Ginkgos are gorgeous trees, most appreciated for their unusual leaf shape and brilliant yellow fall foliage. But how many of you have enjoyed the flavor of ginkgo nuts? These trees are dioecious, meaning that trees are either male or female. Without DNA analysis it’s impossible to determine the sex of a tree before it reaches bearing age, which can be…
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How do you get started as a forager? If you’re lucky, you learn from a friend. But not everyone has a foraging friend. So you go on foraging walks, you read everything you can get your hands on, you take classes, you watch videos, you sign up for wild foods weekends. And now you have another option: you take my…
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This is not my recipe. I got it from Dr. Nadia Navarrete-Tindall. Nadia took my wild syrups class at the Midwest Wild Harvest Festival, in Prairie du Chien, WI. She is a native plant educator and consultant living in Columbia, Missouri, and last November I read an article she wrote about acorns. At the end of the article, Nadia referred…
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How do you know when something is safe to eat? When we shop in grocery stores, we rely on government regulations to keep us safe, but there are times when we disagree with decisions made by large institutions. To put things in perspective, do you drink raw milk? It’s banned in 22 states. And the USDA considers cheeses and yogurt…
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All fern fronds emerge from the ground tightly coiled, looking like the scroll on the top of the violin. (Hence the name fiddlehead.) But while all ferns begin as fiddleheads, not all fiddlehead ferns are equally tasty. The young foliage of ostrich fern (Matteuccia struthiopteris and Matteuccia pennsylvanica) is generally considered to be one of the most delicious ferns around,…
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