Learn The Craft Of Foraging In Missouri
In my homesteading research, I stumbled upon information online about homesteaders in Hawaii. Living in a tropical environment makes so many fruits that are native to Hawaii great for homesteads there.
One Hawaiian homesteader mentioned that native plants are best there because they do not have to do very much to the native plants for them to flourish.
This got me thinking and researching native plants in my own area. I started wondering what plants were native or grow wild in Missouri. I decided I wanted to find what plants will grow wild here.
My research of Missouri edible plants led me to the world of foraging. While I am very new to foraging, so far I have found several very delicious foods that are native or grow wildly where I live.
The first and easiest edible plant to forage is commonly thought of as a weed, and many lawn owners fight to get rid of them every year. What are they? Yep, you guessed it—the dandelion!
Every part of the dandelion plant is edible. The roots make an amazing diuretic tea, the leaves can be eaten in salads, and the blossoms are good either in salads or they are also great battered and fried. Dandelions are a wonderful plant to start foraging.
The second native plant that I learned about early on in my research was wild carrots. Lucky for me, there is a field by our house that has tons of wild carrots. And they are delicious! They taste better than any carrot I have ever tasted.
These wild carrots do not look like the regular orange carrots that we all know and love, though. The carrots are actually whitish-colored, and not orange at all. These carrots grow abundantly around me, and I am thinking of growing a small garden of these native wild carrots.
Another wild edible that I have found out about is purple dead nettles. These things grow everywhere in our yard. I guess they are good medicinally as allergy medicine.
This year, I decided to make a tincture of purple dead nettles. I foraged some purple dead nettles and then brought them inside to wash them. Then I chopped them up and put them in a jar with vodka in it, and even as I write this, my tincture is still soaking. In about another week, I will be straining the purple dead nettles out of the vodka, and then I can begin testing the tincture out as allergy medicine. I hope it works really well. I need a non-drowsy allergy medicine, so hopefully, this is it.
As for other plants in my own yard, early spring always brings wild violets. I see them all over our yard, and they can be harvested and eaten. I saw a recipe for violet syrup that I have been wanting to try. There are so many things to try.
There are so many more plants that grow wild or are native to Missouri. I want to keep learning and eventually have a garden with all wild or native plants. It is amazing to me that there is so much free food growing right out of the earth, and many people walk past it thinking it is just a weed, never knowing the true value of these plants.
