Foraging for Food: 10 Useful Plants to Look For

How “hit or miss” were our ancestors when it came to foraging for food? After all, someone had to be the first person to try eating a mushroom or picking walnuts from a tree. I can only imagine the hard lessons learned during the trial-and-error period of early foragers. There must have been a lot of “uncomfortable” experiences.

But over time, we humans built up a base of knowledge about which plants were useful and which weren’t, as well as which were deadly.

After industrial agriculture swept the globe and we began living lives that didn’t revolve around hunting, growing, or gathering our own food, foraging started to seem like a strange activity, one far outside social norms.

Foraging is still a wonderful way to supplement your diet, get out into nature, and learn quite a bit about the plant world. Here are some tips for foraging, as well as ten of the best plants to look for in your area.

Foraging Tips

Knowing the difference between similar-looking plants can literally mean the difference between life and death, or at least an uncomfortable reaction. Sometimes a delicious, nutritious wild plant and a poisonous plant look eerily similar. This is doubly true when it comes to foraging for wild mushrooms, as edible ones often look nearly identical to poisonous ones. Don’t take chances: do your research.

Know Where to Look for Wild Plants

Where you decide to forage is just as important as identifying plants correctly. Avoid harvesting plants growing in less-than-ideal environments, like near polluted streams, roadsides, or commercial farms.

If you decide to harvest these plants anyway, give them a thorough wash to remove surface pesticides or contaminants, but you should probably just avoid them altogether. Venture further off the beaten path to find abundant harvests safe from contamination.

Forage at the Right Time

Expert foragers always pay attention to the weather and the time of year. The seasons determine what you’ll find in your area. For example, berries and fruits often show up in autumn, while mushrooms and nettles are only available for short periods in the spring in most areas.

Don’t Be Greedy

When you do find a stash of edible plants, don’t harvest all of them. Use the “take half, leave half” rule to ensure a bountiful harvest the next season. If you find plants that are edible but endangered, leave them be.

Learn to Cook Your Foraged Plants Well

Some of your foraged finds are edible, provided you prepare them correctly. Make sure to consult a good recipe book or a trusted source for preparing your foraged harvest.

Cattails

Cattails are one of the most useful plants you can find in the wild. Experienced foragers go absolutely nuts over these versatile plants, making all sorts of cattail recipes after a forage session. They’re available year-round in most areas and are a fantastic source of starch.

Known as the “supermarket of the swamp,” you can eat the shoots, leaves, rhizomes, and pollen. As for health benefits, cattails can serve antiseptic purposes, slow bleeding, and improve skin health. Beware of foraging cattails from polluted or stagnant water, though, because cattails act as a filter, meaning the plants take up all of those toxins.

Look for tall, cylindrical brown seed heads near ponds, marshes, and wetlands. Cattails can grow anywhere from two to ten feet tall and thrive in shallow, standing water.

Yarrow

Yarrow, known as “nature’s medicine,” is a flowering herb that grows all around North America. You can usually find it in spring or summer around fields and meadows. The Greeks first used yarrow over three millennia ago, and its benefits are many:

• Fights bacteria
• Decongestant
• Astringent
• Anti-inflammatory
• Expectorant
• Promotes digestion

Cooking with yarrow is also a great way to take advantage of its many benefits. You can substitute it for tarragon, work it into a tea, or even use it in a dessert due to its natural sweetness.

Yarrow blends into the surrounding area well, so it can be hard to spot. Look for the distinct feathery leaf pattern and clusters of small white or pink flowers.

Mullein

Most people consider mullein a weed, and it is, growing all over the United States near roads and highways. However, herbalists still use it in medicine (and herbal teas) for the following reasons:

• Coughing
• Lung Weakness
• Chest Colds

Mullein can grow to over six feet high, and you can easily recognize it by both its height and its yellow flowers covered in hairs. One of the funniest uses for mullein is what’s known as “cowboy toilet paper.” You can also make a tasty tea from mullein to treat the health issues above, mostly focused around respiratory problems and coughs.

Mullein is easy to spot once you know what you’re looking for. The largest plants reach up to six feet tall, and you can easily identify them by their height and fuzzy, velvety leaves.

Rose Hips

Most of us know the rose plant for its beautiful flowers, used both ornamentally and in teas and medicines for centuries. However, the cherry-sized rose hips the plant produces can be eaten raw or used in a variety of recipes.

• 50% more vitamin C than oranges
• Mild diuretic and laxative
• Astringent
• High in antioxidants

You can find these fruits in late summer or early fall, and if you forage for them the right way, you’ll end up with a massive haul of these versatile fruits!

Look for rose bushes, which you might only find on commercial or residential property. Most people don’t use their rose hips, so you should be able to harvest them if you ask. Rose hips only grow where a rose flower was previously pollinated.

Cedar Trees

Cedar trees should be familiar to most people, gardener or otherwise. They’re massive evergreen trees with needle-shaped leaves. These needles are much shorter than those of pine trees. Cedar trees offer many benefits, from anti-fungal properties to:

• Assists with inflammation issues
• Increased stomach acid production, so treats many bloat and GI issues
• Apply topically for acne, psoriasis, etc.

As far as cooking with cedar, it’s best to make a tea from the leaves and soak your skin in the preparation. You can also use cedar woodchips as a natural insect repellent.

Cedar trees are easy to identify by their scale-like or short needle foliage and distinctive fibrous, reddish-brown bark. Look for them in forests, parks, and residential landscapes.

Nettles

The humble nettle is a versatile herb you can find practically everywhere in North America. Nettles are wonderful for medicinal uses, such as:

• Better decongestant than some prescription medications
• Sold as an herbal treatment for prostate diseases
• Roots used as a diuretic

You can use nettle tea to treat congestion, stomach aches, and diarrhea, and a decoction of nettle leaves can clean infected wounds.

Harvest nettles early in spring when they first pop up and before the plant reaches one to two feet tall. Wear gloves while harvesting: they’re prickly!

Nettles don’t look or smell very appealing, but they’re fantastic for foraging. They start popping up in spring in sunny areas with rich soil. If you’re out in the wild, they’ll most likely cluster around water sources like rivers and lakes. The stalks of mature plants can reach up to eight feet tall.

Dogwood Trees

Dogwood trees are a unique plant to forage for. They’re deciduous trees with an odd, camouflage-like bark that flakes off and effectively mulches the area around the trunk. You can make a tea from the bark to help mitigate fever symptoms, but foragers prize dogwood mostly for its berries.

The large, red fruit has an interesting texture and taste, one that sparks a lot of debate among foragers! Some say it has an apple-like taste with a pear-like texture, while others feel it’s closer to a persimmon. You’ll just have to forage for it and find out for yourself.

You can also use dogwood twigs as a natural teeth cleaner and whitener (a favorite practice of Native Americans). By chewing on the twig, you break it into individual fibers, and it acts as a makeshift toothbrush.

Some more benefits of Dogwood include:

• Diarrhea remedy
• Improves liver and kidney function
• Antibacterial and antiviral
• High in antioxidants

People have planted dogwood as an ornamental in many areas of the United States, New York especially. Look for it in pots or landscaping, but you can also find it in the wild. It’s very easy to spot due to its unique flowers and camouflage-like bark. You can eat the fruit raw and boil the leaves.

Wild Comfrey

Comfrey is a favorite plant of many gardeners and permaculture enthusiasts, and for good reason. Its uses as a fertilizer, mulch, companion plant, and herbal remedy have made it a very popular addition to many gardens.

• Leaves used for sprains and bruises
• Pain relief if leaves are crushed and heated, then applied to body
• Tea can be used for lighter injuries like stings or burns (do not drink this tea, however)

Comfrey is less popular in cooking, but it is edible and quite high in protein. In fact, it’s second only to soybeans in protein content. Using the young leaves works best, and many country people have been making comfrey soup for generations as a way to supplement their diets.

Comfrey isn’t native to North America, but because it grows so rapidly, you can find it in the “wild” if you look closely. If you live in the northeastern region of North America, chances are good you’ll find it along streams and lakes. It’s fuzzy and has white and purple flowers that droop and form a bell shape.

Horsetail

Horsetail is an interesting plant to forage for. It has an underground network of rhizomes that send up shoots in the springtime. They grow around two feet tall at most and almost look like many shoots stacked on top of each other.

The primary benefits of horsetail have to do with its healing qualities:

• Highest silicon content of any plant
• Helps bones heal faster
• Fantastic diuretic

In the kitchen, horsetail works mostly as a tea. Pour hot water over horsetail in a 2:1 ratio and let it steep, and you’ve made a horsetail tea that can help with many of the issues mentioned above.

Horsetail is easily identified because of the unique structure of its stems and nodes. At each node, a whorl (or spiral) of foliage protrudes. Stalks can reach over two feet tall, with giant horsetail growing to a massive 25 feet or more.

Walnut Trees

Although most of us consider walnuts a healthy snack, they offer many more benefits than most people realize.

• Walnut skin is extremely high in phenols
• The particular chemical structure of the Vitamin E found in walnuts is different and beneficial
• Protective against many of the ‘diseases of affluence’ we suffer from

On top of that, you can brew the leaves of the walnut tree to reduce symptoms of both constipation and diarrhea.