I mentioned the other day about needing to find healthier ways to get dopamine fixes, and that going to nature is a good way to boost your mood in a healthy way. So a few days ago, I decided to go to the forest and walk around, and while I was there, I took pictures of all the wild edible plants there, and foraged some to eat as trail nibble.
This post is not going to be a foraging ID post, with just one picture per plant, and some of the pictures didn’t come out so clearly, but I will be linking you to ID posts of the plants that I have written about, and I took plenty of pictures of many of the plants I havent written about yet, so I can make educational posts about them in the future.
This was going to be one long post but then I realized that 28 pictures in one post would be a little picture heavy, so I’m dividing it into two different posts.
The first plant I saw was dock, rumex crispus, or sorrel, which wasn’t growing in the forest itself but across the street from it. It is one of the few places I know to consistently find this plant in the nearby city.
Right next to the dock, behind a fence, was a sumac tree. The fence didn’t used to be there, and you used to be able to forage the sumac there, but I guess the city didn’t like that. But at least some of the tree was sticking out.
Also across the street from the forest was this ice plant, not native locally, but it grows all over. The fruit are edible, though I’ve only ever seen mature fruit when it grows near the beach.
Then I went to the edge of the woods and saw this wild wheat…
Then I saw some sow thistle…
A wild almond tree with bitter almonds (all wild almonds are bitter)…
Some oat straw…
Then there’s wild asparagus mixed in with some inedible wild madder and some very sorry looking wood sorrel.
One of many types of wild mustard plants…
Then there was lots and lots and lots of milk thistle- be careful of the thorns, but there are lots of yummy parts to eat! (I plan on writing another post about what I missed when I wrote about foraging milk thistle before.)
This is a terrible picture because I couldn’t get my camera to focus, but I found some shepherd’s purse.
Believe it or not, but there’s wild fennel hiding behind this mess of blurriness in the foreground, haha.
So many plants, so little time to pick them all.
It is amazing to see the bounty, the wild edible plants growing everywhere.
I hope you enjoyed seeing a taste of some of what was growing near me, and now get out and see what you can find!
Have you seen any of these plants growing near you? Have you foraged any of them before?
