Suburban foraging...

sub...what? you ask. We'll it's foraging, but in our own yard in the suburbs. I've been thinking a lot in the past year or so about knowing where our food comes from and trying to avoid processed and factory farmed food (some weeks are far better than others in that regard). Along the way I started reading about foraging for wild, edible plants. I even bought the Forager's Harvest book. The whole idea of just picking wild things to eat really intrigues me.

A couple days ago I was doing my normal one thing leads to another online reading and happened across this blog post about Dandy muffins and bread. Since we never use pesticides or herbicides on our yard and we always have a healthy crop of dandelions I decided to try our first true suburban foraging experiment. Today was a lovely spring day and the dandelions are out in full force. Alison was already picking some so I told her if she picked enough we could make the bread we had seen online. (I had showed her when I found it and she thought it looked like fun.) She was amazed at how many dandelions she needed to pick for us to get 1 cup of dandelion petals. While Ian napped, we picked the petals off the flowers, then she went back out to play while I mixed up the batter and made the bread. It turned out really good. Just like the blog said it tastes kind of cornbread-ish. This website has tons of uses for the whole dandelion plant. Instead of fighting dandelions, maybe we should look at how we can use them as a free food source.

Also on the website they gave ideas what to do with wild violets. We have a ton of little violets in our yard so I think we'll give one or two of those ideas a try too. This is the kind of gardening and local foods that I can do successfully!