Wild Edibles Identification Guide

[MercuryArgentum]

I'm surprised no one did a post on acorns, so here goes:

Acorns are ridiculously common, at least here in AR they are (I've only ever traveled to Texas and Missouri). Acorns are inherently poisonous, but prepared correctly, they can make great nutritious food.

You don't want the green ones, of course.


You'll want to gather up many ripe ones (brown)


To prepare the acorns, take a rock or a knife or something and shell them


Next, grind them up, put them in a bag and blanch them in clean water many many times until the water that comes off of it is mostly clean; i.e. not nearly as dirty looking as before. 3 or 4 times should be enough.




From there, simply take the rest and set out on a pan in the sun to let it dry, or an oven heated to 200 works just as well. The resulting mix can be used as flour for bread or roasted and used as a coffee substitute.

[djblocker88]

Nice thread, though I didn't see anything on mulberries. Some people consider them a super food on certain websites and magazines. Two trees outback near my house have tons of them and they taste pretty good honestly.

Morus is a genus of flowering plants in the family Moraceae. The 10–16 species of deciduous trees it contains are commonly known as Mulberries.

They resemble blackberries and taste pretty good. The unripe ones are pretty sour, and I read in a cracked article eating too many can lead to hallucinations and explosive diarrhea. Other than that they seem semi common here in Illinois. Like all berries though they do stain.



Sad thing is a bag of dried mulberries goes for $8 or so, so many ar egoing to wast ein my yard.

[Woods Walker]

The Staghorn sumac lemonade.

This is an easy to ID wild edible. The tree/shrub is often under 15 feet high and grows well in disturbed and poor soils.

The berry clusters.

These are red and pointing up.



Berries and leaves.

The leaves are alternating with about 12 or so on each stem. They have a rough edge and shaped like a spear point. The berries are in furry clusters.





I removed the stems then stirred and soaked the seeds in COLD water. After that used a coffee filter to remove any of the hairs and floaters.



Here is a short video on the Staghorn sumac lemonade like drink. Don’t used poison sumac. I don’t think the two are easily confused.



The clusters turn red from July into September/October in my AO. It is best not to harvest them just after a hard rain as this might wash the goodness out of the cluster just like soaking them in cold water for the drink does.

Sumac issues.

I think there are other relatives in the group and if your have allergies to them then maybe reconsider this. Also not to be confused with Poison Sumac. My advice is to do your own research on these issues and as always never eat or in this case drink anything you’re not 100% certain about from the wild.

[SOWMAS]

[quote][Don’t used poison sumac. I don’t think the two are easily confused./quote]

It would be pretty hard to end up using poison sumac to make this beverage. The berries of poison sumac grow on racemes, which are clusters of fruit that grow on a central stalk. In this case, there will be multiple racemes that grow along the length of leafless branches. The berries tend to make the branches sag downwards, so they probably won't be sticking up like other sumac fruits do. The berries themselves are green at first and become a whitish color when ripe. They are never red and they are never covered with any fine hairs like staghorn sumac is.

Sorry I don't have any pictures. Poison sumac isn't something that I run into a lot. It tends to grow in or on the edges of swamps or areas that never fully drain. Where I live you pretty much have to go looking for it if you want to find it.

[Woods Walker]

Here is a fire side Staghorn Sumac lemonade video showing field prep. Sometimes preparing wild edibles in the field will differ from the kitchen as there are less tools at your disposal.

[Boondock]

Got a question, that's probably buried in the deep recesses of the ZS archives: I'm looking for a pocket-sized tree/plant/wild edible handbook for my possibles bag. There are many for sale, but I'd like suggestions on the best one. Thanks in advance.

[SOWMAS]

Got a question, that's probably buried in the deep recesses of the ZS archives: I'm looking for a pocket-sized tree/plant/wild edible handbook for my possibles bag. There are many for sale, but I'd like suggestions on the best one. Thanks in advance.

That can be a tall order. How big of a pocket are we talking about? The Peterson Field Guides Edible Wild Plants for Eastern/Central North America will probably give you the most bang for your buck. It doesn't have a ton of good pictures and it covers a lot of plants, which means that it is more general in nature than books that cover smaller numbers of plants. Having good, color pictures is a nice feature for a book to have, especially when you are first starting out trying to ID things. However, the pictures can also become a crutch.

Take a look at Thomas Epel's Botany in a Day. It breaks plant ID down in an easy to understand manner. Stan Tekiela and Teressa Marrone are two other authors that publish field guides for the Upper Midwest. If you're in the Chicagoland area, they will still be appicable to you.

[Boondock]

Thanks, SOWMAS. I was leaning toward the Peterson guidebook.

[MDiddy]

Boiling mushrooms is considered to be safer. Not because, it kills deadly bacteria. But, because majority of toxic mushrooms will change color to blue when boiled. In fact if you want to see if your mushrooms are toxic, boil them with a head of white onion. If the onion turns black or dark blue, throw everything away.

http://www.botanical-online.com/english/mushroompoisoningprevention.htm

It doesn't look like boiling with a garlic clove or onion will help identify toxicity in mushrooms. I'm with you on the "if unsure, don't eat" adage though.

[Ncdave]

Chestnuts from what I understand use to be very common in NC until a bad blight took must of em out. I was lucky enough to find this one.
Not ripe chestnut in the outer green husk. Notice the leaves the arrowhead shaped leaves





this is when the husk has turned brown and nuts fallen on the ground they can be picked up at this point but BECAREFUL they can stick you. Also make sure worms have not gotten to them first.


Now that you have a handful, I like to roast mine in the oven. Wash the nuts then lay them flat on their backs and cut (scurch) an X in the round side. I use a large knife and a cutting board. Then heat oven to 400 and bake for 15 to 10 min. Once done take em out and remove from shells when cool enough to tuch. You can also boil or grill them but I have done neither. Also don't over cook them as they will get hard, this will also happen if you let them get to cold.

[ODA 226]

My wife and I love to go out into the hills around our house and collect mushrooms. We collect one, easilly identifiable and especially tasty kind named Vrganj in Croatian or BOLETUS AEREUS in Latin. We concentrate on this particular mushroom because it is big, tasty, abundant and has no poisonous look-alikes...at least in these parts.

WARNING!!! DO NOT ATTEMPT TO COLLECT OR EAT MUSHROOMS THAT YOU CANNOT POSITIVELY IDENTIFY! DEATH LASTS FOREVER!!!

Vrganj is a very tasty mushroom that is considered a delicacy in the Balkans. It is hard to confuse with any other poisonous mushroom because it is brown on the top, has a white ring that runs around the bottom of the cap of the lack of gills on the underside. The stalk can be light brown to tan in color.


Instead of "gills", Vrganj has a "Sponge" underneath the cap that ranges from white, yellow to gray or blue.



Vrganji can grow to HUGE sizes! Here is a fairly big one:



Some can be wider than a man's outstreched hand, but since it's late in the season, here's some of the biggest we found with a US Army lensatic compass along side for size referencing:







This is part of our take for that day. We harvested about 15 kilos total:



My wife made some into a DELICIOUS Vrganji sauce for meat and potatoes! She also made a spagetti sauce to die for!



The rest, we put into my "Hillbilly Dehydrator" over night to dry them out. It took about two days to dry them all.



After the Vrganji had dryed, we put the remainder into Tupperware containers with O2 absorbers for long term storage. Vrganji reconstitutes very quickly into a very tasty and filling meal!




I TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY IDIOT THAT EATS A MUSHROOM WITHOUT HAVING BEEN TRAINED IN MUSHROOM IDENTIFICATION! GET TRAINED, BE SAFE AND HAVE FUN MUSHROOMING!

[lll000000lll]

Violets.

I find violets in areas which have good soil and sunlight. Not sure they like constant exposure to direct sunlight but don't grow them. Their habitat includes both fields and their margins, lawns, sides of roads/trails and partial clearings. There are herbal medical uses for violet tea though never tried that. I eat the leaves and flowers raw. The roots are toxic and shouldn’t be eaten

Violet in bloom.



A close up of the flower and leaf which again are edible. Notice the heart/arrowhead shaped leaf.



Once again just to make certain everyone got it.

Flower.



Leaf.



Roses are red and violets at blue….. Well not always. Here is a white violet.



These are less common in my AO but taste the same. A comparison between the two varieties.



Violet issues.

There are lots of blue and white flowers in the woods. Not all of them are from fun loving plants so make 100% certain of the identity of any wild edible before eating. I roll my own photos and misidentifications are possible aka do your own research. In my AO violets start to bloom in early spring.

I hike every sunday looking for wild edibles in CT if you want to meet up, I'm down. PM me and we can exchange info

[ZombieThrasher]

Awesome info! thank you.....we should start a discussion on what plants have other purposes besides just eating.......Goat ear as TP.

[JFlagg]

I have two contributions... One I know and one I need help identifying.

This is the one I'm curious about. I was scouting an island in the Missouri River for turkey season here in Missouri. The island is heavily wooded by mostly cottonwoods and sycamores along with smaller trees like elm,ash, etc... But on the 442 acre island I've yet to find one mast producing tree with anything edible like acorns, persimmons, etc. Lots of deer sign, but they seem to be dependent on browse. The above plant is quit abundant, but after numerous Google searches I can't identify it.

And this one...
I found about a grocery sack of them, if I would have picked them. This is a false morel mushroom and is quit poisonous... Similar to the common morel that is edible, but when compared can definitely be identified differently.