Wild Food Farmer
Mighty Morels & Lip-Smacking Smilax
The woods and fields of American farms are full of wild edible plants and gourmet mushrooms. They’re like an unplanned, untended, yet highly productive crop waiting to be harvested. These are the same free feral foods that used to sustain tens of millions of Native Americans. It’s just a matter of learning to identify a few of these edibles and then, on a day that’s too wet to plow, grabbing a basket, a beer and your dog and hitting the woods and fields of your own land.
I think any hobby farmer would be glad to have high-dollar perennial crops that are: 1. drought-resistant and need no irrigation;
2. do not need any herbicides, pesticides or fungicides – ever;
3. grow best without fertilizers of any kind;
4. come back every year without plowing or planting; 5. never need mulch; and
6. never need weeding.
The only expense required is a bit of education and a few collection tools such as baskets, buckets and a knife. There are plenty of great books on foraging, and you should start looking for a few regional ones at your local bookstore. Truthfully, a forage guide with two
legs is better than one with two covers, as Alan Muskat of NoTasteLikeHome.com says. After your first walk with a local, experienced forager you’ll be able to put food on the table yourself. After half-a-dozen walks in a year or two, you can be proficient in every season. Of course, you’ll get proficient faster if you’re reading this foraging column, too!
Isn’t there a danger to eating wild edibles? We foragers like to say, “When in doubt, throw it out.” You’re more likely to be killed by a stampeding herd of horses or eaten by sharks than die from wild edibles. Almost every poisonous plant tastes bad (so you’d spit it out), and most poisonous mushrooms can be identified without much trouble. Foraging is a very safe activity for careful people, and it’s growing in popularity and profitability.
When people do get sick or die from foraging it’s either because they ate something they weren’t 100% certain about, it was an edible that was eaten raw when it should have been cooked or it was an edible allowed to sit in the car or on the counter overnight. Some studies show that the vast majority of people who get sick from wild foods are really suffering from food poisoning due to poor handling. An article in the Wall Street Journal explores this, quoting a study in the journal Human & Experimental Toxicology, which found that “the majority of mushroom-poisoning cases involved people consuming edible mushrooms, not toxic ones … Unsafe collection methods and storage of mushrooms considered safe to eat caused most of the illnesses.” (https://on.wsj.com/2Tk35hf). So, if your brain is turned on, you shouldn’t have any problem.
Also, many native, foraged plants and mushrooms can be bought locally or online and planted in places too wet, too shady or too dry to grow conventional crops. If sited correctly, they’ll propagate themselves and fill the hobby farmer’s larder with minimal effort and expense.
Mighty Morels
Morels resemble a cartoon Christmas tree: a fat stalk and a crinkly, conical honeycombed cap that’s hollow. If they’re big enough, you could pop one on every digit like so many finger puppets.