Spring foraging often focuses on really basic spring greens, like dandelion greens. While they’re easily accessible…most just don’t taste all that good, at least to a modern palate not accustomed to bitters.
I think that’s one reason beginning foragers just stop at the basics. They’re not that tasty, why put in more work? If you dig a bit deeper, past the bitter springtime greens, there’s plenty of tasty spring edibles out there.
A few years ago, I wrote a really basic article on spring foraging for beginners, focusing on 20 readily available and easy to identify wild foods. They’re everywhere, and perfect even if you’re just foraging your backyard.
The thing is, there are literally hundreds of things to forage this time of year, and the vast majority of those things are also easy to identify and readily available in most backyards. Some require going a bit further afield and require more effort (like a shovel), but they’re well worth it.
I have this ambition to write a much more comprehensive spring foraging guide, with perhaps 100 to 200 things you can forage in the spring. More than just greens, adding in roots, mushrooms, medicinals, and even a few fruits that are available this early in the season.
You know, something like my article on 50+ Edible Wild Fruits and Berries.
This week, I’ve been focusing on wild edible roots, harvesting, and documenting all that I can find. Most of my foraging “trips” haven’t gone off our land, as just about all of these are quite common.
Something like that takes a long time to put together, and it won’t be ready until next spring. In the meantime, I’m giving y’all a sneak peek.
Spring Roots, Tubers & Rhizomes
Fresh greens get all the attention this time of year, but historically, edible wild roots would have been just as important (if not more important). Greens provide much-needed vitamins lacking after a long winter on stored food, but roots provide calories to get you through what would otherwise be a very lean time.
Perennial plants store energy in their roots to fuel quick growth in the spring, and you can capture that energy if you harvest them just as the growing season begins.
Good beginner options include dandelion and burdock roots, as you’ll likely be weeding those out of your garden anyway. All of the roots in the picture below were harvested within on our land in about an hour on a sunny afternoon.
As you can see, the food potential here is pretty amazing:
Here are all the wild roots I know to be useful, either edible or medicinal. Almost all of them are common, easy to identify, and prolific:
Arrowroot (Sagittaria latifolia)
Blackberry (Rubus sp.) ~ Medicinal
Barberry (Berberis vulgaris) ~ Medicinal, goldenseal substitute
Bistort (Polygonum bistortoides)
Black-Eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta) ~ Medicinal, echinacea substitute
Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) ~ Medicinal, but risky, do your research first
Cattails (Typha sp.)
Chickory (Cichorium intybus)
Chufa (Cyperus esculentus)
Comfrey (Symphytum officinale) – medicinal, external use only
Cucumber Root (Medeola virginiana)
Daylily (Hemerocallis sp.)
Dock (Rumex Sp.) – medicinal & edible
Echinacea (Echinacea sp.) ~ Medicinal
Elecampane (Inula helenium) ~ Medicinal
Evening Primrose (Oenothera sp.)
Garlic Mustard (Alliaria petiolata)
Ground Nut (Apios americana)
Horseradish (Armoracia rusticana)
Japanese Knotweed (Reynoutria japonica) – medicinal
Lotus, American (Nelumbo lutea)
Marshmallow (Althaea officinalis) ~ medicinal & edible
Sego Lily (Calochortus nuttallii)
Shepherd’s Purse (Capsella bursa-pastoris)
Spring Beauty (Claytonia sp.)
Solomon’s Seal (Polygonatum sp.)
Trillium (Trillium erectum) ~ Medicinal but threatened, not sustainable to harvest
Trout Lily (Erythronium americanum)
Valerian (Valeriana Officinalis) ~ Medicinal
Wild Carrot or Queen Anne’s Lace (Daucus carota) ~ harvest cautiously, deadly poisonous look-alikes.
Wild Ginger (Asarum canadense) ~ medicinal, used in small doses
Wild Parsnip (Pastinaca sativa)
Wild Potato (Orogenia linearifolia)
While my focus this week has been almost exclusively on roots and underground sources of nutrition, I also want to mention many of the other incredibly delicious things available this time of year.
I’ll focus on things that are NOT the common spring greens you’re all used to hearing about…
Tree Bark, Buds & Sap
Trees provide food year round, in the form of their nutritious inner bark. Species like Birch Bark, Pine Bark and Slippery Elm Bark are good examples. Spring is the best time to harvest tree bark, as it’s calorie rich this time of year as they send nutrition up from the roots to form new leaves.
Beyond the bark, there are dozens of trees have edible sap that can be drunk as is or boiled down into syrup. Tapping the tree is one method, but you can also just snip off the tips of a few small branches and many species will pour out sap that you can collect in just about any container.
The leaf buds and early spring flowers of some trees are a particular treat. I absolutely love linden tree leaf buds this time of year. They’re sweet, and they taste like fresh green snap peas.
Pine needles are edible (and medicinal), and they happen to taste darn good too. We make pine needle tea year round, but we make something special in the spring. It’s called Pine candle syrup.
The “candles” are the fresh growing tips of pine trees, and they can be harvested when they’re 1 to 3 inches long in the spring. They’re full of flavor and nutrients, and while they can be eaten in a number of ways, I tend to toss them in a bit of sugar. This causes them to release liquid and resin, which combines with the sugar to create a delicious two ingredient syrup.
It makes a good cough syrup, but it also makes a great sauce for meats too.
This is, honestly, still just scratching the surface of all the fun things you can forage in the spring time…and I haven’t even mentioned mushrooms. There’s a whole book to be written here, and maybe I’ll write it someday, but there’s a lot more foraging to do before then.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear about your favorite things to forage this time of year. Be they common yard weeds, or something more exotic. What have you absolutely loved (or hated)?
Let me know below.