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On a Saturday morning in mid-March, a small group of hungry explorers met at Hidden Villa, the nonprofit farm, education center and nature preserve nestled in Los Altos Hills. They weren’t there to pick up a CSA box of produce. Instead, the mission was to get a taste of the abundant wild plants growing in our area, under the expert tutelage of senior naturalist Garth Harwood. Over the course of two hours, they got a hands-on (and mouths-on) introduction to some of the edible greens all around us, including tips on how to identify and prepare them safely, courtesy of Harwood’s “Make a Wild Salad! Foraging Basics” class.
Why forage? For Harwood, “the real motivation is really about growing my relationship with different plant members of my community,” he told this news organization in an interview preceding the class. There are other benefits, too: Wild-foraged plants can have high nutritional value, he said. Plus, foraging is just plain fun.
“You always feel like it’s a bit of a treasure hunt, to learn that a plant you’ve known as a backyard weed your whole life turns out to be edible and delicious,” he said. “And you can come across some exotic flavors and textures that are generally not to be found in the produce aisle.”
You don’t need to stray far from home to forage. In fact, you may not even have to leave your own yard.
This time of year on the Peninsula, for example, it’s hard to avoid the ephemeral, invasive carpets of yellow-blossomed oxalis, which children often call sour grass and which can make a tasty treat in small doses.
“It’s delectable,” Harwood said, “especially if you like sour things.”
One of the best known edible wild plants in this area is Claytonia perfoliata. You may know it as miner’s lettuce, although Harwood steers away from that name out of respect for Indigenous communities. A mild-tasting, spinach-like supergreen that’s packed full of vitamin C, it got its association with miners, Harwood said, when in the 19th century they learned from Native Californians that eating “Indian lettuce” would fight off scurvy and other nutritional deficiencies. Claytonia is among the easiest to identify, with its round leaves, smooth stem and tiny white flower sticking straight through the middle. With Harwood’s guidance, students gathered handfuls, making it the base of their wild salad.
At first glance, thistles may not look like something you’d want to put in your mouth. However, “most parts are edible, nutritious and often delicious, but a bit of a prickly endeavor,” Harwood said of the spikey vegetation. The class encountered milk thistle, which is medicinal as well as edible, Harwood said, noting that he’s seen milk thistle tablets selling for big bucks at pharmacies and grocery stores because of its association with liver-cleansing properties. It has even been used to help counteract poison, he said. The class was also introduced to sow thistle and Italian thistle along its foraging journey.
Other wild edible plants found that day included bur clover, which later in the summer you’ll likely be annoyed to find attached to your socks and sneakers but right now is perfectly digestible and comes with what Harwood called a “really big load of micronutrients;” shepherd’s purse, with its heart-shaped seed pods and peppery taste; cheeseweed mallow, named for its round leaves that resemble a wheel of cheese; chickweed; wild oats; and curly dock, which has a surprisingly citrus-like flavor.
Harwood will lead two more foraging basics courses in upcoming weeks: March 30 and April 6. The timing was chosen with both practicality and ethics in mind.
“This is the season of great abundance in the world of plant greens,” he said. Each season has its edible delights, but in late winter and early spring, there is an “almost infinite quantity of delectable young greens,” he said.
“Fall brings out the nuts and the berries, and those are a special kind of treat in and of themselves,” he said, but those autumn favorites are more difficult to collect in quantity, and doing so has a bigger impact on the local wildlife who depend on them. “I don’t like to encourage high-volume collecting of fruits and nuts,” he said. “The wildlife have enough stresses on them as it is.”
In March and early April, the plants are new, tender and plentiful, which is when they are at their most palatable and “beginner-friendly,” he explained. They haven’t yet developed the robust defense mechanisms that can cause bitterness or toughness later on. “The plants are always at their best when they first emerge from the soil,” he said.
During the class, Harwood often thanked the plants as he harvested them. Rather than yanking them out by the roots, which would kill them, he instructed students to use scissors to gently snip off small amounts. He also made sure they kept each plant in a separate container for safety so that it could be inspected before eating. When foraging, safe is always better than sorry.
For his entry-level foraging classes, “folks knowing the ABCs of how to identify plants, which is the first step in identifying hazardous plants,” is critical. Harwood’s general rule for students is that they identify a minimum of three convincing attributes of a plant before they plan to eat it.
“As a bottom-line safety measure they have to show it to me, every time,” he said.
Foragers should beware of hemlock, which is highly poisonous, Harwood said, showing the class a handful of it as an example. Hemlock is a member of the carrot family with similar-looking foliage, so he recommends avoiding that family entirely.
Stinging nettles are perfectly edible – Harwood recently ate some on a pizza – but, as anyone who’s felt their painful sting knows, they must be dealt with carefully. Edible, he also pointed out, is also not the same as palatable, and the great variation in wild plants means that even something you’ve found scrumptious in the past might not taste the same the next time you try it.
“Where you gather is as important as what you gather,” he noted.
For example, foragers would do well to be mindful of poison oak and wash off what they pick before eating it (especially in areas well-trafficked by dogs). And foraging is not welcome everywhere. At Hidden Villa, public foraging is not permitted unless you’re part of a class. Most parks, too, have rules that should be checked beforehand. Sidewalks and vacant lots can be great spots to forage, but it’s advisable to avoid picking right near busy roads because of potential contaminants and pollution. Still, he said, “you shouldn’t lack for places to gather.”
Hidden Villa is a working farm, and Harwood said he’s happy to harvest plants that are often considered weeds around the property’s agricultural fields. “They see me weeding in my own way,” he laughed, noting that the farm crew might not always be thrilled that he doesn’t pull the plants out by the roots. “I want to see them regrow so I can come back and get another crop later,” he said.
As class member Lizzie Redford put it, the concept of a weed is sociological rather than botanical. Harwood agreed. It’s a matter of perspective, and a delicacy to one culture may be unappreciated in another. A weed, he said, is “a plant out of place.”
When you think about foraging, gathering mushrooms may be what springs to mind. However, Harwood does not include fungi in his foraging classes because, compared to plants, “the risk factors are infinitely higher. Probably close to half of all fungal species that occur in our region are of unknown toxicity,” he said. “That’s just playing with fire, even if you did your identification well.”
There are ethical environmental considerations, too. The popularity of foraging for mushrooms “is so extreme right now that areas tend to be overharvested and many species are in retreat,” he said.
Harwood, who has master’s degrees in education and biology, grew up in Menlo Park, Mountain View and Pescadero, spending as much time as possible outside.
“I think it would have been fair to describe me as a feral kid,” he said. Foraging, if you’ll excuse the pun, came naturally. “I learned a lot about snacking on plants that grew in my neighborhood from my peers,” he recalled.
In his 20s, still fascinated by the environment around him, he sought out more information about what local plants were good and safe to eat, and how to best find and harvest them. As a longtime naturalist and teacher, it’s all the more important to him to continue to “cultivate (his) connection to the Earth and the living things around (him) by depending on them to some extent…and interacting with them in those most intimate ways,” he said.
Last year was the first in which he offered stand-alone foraging classes, but he’s been incorporating elements of it in his teaching since he first started with Hidden Villa back in 1999.
He recommends that all would-be foragers consult and cross-reference resource guides for their local area. Some of his most trusted include “The Flavors of Home, a Guide to Wild Edible Plants of the SF Bay Area” by Margit Roos-Collins and “The Bay Area Forager” by Mia Andler and Kevin Feinstein, along with the “The Foraged Foodie” blog (foragedfoodie.blogspot.com).
For the grand finale of the class, the collected greens were inspected again, rinsed and mixed. Harwood brought out some fragrant three-cornered garlic, along with oxalis blossoms to sprinkle as a garnish and a dressing of oil, vinegar and lemon juice.
Harwood said the sometimes intense flavors of wild plants can come as a shock to palates dulled by the grocery store, as cultivated crops are selected for their sweetness and sameness.
“Your taste buds may go, ‘Whoa, I haven’t been called upon to do this much identification in years!'” Harwood said, “but that’s what they’re designed for.”
The next foraging basics classes will be offered on March 30 and April 6 ($30/person) at Hidden Villa, 26870 Moody Road, Los Altos Hills. Visit tinyurl.com/hiddenvillaforaging to register.