Ten Foods to Forage in the City

It seems everyone I know is out picking serviceberries (AKA Saskatoons) this week, and I'm just waiting for the mulberries to ripen at the community garden. So here are some ideas for would-be urban foragers: to the best of my knowledge, all of these can be harvested without destroying the plant.

I encourage anyone who wants to start harvesting city fruit, berries, fungi or greens to be conscious of the health and ethical questions that will arise.

• Use your own judgment about whether the plants you're harvesting may be too contaminated (a former petroleum refinery's probably a bad place to pick edibles).
• Read up: for instance, morels can make you sick if you eat them raw. Some edible flowers have poisonous lookalikes. And no one who doesn't know what they're doing should eat foraged mushrooms.
  
• Get permission from land owners when it's feasible to do so, and exercise discretion, courtesy and a sense of sharing when gathering food in public space.
• Avoid gathering plants like wild garlic, which won't grow back, and limit the amount of food you take in any genuinely natural setting to 5% to 10% of what's there, if any at all.
  

Dates given are for the Toronto area, and even here the season can be as much as two or three weeks early or late.

1. Crabapples (Malus – August-September): Yes, you can eat the little apples from those ubiquitous ornamental trees. Some taste better than others, but all can be used to make tangy pink jelly.
2. Dandelions (Taraxacum – April): Before they bloom in early May, you can gather young dandelion leaves for salad. Wash them before eating, of course.
3. Garlic Mustard (Alliaria petiolata – May): This is a slender, leafy green that produces small white flowers. It’s also massively invasive, so you’re doing local forests a favour if you help eradicate it. Related to broccoli and cabbages, it has a pleasant garlic scent. Remove the toughest stalks and cook it like kale or Swiss chard; it makes a hearty soup with potatoes.
4. Mint (Mentha – June on): Mint relatives have square stems and alternating perpendicular pairs of leaves; they grow prolifically all over the place. Spearmint (Mentha spicata) and peppermint (Mentha × piperita) smell just like your toothpaste; lemon balm (Melissa officinalis) has a distinctly lemony-sweet scent, while catnip (Nepata cataria) is pleasantly skunky. Any of these can be steeped as refreshing tea, either dried or fresh. Just don’t confuse them with nettles (taller and darker green), which sting.
5. Morels (Morchella – June, pictured): This is the foraging jackpot. Look for a pale grey-brown, pinecone-shaped mushroom with a texture like honeycomb, especially where there has been a fire. They’re only around for about three weeks in the spring, and they cost $35 to $50 per pound in shops. Store them in an open paper bag in the fridge; they’re delicious sautéd in butter.
6. Mulberries (Morus – July): You may have noticed the messy splatters below this underappreciated fruit tree, which can grow to 45 feet. Mulberries look like thumblike overachieving raspberries. They start out green and hard, but ripen through red to purple-black (or occasionally greenish white). They’re not as intoxicating as strawberries or raspberries, but they make fine pies and jams.
7. Quinces (Cydonia oblonga – September-October): As a shrub that puts forth brick-coloured or salmon-pink flowers in late April, the quince is a traditional park and garden plant. However, even the ornamental type can bear late-summer fruit, which looks like a hard yellow apple-pear. Quinces aren’t good eaters, but they make great jam and can be boiled to a paste and dried into “membrillo”: a highly coveted item on cheese and charcuterie platters!
8. Serviceberries (Amelanchier – June-July): These are the same thing as Saskatoon berries: a dark purple blueberry relative that grows on a shrub or small tree with white flowers in early spring. They’re plentiful in Toronto, where they seem to be popular with landscape architects. The berries freeze well, so you can save them for the winter, or make them into jam, jelly or pie right away.
9. Shiso (Perilla frutencens – June on): A knee-high herb with dark purple leaves that seeds itself abundantly and turns up uninvited in many front yards. It’s popular in Asian cooking; the leaves can be shredded and added to sandwiches and salads like basil. The flavour is unique, but reminiscent of licorice and cinnamon.
10. Sumac (Rhus glabra, Rhus typhina, etc. – August-September): These short trees spring up in abundance on vacant lots and along the edges of highways. Their fruit forms in conical clusters of fuzzy dark red berries. To make sumac lemonade like the early North American settlers, cover these “sumac bobs” in water and steep them like tea until the liquid is dark red. Strain and drink hot or cold, sweetened to taste. (Sumac is related to poison ivy and poison sumac, so if you think you could be allergic, proceed with caution.)
    

Photo by jdurham at Morguefile.