Guidelines for a Good Harvest

Rules can make us feel safe, but when dealing with the boundless, living world, sometimes there aren’t any. That can seem daunting, but it’s better to engage with curiosity rather than freeze in fear. Equipped with the following guidelines, a few quality books and teachers, and your own good old-fashioned instincts, you’ll be bringing home the berries in no time.

Be your own compass.

Foraging is a largely unregulated activity (for now). This should not inspire a Wild West attitude but, instead, impeccable discipline. Ethics are what you do when no one else is watching. Calibrate your internal compass toward the greatest good, and get regular tune-ups.

Become an observer of plants.

Observe constantly and without an agenda. This is easier said than done when you’re hungry, but a practice of foraging responsibly can only be built on a foundation of direct observation. Observe the plants from afar, up close, with your fingers, and with your nose, for a year, for a lifetime, in books, in the field, in the winter, and every other way you can think of. Most of what you need to know about a plant (but not a fungus!) can be learned through direct observation. The time spent observing is often more fulfilling than the meal we go out hoping for, and when it does come time to eat, it tastes that much better.

Ask Permission.

Before you collect plants on any land that you don’t own, always ask permission. Our public lands, state lands, and land trusts all have different regulations, so it’s best to ask regarding each individual parcel. Be gracious with the landowner or managing entity no matter their response.

Ask Again.

Ask permission from the place itself, by way of observing and ensuring that harvesting there won’t have a negative impact. You should also consider the plant’s overall abundance in an area before you decide to harvest there. A plant can be common in one place and rare in another, so it’s good practice to check its status in each locale.

Ask yourself: Would I eat here?

Is the plant growing in a place you feel safe eating from? You want to avoid environmental factors like chemical pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, fertilizers, contaminated water, and runoff. Step back and take in the bigger picture of your environment before gathering food.

Only harvest what you know.

Samuel Thayer, the author of everyone’s favorite foraging books, offers a simple, effective test. When you see a banana, everything in your brain and body says, confidently and certainly, “That’s a banana.” That’s how sure you need to feel about a plant before you eat it. If you’re not certain but would like to learn more about a plant, take photos and maybe a sample for further identification and observation.

If it tastes bad, don’t eat it.

Many toxic plants taste overwhelmingly bitter or foul. Many medicinal plants taste bold but not unbearable, and food plants tend to be mild. New flavors are to be expected and welcomed, but if something tastes so bad that you’re tempted to spit it out, you should. You may have misidentified the plant, harvested the wrong part or at the wrong time, or prepared it incorrectly, meaning it is anywhere from unpalatable to potentially toxic. Toxicity is a spectrum, and our tongues are built for perceiving that spectrum in plants quite accurately.

First taste, small taste.

Once you’ve identified your plant and you’ve got it in the kitchen, pump the brakes before you pile your plate too high. With any new food you’ve never tried before, it’s good to start with a few bites and wait a day before eating more to make sure your body isn’t allergic or intolerant to it.

Eat the invasives. (But don’t spread them!)

Invasive species are great for foragers. You can harvest abundantly without trepidation! However, do be careful what you do with the leftovers. You don’t want to add invasive plant material to your compost heap. Instead, bag up fresh kitchen waste and put it into the trash.

Give back.

Plant trees, spread seeds, pick up trash, volunteer, share what you’ve learned, shower landowners with thanks, shower land with thanks, feed people.

Always check for ticks.

It’s just good practice.

A Field Guide for Getting Started

by Jenna Rozelle

If you’ve always wanted to try foraging but didn’t know which plants to begin with (or what to do with them), this field guide is for you. Jenna Rozelle, who is a wild foods educator, chose these plants because they’re abundant, easy to find, easy to identify, and easy to enjoy in the kitchen. Along with descriptions of what they look like and when to harvest them, this guide will teach you how to prepare the seven plants, what they taste like, and how foraging can help our ecosystems thrive.

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Autumn Olives

Elaeagnus umbellata

Think of autumn olives as the cherry tomato’s little sweet-tart sisters. They have that fun effect that really sour candy has, where you feed them to people to watch their face twist (but then they also can’t stop eating them). The silvery red fruits have an oddly pleasant astringent bite, and while they look like berries, each individual pod houses just one seed, making them technically a fruit. Birds love them, which is understandable, but they have also expedited the plant’s rapid spread. Native to the Himalayas, the bushes were brought to North America as ornamental shrubs in the 1800s, and the autumn olive is now widely considered an invasive species. They take hold easily in Maine, so don’t plant them at home. Do, however, pick their fruits and enjoy their bounty. They’re one of the most underutilized foods on our landscape, and there’s plenty to go around.

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Black Locust

Robinia pseudoacacia

If you’ve ever driven to Mount Desert Island in early June, rolled down your windows when you’re about to cross Mount Desert Narrows, and thought, “Man, this place smells good,” then you know black locust. That’s how I usually find them: by their smell. The blooms are often so high overhead that I’d never notice them if I didn’t walk into the dreamy cloud of their perfume. The edge of Mount Desert Island is a typical habitat for black locust, which thrives along waterways, roadways, and at the edges of fields. As a “pioneer” plant, it tends to inhabit disturbed places, holding the ground together and enriching the soil with its nitrogen-fixing roots until the place is again habitable for less avant garde plants. It’s very good at this job—so good that it’s been deemed “invasive.” This can muddy some people’s feelings about it, but from a new forager’s perspective, its nimble nature means it’s easy to find and harvest. They’re easiest to spot when they’re flowering, but if you wait till then you may be too late to pick. Scout early and watch them like a hawk toward the end of May to pick their blossoms when they are pristine and not yet littering the ground. You’ll know the time is right because you’ll smell them—and there the locust will be, standing on the riverbank, dripping with pendulous white blooms, looking like the envy of every bride that ever was. There are three other locust trees you may come across in Maine: honey locust (Gleditsia triacanthos), bristly locust (Robina hispida), and clammy locust (Robinia viscosa). These trees tend to be smaller in stature, and they have golden, purple, and pink flowers, respectively. None of them are edible.

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Cattail

Typha latifolia

Cattails should be the queen of every hungry heart. There’s so much food to be found in a cattail (and even more pleasure to be found in mucking around in the marsh!) I often hear people refer to cattails as “survival food,” and while it’s true that you have a better chance of surviving with cattails on your side, they’re also just a joy to eat on any old day when you’re not lost in the woods. One of my happiest moments as a cook is thanks to cattails. I served a big platter of cattail “spikes” (clusters of male flowers), simmered in salted water then poured over with melted butter and a squeeze of lemon, for my whole extended family at our beach house in late June. Everyone was hesitant to take their first bite, but boy were they eager for the second, and every single one of them came back for more! Then they stood around the table, sopping up the butter.

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Rosehips

Rosa rugosa

If you were ever tricked into biting into a rosehip like an apple, I wouldn’t blame you for writing them off just as soon as you were done spitting out all that itchy, fl uff y seed pulp. Roses are actually related to apples, as are peaches, pears, and plums, but as we all know, “family” does not mean “the same,” and all fruits need to be treated a little differently. It’s time to give rosehips another chance, and this time, if you take just a nibble of the red flesh instead of biting into the seedy center, you’ll see that there’s a lot to love. Rosehips are not just a novelty snack or a survival food—they’re a powerhouse of flavor and nutrition, and we have an annual bumper crop of them in Maine. Rosa rugosa is featured here because they’re abundant in Maine and have the largest fruit, but the hips of all our shrub roses are usable.

How to make rosehip puree

1. Trim off stems and green parts and rinse.
2. Cover with water in a pot and boil until very soft.
3. Run softened hips through a food mill; if any seeds make it through, mill again.
4. Use now or freeze for later.

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Garlic Mustard

Alliaria petiolata

If you are a wasabi-loving, hot-sauce-obsessed, salt-shaking craver of flavor, garlic mustard is for you. It’s appropriately named, with its pungency standing unapologetically on the borderline between garlic and mustard. I’ve heard from landowners who, before knowing what it was, would cut it down with a string trimmer and begin salivating, overcome with hunger pangs from the resulting aroma. Humans were using garlic mustard to liven up their food 6,000 years ago, and today, probably much thanks to humans loving its flavor and carrying it around with us, it’s been crowned the most invasive plant on the planet. This tough green can outcompete native plants, even woody seedlings in the understory of deciduous woods. It’s bold in every way.

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Sweet Fern

Comptonia peregrina

Sweet fern is, without rival, the smell of summer in Maine. To me, it just reeks of nostalgia. It takes me back to when I was a young woman, getting to know the plants on my first homestead in Roque Bluff s. It was revelatory to learn that I could savor both the smell and the flavor. Since then, it’s become one of my most reached for herbs in the pantry. A thriving native of the Maine landscape, sweet fern loves nearly any sunny, exposed site. It’s also a breeze to grow, making it a beautiful addition to the perennial herb or pollinator garden. Although sweet fern isn’t widely cultivated, people have been using this plant for centuries. According to some sources, many Indigenous peoples, such as the Passamaquoddy of downeast Maine, have used sweet fern as a remedy for a number of ailments, treating everything from poison ivy to diarrhea with an infusion made from the leaves. It’s worth noting that sweet fern, despite its name, isn’t a fern at all. It’s a woody shrub with leaves that resemble ferns, but it’s actually a member of the laurel family (as is bay, which should give you some idea of how to use it).

How to dry sweet fern

The easiest way to dry any herb is by hanging it upside-down in a bundle, preferably in a dark area with low humidity. However, you can also dry herbs in your microwave, dehydrator, or oven. An oven at low heat will dry most leaves within 30 minutes. To nuke them instead, just do 30-second intervals until they’ve lost enough moisture.

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Japanese Knotweed

Fallopia japonica

If there were ever an apocalyptic event and only a handful of lifeforms survived, I’d put money on knotweed being one of them. It is extremely tenacious. You’ve probably seen it creeping into backyards, busting up driveways, swallowing riverbanks, and decorating roadsides with its wispy white blossoms. It’s not an ugly plant, but other species have a hard time competing for resources after it sets down roots. Once settled it’s very hard to remove; even a tiny fragment can burst into green life. Because of its height and segmented stalk, many people call it “bamboo” (or something from a laundry list of expletives for invading their property). You may be familiar with what it looks like, but did you know that it tastes just like our beloved rhubarb? This is the silver lining to the ominous ecological cloud that knotweed carries, and the best thing to do is to capitalize on it by making pie.

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My First Time Foraging for Mushrooms

How I learned to eat wild fungi without keeling over.
By Katy Kelleher

I thought I knew what I was doing. Weighed down with a backpack full of field guides and foraging books, I crouched next to the specimen. It was a pale orange, frilly thing, sprung from the trunk of a rotting tree. It had to be chicken of the woods. I broke off a tiny section and nibbled it. It tasted strange, so I spit it onto the ground. I returned home, wracked with anxiety about my impending death. I only calmed down after I received a text message from Haley, an experienced forager friend. “It’s 100 percent chicken of the woods,” she wrote after examining the pictures I had snapped. “But it’s way past prime.”

For the past three years, this is how I engaged with wild mushrooms: with great fear and uncertainty. I wanted very badly to harvest mushrooms from the woods behind my house, but I couldn’t seem to commit. During a foraging workshop I happily ate mushrooms that my friend and colleague Jenna Rozelle picked—I trust her judgment entirely. But, even when I knew there were no dangerous lookalikes in Maine for the puffball or the yellow chanterelle, I couldn’t make the leap from forest to frying pan.

Then I found my dark grove.

Below the beeches and oaks, just footsteps away from our newly blazed trail, I spotted a cluster of black trumpets. They were upright and charcoal-dark, hollow stems flaring out into open mouths, rising out of the detritus of leaves and sticks and moss. I got down on my hands and knees and smelled them. The fragrance was meaty and rich, savory and familiar. I knew exactly what they were, the so-called turmpets of death. I had eaten them many times before, and I recognized their scent, their shape, their color. Even their location was textbook—I had spotted them beneath a forest of pine and oak, near a small grove of beech trees, on the downward slope of a hill that led to a creek. I went home then returned to the woods armed with a knife and a vintage wicker basket (I’d always imagined using it for something photogenic). Very carefully, I gathered a small portion of mushrooms from the mossy forest floor, placing each one in the basket like it was a precious, stinky treasure.

When I got home, I cleaned a single specimen carefully, rubbing away all the dirt with a moist paper towel. I plucked off tiny yellow spruce needles and looked at it inside and out. The one I had chosen to eat was almost as large as my palm and felt sturdy in my hand, a robust little trumpet. The outside was walnut brown fading to gray, and the inside was a deep black. In years past, I had almost eaten a Devil’s urn mushroom once, thinking I had found a black trumpet, but now my mistake was so obvious to me as to be laughable. Devil’s urn mushrooms are a similar color, but they’re low, broad cups—not upright straws. I took out a stick of sea-salted Kate’s Butter from the refrigerator and sauteed my single, tester trumpet over low heat. I had read you aren’t supposed to add anything to foraged mushrooms you are tasting for the very first time, but I couldn’t resist a little butter and a dash of salt.

It was delicious. It was hard to make myself wait a full day before eating more, but I managed. The next day, I chopped up a small pile of black trumpets, added a heap of chives, and stirred them into an omelet. I had fresh eggs to use (a gift from our neighbor down the street), and I felt like a culinary queen, a present-day Julia Child, creating sophisticated French-American fusion right in my own kitchen.

For the next few months, I visited the patch of black trumpets whenever I could. There was another big bloom of fungi in September, and since it was my land, I was able to harvest as many as I liked. Haley told me to leave at least half of them in place so that the cluster could regenerate. I did, and it did. It wasn’t always as majestic as the first big find, but the woods had remained fertile throughout the long rainy summer and now into the fall. I also found that my eyes had sharpened: the more I looked for mushrooms, the more I found. It was as though I had crossed an invisible line from dabbler to doer. In a way, it reminded me of the first time I caught a green wave on a surfboard. I went from being surf-curious to a surfer, riding a wave into shore.

Of course, the stakes are different in surfing and mushroom foraging. But in truth, both have their dangers. You could crash on rocks and break an arm; you could eat the wrong mushroom and wind up in the hospital. As I’ve become more mushroom literate, I’ve also learned that the kingdom gets a bad rap. There are some terrifyingly poisonous mushrooms (the destroying angel and the fly agaric, both deadly, are found across Maine), but most mushrooms are simply unpleasant if eaten rather than fatal. This isn’t a call to be cavalier but rather a statement about my own growing confidence as a student of nature. I can learn to eat wild, just as I’ve learned to master other dangerous tasks, like driving a car or splitting wood.

Okay, that last one? I’m stretching the truth. Axes still scare me. I’m much more comfortable with a three-inch blade, a field guide, and a wicker basket on my arm.

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Drinking and Foraging

This negroni variation from Magnus on Water in Biddeford uses bitters made from foraged dandelion roots and dried strawberries.

Summer King Negroni

Created by Brian Catapang, director of beverage for Magnus on Water in Biddeford, this is a spring and summer take on a negroni, with notes of fresh strawberry and hibiscus. It is feminine in appearance and packs a boozy punch.

¾ ounce gin
1 ounce Dolin Blanc Vermouth de Chambéry
½ ounce Ramazzotti Aperitivo Rosato
¾ ounce Luxardo Bitter Bianco
5 drops strawberry and foraged dandelion bitters

Stir all ingredients with ice. Strain into a rocks glass with one large, clear ice cube.

To make the bitters

1. Harvest dandelion roots in early spring (they will still have all the nutrients and energy that were stored there during the colder months).
   
2. Wash, clean, and chop the fresh dandelion roots. Combine with ¼ cup of sliced dried strawberries in a glass container with a tight-fitting lid.
   
3. Add 2 cups of high-proof clear alcohol to the chopped roots and strawberries and let rest for 1 week. Then strain out the solids and store the bitters in an air-sealed jar.

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Resources to Continue Your Foraging Journey

Books

Nature’s Garden: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants
by Samuel Thayer
Bruce, WI: Forager’s Harvest Press, 2010

Incredible Wild Edibles
by Samuel Thayer
Bruce, WI: Forager’s Harvest Press, 2017

Ancestral Plants: A Primitive Skills Guide to Important Edible, Medicinal, and Useful Plants of the Northeast (Volumes 1 and 2)
by Arthur Haines
Turner, ME: Anaskimin, 2010, 2015

Natural Landscapes of Maine: A Guide to Natural Communities and Ecosystems
by Susan Gawler and Andrew Cutko
Augusta, ME: Maine Natural Areas Program, Department of Agriculture, Conservation, and Forestry, 2018

Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places
by Steve Brill and Evelyn Dean
New York: Harper Collins, 2010

Botany in a Day: The Patterns Method of Plant Identification
by Thomas J. Elpel
Pony, MT: HOPS Press, 2013

Reading the Forested Landscape: A Natural History of New England
by Tom Wessels
Woodstock, VT: Countryman Press, 1999

Mushrooms for Health: Medicinal Secrets of Northeastern Fungi
by Greg A. Marley
Camden, ME: Down East Books, 2009

Websites

Go Botany—Native Plant Trust
gobotany.nativeplanttrust.org

Josh Fecteau
joshfecteau.com

Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation, and Forestry
maine.gov/dacf

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