I know it’s been a while since I shared anything here. I’ve been busy with book promotion, freelancing, family stuff, end-of-school-year obligations and health maintenance. It’s been A Time.
But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the roots of my foraging knowledge, how I learned about edible plants and trees and herbs. It was sparked, in part, by a conversation with Cailleach’s Herbarium over on Instagram, after they posted about a kind of honeysuckle that we used to have growing on one of our fences in Forestville. I remember sitting by the fence for hours, picking the flowers and pulling the stigma out from the back of each blossom to snack on the drops of flower nectar that would come out. The yellower the flower, the sweeter the nectar.
On that same fence, blackberry vines grew, bursting with fruit in the late summer. They were great just to eat out of hand, but often, enough ripened at one time to make a pie or blackberry jam. I once made a blackberry galette and brought it to San Francisco, where I interviewed Primus and fed them pie. (Some of them were suitably wary, and others dove right in).
Nearby, we had a trio of purple-leafed plum trees, which we called cherry plum trees for the size and flavor of their fruits. The cherry plums are delicious if you can catch them at the peak of ripeness; a little early and they’re pretty tart. These trees often grow as street trees in San Francisco, and I’m always surprised to see that people avoid the fruit or say it doesn’t taste very good.
In late winter, after the rainy season, the ground would become blanketed with oxalis (also known as common yellow wood sorrel). We called it “sour grass,” because the stems and flowers have a refreshing, lemony flavor. As a kid, I chewed on it randomly when the mood struck. As an adult, I’ve made soup and sorbet with it; the soup was good, if time-consuming to harvest the individual leaves; the sorbet never set properly but it tasted delicious, like a herby lemon sorbet.
We also had more obvious sources of food, like the Gravenstein apple trees I would climb and sit in, eating still-green apples even when my mom swore they’d give me a stomachache. We had nectarine trees and a garden with corn, green beans, zucchini and cherry tomatoes (I was guilty of stealing cherry tomatoes right off the vine).
I still have fond memories of grazing on cherry plums, blackberries, honeysuckles and sour grass, and wish I’d realized, back then, that the wild garlic and lilacs that grew in our yard were also edible. But the whole experience gave me a kind of confidence about foraging and eating wild plants that still thrills me today.