endless competition, and productivity is
the means to ultimate capitalist success. So why waste timeUrban Foraging

walking when you can pack in more by driving? Still, thelack of nature in the city is real. Pavement and buildings
are everywhere, sealing off the ground from plants andanimals. But fortunately, for those of us who live in cities
and still want to take in nature on a daily basis, wild plants
find their way in.
Life on earth is a battle. Trees in forests compete forsoil nutrients and sunlight, predator and prey counts riseand fall cyclically, and any genetic variation that produces a
trait that is favorable, at least for the time being, ispreserved. Therefore, even when it seems like all the dirt ina city has been sealed off, a city stroll can still be a nature
expedition, and a lesson in tenacity. A goldenrod seed lands
in some crack on a bridge and enough city dust blows in toallow the seed to germinate and fill the bridge with flowers.
A purslane plant emerges like magic from the line where abuilding meets the sidewalk. And wherever city planners
have placed a park, or citizens have built a garden, so longas the maintenance is a bit lax, weeds—a lot of them edible—enter the scene.
The wild plants in a city are a tiny fraction of what youfind in other places, but they are still abundant. In fact, for2

David Craft

people completely new to botany, a city is an ideal place tolearn because the variety of plants is much moremanageable than what you find on a walk through thecountryside. City arborists, when choosing trees to plant oncity streets, rely on about six types of trees that are hardy
enough to withstand the environment and do not lose theirlimbs or push up the sidewalk too much. Once you learn torecognize the honey locust, London plane, flowering pears,
maples, oaks, and lindens, you have 80% of the trees you’dhappen by on an urban nature walk in Boston, New York,
Chicago, Seattle, London, and Berlin. And the last three of
those six trees provide fine foodstuffs for the urban forager.
This book progresses through the seasons, from early
spring to the end of fall. Many plants make more than one
edible appearance throughout the year, and this structure
allows them to reenter the story when appropriate. Field
guides and the Internet are both valuable sources forlearning more about the plants and mushrooms discussed inthis book. Although photographs are included in thesesources, the same plants living under different
environments can look very different, and so it is a goodidea to get a variety of pictures and viewpoints to learn a3

Urban Foraging

new plant. The ability of humans to generalize and extract
key features of plant life—an obvious benefit evolutionarily—does not get used much by the modern human. As aforager, you get to tap into that neglected ability quite
often.

4

-Chapter 2The Linden:
A Tea Tree and a Salad TreeL

inden trees, also called basswoods, deserve special
attention from urban foragers. Summers always fly
by, and springs are too short, but winters seem tohang on forever. And so when the first spring greensappear, humanity celebrates, and maybe the ducks do too.
For them, as well as for us, it’s time to start foraging again.
The linden tree is an early tree to come out of dormancy,
and its new buds and leaves are fine eats. The new leaves
are so mild and tender that one can use them in a salad. In

Urban Foraging

fact, with some dandelion greens thrown in for kick, a few
finely chopped wild onions found on a riverbank or agrassy area (look for chive-like greens and yank them up to
see if there are small onions attached), and a dressing ofolive oil and vinegar and a dash of salt and pepper, you will
gracefully enter the world of foraging cuisine: no one will
object to a linden salad. Few will even notice they are
eating something strange, making this a good plant withwhich to start your foraging hobby, since many foraged
items are quite unusual and a harder sell to people whorarely stray beyond the boundaries of their supermarket.
As with many edible plants, the best time to learn andidentify the linden tree does not coincide with the time youwant to eat it. For the lindens, the easiest time to identify
them is any time in summer. The leaves are heart-shaped
but slightly asymmetric, one lobe being less pronounced
than the other. The top side of the leaf is shiny and dark,
while the underside is paler. In summer, the tree is also
covered with narrow, light green leaves, called bracts. A
linden bract looks like a narrow tongue, curved like a candy
cane.

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David Craft

Characteristic lopsided heart shape of the linden leaf.
Linden bracts, the lighter green tongue-shaped leaves, arealso shown.

In early spring when the linden leaves first appear,
there is a red tinge to the bud. You can eat the whole bud—just grab it and pop it in, since there are no poisonous parts
to be careful to avoid. For the next few weeks, as long as
the leaves are not too tough, I keep eating them. They neverget poisonous, just too tough.

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Wild onions, cleaned and ready to eat. Chopped finely,
they make a good addition to a linden salad.

In early to mid summer, linden trees come into blossom
with tiny yellow flowers covering the whole tree, making arich addition to the smells of summer. Take these yellow
flowers and the attached bract (the light green tongue),bring them home, and dry them (use a food dryer or leavethem out by a sunny window—they dry quickly). Thenplace the dried plant parts in jars and store them in yourcabinet. You can make a tea with them all year long. This isa sought-after tea, full of soothing demulcents. Given that
there are plenty of linden trees in a city, it is worth finding aclean one for harvesting. When I started foraging, linden
was one of the first trees I looked for since I had read that it

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sends out its leaves early. Not knowing just how common
they are in cities, I googled for “Boston linden tree” andlucked out, for there was a mention of a single old linden
tree outside a church in the South End. Off I went to findthe specimen, and sure enough, young buds were emerging.
They were green with a touch of red, and they tasted good,
if a little plain. When I returned home, I noticed the samebuds on the tree right outside my door. Lindens are
everywhere in cities.
Due to its widespread distribution, the linden also
makes for a good urban foraging demonstration in the city.
Eating tree leaves is, in a certain sense, the ultimate inforaging, and to stand under one and pluck the leaves andpop them in, say on a set break outside of your favorite
music bar, ought to get some looks. But the first time youfind what you think is a linden tree, you might be nervous
trying it out. The good news is that many early spring tree
leaves are edible (but none are as good as linden). But if
you are still nervous and the search on “your city lindentree” turns up nothing, then the nearest arboretum is a great
way to learn the tree. Find Tilia americana or some otherTilia species, and take a nibble. The sensation of picking

9Urban Foraging

the new buds, feeling their softness and their substance atonce, and tasting them or the young leaves that they turninto will imprint the tree on your consciousness far better
than any pictures or words can. So, for better learning, andto pause to marvel at the architectural intricacies, take these
extra minutes here and there to really observe the plants
you are eating.
Throughout the summer, city lindens send out new
shoots at the stump where they are pruned back, and sooccasionally you can find new leaves later in the year,
providing a taste of spring in midsummer.

10-Chapter 3Hearty Spring Weeds:
Knotweed, Pokeweed, and Milkweed
What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have notbeen discovered.
Ralph Waldo EmersonThere is a profound assurance every year when thesame plants come back, healthy and strong, despite
the daily reports of how we are ruining the earthand climate. Many of these early risers are edible too,
which makes the yearly rebirth all the more exciting. The
best plants to look for on the ground in spring, within theUrban Foraging

city limits, are Japanese knotweed, pokeweed, milkweed,
evening primrose, and curly dock.
The first three, the knotweed, the pokeweed, and themilkweed, are shoots. A shoot is the name given to a plantthat shoots up from the ground, is substantial (thick), and iseaten in that stage. The shoot non-foragers of the worldcommonly eat is asparagus, also an early spring vegetable.
When you eat a shoot, you are eating a plant well before it
transforms into what it would otherwise become. In thissense, it is like how we treat grass—constantly mowing it
and never letting it mature into a field of hay. Whengardeners let their asparagus go, it becomes a tall wispy
plant, with little green seed balls that redden in the fall,
ending up very different from the shoots that are bundled
together in rubber bands, on ice, in supermarkets.
Likewise with knotweed, pokeweed, and milkweed.
Knotweed turns into an eight-foot-long, arching, woodystemmed plant with creamy white flowers. Pokeweed
produces robust clusters of vibrant purple berries once used
for pen ink. And milkweed yields fragrant pink flowers
that, after pollination, give rise to milkweed pods, full ofcottony seeds that fly away in a winter breeze. Milkweed

12David Craft

pods provide the only home for monarch butterfly eggs.
The fibers from the pods were also gathered and used as fill
for life jackets in World War II. Thomas Edison tried tocultivate milkweed as a source for rubber, but the amountof latex in the plants was too small for him to be successful.

Japanese knotweed shoots. Note the bamboo-like
sectioning. The knotweed is hollow everywhere except atthese segments.

Knotweed is the most common of these plants. Native
to mountainous regions of China and Japan, it was
introduced into the United States sometime in the mid-

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1800s and popularized as an ornamental—the story goes,
without hard evidence—by Frederick Law Olmsted, thedesigner of Boston’s Emerald Necklace and New York’sCentral Park, among many other North American parks. By
1910, however, a popular garden book was already warning
readers to “think twice, possibly thrice, before planting [it]within the garden enclosure.” Although a pretty plant, once
it escaped the confines it was planned for, Japaneseknotweed turned out to be extremely adept at growing
anywhere (rivers, cracks in the sidewalk, highway medianstrips, and up through dense hedges), becoming universally
despised. In Great Britain, it is a federal offense to plant
Japanese knotweed. The only people I know who likeknotweed are foragers, everyone else hates it. When you
harvest knotweed, you are doing a true community service—except that you could never control a knotweed patch
simply by harvesting it, it is far more resilient than that.
Appropriately, the first time I found knotweed was
because of an eradication program underway. A posted sign
indicating eradication efforts alerted my friends and me tothe possible presence of knotweed, so we got off of our
bikes and poked around. Soon we spotted some, and then14

David Craft

we realized it was all over the place. The idea of eradicating
knotweed is funny—like trying to eradicate rats in New
York City.

Japanese knotweed will grow anywhere. Here are somepatches breaking through pavement of an abandoned lot.

The time to harvest knotweed is during its first weeks
of growth: after it breaks through the ground and when the
stalks are no taller than about a foot and a half. After this,the hollow and juicy shoots become too tough and fibrous.
If the knotweed area has not been cleared, the tall remainsof last year’s crop make for fun roughhousing as you breakthrough them to get to the new growth. To harvest, snap off

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the shoots near the ground—a quick snap will produce asatisfying popping sound.
Black Sesame Japanese Knotweed Salad
5 raw knotweed shoots, sliced diagonally, ¼-inch pieces
The pulp of 1 grapefruit, broken up
1 can black beans, drained
5 scallions or wild onions, sliced thinly
5 tablespoons black sesame seeds, lightly roasted
Dressing:
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon chile paste
1 tablespoon maple syrup½ cup grapefruit juice
Toss salad with dressing and serve.
In the kitchen, knotweed can be a tricky sell, as many
people cringe at the taste of it, raw or cooked. But I think
one of the reasons for this is that because there is so muchof it, hungry foragers like me gather it in bulk and try to16David Craft

sneak it into every meal. Exercising some modest
discretion, one might not turn people away from thisvegetable.
Spicy Japanese Knotweed Pickles
10 cups chopped young Japanese knotweed shoots
5 cups water
5 cups white vinegar
A few tablespoons of various pickling spices. I like to use
whole black peppercorns, hot pepper flakes, and coriander
for knotweed.
Salt to taste
Combine the water, vinegar, salt and spices and bring to aboil. Remove from the heat and add the chopped
knotweed. Jar the pickles right away in sterilized canningjars, or just let them cool in the pot. Ready for
consumption as soon as they are cooled down.
It is crunchy, tart, and pretty, with flecks of red on agreen stalk. Some people like it raw, but the best way to use
it seems to be to treat it as if it were rhubarb and go from17

Urban Foraging

there. Thus, strawberry rhubarb pie becomes strawberryknotweed pie. For those of us looking to avoid so muchsugar, it works fine in stir-fries and soups as well, although
if it is cooked for longer than a few minutes, the color
becomes an unattractive brown-green, so better to drop it
finely chopped into a soup just before serving. For a classy
presentation, try the black sesame knotweed salad.
Knotweed freezes well too. Just pack it up raw inplastic bags, and it will store for the year until the next
batch comes out. Another option is making a spicy pickled
knotweed, which has become my favorite knotweed
preparation. Lastly, a google search on itadori recipe willturn up some traditional Japanese preparations.
Compared to knotweed, pokeweed is a much more
intimidating plant for beginning foragers. With knotweed, if
you find a plant in early spring that is hollow and crunchy
and lemony, that grows in colonies, and that is segmented
along the length like mature bamboo, you probably havethe right plant. Pokeweed, on the other hand, is toxic raw
and is only edible when young and boiled for 10 minutes. It
is also harder to identify for beginning foragers. Like
knotweed, pokeweed is best identified by looking for last18

David Craft

year’s dead stalks. Mature pokeweed is very easy toidentify because the shape (like a bunch of little grapes) andcolor (dark red-purple) of the berry clusters are so distinct.
When you find it at that stage at the end of summer,
remember the spot and then revisit in mid-spring. The
shoots will be coming up in the same spot. The shoots areabout a centimeter thick, not hollow, and a juicy light green
when sliced. There are also some red tones on the stem andleaves. If the area has not been cleared, the dead stalks(with spongy interiors) from last year will probably bepresent, including the faint remains of the berry clusters,looking a little ghostly. This will help you identify
pokeweed in places you haven’t seen it before. It pokes up
in poorly managed plant areas, under evergreen trees andshrubs, along railroad tracks, under overpasses, and alongfences and roadsides.
To prepare pokeweed, harvest the shoots when they areyoung (under eight inches) and boil them for ten minutes ina good amount of water. Do not harvest the large taproots—these are toxic. Drain and rinse. Enjoy them with salt andolive oil for a spartan presentation. Or try them in a salad of19

Urban Foraging

quinoa, pokeweed, and roasted red pepper for something
more fancy.

Pokeweed is easier to find when its berries are out, but thisis not when you want to harvest the plant. The berries arepoisonous to humans.

Native to North America, pokeweed has been used here
for a long time. Native Americans ate it and used it
medicinally. Elvis Presley sang about it in the hit tune Poke
Salad Annie. In Arkansas it was canned and soldcommercially by Allen Canning Company up until thespring of 2000. They did not stop because demand wasdown—they stopped because it is hard to cultivate thisplant, since the seeds need to pass through a bird’s digestivesystem to germinate. Therefore, they had to harvest their

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David Craft

pokeweed wild, and there were not enough people for thistask, so they stopped producing it.

Pokeweed shoots in the spring emerging from anabandoned city lot. At this stage, the entire above-ground
portion of the plants can be picked and boiled for food.

Most plants we know from grocery stores have a single
part that people eat. Exceptions are beets, turnips andcarrots. In those cases, some people eat the green tops inaddition to the roots. In the foraging world, many plants

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offer multiple edible parts, with these parts emerging atdifferent times of the year. The linden tree is like this, but
one of the best plants for multiple edible parts is the
milkweed.
In the early spring, along river banks, on the grassy
areas sloping down from overpasses, and sometimes alongcity streets and in the mini front yards of city residences,milkweed shoots poke up. They are smooth and green andabout a half-inch thick, similar to pokeweed shoots but
smoother and stiffer, and without the large unopened leaves
characteristic of pokeweed shoots. Dogbane shoots are a
toxic look-alike to milkweed shoots. To differentiate, I startby verifying that some of last year’s dried gray pods arelying around the area. Then, a close examination of themilkweed shoots and bottoms of the leaves should reveal
soft white fuzz, whereas dogbane shoots are smooth andhairless. Also, when a milkweed shoot is sliced crosswise, it
exudes a lot of milky latex, and the stalk is hollow; incontrast, dogbane shoots only leak a little latex, and they
are solid.
Yanking straight upward on the milkweed shoots
releases them (whereas pokeweed should be cut or torn

22David Craft

since the roots of it are toxic). The lower parts of milkweedshoots are whiter, with earthy coloring, but you can eat
these parts too. And, true to the name, one often gets sticky
with white, milky latex when gathering milkweed, areassuring feature for beginning foragers.

A meal of milkweed shoots. When broken, they exude quite
a bit of white latex, which is a helpful guide to identifying
the plant. Also, look around for dried pods from theprevious year.

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The jury is still out on whether or not milkweed shootsare bitter. Euell Gibbons, when writing in the 1960's,
contended that milkweed is bitter and recommended boilingit in multiple changes of water. Sam Thayer more recently
has refuted this and claims milkweed shoots are not bitter atall, and can even be sampled raw. I come right in between.
Many of the milkweed shoots I have eaten are perfectly finewith no bitter principle, tasting a bit like green beans. But
in nearly every batch I get a few bitter ones, and trying tofigure out which ones will be bitter by appearance has
proven futile.
Milkweed shoots can be gathered until they are about
10 inches tall, after which they become tough and stringy.
They should be boiled for about 10 minutes and thenstrained, and they then can be served with olive oil, salt,
and pepper, or tossed into a stir-fry. Milkweed plants
produce plenty of other fine foods throughout the season, so
take only a small fraction of the milkweed shoots you find—not only for yourself, but also for the butterflies, for otheranimal foragers, and for next year’s crop.

24

-Chapter 4Spring RootsW

hen we are in the deep of winter, when thebears in the Berkshires are hibernating andfrogs are frozen beneath the leaves of theforest floor (truly), the seeds and the roots that will become
the greenery of next year are lying there in waiting too.
One of the first plants to make an appearance is theevening primrose. All winter, the root has been sitting in the
ground until the temperature cue says: “ready to start yoursecond year.” This root is highly sought after by foragers.
An early bulky food, it helps quell the chorus of foraging
skeptics constantly questioning how one can get anythingof substance from foraging.

Urban Foraging

Here are a couple of hints for finding evening primrose.
It grows among other wild flowers and occasionally pops
up in gardens, sometimes intentionally and other times not.
It also likes sandy soils near shores of rivers and oceans.
The evening primrose is a robust plant, tall and with sturdy
stems that branch like a cactus. This plant is easiest to
identify in midsummer, when the fragile yellow flowers
come out. In the spring though, the time when the roots aregood to eat, the key to finding them is to look for the deadstalks from the previous year. They are often still standing,around five or six feet tall, and the browned stems arecovered with narrow, centimeter-long, curled, open seed
pods. This is a good place to search the ground for the newleaves of the second-year plants. Also, since they are one of
the first plants to emerge, you have a better chance of
spotting them.
Lying flat on the ground, a round rosette of flat
elongated green leaves emerges. These leaves have a slight
red tinge to them, and the mid-vein, the main line rightdown the middle of the leaf, is characteristically white(other plant leaves show a lighter mid-vein too, but not asprominently as evening primrose). If you find a suspected26

David Craft

evening primrose, get out your trowel and carefully dig it
up. If it has a decent-size white root, with a slight red tingenear the leaves, you have probably found the plant.
Sometimes the root will be skimpy and not worth
collecting, but a few weeks of experience squeezing at thebase of the leaves to size it up will make you good at
predicting which ones will be worthwhile.

Evening primrose shown three ways: uprooted, still in the
ground, and a stalk from the previous year.

I am always compelled to speak about the greatness ofeach plant I forage. This has a lot to do with the thrill offinding a bargain (free food!) and has little to do with theactual taste of the particular plant. To put it all on the table

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regarding evening primrose, there is a minor issue with it asa food. Even after the requisite boil of 5-10 minutes, somepeople complain of an itchiness or scratchiness left in theback of the throat after eating this plant. Raw cattail shoots
do the same thing to me. And lots of other foraged foods
have their quirks too. This causes a dilemma, because
foragers who have not yet turned entirely hermitic will
want to share their goods with others. Most people are waryof trying new foods, and these quirks do not help.

A substantial wild carrot, dug in early spring before it gets
too woody to eat. If left undisturbed, the wild carrot
becomes the famous wild flower Queen Anne’s lace.

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David Craft

Arguments I run over and over again in my head toentice people to eat some of the weirder foods found out
there go like this: 1) Urban foraging is a modern person’s
grasp at reconnecting with the world of dirt and plants, so
we should love these quirks in celebration of this reunion;
2) A strange and completely new taste is a rare opportunity,
and if we get comfortably set in our ways, we are getting
old and boring.
I have convinced myself to love all of these challenging
characteristics that have been bred out of domesticatedvegetables. If I feel a scratchiness, I am feeling something,some real plant that I cannot buy but that I can eat, and thisis one of its trademarks. I've also tried the following
approach on people: Imagine you are on a desert island andall there is to eat is boiled evening primrose roots—thensuch trivialities would not matter...dig in! Unfortunately,
this argument doesn’t work any better than the others. So
what I often end up doing is disguising quirky plants inlarge soups, and if I start feeling a scratch in my throat, I
expedite the after-dinner drinks. One such disguise I
recently hit upon for evening primrose root is to serve itwith cocktail sauce (ketchup plus horseradish). For years

29Urban Foraging

I've been wondering what would make a good shrimp
substitute for the classic party hors d'oevre. The evening
primrose root fits the bill: white and pink and crunchy, andmild enough to let the cocktail sauce (the real force behind
shrimp cocktail) shine through.

Early leaf growth of a burdock plant, ready for digging.

Burdock and wild carrot are two other roots to look forin the springtime. Wild carrot is the same plant as Queen
Anne’s lace, a recognizable wild flower. When the Queen
Anne’s lace is blooming, for show-and-tell I sometimes
yank one up and have people smell the broken root: carrot,
exactly! At that point though, the root is too woody to eat,30

David Craft

but it is a good way to learn the plant and mark a good spot
to look in early spring for little green carrot tops emerging.
Wild carrots are white and not as big as their domesticatedcounterparts, but sometimes you can get lucky and findsome slightly hefty ones. If the smell is not strongly
reminiscent of carrot and the tops don’t look exactly like asmaller version of the tops of store-bought carrots, there is
the danger that the plant might be poison hemlock. So if
you are uncertain, it’s better to avoid this plant.

Burdock roots, the spade that dug them, a burdock leaf,
and some burdock burrs.

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Burdock root is also available as soon as the groundthaws and the greens emerge to tell you where the plant is.
Burdock is easier to find in the fall—for a more thoroughdescription see Chapter 12—but it is good to briefly
mention it here too. The leaves of the emerging basal
rosette of the burdock plant are green, soft and fuzzy. They
can be eaten after being boiled, but they are terrible. The
root underneath, however, is a meal in itself: the larger yourshovel, the more root you will get. If you don’t find any
during your first spring of foraging, there are plenty ofother plants out there you will find. Then when fall comes,
and burdocks have giant leaves, you’ll spot them easily.

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-Chapter 5Urban Popeye:
Spring and Summer Greens and SuchA

foraging book, urban or otherwise, would beincomplete without discussing the world’s most
famous wild edible weed: the dandelion. The
dandelion grows over almost the entire world. The plant
distribution maps available at plants.usda.gov show acompletely filled-in map for Taraxacum officinale, going
all the way into northernmost Alaska and covering all of
Texas as well. Every part of the dandelion is a food source,
except once I tried to make an edible straw out of theUrban Foraging

hollow stem and that was a complete failure. The mostpopular part of the plant in the States these days is theleaves, best in early spring (and briefly in the fall). The
identification of the plant—when it is missing its brightyellow flower—is found in our name for it, which derives
from the French dent de lion, tooth of the lion. The leaves
have large notches that do look a bit like ferocious teeth.
Dandelion Flower Bread
1 cup unbleached flour
1 cup whole-wheat flour
2 teaspoons baking powder½ teaspoon salt
1-2 cups dandelion flower petals¼ cup vegetable oil¼ cup maple syrup½ cup apple sauce
1 ¹⁄3 cups almond milk
Mix all ingredients until just blended and pour into agreased loaf pan. Bake at 400°F for about 25 minutes oruntil a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

34

David Craft

Dandelion is eaten across the world. The roots can beboiled and eaten or roasted and ground for a coffee
substitute, which is also commercially available. Recipes
abound on the web for such things as dandelion jelly,
dandelion wine, and dandelion soup, and there is at least
one national dandelion cook-off. The crown of the plant,
the emerging flower buds before they have shot up at all,can be dug out with a small knife and briefly boiled for aninteresting bulky food.
The dandelion is a fast-growing plant. Shortly after its
leaves appear, it sends out its bright yellow flower—pretty
yet despised by most, which is a common sentiment toward
aggressively successful plants. The flowers are edible, as
are the buds, which can go right into a stir-fry. Dandelions
also provide a great activity to encourage children to
become forager-bakers: dandelion flower bread. A loaf ofdandelion flower bread is not worth making for its taste,
which is subtle (subtle of course being a culinary
euphemism for bland). It is worth making because it is fun
to do and is a good activity for the little ones. It also looks
nice and provides a great vehicle for a tasty jam.

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Urban Foraging

To make dandelion flower bread, bring the kids into afield and set them on a task: bring back 50 flowers. If they
are at the stage of learning to count, here’s a good time tothrow that in there too. Once you gather about five cups offlowers, you should be good for one loaf. The next stage
involves sitting around a table, and, instead of peelingapples like you might in the fall, you pluck the yellow
flower petals out. Pile just the yellow flower petals into abowl until you have about two cups of them. Your fingers
will be yellow and sticky afterward. I did this with mynephew once, and he enjoyed himself (especially thepicking part—the separating part he was not so good at, but
he was only four). I was thinking I was well on my way tomaking a little forager out of him until later in the day,when he told me: “I’m hungry...but I don’t want to eat
plants.”Another common but less recognized plant with healthy
edible leaves is curly dock. Curly dock is a potherb, whichrefers to any plant that one prepares by cooking it down,
either by boiling or sautéing. Dock is an old English termfor potherb. Curly refers to the wavy shape of the leafedges. Curly dock has a lemony zing to it, like Japanese36David Craft

knotweed, and therefore it makes a pleasant addition to stirfries and soups. A downside is that, like Japanese knotweed,
it goes from a pleasant deep green to a pale brown-green on
cooking, so it is best used as a part of a dish and well mixed
in. Unless, of course, like Thoreau with his scrawny andgnarly wild apples, you find beauty in everything natureprovides. Curly dock is a perennial, found year after year

An abundant edible, curly dock is recognized by its longnarrow leaves with wavy edges. Young leaves can be eatenraw, but I prefer to cook my curly dock leaves in a stir-fry
or a soup.

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in the same spot, and it will keep on producing as you
continue to harvest leaves from it. There are other edible
docks around but curly dock is the best-tasting of thecommon ones. During winter the plants can be identified bytheir brown stems, a few feet high and densely covered
with seeds. This plant has a long harvesting period, whichmakes it one of my favorites.
Lots of other edible greens come out in the spring. The
best of these, and one of my favorite foraging plants ingeneral, is lamb’s quarters. Not only is it everywhere, but it
makes the best spinach substitute of all the potherbs. It isavailable over the entire summer and is packed withnutrients. I recently sprinkled a bunch of lamb’s quarters
seeds in my garden to create my own patch of it.
Another name for lamb’s quarters is goosefoot, which
is helpful for identifying the plant: the leaves often bearresemblance to a webbed foot. The other identifying featureis the white powder on the part of the leaves closest to thestem. A lamb’s quarters plant in good soil can grow to bequite tall, but in the city I rarely find them over a few feet
high.

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David Craft

A lamb’s quarters plant growing out of a crack next to adumpster. The leaves have the shape of a webbed foot andthe newest ones closest to the stem are dusted with a white
powder.

Lamb’s quarters can stand as the main player in arecipe: cooked lamb’s quarters with salt and wild onions
will go down without question from most diners. The color
stays a deep green, and the plant exceeds spinach in its
vitamin and protein content,§ while matching it in soft
§ The protein craze, including the idea that complementary
proteins need to be consumed at the same time, is largely

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texture. Cooked greens are the main way I enjoy lamb’s
quarters, but when the leaves first come out I also eat themraw. In late summer, it is possible to harvest the small black
grains—like amaranth seeds—that the plants produce but inthe city the plants don’t usually grow in conditions thatmake this possible.
Lady’s thumb is a runner-up to lamb’s quarters. It is
common, has a long season, and like curly dock and lamb’s
quarters, should be steamed or boiled before eating if theleaves are a bit tough. Lady’s thumb is easy to identify
because of the distinct dark splotch in the middle of eachleaf. Depending on the growing conditions, this dark spot
can be faint or very obvious. Sometimes after rain and atnight, this spot really pops out as the leaves glisten. Plus,
since they’ve just been washed by the rain, this is a greattime to pick some, although it is probably smart to rinsethem again at home. Once, when I skipped this step, one of
my dinner guests found a wooden match in her greens.
Luckily she was not squeamish (she was Romanian), anddiscredited by nutritionists today. The Centers for Disease
Control website, www.cdc.gov, is a good place to read about
this. Plants contain plenty of protein for the human diet.

40David Craft

she, like myself, appreciated this evidence that we were
eating from the land around us.
When picking lady’s thumb, just pluck individual
leaves since the stems are a bit tough. For lamb’s quarters,on the other hand, you can grab a bunch of the leaves (fromthe top of the plant, leaving the rest of the plant to grow)Lady’s thumb after some rain, when the dark splotches in
the middle of each leaf are most obvious.

without too much discretion, since those stems are not too
tough and taste fine. By the end of the summer you can findlady’s thumb leaves that are up to six inches long, but I

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usually gather them only when they are no bigger than two
inches since they are more tender then. Later in summer,
lady’s thumb produces a vertical stack of tightly bundledpink flowers, but the thumbprint on each leaf is distinct
enough that you don’t need to wait for these flowers to
identify the plant. Some other members of the smartweed
family resemble lady’s thumb but do not have the fringe ofhairs around the leaf-stem joints that lady’s thumb has.
These other plants are not poisonous—they just don’t tastevery good.
Both lady’s thumb and lamb’s quarters are commonly
found as garden weeds, so urbanites who want to help weed
urban gardens should keep this in mind.

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-Chapter 6The Variety of Life:
Early Flowers and Early BerriesTo open your eyes to the natural world is to becontinually astounded by the variety of life. I haveconsidered becoming a biologist or a botanist, but
it’s possible that spending eight-plus hours per day
observing the natural world would send me overboard,
frozen with awe. A few walks per week foraging is a goodbalance for me. Obsessed with order, humans have spentlots of time classifying plants and animals and fungi, and todate we have described about 2 million species. The task ofestimating how many total species exist is formidable, andcurrent estimates range from 5 million to 30 million.

Urban Foraging

Taxonomic trees for the known species are continually
being rearranged to account for new DNA findings ofancestral relationships among life forms. Mushrooms areespecially prone to such reclassification. Initially,
mushrooms were grouped together into genera based on theform—basically, the mechanism by which they disperse
their spores. Mushrooms can have gills, which create a lotof surface area to generate and expel spores from (forexample, the familiar button mushroom and the portobellos
found in grocery stores), or they can have tightly packed
tubes for spore dispersal (for example, hen-of-the-woods
and porcinis). But there are also mushrooms that rely onraindrops and animals to come and crush them, releasing apuff of spores that looks like brown smoke (puffballs). And
then there are truffles, which never send a mushroom body
above the surface but live entirely under the dirt and, by
producing enticing smells and tastes, get forest critters likesquirrels to dig them up and take them from place to place.
It was originally thought that each fungus form defineda different branch of the taxonomic tree, but recent findings
show that all branches give rise to these different forms.
Thus a mushroom book from 50 years ago will contain44

David Craft

many mushrooms whose scientific names are now different.
Botanists swear by their Latin names, but this influx of
DNA classification is reason enough for me to stick by thecommon names when possible. The porcini will always be
the porcini.
A general rule that I’ve accepted is that if you canconceive of it, it exists in nature. We have plants that eat
animals (Venus fly traps and the pitcher plant), single-sex
lizards that reproduce by parthenogenesis, and thousands ofspecies of water bears—microscopic animals with eightlegs, existing over the range of extreme environmental
conditions from hot springs to the tops of the Himalayas.
Our biggest mammals, the whales, eat tiny plankton we
can’t even see. There is a mushroom that reproduces by
infecting ants, sending them into a delirium that causes
them to climb upward, clamp onto a high branch, die, andsprout new mushrooms out of their heads. Every apple seed
gives rise to an apple tree different than the tree it camefrom. Over the course of time, an estimated 4,000 distinct
types of apples have been cultivated. How many moredelightful apples-to-be do we toss out with our apple cores
every day?

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The heart-shaped leaves and the purple flowers of theviolet make this plant hard to miss. Violets grow inbunches and are found in lawns and in the woods.
Young leaves, before they get too tough, are a goodsalad green, and the flowers add a little edible color.
All of this variety directly impacts the urban forager
too. The natural life cycle of a plant consists of gathering
energy from the summer sun to grow and produce seeds,
and possibly to store energy in roots for perennials andbiennials. But before the seed can be made, the plant needs
to flower for sexual reproduction, stirring up the gene pool.
And even though we are not the pollinators, the flowers
often smell and taste sweet to us, not just to the bees.

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David Craft

If there is an opportunity out there, Darwin assures usthat something will fill the void. Bees are busy for all of thewarm months because different plants are sending out theirflowers at different times. Violets come out early on, andtheir heart-shaped leaves are good for a salad at this earlystage, along with their purple or occasionally white flowers.
People with lots of patience and a sweet tooth can enjoy
hand painting violet flowers with a sugary egg whitesolution to make candied violets.
But the king of the early flowers for foragers, a dessert
unto itself, needs no help from the sugar plantations of the
Caribbean. This is the black locust flower. The black locust
is native to the southern United States but has become
naturalized across the entire eastern U.S. and parts of thewest too. When grouped together, the twisting trunks anddeeply furrowed bark of the plant can produce a haunted,
fairytale-looking plot, as a bunch of them do in an old
graveyard set off the road in Lanesville, a small section of
Gloucester, MA. In tall trees, the white bunches ofdrooping flowers are sometimes completely out of reach,but in younger trees or trees with limbs that bend down far
enough, the white flowers are there for you to grab.

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Urban Foraging

Black locust flowers, plucked and ready for eating.
Start by smelling them. A thick, jasmine-like scent fills youup, with a taste that is just as good. I pluck a whole bunch
and then strip off the flowers with my teeth. Other edible
flowers are at best color additions to salads, but these black
locust flowers are hearty, crunchy, and sweet, and make agreat snack in the field or at the table back home. If you
want an impressive and unique dessert using fresh
specimens, try black locust fritters. Using whole-wheat
flour ought to partially offset the fact that these are bestwhen fried in lots of oil.

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David Craft

Black Locust Fritters½ cup silken tofu
½ cup whole-wheat flour
1 cup almond milk or water¼ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon maple syrup
1 teaspoon baking powder
About 20 black locust flower bunches
Canola or coconut oil for frying
Mix the dry ingredients together. Then add the tofu,
almond milk, and maple syrup. Blend or whip untilsmooth. Keeping the flowers on the stem, dip the entire
flower bunch into the batter and fry a few at a time in oilover medium heat, flipping after a few minutes. Drain on
paper towels. Serve hot or warm.
Black locust trees are actively cultivated in cities andyards, but most people do not know the flowers are edible,
so there are plenty to eat when you find the trees. I’ll
sometimes stand under a giant and ponder about all thetasty flowers draping the entire canopy above. I wonder,
how could I get them all, and then what would I do with49

Urban Foraging

them? They freeze okay for use later on in oatmeal, butthey are far better fresh and are a challenge to preserve.
Were they around all year I could easily start each daywith a bunch or two, but like many foraged foods, theseflowers are only out for a few weeks. Foraging encourages
a Buddhist sense of non-attachment in us: what is here andgood today is gone tomorrow.
Another early flower, this one on a shrub, is juneberry.
These flowers are not for eating—they merely help you
locate the small trees and remind you that their berries will
be out soon. The flowers are white and star-shaped (rayflowers) and come out a month or so before black locust
flowers. The bush has smooth, gray bark and stands
anywhere from 10 to 20 feet tall, usually with three to six
individual plants clumped together and emanating from thesame spot, like a lilac bush.
The name of the juneberry is a helpful mnemonic for
the forager, since it is a reminder that by June you can be
hunting for berries. The plant also goes by the name of shadbush, since the flowering of it coincides with the running of
the shad, a migrating ocean river fish. It is also called
serviceberry, saskatoon, sarvisberry, and shadblow, the50David Craft

flood of regionally distinct common names probably related
to the fact that, without economic importance, there is nopush toward a single shared name.
The berries, out in June, resemble blueberries but are a
bit less sweet, and the seeds inside them are slightly larger,
making the entire berry a little mealier. Still, the entire
berry is edible, seeds and all, and if you add them topancakes, no one will know they are not blueberries. Like
blueberries, they freeze well. So if you are lucky enough tofind some shrubs with lots of fruit, save some for latermonths. Freezing them on a cookie sheet before bagging
them prevents the berries from sticking together in one
clump in the freezer.
Unfortunately, urban planners usually avoid planting
fruit trees in the city because of the “unwanted” fruit theydrop. Urban fruit trees, if found, occupy out-of-sightcorners and are never as common as the oaks, lindens,
maples, Callery pears (inedible), and sycamores that line
the streets. Sometimes though, a corporate landscape or asmall municipal park will contain a few juneberries,
probably chosen for their early flowers. I have found them
planted along rivers and ponds in cities (Central Park has

51

Urban Foragingsome), in landscaping around malls, and on college
campuses. Once, while I was picking a haul of them by an
office building in downtown Boston, a quirky older
gentleman came up and asked me, “What are you going to
do with those Amelanchier canadensis?” Sometimes, if you
know the Latin name, you just have to say it.
While farmers’-market shoppers go berry-free after
strawberries and before the arrival of the August onslaught—blueberries and raspberries and blackberries—urban
foragers enjoy a steady stream of berries from the time thejuneberry comes out. A fantastic urban berry appearing justas the juneberries are fading is the mulberry.
Mulberries are among the easier trees to identify. The
berries look like multi-colored blackberries, and the leaves
come in all sorts of shapes—mittens with anywhere fromzero to six thumbs. The berries on a single tree ripen at
different times, offering a harvest window of a few weeks.
In the middle of this period, look up at a productive tree
and you’ll see mulberries of all colors. They range fromwhite to pink to red to almost black, unless you have founda white mulberry tree, in which case ripe berries are a pale
white with a tinge of brown and red, and they do not taste

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David Craft

nearly as good as the other mulberries (insipid is the taste
described by some books). Nonetheless, even the whitemulberries are sweet. Since they are some of the earlier
sweets to emerge, these too make it into my foraging bags.
The young leaves of any mulberry tree make a very nicecooked green, and juiced raw they yield a vitamin-packed,
wheatgrass-like shot.
The easiest way to find a mulberry tree is to keep youreyes on the ground as you walk the neighborhoods. Ripe
mulberries fall easily and get squashed to dark purple stains
on the sidewalk. Around mulberry time, this is the only
plant dropping such fruits, so if you look up and see
blackberry-looking fruits and varied leaf shapes, you have amulberry. Start munching, and bagging if you have thetime.
If a tree is loaded with fruit and not hanging over abusy street, an efficient way to get the berries is by laying
down a sheet and shaking the branch over it. I refrain fromusing this method on my favorite mulberry tree in Boston,
however, because the ducks like the mulberries too. They
wait and wait for them to drop to the ground below, so I

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Urban Foraging

feel like using the sheet method would be unfair. Instead,for that particular tree, I harvest the berries individually

Mulberry tree with some dark ripe berries. The others
will be ready in a week or so.
and toss a few to the ducks while I do so. In the city, it isparticularly important to be considerate to what little wild
animal life there is. If there is an item that the birds andsquirrels like and there is not much of it, I make it a point toshare with these guys, the real foragers.
Mulberries are good enough to eat on their own, andthey freeze well for smoothies too. While shaking onto a54

David Craft

sheet works well for harvesting a lot of berries fast, a goodmulberry tree leaves me with the same longing as a good
black locust tree when I gaze up at all that food highoverhead: so much food, and such short arms. For thisreason, I do not worry too much about “stealing food fromthe animals,” because they can scurry and fly right up there.
Plus, no matter how well I know my city, I still have only
explored a small fraction of the streets, so I know I always
leave plenty for them.

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Urban Foraging

Edible Flowers
The flowers of many cultivated plants and many weeds
are edible and always add a fine splash of color to a salad—and sometimes a nice flavor too. Two of the flowers that I
add to salads for their color, even though they have almost
no taste, are chicory (pale blue, shaped like a tiny
sunflower) and vetch (purple, shaped like a tiny bunch of
grapes). These both grow in abandoned spots and fields.
Chicory roots, incidentally, make a great coffee substitute,so if I see a particularly large plant I uproot it, clean androast the root, and grind it for coffee as needed.
Slightly more tasty flowers include violets, tulips, andpansies. If you are going for the violets and the leaves arestill young, grab some of them for the salad as well. Roses
not only smell great but also taste pretty good, and the fruitof the roses, called rose hips, are edible as well. Evening
primrose flowers (yellow, late summer) are slightly spicy,
but less so than nasturtium flowers, which are grown in lotsof gardens. Nasturtium leaves are edible and quite good too.
Big bunches of black locust flowers, most too high in thetree to get but hopefully some within reach, can almost

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David Craft

make a meal in themselves—succulent, sweet, and crunchy.
Lilac flowers also come in bunches and are edible, and they
make an unexpected topping for cupcakes. Likewise withwisteria. Milkweed flowers are edible after parboiling for a
few minutes, but I don’t use them. Leaving the milkweed
flowers undisturbed, the plant will produce more milkweed
pods, which is a superior food and one that monarchbutterflies rely on. Daylilies are also edible but should be
tried in small amounts at first because they can give somepeople an upset stomach. Eating just the petals and not thestamen or pistils might help here.

57

-Chapter 7Road Trip to the CountryE

ven an urban forager wants to be able to spot thecommon good edible plants found outside of thecity limits. This is not to say you need to be an
expert at harvesting and processing wild rice or finding
groundnuts (a food that helped sustain the Pilgrims on theirfirst winter, though not by their own foraging efforts—
Miles Standish found an Indian cache of them and raidedit). However, you should be able to spot some of the classic
foraged items: watercress, fiddlehead ferns, ramps (wildleeks), and morels. Mention foraging for edible mushrooms

Urban Foraging

three times, and twice someone will ask if you have foundmorels. Morels are a highly prized, wild edible mushroom.
It is so prized, in fact, that people keep their morel spots
locked in secrecy. Morels are much more common in the
Midwest and the West, but they are found sporadically inthe eastern United States too. In terms of quickly adding to
your country foraging knowledge, the morel is a good
choice because its shape is so distinct: if you stare at a
picture of one for a minute or so, you will be able toidentify them in the wild. But there is considerable mysteryon the issue of where to find them. Some possibilities areabandoned apple orchards or recently burnt land. Once, at abar, I overheard that some had been found by the train
tracks in an industrial part of town.
Morels need to be cooked before eating, and in fact, it
is a very good rule of thumb to cook all wild mushrooms(with the exception of the beefsteak mushroom, Fistulina
hepatica, which is best raw, thinly sliced, and tossed withgarlic, olive oil, and salt). If you are having trouble finding
them, which is a likely scenario in the Northeast, you canfind them at high-end grocery stores. Study them here.
Then, when out for a walk on some warm spring day, you60David Craft

might just spot one, which is always a rush since they hideand then jump out like gold in a 49er’s pan. The same
feeling occurs when you spot a bunch of fiddlehead ferns:
little treasures popping up in damp areas, associations ofleprechauns and the magical forest world.
Fiddlehead ferns, one of the most famous wild foods,
can be found in most high-end grocery stores in the spring.
If you ever see them for sale, take the time to get a lesson in
the characteristics of the plant. Lots of ferns start off in a
fiddlehead stage. This is just a tightly balled up fern.
However, the one that you are seeking when you are off inthe country is the ostrich fern. This is the best tasting of all
the ferns that start off as fiddleheads, and there are two key
features to help identify the plant. The most defining is thegrooved stalk. Just like a piece of celery, the ostrich fern
has a deep groove along the entire length of its stalk. The
second feature is the smoothness of the plant itself. Most
other ferns have a slight fuzziness or all-out furriness at thefiddlehead stage, but the ostrich fern is smooth and green
with papery brown flaky scales that rub off easily (although
you do not need to rub them off to eat the fern). Ostrichferns come up in sets of four to eight or so, and you should

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only harvest a couple of them per set, leaving the majority.
Harvest them at the base of the stalk. That is, take thewhole above-ground part of the plant, even though grocery
stores only sell the part that is balled up. The long straightstems taste just as good. Also, harvest only while the plantis still tightly rolled up. When it begins to unfurl, toxinsappear in the plant. The preferred way to eat fiddleheads is
to let their crunchiness and greenness shine by quickly pansearing them with olive oil, garlic, and salt.
This trick of letting the foraged items come to you,already identified, can be used very productively at farmers’markets, where fiddleheads, ramps, and even wildmushrooms are common. Since mushrooms are some of thebest-tasting and exciting foods to forage, and also morescary than wild plants, having an identified sample to learn
from is a huge time saver. Always poke around your local
farmers’ markets to see if there are foraged mushrooms orother items there, and take the time to study them closely.
It shouldn’t be surprising, but when plants show up
precisely in the habitat the plant books say they will, it
always gives me a little jolt of amazement. It means that
seeds of essentially all plants have dropped everywhere,62

David Craft

and they take when the conditions are right. That thishappens so reliably across the board is a reminder of just
how long the plants have had to find their way into thesehabitats: thousands and thousands of years. One thousand
years is a blip in the history of the natural world. You might
not recognize the languages, the customs, or the smells if
you were dropped into the world 3,000 years ago, but theplants would be the same. They’ve had plenty of time tofind their favorite places.
Watercress likes shallow, slow-moving, tricklingstreams. It is a crunchy, spicy, green plant that grows in thewater with roots dangling just beneath the surface—truehydroponic growth. Often the colony extends across theentire brook. Gather it by tearing or knifing it, being careful
not to uproot it. If you find yourself on Martha’s Vineyard,
look on a map for the big lagoon. At the southern tip of it,
the head of the lagoon, is such an enormous patch ofwatercress that I feel okay about putting this specificlocation in the book—I think this location will never runout of watercress. If the source of your watercress is apristine place, you can enjoy it raw, but I usually opt for thesafety of preparing it in, say, a watercress soup.

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Wild leeks, or ramps, are one of the first foraged items
to appear in high-end farmers’ markets in the spring. In
some places, the forest floor is literally covered with ramps.
As you move north though, the ramps become moreelusive. To find them, enter the woods—wild leeks likemaple forests—and look for a plant with two palm-likeleaves flopping over. The plant has a white bulb not far
under the surface and easily pulled out. The whole plantshould be eaten after frying it up in some olive oil and salt
and nothing more. With standard foraging etiquette, it
should only be taken when plentiful. I once found four wildleeks on Martha’s Vineyard, right near that slew ofwatercress. Having never found them before, I let myself
take one of them, even though there were so few. The next
day I came back and the rest were gone, which got me
steamed about the idea of another forager cleaning out thepatch. Hopefully that forager was a deer or a hungry rabbit.
America abounds with wild grapes—along highways,
crawling up the trees along rivers, and at the edges of fields
and cemeteries where trees start. I have stopped getting myhopes up to find sweet Dionysian bunches of grapes hiding
under their big leaves at the end of summer, and turned

64David Craft

instead to a much more consistent food source from thiswild plant—the leaves themselves. These offer a wide
range of culinary possibilities and always seem to be apleasant surprise on the forager’s table. This is probably
because everyone has heard of them as a food and so it isless scary than showing up with boiled milkweed shoots.
And still there is the novelty—stuffed grape leaves are notwhat the forager is expected to show up with. Most people
have no idea of the number of wild grape plants they passby on every highway trip.

Grape leaves. Some are pointed, some are more rounded
like these, but all grapes leaves have a glossier upper side
and a softer and whiter underside, and the climbing stems
always fork into two tendrils.

Grape leaves are best in early summer when they arelarge but still young and light green. Look for the tendrilsthat help the plant climb up onto other plants (a clever bit of65

Urban Foraging

evolution—instead of forming a costly sturdy trunk, they
just climb up someone else’s). Grape tendrils fork into
exactly two branches, and the grape leaves are pointed likemaple leaves. The top side of the leaf is smooth, theunderside textured by the leaf veins. Harvest the leaves bybreaking them off right at the point where the leaf stem
connects with the leaf proper.
Stuffed Wild Grape Leaves
Boil 20 wild grape leaves in an inch of water for about 5
minutes to tenderize them. Then, cool them under coldrunning water. With the rougher side facing up, stuff theleaves with a heaping tablespoon of a mixture of cooked
rice, quinoa, any chopped mixed wild greens (lamb’s
quarters and lady’s thumb are out at the same time as
grape leaves), onions, and salt and pepper. Roll by first
folding over the sides and then rolling up in the otherdirection. Pack them into the bottom of a soup pot and justcover with water. Cook on the stovetop on low heat for
about 30 minutes. Serve warm or cold, either plain or witha dipping sauce like tahini.

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Along the highways, autumn olive bushes, with theirsilvery leaves and red berries covered with tiny silver dots,
can also be found in abundance. This is a classic red-berry
plant that most people, not knowing what it is, will assume
to be poisonous. On the contrary, this plant is a forager’s
dream. In the early fall, these bushes are loaded with red
berries, and using nothing but a plastic grocery bag and two
hands (although four is better), it is a simple matter to strip
off quarts of them in 15 minutes or so. They can be eaten
directly, but if they are too sour, they can come home withyou and be turned into a sauce or a jam. I gather so many ofthese berries that every serving of oatmeal I have in thewinter is flavored by autumn olive puree. The seeds areharmless but should be removed for a smoother sauce. They
are separated easily by sending the berries through a foodmill. Autumn olive is an invasive species and easily grows
in nutrient- and nitrogen-poor soils. These plants are fast
growers and sometimes are planted by highway
departments to quickly decorate the areas around exit ramps
and interchanges.
Road trips to the beach open up another world of
foraging possibilities. Beach peas, which look and taste like67

Urban Foraging

regular garden peas, are edible, although some sources
recommend cooking them first since there are trace
amounts of toxins in them (there are trace amounts of
toxins in most of the plants we consume, as these are theplants’ defenses).

The abundant white flowers of Prunus maritima, the native
beach plum. In May, certain stretches of New England
beaches are covered with these white flowers, which means
you should come back with your pail in August to collectthe delicious plums.

68David Craft

A popular summer spot for New Yorkers is Fire Island,
the skinny island off the southern coast of Long Island.
There are many quirks that make this island memorable.
One is the large deer population, which is a constant hot
debate item among the human inhabitants. Another is theisland’s layout. Since the island is only about a quarter mile
wide and about 20 miles long, exploring it is a linear
expedition, occasionally obstructed by chain-link gatedcommunities but generally offering a pleasant flow ofvarying ecosystems and beach architecture. And of course,
there is the plant life. The occasional blueberry bush gets
some of the tourists excited, but what will get me backthere are the plumpest and juiciest black cherries I haveever seen (more on black cherries in Chapter 9) and theabundance of beach plums.
Some wild edibles, such as highbush cranberry, have amisleading name (highbush cranberry is not a real
cranberry, and not as good§), but the beach plum is a real
§ Still, highbush cranberry is a common urban shrub that has
berries late into the season when others are gone. Even though
the taste can be challenging, I compare this to discovering anutmeg seed for the first time and trying to see past its
extreme bitterness. Someone found a way to make it great.

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plum (Prunus maritima). This is important because it helps
people identify the plant. The same white film that you rub
from supermarket plums appears on the beach plum, andthe flesh and pit look the same. The beach plum is smaller
in size, but exceeds cultivated plums in the intensity offlavor. Beach plum jelly is a common preparation, but thisis such a tasty little guy that you shouldn’t stop there. Aslong as the plums, which sometimes abundantly cover the
waist-high shrubs that they grow on, are ripe, fill up yourforaging bags and let your culinary ideas range free on yourwalk home.
One fall, I found myself at a conference along the rocky
New England coast. I learned on arrival, around 2 p.m., thatno food was going to be served until dinnertime. Being avegetarian grazer, I eat all the time, so I panicked slightly. I
had collected a bag of autumn olives, but I wanted somevariety, so I took a walk along the beach. It was late fall, somost of the green plants were gone. There were some rosehips that I munched on. But two other finds that afternoon
deserve special mention.
The first was seaweed. On the Northeast coast, almost
all of the seaweeds are edible. The omnipresent rockweed70

David Craft—the blackish seaweed that attaches to rocks and iscovered in air bladders that cause it to float to the surface
during high tide—is edible but not particularly good. If you
want to eat it, I recommend drying it and smashing it up, or
putting a little bit in a blender for a soup.

Cutting a piece of kelp to take home. Seaweed extends theforaging season into winter, when this picture was taken.

Kelp, which comes in thick, long, rubbery sheets, istough but can be eaten on the spot. This is the edible that I
came across and that helped hold me over until dinner thatnight. Another great seaweed to eat on the spot is sea
lettuce, which is translucent green with a light, wispy

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texture. Low tides allow you to explore below the shoreline
and find fresh specimens, but commercial harvesters use
boats to harvest near the shore. All seaweeds are packed
with B vitamins and are therefore an especially good
foraging choice for vegans.
The next edible I stumbled upon while trying to stave
off hunger that day was a cantaloupe. No one needs to betaught cantaloupe, so this plant is not found in foraging
books. But apparently, a summer beachgoer had eaten one,leaving the seeds behind, and the sandy conditions wereadequate for a cantaloupe plant to emerge and bear asmallish fruit with salty flesh. The point here is that once
the foraging mentality takes over, you will always be on thelookout for edibles. This salted cantaloupe was a great findfor a hungry forager, as have been perfectly good peanuts
after a ball game, Goobers after a movie, and pumpkins allover the city in the weeks after Halloween. Keep your eyesout for asparagus too: it has escaped cultivation many times
over the years of domestication and pops up in the strangest
places.

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David Craft

Teas
If it is caffeine you want in your hot beverages,
foraging is not going to help you, unless you count swiping
a few extra tea bags from corporate functions. But, if you
are an herbal-tea drinker, a few hours of tea foraging spreadover the course of the spring, summer, and fall can provide
you with enough tea for the whole year.
The main tea plant I forage is wild mint, which is easy
to identify because of its smell and because all mints havesquare stems. Mint likes moist soils, and I find it most often
along shallow river banks. Where it grows, it grows
abundantly, and the whole plant can be plucked and driedfor tea. Linden flowers are also excellent for tea, as are
dried crab apples.
Goldenrod pops up throughout the city, and if you finda patch in a good-looking place, grab some leaves andflowers. Goldenrod is a little bitter, but when mixed withmore pleasant-tasting herbs like mint and stinging nettles(found sporadically in cities), it is fine. Also, goldenrod isreported to be useful for treating the common cold, flu,
allergies, and arthritis, as well as for lowering blood73

Urban Foraging

pressure, so I gladly accept a little bitterness.
Where goldenrod grows, mugwort grows too. In fact,
there is probably enough mugwort to make every citydweller wealthy if the plant had any economic value.
Mugwort has some reported hallucinogenic properties (itsgenus, Artemisia, is also the genus of wormwood, the plantused to make absinthe), and so I use it sparingly. It is said topromote vivid dreams if consumed before bedtime, or if abundle of it is placed under your pillow, but I have not yet
tried this so I cannot verify it.
Another plant that seems to appear on every patch ofgrass that hasn’t been blasted with herbicides is clover. The
three leaves and robust white or purple flower make it easy
to identify. When collecting clover, I usually pop a flower
or two into my mouth for the nutrients (the taste of clover
flowers is a firm mediocre) and then bag a bunch of themfor tea.
Walking along dirt paths, you’ll sometimes see little
yellow flowers at your feet that are shaped like miniature
pineapples. Strangely enough, when crushed they smell likepineapple too. This is pineapple weed, considered aninvasive in some states. It is great as tea (it is related to74David Craft

chamomile). If you know of a raspberry or blackberry
patch, those leaves, when dried, can also be used for tea.
These are the main plants that I find in the cities formaking tea. In all cases, dry them before using. Drying
helps them store well, and, perhaps counter-intuitively, canimprove their flavor. In drying, the cell walls become
brittle, and when reconstituted, they break open and release
more flavor. I find that foraged teas require more herb
matter than commercially bought teas, which are
specifically selected for their strong flavors. For best flavor,
use a lot of the herbs. Go heavy on the mint and then
combine any to all of the above for a one-of-a-kind local
tea.

75

-Chapter 8Cattails:
Some Personal Issues, Some Prospects, andSome Tastier Contemporaneous PlantsA

round the time when grape leaves are big enoughto collect, cattails are shooting up out of marshy
areas and, like grape leaves, they are at the right
size: big enough to collect but not so mature that they are
too tough. Cattails in a city environment are often best
admired rather than eaten because the water they sit in canlook a little scary. They never seem to mind though—I’ve
seen them happily taking over oil-slicked, stagnant water inseveral different places. I usually let those go. To be honest,
this has more to do with my general feeling about cattails
than with my fear of polluted habitats. Yet, a small amountUrban Foraging

of poking around the web or through wild plant books
verifies that cattails, like milkweed, are considered aforager’s treasure trove, offering a variety of food parts
throughout the entire year. (In the cold months, as long as
the ice is not too thick, the brave and the crazy foragers canplunge their hands down into the muck to harvest cattail
rhizomes for starch.) This plant was used heavily by Native
Americans for food, weaving, fires, and medicine. But, try
as I do, I have yet to fall in love with the cattail. Maybe I
just expect too much from a plant that gets so muchattention in the foraging literature. Still, it is an easy-to-findfood source, so I will give it some space and stuff myopinions down there in the muck.
There are a couple of easy parts of cattails to enjoy,
which don’t necessitate a cold plunge into the mud. No partof the plant is poisonous; the trick instead is to isolate theparts of the plants that go down the easiest. Since the leavesof the mature plants were used by Native Americans to
weave thatched huts, it is a good guess that these leaves are
not a good edible. However, the inner core of the youngplants, when they are up to three or four feet tall, is soft andwhite and makes a good addition to hot soups. The stalk78

David Craft

Cattails grow in marshy areas. Urban marshy areas arelikely to be polluted so not great cattail foraging spots.

cores can be obtained by cutting the plant at the base or
firmly yanking the inner leaves straight upward (bend at theknees). The core is less stringy than the outer leaves. You
can try it raw, but it leaves a scratchiness in my throat likeevening primrose roots do. Better to chop it small and mix
it into a soup. To eat the next part, the brown corndoglooking thing at the top that is the most recognizable part ofthe cattail, we have to wait for another month of summer topass. When the plants reach about five feet tall, keep an eye
out for a swelling under the leaves near the top of the plant.

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This is the developing flower spike, and you want toharvest it when it has swollen to a centimeter or so but isstill covered by the leaves. Peeling back the leaves reveals
that there are two parts to the cattail-corndog, the upper
corndog (male) and the lower corndog (female). Both areedible and are best if boiled for 10 minutes and thenseasoned and eaten right off the stick like corn-on-the-cob.
Cattail is a prolific plant and it is fine to harvest lots of it.
They have been here for a long time and they benefit fromthe thinning anyhow.
If you go away for a week in the beginning of summer,changes are everywhere in the local plant life upon yourreturn. The cattails have added a couple inches and the
knotweed plants have probably added even more than that.
Unopened milkweed flower buds, in what I call theirbroccoli stage, have suddenly opened into pink flower
clusters. These flowers do not make it into vases since they
are not striking enough and do not have long supportive
stems, but if they were judged on scent alone, they would
be plucked more often. They are also edible, but since
taking them reduces the number of pods the plant will beara month later, and because the pods are a much better food,80

David Craft

Milkweed at the “broccoli” stage, right before the flowers
emerge. These flower buds can be boiled and eaten.

I do not usually bother with the flowers. If you care to try
some, first dip the flower bunches in boiling water for
about a minute, then run them under cold water and addthem to a salad.
As the milkweed flowers begin to die, I start making
weekly visits to the milkweed patches around town. This is
midsummer: things are growing fast and I do not want to let
the milkweed pods get too big. Milkweed pods are only

81Urban Foraging

good for eating when they are young, up to about two
inches. Beyond that, the fibers inside get too tough. I once
ruined a vegetable casserole thinking the fibers from large
pods might mellow out and turn into some luxurious,
velvety substance. I thought I had read that somewhere.
Well, they didn’t mellow out and because I don’t like tothrow things away I ended up with a pretty chewy
vegetable casserole that took me weeks to work through.
When you gather the young pods, your hands will get
sticky, but often there is a waterway nearby for rinsing.
Good foraging etiquette applies here—take only a small
fraction of all that you find—particularly because this iswhere monarch butterflies lay their eggs. When you get thepods home, boil them for about 10 minutes to drive away
the bitterness. At this point they can be added to stir-fries(they make a good substitute for okra, so I like to use themin Indian curries) and they can also be frozen and reheatedlater. The season is a little short for the milkweed pods, so I
like to freeze some since I consider them a top wild edible.
I imagine that a fun way to prepare them (after the 10minute boil and drain) would be as vegan Jalapeno

82David Craft

Milkweed pods in a range of sizes, from about one to two
inches long. The entire pod is edible after boiling in waterfor 10 minutes and draining.

poppers, with the white seed silk inside acting as a cheese
substitute, but as I have not tried this yet, I leave the details
to the culinary adventurers.
You will continue to see milkweed pods through theremainder of summer and fall, when they crack and let theirseeds out into the wind. But the milkweed as a foodsource is finished until next spring, when the on-the-ballforagers come back to find the first milkweed shoots.
One of the most popular and highly cultivated garden
perennials (over 60,000 reported cultivars!) is the daylily.

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Urban Foraging

Some states list the common daylily as a noxious weed,
which just means that foragers can find it more easily anddon’t need to worry at all about taking it. Unopened, thebuds make an interesting addition to stir-fries and soups,
and the dried, opened flowers are sold in Chinese grocery
stores as golden needles. The tubers and early shoots arealso edible.
A small fraction of the population (around 5%) isreported to be allergic to the plant. It seems as though thejury is still out on this, however, and it could be thatinstead, a small fraction of the cultivars cause allergic
reactions (upset stomach). For the flowers, one trick may be
to remove the stamens and pistils, but this is not aguarantee. Once, I broke up with a girlfriend and ate somedaylilies the same day, and apparently I am in the 5%. That
didn’t make for a very fun night. So, I considered notincluding this plant, but it really does show up everywherearound the city and the many buds each plant produces are
just calling out to be thinned and eaten. So, approach it withcaution: try a bite of a single cooked bud first and gradually
become more adventurous. If you find that you tolerate and84David Craft

enjoy this plant, as people have for thousands of years, youhave at your hands a reliable urban food source.
While daylilies are planted in gardens for their visual
beauty but also happen to be edible, many plants in thegarden that creep in, unwanted by gardeners, are equallyprized for their edibility. Such is purslane, which should beconsidered a prized vegetable and not an aggressive weed.
It is crunchy, mild, and slightly salty. It can toleratecompacted soils and might even prefer them, since I often
find the plant thriving out of sidewalk cracks rather than in
the nicer-looking dirt patches close by. Found all over theworld, purslane is used in Indian cuisine, and aboriginalAustralians use its seeds to make seed cakes. When peopleyank out purslane from their garden beds or spray it withweed killer, they are killing the best vegetable source ofOmega-3 fatty acids out there.
Purslane is a low succulent ground creeper, withreddish stems and shiny, green paddle-shaped leaves. It
likes warmer weather and waits until summer to come out.
The stems and leaves can be plucked all summer and eaten
raw or cooked, although I almost always cook mine since I
gather it in the city and it gives me peace of mind to boil or85

Urban Foraging

sauté plants that I pull right from ground level. Purslane canbe stored by pickling or, even more easily, by boiling it fora few minutes, straining it, and freezing it in mason jars.
Since sometimes people intentionally grow purslane as aground cover, it can be difficult to tell when it is okay tohelp yourself to purslane growing in someone’s garden.
Once while walking down a quiet back street in Boston, I
noticed a well-tended vegetable garden with a pile ofrecently weeded purslane piled up at the edge of the plot.
That was an easy bunch to decide upon. A trickier patch I
came across the same day was purslane growing out of agravel cover. I immediately concluded the gravel cover was
an indication that the owner of the building had tried tocover up the only patch of dirt on his property, to make hislife easier, and so I was ready to hit that purslane patch.
However, friends with me at the time suggested that maybe
the plants were put there on purpose, since they can grow inpoor and rocky soil, and maybe this owner was trying to regreenify his property one small plant at a time. I was
doubtful, but erred on the side of optimism and let thosepurslane plants go.

86David Craft

Purslane growing in some compacted, sandy soil. This
entire plant can be plucked and eaten raw or cooked.

A walk in the summertime through city streets, withnothing but a few plastic grocery bags stuffed in yourpockets, can yield a meal that embraces the randomness offoraging. Maybe you take a longer route from point A topoint B, and as a result you come across a big healthy patchof lamb’s quarters; or you go through a little park and find asmall stand of cattails or an abandoned garden plot full of
purslane. I enjoy these foraging surprises, and I like notknowing what will become the centerpiece of my next
meal. When I have time, I try to take the long way home.

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Weeding Urban Gardens
Garden space in cities is forever in short supply. I got
lucky once: I called the phone number posted at the urban
garden near my apartment and was given a plot right away.
Someone had left the plot just then, and I must have calledat the perfect time. In all of my other attempts though, there
has been too long a wait and I’ve moved before getting thatawaited phone call.
Enter the urban forager, a.k.a. the urban weeder. It
would be easier to list the garden weeds that are inedible,
since most of the plants that people pluck from theirgardens are perfectly fit for the dinner table. Many edible
weeds have fun names, like shepherd’s purse, lamb’s
quarters, lady’s thumb, chickweed, and quickweed.
Shepherd’s purse, with toothed leaves that look vaguely likedandelion, is named for the seed pods that are shaped likehearts, or, to someone more imaginative, like shepherd’s
purses. Two types of sorrel, a lemony-tasting plant, arecommonly found on lawns and in gardens: wood sorrel(called clovers by nearly everyone, although the threeleaves are heart-shaped, which is not true for clovers) and88

David Craft

sheep sorrel (which my nieces and nephew call sour fish
because of the lemony taste and the leaf shape).
Plantain, not related at all to the banana-like tropicalfruit (except that they are both plants), was known as thewhite-man’s footprints by Native Americans because it
came over with the Europeans and followed themaggressively. It is found everywhere there is dirt. Youngspecimens can be eaten raw, but I usually cook this plant or
make a pesto with it since the leaves are pretty tough andstringy. Two types of plantain are common, the broad leaf
variety and the narrow leaf variety, each with about five
stringy veins running parallel from the base of the leaf to its
tip. Chickweed is a crunchy plant that can be eaten in its
entirety—flowers, leaves, stems and all—and makes a good
raw addition to salads. Peppergrass, which does not look
like grass at all, sends up stems in a cactus-like formation.
These stems are covered with peppery seeds that can be
stripped off with the teeth and enjoyed on the spot or saved
for a peppery addition to meals.
If we round out the section on weeding urban gardens
by mentioning that all grasses are edible (although here weare stretching into survival food: only young grasses are89

Urban Foraging

digestible, after which the best thing to do is send themthrough a juicer to make a wheatgrass shot), we conclude
that a large fraction of the unwanted plants in gardens arefine for consumption. Just be sure to pass over any bitternightshade (the pretty plant with red and green berries andpurple and yellow flowers commonly found trailing up
fences—much easier on the eyes than on the palate).

90

-Chapter 9City Fruits
A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; whatelse does a man need to be happy?
Albert EinsteinI

have spent a fair amount of mental effort trying tounderstand why homeowners, when they decide toplant a tree, choose something other than a fruit tree. I
guess I’ve boiled it down to the not-too-revelatory:obtaining food directly from the land around you is not thefirst thing on most people’s minds. Still, a fruit tree versus a
non-fruit tree to me is just too easy. They are both strong

Urban Foraging

and climbable and provide shade and beauty; one gives
sweet food, like apples or cherries or peaches or pears, andthe other does not; and fruit trees are not any more
expensive. In 1863, at Fruitland Nurseries in August,Georgia, P. J. Berckmans was selling apple trees for 40
cents each, plum and quince trees for 50 cents, and 10
dollars would get you 100 grape vines. Maybe if theseprices were still the going rate, people might plant more ofthem. On the bright side, the shortage of fruit trees makes
the hunt more challenging, and challenges keep us all
going. Who wants a utopian fruit-tree-filled society where
all we do is sit around and play music, enjoy great books
and movies, and munch on peaches? No challenge there to
distract us from ourselves.
John Chapman’s life vocation was to plant apple seeds
across Pennsylvania and west across Ohio, Indiana, andIllinois. During his lifetime he became known as JohnnyAppleseed. He gathered seeds from cider mills and, packing
them onto his back, traveled around to help people startorchards. He returned to the mills again in the fall andrepeated the cycle many times throughout his life, checking
back on his previously planted orchards for maintenance92David Craft

and to offer guidance. He wanted for nothing and remained
a homeless wanderer his whole life. By planting so many
apple trees, he provided food, drink, and vinegar—a muchneeded preservative in the 1800s—to the Midwest.
Harming any of God’s creatures was out of the question for
Johnny Appleseed—he practiced Swedenborgianism, aChristian theology which emphasizes leading a good,charitable life. As a result, Appleseed forbade even pruning
apple trees. Of course, if you are mainly growing apples forvinegar and cider, it is not important to have large apples,and so pruning would not be necessary.
In order to produce an apple tree bearing the same
variety of apples as an existing tree, grafting is necessary.
Planting the seeds of a Macintosh will not yield aMacintosh, but some likely highly inferior apple. Grafting
involves cutting a limb from one tree and attaching it toanother tree, which, of course, Johnny Appleseed would not
tolerate. He planted all his trees directly from seeds. The
result was thousands of trees with fruit that today would beconsidered low quality and essentially worthless, althoughfine for making hard cider, which was a very popular

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beverage in the 1700–1800s. John Adams started out every
morning with a mug of it.
We now find ourselves walking down the street on alate summer day, and we spot an apple tree. If this tree is ina yard, it is probably the result of grafting, and therefore
probably has good eating apples. On the other hand, if thistree grows on the side of a river or some other out-of-theway spot, it could be from someone’s tossed apple core, andthen all bets are off. An apple may be plump and bright red,but too sour to enjoy. Or it could be small andunremarkable-looking, but taste sweet. These mystery trees
make for fun guessing, and even if the taste is not great, theapples can still be used for something. When I find a tasty
one, I open up my backpack and pack in as many as I cancarry. Even living in a city with relatively few apple trees, I
can keep a constant supply, having an apple a day from
August to mid-November. I try to stay calm when I see
people buying bananas and oranges during this great fall
fruit period, but it’s hard sometimes, and I find myself
holding back the urge to let them know that there are six
apple trees within six blocks of here currently yielding

94David Craft

perfect apples, fruits that hold no stigma of food-miles orbanana republic exploitation.
Apples store very well in the crisper drawers of yourrefrigerator, but if you find enough, you will need to turn tosome other storage techniques. One method is to dry them.
For this, slice the apples into ¹⁄8-inch slices, put them on acooling rack or a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper,and place them in an oven for a few hours on low heat—around 200°F—with the oven door cracked to let the
moisture out. Or use a food dehydrator. Applesauce is amore common preservation technique, and you can alter
any recipe you find to make it as sweet or spiced as you
like.
Many of the apples found in cities are crab apples,
which is the common term for any wild apple, but inparticular refers to small and sour apples. I wish I had a usefor every crab apple I come across, but I cannot keep up
with them all. There is one variety though, the Hopa Crab,that is the queen of crab apples. Introduced in 1920 by theSouth Dakota Agricultural Experimental Station, it isbright, reddish pink all the way through and makes
beautiful crab-apple jelly and crab-apple butter. Both can be95Urban Foraging

made from the same batch, and no pectin is needed for thejelly since apples come with their own supply of pectin.
Gather a bag full of crab apples—at least enough to fill
up your biggest cooking pot halfway. Put them in the pot
whole and add just enough water to cover the apples. Coverthe pot and bring to a boil, simmering for about 20 minutes.
During this time, the water will become infused with thesweet tartness of the apples and pectin. Pour the apples andliquid through a colander, catching the liquid in another pot.
You will use the liquid to make the jelly, and the apples,
which still have plenty of flavor, to make the apple butter.
For the jelly, add about a cup of sugar to every three cups ofliquid and bring the mixture to jelly stage (which you canread off of a candy thermometer) on a pot on the stove.
Grandmothers and other jelly makers have no need for a
candy thermometer here, but I can’t seem to get it rightwithout one. Either way, at the jelly stage, remove the pot
from the heat and pour the hot liquid carefully into
sterilized canning jars. An easy way to sterilize jars is to fillthem one quarter of the way with water and microwave
them for 10 minutes. Put the lids in boiling water on thestove while the jars are in the microwave.

96David Craft

To make the apple butter, a food mill is necessary toefficiently separate the apple pulp from the seeds and skin.
Send the warm apples through the mill and add some sugar
and spices—cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, ginger, allspice (adeparture from local-only food with this all-out embrace of
the Indian spice trade)—and cook the puree over low heat
for about 10 minutes. Then spoon the crab-apple butter into
the sterilized canning jars. One crab-apple tree often yields
enough crabs to keep you eating crab-apple jelly and butter
every day of the year. I have never seen anyone else
harvesting crab apples, so if you fall in love with this fruit,
you are all set. Substitute local honeys or maple syrup for
white sugar and use mint or rosemary as spices for a more
local version of these goods.
Urban areas contain a variety of cherry trees. In thename of biodiversity and beauty, this is, I suppose, a goodthing, but selfishly, I wish a lot more of them were sourcherries. The sour-cherry tree, which has been in cultivationfor over 2000 years, shows the flowering beauty of the
fruitless flowering cherries so common in urban areas but
then yields plump and delicious fruits in the summertime.
By keeping my eyes peeled, I have been fortunate enough97

Urban Foraging

to find three of these within a couple of miles from where I
live, compared with probably about 100 flowering cherries.
The native cherry species, the black cherry, is acommon urban tree. This species grows quite tall and, while
often full of fruit, goes unnoticed by most people. The fruitsof the black cherry come in large clusters, but the cherries
are quite small, and mostly pit. They often don’t taste great
either, and so I usually don’t harvest them in bulk.

Black cherries hang in clusters. These clusters have been
picked over by birds. Black cherries from different trees
have wildly different tastes, so don’t give up on them if you
first happen upon some lousy ones.

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Sometimes though, I stumble across a black cherry withplump and tasty fruits, and then I eat my fill there and packsome away for later. Boiled briefly and then sent through afood mill, these native blacks produce juice that can add
nice color and tartness to jams, cocktails, or baked goods.
About the same size as a black cherry, and with asimilar color, is the berry of the black nightshade plant.
Eyebrows raise and ears perk up at the mention of eating
this. But black nightshade is merely one of a number ofedible nightshades. Popular nightshades include eggplant,
tomato, and potato. Still, when a plant’s common nameincludes the word nightshade, warning bells go off. This
makes sense: the unripe berries of the black nightshade arein fact poisonous, and the deadly nightshade, a different
plant altogether, is highly toxic. But the ripe berries of theblack nightshade are not poisonous.
In Massachusetts, where I live, I have never found adeadly nightshade plant, although apparently they arearound. Black nightshades, on the other hand, are quite
common, and despite misinformation about this plantdisseminated on the web, this is a perfectly edible plant. It
is eaten all over the world and makes quite a pleasant99

Urban Foraging

snack, or a berry pie if you can find enough. Some people
cook and eat the young leaves, but I like the berries so I
wait for them.
To make sure you have black nightshade and not deadlynightshade, well, a field guide is recommended (although
the field guide will probably tell you to avoid blacknightshade altogether). Briefly though, the key
distinguishing feature that I use is that black nightshadeflowers and berries come in clusters of three or more (thestems are connected at the base). In contrast, deadlynightshade berries appear individually. Black nightshadeleaves are often eaten by insects and thus peppered withsmall holes. The flowers of the black nightshade are whitewith five petals that bend back slightly at the tips.
These details should be confirmed with an illustrated field
guide, but if there are clusters of small berries, if the plant
is a knee-high herbaceous annual, and if the berries start off
a firm green and then ripen to a dark charcoal color—transitioning with pretty green stripes along the way—it islikely a black nightshade. After confirming, taste a berrythat has ripened fully. It should be dark and soft, with a thin100David Craft

Black nightshade berries grow in clusters and ripen at
different times. Here the ones in the foreground are readyto eat, but the rear ones, still green, should not be eaten, as
they are poisonous at this stage.

taut skin. The whole berry is edible raw and tastes a lot likea husk tomato, which is also called ground cherry.
We have gone from black cherries to black nightshadeberries, two fun and lesser-known urban fruits. Meanwhile,as the summer wears on, a real gem is quietly ripening
along every day: the peach.
Urban peaches present an interesting dilemma for theforager. One has to balance between letting them ripen on
the tree to perfection and getting a few before someone else101Urban Foraging

takes them all. This always happens, with every peach tree I
know in the city. One day the peaches are looking pretty
good (and I’m restricting myself to only the fallen ones,
even when they’ve already been half eaten by some othercritter), and the next morning every last one of thosepeaches is gone. Applied mathematicians do research on
this “optimal harvest problem” because it is not clear what
the best strategy is: wait one more day for an increase in thesize and quality of the harvest, or harvest today to avoid thepossible single catastrophic event, like a frost, that destroys
the whole crop. In the urban peach-tree scenario, thecatastrophic event is the onslaught of old ladies sneaking
out in the middle of the night and swiping all of thepeaches. Apparently they don’t get hung up on the math.
Anyhow, grab a few peaches when you find a tree in an
okay spot and don’t neglect the ones that have fallen to theground, because these are usually the ripest and juiciest
ones the tree has to offer. That’s why they have fallen.
Most foraging books do not include apples, pears andpeaches, apparently because everyone knows them, but forme, omitting them would be strange since they constitutethe bulk of the food I forage at summer’s end. A haul of102

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apples or pears provides plenty of great nutrition for weeks.
No one needs a picture to learn an apple, but people can use
the reminder to keep their eyes peeled for fruit trees. The
best wild-urban apple tree I know of gets passed bythousands of cars and hundreds of pedestrians every day,but no one sees it. It sits in a median strip adjacent to an
overpass and across the street from a bike path, and it gives
big, juicy, crisp red apples virtually bug-free for twomonths straight. The point is that you do not know how
good a randomly placed off-the-path apple tree will be until
you try it. Over the decades, magnanimous people haveplanted high-quality varieties in strange places, so keep
your eyes up and walk instead of cycling if you have thetime, since you see a lot more that way.
Another fall fruit, unknown to most people but a great
edible nonetheless, is the Kousa dogwood. Most dogwoods
yield black or red bitter and poisonous berries, but the
Kousa yields a larger orange-colored fruit, about the size ofa super ball, with a distinct hexagonal-tiled pattern on theskin and a circular indent at the center of each hexagon.
The tree is a medium shrub and usually a lot of the fruits
are easily reached by hand. The fruits are reddish orange

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Early Kousa dogwood fruits. These are not ripe yet, since
they are still green, but when they get reddish orange andsoft, they will be ready for eating. Just avoid the hard
seeds inside.

and, when ripe, a bit soft to the touch. The skin itself isgritty and a little bitter, which most people findobjectionable, but I eat the fruits whole, just being careful
to avoid and spit out the rock-hard seeds within. The inside
is a soft, orange flesh that is sweet. As with lots of plants
though, the taste of the fruit differs dramatically from tree
to tree, and sometimes the fruit is dry and bitter and not
worth eating even when ripe. If those are the first Kousa
fruits you find, you will not have the motivation to try them104

David Craft

Whole-Wheat Kousa Muffinswith Chocolate Chips½ cup vegetable oil¾ cup brown sugar
1 cup Kousa dogwood puree
1 ½ cups whole wheat-flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon½ cup chocolate chips
Spray mini muffin tins with vegetable oil. Beat together
the oil and sugar and mix in the Kousa puree (instructions
for making the puree can be found in the text, just below
this recipe). In a separate bowl, mix flour, baking soda,
and cinnamon. Combine all ingredients in a large bowl
until just mixed. Pour the batter into the muffin tins. Bakeat 350°F for about 20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted
in the center comes out clean.
again, but you should. Usually Kousa fruits are good,occasionally they are very good, and sometimes they areeven seedless.

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Kousa dogwood is planted as an ornamental, and theowners typically have no idea that its fruits are edible.
Native to Eastern Asia, this tree is now widespread acrossthe United States. In early autumn, a healthy tree can beloaded with easy-to-gather fruits. And so, as with many
foraged items, there is a desire to come up with some way
to use the fruits en masse. Sending freshly picked, ripe
fruits through a food mill removes all of the seeds and mostof the skin, producing Kousa puree, which is orange andgoopy and not too attractive, reminiscent either of babyfood or uni (sea urchin roe), depending on your frame ofreference. But it makes a great snack when turned into
whole-wheat Kousa muffins with chocolate chips. Other
imaginative uses are merely kitchen experiments away.

106David Craft

Schnapps
Schnapps is made by infusing plant matter in vodka,
and adding schnapps-making to your activity roster
greatly expands the number of forageable plants on yourlist. One might not think that young oak branches or thesoft, gray pussy-willow catkins have much foraging value,
but steep these in vodka for a few months and voila: adistinct aperitif and a fun guessing game for your guests.
Other common urban plants you can use for making
schnapps include hawthorns, crab apples, basil, dandelion
flowers and roots, linden and rose flowers, and SaintJohn’s-wort, which makes one of the finest kinds ofschnapps there is. Saint-John’s-wort is a knee-high plantwith yellow flowers, which have tiny translucent dots onthem that you can see if you hold the plant up to the sun.
The leaves have these dots too. Over the thousands ofyears that the Danes and the Germans and the Swedes
have been infusing grain alcohols, probably every plant
has been tried, and instructions—which basically amountto how long you infuse the vodka and how long you let theinfusion sit after straining out the plant matter—abound on

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the web. The general rule is that flowers need only a few
days for infusion and then up to a couple of weeks formellowing time. Fruits, on the other hand, take months,
exceeded only by oak schnapps, the true test of patience,
which steeps for one year and then mellows for anothersix months. An online search for any of these plants (plushundreds of others) together with the word “schnapps”
will provide the details. Happy foraging, and bottoms up!

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-Chapter 10Going After the Acorns,
Maybe a Little NutsF

all is the time of fruits and nuts. Although mostchestnuts in America were wiped out in the early
20th century by a fungus, there are still many nut
trees growing in the States. Black walnuts, hickories, andacorns make up the primary nuts foragers go after. In thecities, we focus on the acorn, the nut of the oak tree. City
arborists prefer the hard oak species over the white oaks,
and the common opinion is that these hard oak acorns havemore tannins and thus require more processing to remove
the bitterness, but this is not supported by a careful
investigation. The truth is that all acorns require a fairamount of processing, and rather than providing a generalUrban Foraging

rule, each acorn batch should instead be tasted along theway to figure out how much boiling and straining needs tobe done to make the acorns palatable. It is the processing
required that keeps acorns from being a popular food, butwhen the world collapses, acorns of all types will surge in
popularity. For now, acorns are kicked around on biketrails, hoarded away by squirrels, gobbled down whole bygeese, but rarely collected and eaten by humans, eventhough they constitute an easy-to-identify and plentiful
food source. Maybe one day a cultivar will be produced
that yields big edible acorns requiring no leaching. Until
then, we deal with acorns as follows.
Gather acorns that have fallen to the ground. Take a lotof them and, sometime in the next few days, set up a spotwith a hard surface, a couple of bowls, a hammer (or aDavebilt nutcracker, a good choice for acorns), some music,
and as many friends as you can convince to help. Eachacorn needs a solid whack, enough to split the shell but not
to pulverize the nut meat inside. Then, the nut meat can beseparated from the shells. The right style of hammering andsplitting will make it so that you can generally get the acorn
meat out of the shell without too much effort. (If an acorn

110David Craft

seems like it will be a difficult one, I just throw it awaysince the bowl of acorns sitting in front of me is usually
pretty daunting.) Meanwhile, bring a very large pot of water
to boil. This will serve as the hot water reserve; the acorns
need to be boiled in several changes of water to leach out
the tannins. Crush the acorns by chopping them coarsely ina food processor or by hand. This will expose more surface
area and thus get the tannins out faster, though it will stilltake a while. In a smaller pot, one that easily fits all of youracorns, cover them with twice as much hot water and boil
for 10 minutes. Strain and repeat this process about fivetimes. Each time, the water should turn less brown as thetannins leach out. After the final boil, place the acorns on a
cookie sheet and heat in an oven on low heat, about 200°F,
for a couple of hours to thoroughly dry them (if you were to
dry them out in the sun, squirrels would come for a snack).
Or you could freeze them in mason jars without drying. The
acorn meats can then be ground into a flour or salted andused for a snack. I have also skipped the toasting process
and added the boiled acorns directly to soups.
In some years, the number of acorns produced by oaktrees skyrockets. These are called mast years, mast being

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the botanical word for fruit produced by woody plants. An
extreme example of a mast year is a bamboo species innortheastern India that flowers and fruits once every 48
years. Oak trees mast much more frequently, and themechanism by which they do so is worth describing, being
one of those astounding evolutionary explanations.
First, a related tangent. I once asked a friend of mine,
who at the time made a living playing online poker, how togo from being just a good poker player to one who could
make a reliable income of it. What was his secret? Hethought for a moment and said, “Randomization.”
Apparently, you need to be able to randomize your play sothat the other players do not know if you are bluffing or
not. So, after mastering the methods in the poker books,
you need to become an expert at mentally flipping coins to
produce unpredictable variation in your game. As anotherexample, take the game rock-paper-scissors. Imagine you
are on a deserted island with someone, and you need abreak from foraging. You might decide to play a few weeks
of rock-paper-scissors. Eventually, assuming your opponent
is moderately sharp, the only way you won’t lose most of
the time is if you play randomly. Otherwise, your opponent

112David Craft

will be able to predict what you will do and therefore beatyou.
Oak acorn production is an example of a randomized
strategy that has been evolutionarily selected for. If oaktrees produced the same number of acorns each year, thepopulation of forest creatures that relies on acorns as a
primary food source, like squirrels, could stabilize to a levelsuch that all the acorns would be eaten every year. Even if
the oaks produced a big crop every 5th year or something,
critters would adapt to this. Therefore, the only effective
way for oaks to ensure an advantage is to occasionallyproduce a surprise crop so big that there are not enoughsquirrels to eat all the acorns. But how does an oak tree
produce a surprise crop? By relying on the random timingof the last spring frost. Oaks flower fairly early in spring,and if a frost happens after they flower, most of the flowers
die before getting fertilized, and therefore those flowers do
not mature into acorns. Mast years occur when there is no
frost after the oak flowers appear, in which case most of theflowers mature into acorns. Until nature evolves squirrels
that can accurately forecast weather years in advance, this113

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is a pretty effective way to make the occasional
unpredictable bumper crop of acorns.
Acorns are the most labor-intensive food item in thisbook. But they are everywhere, and some years they appear
in great quantities. They provide a good reason for getting
together with friends, and the smell and taste of properly
leached and roasted acorns makes the time well spent.

By grinding shelled acorns before boiling, you can speed
up the leaching process.

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Acorn Whole-Wheat Bread2 ½ cups whole-wheat flour
1 cup water
1 packet yeast
1 tablespoon vital wheat gluten½ cup leached and coarsely ground acorns
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon molasses, honey, or maple syrup
Method 1: Put all ingredients in a bread machine and hit
Start.
Method 2: Mix all ingredients until uniform, then kneadon a floured surface for 15 minutes, adding flour as
needed. Put in a greased bowl and let rise, lightly covered
with a damp cloth, for a few hours. Punch down and form
into one or two loaves, shape into a boule, or place into
loaf pans. Let rise for another hour, and then bake in a
350°F oven for 30 minutes.

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-Chapter 11Mushrooms
Because some species are deadly poisonous we shunthem all. But this makes no more sense than to give up
swimming because there are sharks in the ocean; for inforgoing the delights of wild mushroom eating we areunnecessarily depriving ourselves of a truly noble
pleasure...Some of the most delicious varieties of wildmushroom are so distinctive in their appearance, so
absolutely unmistakable for any other variety, that they
can be picked and eaten without the slightest qualm...
Mushroom hunting can, indeed, be far safer than ocean
swimming. For in the ocean it is the shark, not you, whoUrban Foraging

selects the menu; and while the shark is notoriously
catholic in his tastes, you can pick and choose.
James Nathan Miller, Harper’s Magazine, 1962

M

ushrooms scare people more than red berries
scare people. And this is perfectly reasonable
since there are a few mushrooms out there thatcan cause a quick death. Stories of mushroom poisonings
make great news items, and some have even been passed
down for centuries. In 1767, in a suburb northeast of Paris,
the composer Johann Schobert went mushrooming with hisfamily and took back some mushrooms for his chef to cook.
The chef refused since he suspected they were poisonous,
and after another chef also refused, Schobert made a soupof them himself. For Schobert and his wife and one of theirchildren, this was their last meal.
These stories are good reminders that mushrooms
should be taken seriously, but need not be warnings to stayclear. There are a few common mushrooms that are very
easy to identify, with no deadly lookalikes, that provide an
excellent meal.

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Fall is the prime time for mushrooms. Some
mushrooms are around more in the summer, and morels
come up in the spring, but most wait for the cooler, damp
days of autumn before popping up. Most kinds ofmushrooms are saprophytic—they feed off decayingorganic matter—and as such, the woods is the place to go
mushroom hunting. And hunting it is, for unlike foraging
for plants, which can be found in the same place year afteryear, the search for mushrooms involves something moreakin to hunting, with your eyes peeled, never quite knowing
when one will show up. Places to look in urban areas
include grassy spots, especially public parks with large
trees. It is worth repeating the obvious: NEVER eat amushroom (and this goes for plants too) unless you are sureof what it is and you know it is safe to eat. Even then, if it isyour first time eating it, eat only a little to make sure you
don’t have allergic reactions to it (also good advice for the
first time you eat any new plant).
The hen-of-the-woods, Grifola frondosa, is themushroom I hunt for the most during the fall. One hen canbe five pounds or more, and I usually end up pickling or
freezing large portions of the ones I find. The place to look

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for hens is at the base of large oak trees, alive or dead. The
mushrooms are nestled right into the base of the tree andare ruffled with many layers. Hens are colored anywherefrom yellowish to light brown to a dark gray on top, andpaler underneath. They are polypores, which means thatinstead of the gills you find on the underside of familiar
supermarket mushrooms such as the portobello, they havepacked-together tubes, or pores, on their undersides.
Depending on where and when you find a hen, it canrequire a fair amount of cleaning since bugs find their way
into the nooks. My culinary preparation technique is thesame for all mushrooms that I cover in this book: thinly
chop and fry with olive oil, garlic, and salt over high heat
for about 5 minutes. If I have too many to eat in one meal, I
also pickle them by boiling them for 15 minutes in equalparts water and vinegar, adding whatever pickling spices
are in my cabinet at the time (like black peppercorns, dill,fennel seeds, tansy flower heads, and northern bay leaves)and then jarring the mixture.§§ I will pickle pretty much anything using this same technique:burdock root, evening primrose root, purslane. Japaneseknotweed with red pepper flakes makes a great pickle. Once,120

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A small chicken mushroom, bright yellow, up high in anold, dead tree.

Another polypore that provides a large meal is thechicken mushroom. This one likes large hardwoods(such as oak or ash) with some damage, like a missing
limb. The tree may be upright or fallen down. The chickenmushroom grows right off the side of the tree and consists
a neighbor told me he had gotten his hands on a case ofsummer squash and wondered if I “could use it.” It wassummer squash pickles all winter long.

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Urban Foragingof shelves, which are orange on the upper side and yellow
underneath. Sometimes a chicken high up in a tree presents
a formidable climbing challenge, which I always like since
it adds an extra layer of adventure and survival skill toforaging. I also jump fences sometimes since it feels cooler
than walking around them.
The chicken mushroom is called so because its flesh
strongly resembles white meat in texture, and if prepared ina chicken-like way, you might be able to fool some people.
It can also be pickled or stir-fried and frozen.
Sticking with mushrooms named after other foods, theoyster mushroom is another common mushroom growing
on dead wood. Oysters like colder weather and can befound in spring and fall. A good place to look for them is on
fallen trees and log piles. I found some once on theoutskirts of an urban cemetery, where the groundskeepers
had piled up some chopped down trees. Since oyster
mushrooms can be easily cultivated, they are sold in storesand can therefore be easily learned. The ones found in thewild are usually not quite as white, but structurally they are
the same.

122David Craft

Some great looking oyster mushrooms growing in theirusual habitat, on fallen trees.

The puffball is another edible mushroom that is very
easy to identify. There are different types of puffballs, somegrowing into a very large white ball, and others staying
smaller than a golf ball. The rule is: if a puffball is white all
the way through and soft, like a marshmallow, it is edible.
Some puffballs found in the woods are purplish black
inside, and they should definitely not be eaten. Some young
puffballs are white but hard—these should also be avoided
because they are poisonous. Slice puffballs through to123Urban Foraging

check the inside when you find them (although you will beslicing them for cooking when you get home, it’s better toSometimes puffballs come very large. This one looked justlike the moon. As long as they are white all the way
through, you can eat them. If you find such a giant
puffball, you will have a chance to try many variations in
the kitchen. Here are two ideas to get you started: breaded
and fried and served with tomato sauce, or boiled and thenwhipped into an herbed mushroom pâté.

avoid the hassle of bringing back poisonous mushrooms).
Another possible misidentification is to grab a white124

David Craft

mushroom and assume it is a puffball when really it is ayoung white mushroom, possibly even a deadly one such as
an Amanita. This is again easily avoided by slicing themushroom cleanly through. A puffball has uniform whiteflesh with no embryonic mushroom form visible. If you
slice open a young amanita, however, you’ll see thebeginnings of a regular-looking mushroom. The puffballdoes not grow up to become a “regular” mushroom withgills, nor is it a polypore. The entire flesh of the puffballturns into spores, and when the mushroom is mature, ananimal foot or a big drop of rain will make it puff out
smoky clouds of spores. At this stage the puffball is nolonger edible, but it is lots of fun to step on and poke, aslong as the spore puff is not inhaled. The puffball is mild
and its soft texture makes it good for frying up like tofu.
The next few mushrooms I will briefly mention require
a little more caution as they are not quite as fool-proof as
the hens, chickens, and puffballs. Still, they are common (Ifind them within city limits), and they are not too difficult
to identify. These are the light-bottomed boletes, themeadow and the horse mushrooms (Agaricus sp.), and thewine caps (Stropharia rugosoannulata). These are all125Urban Foraging

mushrooms of the familiar “stem and cap” type, that is,what you would draw if you were told to draw a mushroom.
Light-bottomed boletes, the most famous of which is the
porcini mushroom (Boletus edulis), are a group ofmushrooms with packed tubes on the underside of theircaps (like hens and chickens) rather than gills. If you findsuch a mushroom, check if it passes the following two tests:
1) the flesh doesn’t turn a darker color when you bruise or
scrape it and 2) a small bite of it is not bitter (bitter ones
look a little pinkish too, but this is sometimes hard to
notice). If it passes the tests, then it is probably a good
edible mushroom. No bolete will kill you, unless of course
it is undocumented and has never been found before, andthen anything is possible. The mushroom literature isslightly off-putting regarding the edibility of even known
species: a large fraction of them are to this day labeled“unknown.” But to dwell on this is to get scared about
mushrooming again, so let’s move on. I find edible boletes
in the city in grassy areas with large trees. Along with themushrooms, I usually find a few foragers from Eastern
Europe and Russia out there as well.

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Agaricus species, specifically the horse and themeadow mushrooms, are the same genus as the mostpopular mushroom consumed in the U.S.: the button
mushroom on the store shelves. With a white cap andbrown gills underneath, this mushroom grows on lawns andcut fields. These mushrooms are relatively easy to identify,
given our familiarity with the button mushroom, except thatthe ones we find in the wild may be bigger because by thetime we see them they are probably more grown up. Brown
gills on the underside are very important though, because
white mushrooms with white gills could be one of thedeadly kinds. Check with an expert—perhaps someone
from your local mycological club.
The last mushroom I want to mention is the wine cap,
which is structurally similar to the Agaricus but has adifferent coloring and grows in a different setting. Wine
caps have a darkish top, burgundy-colored when young andthen becoming light brownish with lilac-colored gills. They
grow in mulch, and they usually appear in large numbers,
as opposed to the Agaricus, which I often find as
singletons. The taste of wine caps is not remarkable, and I
usually end up throwing them in a soup. However, in127Urban Foraging

heavily mulched areas (like an arboretum), they can comeup in large numbers and provide a good mushroom harvest.
For mushrooms and for wild plants in general, a bit ofadvice: be careful and be thorough, but don’t be so timidthat you forgo all the yummy edibles the natural world has
to offer.

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-Chapter 12Fall Roots and a Brief Reappearanceof Spring GreensBurdock is the granddaddy of bulky, nutritious fallroots. Compared to dealing with acorns,
harvesting and preparing burdock root is a walk inthe park, even though it still takes a bit of work to get one
out of the ground. Only if the ground is very soft and sandy
have I ever been able to yank up a burdock root without
using a shovel.
Burdock is a common, large weed, with burrs that stick
to clothing with great tenacity. This feature makes the plant
fairly easy to identify—if you are ambling through a fieldor along a roadside and find a number of round burrs stuck

Urban Foraging

to you, you’ve brushed by a burdock plant. This is themechanism of seed dispersal for this plant. Burrs attach to apassing animal and eventually break free far away. In thehuman’s case, they don’t fall off, so you are left todisentangle each and every one of them. Even as I type this,I see some in my shoelaces that I have not yet gotten
around to removing.
Wild Vegetable Coconut Curry¼ cup vegetable oil
1 tablespoon mustard seeds
1 ½ teaspoons fresh grated ginger
3 cloves garlic
1 large white or yellow onion, thinly sliced
1 medium potato, cubed
2 carrots, sliced into ¼-inch discs
2 green chiles, with the seeds removed
2 ½ teaspoons ground coriander¼ teaspoon turmeric¼ teaspoon paprika
2 ½ teaspoons ground cumin
2 teaspoons salt

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3 cups mixed wild vegetables such as thinly sliced
burdock root, Japanese knotweed, milkweed shoots or
pods (pre-boiled for 10 minutes, drained), pokeweed(boiled for 5 minutes, drained, and then boiled foranother 5 minutes and drained again), purslane, wildmushrooms
1 ½ cups coconut milk
Fresh chopped cilantro for garnish
In a splash of oil, fry the mustard seeds for a few minutes
until they pop. Add ginger, garlic, onions, potatoes,
carrots, chiles, burdock root if using it, and the rest of theoil. Fry for a few minutes, then add all spices and salt. Add
all wild vegetables and coconut milk and simmer, covered,for about 10 minutes. Serve with brown basmati rice orquinoa and garnish with cilantro.
In the 1940s, George de Mestral was on a hunting
expedition with his dog in the Alps. After some run-ins withburdock, he placed some under a microscope to see how theburrs worked and then spent the next decade figuring out
how to mass-produce a synthetic version, which became
Velcro.

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It is a good bet that the first several times you harvest
burdock root, you will come away with burdock burrs allover your clothes. Even when I try to avoid the burrs, I get
so caught up in digging out the root that I get burred. The
root of the burdock plant is the best part for eating. You canboil young leaves in spring if you are desperate for food, or
enjoy the much tastier peeled leaf petioles (the stems thatrun up the leaf centers) and main stalk in early summer, but
the roots in autumn are the part that I covet. Burdock is abiennial (it has a two-year life cycle), and if the plant is in
its first year, which is before it produces its burrs, any timeis okay for foraging the root. However, it will be the largest
after a summer’s worth of fattening, which is why I wait
until fall.
As the foraging myth goes, as long as you are willing tokeep digging down, the burdock root will keep going. From
my experience, this is true; I don’t think I’ve ever uneartheda burdock root in its entirety. But this is okay for several
reasons. First and foremost, we are urban foragers, so wehave lots going on: dinners, art gallery openings, yoga
classes, film screenings. We don’t have time to get thatwhole burdock root. Even when I bring a full-size shovel, I

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still do not have the patience to get out much of the root.
The roots are as tenacious at staying in the ground as theburrs are at clinging to your clothes. I dig down six inches
or so, then get frustrated, break off the root, and take what I
get. The other part goes to Ghost Moth larvae, and maybe,given the other strengths of this plant, there is enough left
for it to send up a new plant in the spring.
For preparing the burdock root, I use an abrasive sideof a sponge to get the dirt off, but I do not peel it. Then,after cleaning, I slice up the root and boil it or pan-fry itwith a cover on, to keep it moist. There are lots of recipeson the web for burdock root since it is commonly used inJapanese cooking (it also goes by the name of gobo root)and has gained in popularity with the macrobiotic
movement. I occasionally see it for sale at Whole Foods.
Pickling burdock root is a good way to store it. To do this,chop cleaned burdock root into bite-size pieces, and boil
them in a mixture of half vinegar and half water for about
10 minutes with some salt and spices of your choosing.
Then pour the entire mixture into sterilized canning jars.
These are hearty enough to stand on their own, and eatingthem brings back the earthy taste of fall all winter long.

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Burdock root is the last food of the year I go after withfull intention. During this time of year I keep a spade in mybackpack, but when I set aside time specifically to forage
burdock root, I bring a shovel (even if this means strapping
it precariously to my bicycle). What often happens thoughis that I come back with bags full of greens and otherthings. Late fall sees a resurgence of many “spring” greens,such as dandelions, the greens of daisies, curly dock, andplenty of garlic mustard weed. These plants come back out
in the fall, after the trees overhead have lost their leaves, totake advantage of the unobstructed sunlight once again
before the freezing weather returns.
In the spring I almost always pass over garlic mustard
weed leaves since there are too many other exciting things
coming up that taste much better. But a few weeks later inthe spring, when the stalk of garlic mustard is about 8
inches tall and the flower buds are present but not open yet,I pick those stalks, strip them of their leaves, and enjoy
them on the spot. They are crunchy and potent and I dub
them health sticks to coax my companions to eat them. But
they shouldn't need coaxing: garlic mustard is one of themost nutritious plants there is and the stalks are crunchy

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with a complex garlicky flavor, without the long aftertasteof actual garlic.
In the fall, new leaves of garlic mustard emerge. Whilefar inferior to the stems of mid-spring, there is far less tochoose from in late fall, so I will occasionally gather abunch of it for a pesto. The entire plant is edible, including
the roots, which can also go into the pesto. Nobody will be
mad at you for taking it in its entirety since it is consideredan aggressive invasive species. It grows in shady places, by
the base of large trees, and it is very common in the woods.
Once you learn it you will see it everywhere.

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-Chapter 13Wintertime
Every resident of Sarajevo is very close to an ideal
macrobiotician; ours is a city of slender people, areal role model for the troubled West. The secret toa perfect body is living in a city under siege. When
combined with rice and well seasoned, everything
becomes edible. In spring, summer, and fall, leaves
found in parks, gardens, fields, and hills are used
as ingredients. We eat a precious mix of wild
imagination.
John Updike, Harper’s Magazine, 1993T

he benefits of finding and eating wild foods go
beyond the added nutrition and the reduced
grocery bills. In fact, if I were to add up my timeUrban Foraging

spent foraging, it would not make economic sense. That’s
okay though, because economic is a terrible word by which
to judge the passing of time. On the contrary, how we pass
our time is everything, and so spending time well (andhelping others do the same) should be the goal itself.
Money is certainly a way to potentially help achieve thisgoal (more money could lead to more leisure time), but I
mostly observe a compulsion for acquiring money not tothat end, but seemingly for the sake of having money itself.
Physical exercise and a heightened awareness of thenatural world are two huge benefits that come fromforaging. John Adams was a vocal advocate of the daily
walk. He would stroll for a couple of miles every day,except when he got sick, and then he would try to make it
closer to five miles. All of the sitting we do runs counter towhat our bodies have evolved for. We have evolved to begood tree climbers and runners and walkers, and foraging
can tap into each of these, although hopefully there is noneed to run. Most modern humans are far away from using
these physical capabilities, or even desiring to—notice how
people stop all physical exertion the moment they set footon an escalator.

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For me, every time I open a newspaper and read about
the latest world disasters, political mischief, and money- or
power-grabbing schemes, I do not feel better. I feel worseand disappointed to be living in a world where 1) those
types of things happen all the time and 2) people seem to be
more interested in reading about these events than anythingelse, even though there is no indication that things wereever different or will ever be different. In my view, a walkoutside, with plenty of stops to smell (and eat!) the roses
and pauses to have a look at all the other plants, is a muchbetter way to pass the time. Perhaps Henry David Thoreau
said it best:
I plod along, thinking what a miserable world this is andwhat miserable fellows we that inhabit it, wondering
what it is tempts men to live in it; but anon I leave thetowns behind and am lost in some boundless heath, andlife becomes gradually more tolerable, if not evenglorious.

Urban foraging is a way to make life more tolerable without
having to leave the towns.
Even the most sophisticated inventions (computers,
airplanes, gene sequencers) pale in comparison to thecomplexity of any plant. We haven’t yet succeeded in

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technologically creating life, because it is still too difficult.
Even if we do, it will be something much simpler than aplant. Attention to plants, and to life in general, sets off a
stream of pure wonder and amazement that front page
headlines never produce in me.
Maple Sugaring
As the winter winds down and days above freezing
start to come regularly, you can jump-start the foraging
season by tapping some city maple trees. Stake out acouple of maple trees when they still have their leaves.
Any maple will do, but a large old sugar maple will be thebest. Most urban maple trees are specimens of the Norway
maple, loved by city planners but hated byenvironmentalists because of its invasive properties. Thesemaples won’t yield a sap with as high a sugar content asother kinds of maples, but they will still provide you withyour own homemade maple syrup.
Making maple syrup requires two steps: collecting thesap from the trees and boiling it to eliminate most of thewater. Collecting the sap requires a drill, some cleaned

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one-gallon plastic milk containers, and some maple taps
(called spiles). A spile is nothing more than a metal orwooden spigot, which is simply a cylinder with a holebored out of it. You can purchase these online and reuse
them from year to year. I bought the smallest ones in thesmallest quantity I could get, and they have worked out
fine. You could also bore out your own from a branch ofwood or a dowel. Make sure to taper it slightly to snugly
fit into the hole you will drill in the tree. In each milk
container, cut a small hole into the upper part opposite thehandle. The taps I purchased have a small lip on them,which makes it possible to hang the milk containers fromthem without needing to secure the buckets with string.
Drill a small horizontal hole at about waist level about
an inch into the tree. The hole should be slightly smaller
than the tap. Gently set in the tap with a hammer. If theweather conditions are right, within seconds you may evenstart to see the sap dripping out. Put your bucket on andcheck back in eight hours or so to see how you are doing.
When sap is flowing well, which happens for a few weeks,
the buckets can fill up once a day. The sap looks likewater, but it is slightly sweet to the taste.

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Back in the kitchen, open your windows and turn yourstove vent on if you have one, and start boiling down thesap. Without proper ventilation, your stove area is boundto get a little sticky from the evaporation process. Your sap
should be boiled down until it is thick and a bubbly froth
emerges, but there is no magic time to stop. In fact, you
could stop when it is still quite watery, particularly if you
plan to use it in oatmeal or some other porridge. But if you
are thinking about pancakes and such, you will end up
boiling down to a ratio of about 30 to 1. After boiling,pour the syrup into sterilized mason jars and seal yourvegan sweet source for later enjoyment.
A word on tree selection: depending on where you
live, it may be against city rules to tap public maple trees.
It might be possible to get permission by assuring thetown that maple tapping does not harm the trees. Like
most organisms in nature, trees are well-equipped tohandle minor damage. I don’t bother asking because I
think the idea of obtaining local foods at no harm toanyone should be encouraged and should not besomething that one has to petition for. If we get to a point

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where too many people are tapping the urban maple trees,
we’ve made some real “progress”—which of course inthis context means reverting to what the Native Americans
were doing for thousands of years—and then maybe it
would be time for some legislation on restricting maple
tapping.

Maple sugaring with simple equipment: two plastic gallon
buckets, two metal taps, and a maple tree in a town park.
The sap looks like water but tastes slightly sweet, and thenboils down to maple syrup.

Aside from the scientific and cultural arguments forpaying more attention to the natural world, there is also amore instinctual benefit. It is interesting that the word dirty
has taken on a solidly negative connotation, given that dirt

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is of central importance for all of the land-based foods weeat. Cultures whose connection to the land is an obvious
part of daily life, such as Native American cultures, praise
the land when it gives them food. I cannot make any claims
about why digging in the dirt and harvesting your own foodis so inwardly satisfying, but I believe it is related to thefact that this is what most humans have done for all but thelast thousand years or so. For me, collecting the plants andeating them is already enough, and I do not feel the need touse primitive skills to preserve and prepare all the foods I
find. If a food processor or freezer can be helpful, I use itwith no qualms, and I think it is important to keep abalanced attitude on things like this. Our society places
great emphasis on people who make up their mind and stick
to it, and this means that being something like a 90%
vegetarian, or an agnostic, is frowned upon. Someone who
forages food but also buys coffee from Africa, olive oilfrom Italy, and wine from Chile—and uses a microwave tocook his watercress—may be considered hypocritical.
However, it is more self-sustaining to be conscious of thecontinual choices we make (the food we eat, where our144

David Craft

clothes come from, how we treat others), and to bebalanced about our decisions.
For those of us in colder climates, foraging for the year
tapers off when the frosts come and the ground freezes.§ In
a way, this is somewhat of a relief to me, as I sometimes goa little overboard during foraging season and I need abreak. It is calming to walk the same walks in winter andnot be constantly on the lookout for something edible.
Still, foraging is never far removed from my life during
the winter. For morning oatmeal, there are frozen
juneberries, blackberries, and black locust flowers, as well
as jarred apple butter. There are dried apples for afternoon
snacks and pickled mushrooms and burdock root for dinner.
Japanese knotweed is tucked away in bags in the freezer
and adds a spring tang to winter soups, perhaps served withwarm acorn bread. And in the evening, over a foraging§ Upon initially hearing the phrase urban foraging, many
assume this to be another name for dumpster diving.
Dumpster diving is a type of modern-day foraging. It adds
considerably to the urban foraging arsenal while at the sametime turning foraging into a year-round activity. For theskeptics, I suggest taking a peek at Waste: Uncovering the
Global Food Scandal, by Tristram Stuart.

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book to get me stirred up for next year’s finds, a cup oflinden tea, and maybe a nip of hawthorn schnapps, arefitting companions.
If your foraging career starts in winter with some booksuch as this one, spend lots of time staring at the pictures ofthe plants and read about where they like to grow. It may be
hard to believe, but these plants will pop up exactly where
and when they are supposed to. Get them in your mind, andsoon enough, when the first spring thaws warm up the land,
they will sprout up and grace your plate and your soul formany years to come.

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Index
acorn 109-115, 129, 145
Agaricus...........125-127
Amelanchier canadensis...................................52
Artemisia...................74
autumn olive........67, 70
basswood.....................5
beach plum................69
beefsteak mushroom. 60
bitter nightshade........90
black cherry...............98
black locust. .47-56, 145
black nightshade........99
blackberry...........53, 75
Boletus edulis..........126
burdock.....32, 129-134,
145
burdock.....................30
cantaloupe.................72
cattails.......................77chicken mushroom.121122
chickweed.................88

chicory......................56
clover..................74, 88
crab apples....73, 95-97,
107
curly dock.....12, 36-40,
134
dandelion. .6, 33-36, 88,
107, 134
daylily............57, 83-84
deadly nightshade.....99
evening primrose......12,25-29, 79
fiddlehead ferns.........61
Fire Island.................69
Fistulina hepatica......60
garlic mustard weed 134
George de Mestral...131
golden needles...........84
goldenrod..................73
goosefoot...................38
grape leaves...65-66, 77
Grifola frondosa......119

hen-of-the-woods.....44,
119
Henry David Thoreau.................................139
Hopa crab..................95
horse mushroom......125
Japanese knotweed...13,
17
Johan Schobert .......118
Johnny Appleseed.....92
juneberry.............50, 52
kelp............................71
Kousa dogwood.....103105
lamb's quarters....38-42,
87-88
lady's thumb........41, 88
lilac............................57
linden 3-10, 22, 51, 107,
146
Martha's Vineyard.....63
mast year..........111-112
Miles Standish...........59
milkweed. 12-13, 22-24,
57, 65, 78, 80-83, 131
morels........................60

mugwort....................74
mulberry..............52-55
mushrooms..............117
nasturtium.................56
onions....6-8, 16, 39, 66
oyster mushroom.....122
peach.................92, 102
peppergrass...............89
pineapple weed.........74
plantain......................89
pokeweed......12, 18-22,
131
protein.......................39
puffball.......44, 123-125
purslane.....................85
pussy-willow...........107
Queen Anne's Lace....30
quickweed.................88
ramps.............59, 62-64
raspberry...................75
roses..........................56
schnapps..................107
shepherd's purse........88
sorrel....................88-89
Stropharia
rugosoannulata........125

Taraxacum officinale.33
Tilia americana............9
velcro.......................131
vetch..........................56
watercress..................63

wild carrot............30-31
wild leeks..................64
wild mint...................73
wine-caps................125