Back in the day, I (Dear Husband) did some prospecting out on the tundra.  I’d be looking for mineralization in the old Canadian Shield rocks of the north, and if I’d done my homework correctly, I sometimes found little bits of it.

When Farmgal and I moved down to the farm, that came to an end.  My new job didn’t involve that kind of work, and at any rate, the country around us wasn’t the kind of country where one looks for gold or diamonds or such.

However, it turns out that it didn’t mean I couldn’t prospect.  It just meant I’d be prospecting for something different:  Wild foods.  Let’s face it – foraging is prospecting for good, and it can be a rewarding experience.

Realistically, I suppose it’s possible to find anything in nature that you could find in somebody’s garden or orchard or hayfield, provided it can self-propagate.  This would include hard fruits, soft fruits, mushrooms, and other “wild” food like garlic or dandelions.  Our experience does seem to confirm this.  We’ve had success finding a number of different kinds of plants (though finding dandelions is hardly an accomplishment, is it?).

The first few years, we went out to the local woods to look for mushrooms.  We’ve yet to find the motherlode – the hen of the woods – but we’ve found a few that are edible and tested them out.  Later, when we’d go for walks on trails, we’d watch for soft fruit, especially blackberries and blueberries.  Nowadays, we watch for hard fruits. 

If I’m at work and go for a lunch-time walk, I look at the trees and shrubs around me – turns out there are a variety of crabapples, apples, plums, and wild grapes in these parks.  I’ve picked the plums, and Farmgal has made some awesome plum sauce out of them. 

If I’m awake on the commute home, I watch the scenery go by.  Last year about this time, I was looking out the window and a flash of red caught my eye as the bus zoomed along a secondary road.  I noted the location and made myself stay awake the next day; I pinned down the location of the red stuff, but we were going too fast for me to get a good look at it.  When I had to drive in to work a few days later, I made a point of re-tracing the bus route on the way home, and pulled over when I got to the spot in question.  I collected leave and berry samples and my suspicions were proven correct when I handed them over to Farmgal later:  I’d found a high-bush cranberry.  This year, I’ve spotted another five in different places, so Thanksgiving’s going to be a delicious affair.

So what’re some tips for “prospecting”?

1)  Know what might be out there, and what it looks like. 

2)  Know where – and when – you might find wild foods.  Blueberries might favor acidic soil associated with evergreen forests.  Blackberries might grow on the edge of recent timber cuts.  A range of fruit trees might grow in ditches or in abandoned farm yards.

3)  Watch for “anomalies” – the colors, shapes, or smells that don’t fit in with the non-edible landscape around you.  A flowering tree along the side of a road is an anomaly.  So is a white mushroom against a backdrop of dirt and old leaves.  So is a clump of shrubs and bushes in a clearing amidst a forest. 

4)  Investigate your anomalies.  This can be as simple as stopping for a minute to collect samples of leaves and fruits – you can then look these up in your books and on the net when you get home.  You may find that the flowering tree on the side of the road is an apple tree (apple sauce!), that the mushroom in the forest is an oyster (cream of mushroom soup!) or that the shrubs in the clearing are soft fruits planted by a homesteader or spread by bird poop (in which case – gooseberry pie!  Elderberry juice!  And maybe some neat flowering plants as well, if you’ve found an abandoned farmstead).

5)  Take notes.  What time of year is it?  What kind of terrain is it?  Not only can this help you identify what you’ve already seen, it can also give you a sense of where else to look if you want to search for more.

6)  Test.  Make sure you’re not on somebody’s yard, for one thing.  For another, be careful in sampling the prospective wild food, just in case it’s not quite what you think it is.  Geologists don’t lick rocks (…much) because they can be toxic, and foragers should treat fruits and food with similar respect.

7)  Have fun.  You don’t need to make this a chore of some sort.  Watch the trees and plants around you when you and family or friends go for walks, picnics, or drives.  Take a different route home, drive a little slower, and keep an eyeball on the ditch.  Even if you don’t actually find something, the experience itself might just be a nice, relaxing break from the usual.

Once you start prospecting, you’ll probably find that you’re getting better at it each year.  Your eye will start picking out the apple trees, the raspberry stands, and the elderberry shrubs, even if you’re really not looking for them at the time.  In this way, Farmgal and I have found apples, crabapples, plums, raspberries, strawberries, gooseberries, blackberries, blueberries, and even nuts.

Do you forage or prospect for food?  Would you add any other tips?  What have you found (and what have you done with your finds)?