I just eat other people's pickled fiddlehead ferns. Some varieties of ferns are used in cough syrups and for asthma. We also fried and salted the very early milkweed pods, before they got fuzz in them, for a kind of natural chip. I'm not sure why. They weren't very good.
Milkweed is used for kidney and gallstone problems.
When spring comes, stick an herb or several into the ground. They'll reward you by growing profusely and making a green place for you. This is a monumental website. The owner of the site has been gathering, since 1995, every bit of information that he can about mythology and folklore world-wide, and publishing it in his online encyclopedia, Encyclopedia Mythica. Go to this site.