Harvesting ornamental & wild plants for food and other uses [View all]

[Kaleva]

Been doing some reading on the internet the past few days about learning to identify wild plants that are edible. Finding it to be quite interesting as it may be a good hobby and a way to streatch the food dollar plus be a potential food source during a disaster. There's an abandoned railroad grade just a short walk from where i live and if I follow it in one direction, I'll go thru woods and down to the bank of the river. If I go the other way, I'll walk thru more woods, open field and swampy areas. A variety of plant habitat which ought to make finding useful plants rather easy.

It is my intent to edit this OP considerably later with more detail and links to informative web sites but below are just a few examples of plants that I've seen written about:

The common daylily

The dandelion

Pine trees

Red and white clover

Cattails-many parts are edible and the mature leaves can be used to make baskets and mats.

Fiddleheads-what the unfurled young sprouts of ferns are called.

Most every site I looked at stressed the importance of correctly identifying plants because eating the wrong ones can make you very sick, clean out your bowels much more then needed, or kill you. In the case of the daylily, eating too much of the leaves can get you high. Which may be a plus for some. Some people won't eat the fiddlehead of the very common Bracken fern while others say it's fine in moderation and if prepared properly.

Here is a site that has a database of over 7000 useful plants:

http://www.pfaf.org/user/default.aspx