When you think of foraging, what comes to mind? Is it digging through loose soils for tubers like Queen Anne’s lace? Maybe you are snipping greens like dandelions and dead nettle?
Most people don’t realize that they are surrounded by much more substantial wild foods like seeds, nuts, and berries. These seeds and nuts are high in protein, vitamins, and minerals, which is pretty rare when it comes to foraged foods.
Here are 10 easy-to-identify wild nuts, seeds, and berries. I think you are going to be surprised at what you find close to home.
Black Walnuts
The black walnut harvest adds up quickly. You need a substantial foraging bag, or better yet, a 5-gallon bucket or two! When the walnuts start dropping in the fall, they drop by the hundreds, but they might not look like what you expect.
A tennis ball-sized and colored fruit is pretty easy to find in the early fall season. Black walnuts are covered in a green hull. The hulls leech a substance that will stain any cloth they come in contact with. Best not to use your favorite bag for foraging walnuts.
Black walnut trees are usually pretty big, too. They have distinct dagger-shaped leaves that grow opposite one another on long stems, and they grow the length of the smaller, younger branches.
These nuts often bunch at the base of these green branches in groups of three or four.
Hickory Nuts
Hickory is an incredible tree. It is very abundant. The wood is great for making tool handles for things like axes, hatchets, and hammers. Hickory smoked foods use woodchips from these trees for that intense smoky flavor.
Add to the list a delicious nut that can be eaten raw or cooked. Most hickory varieties put off a tasty nut with a green hull. The tastiest of these is shellbark hickory. The pignut hickory, however, puts out a very bitter nut that is not great for eating.
I have a few pignut hickories in my own backyard! Struck out on that one.
When you harvest these nuts, allow them about 2 weeks to dry before eating. Once you will hear the dried nut rattling around inside, then you will know it is ready.
Acorns
You see acorns all the time, right? They were my oldest son’s currency when he was in elementary school. Each day he would come home with a pocket full of acorns.
If you have ever taken a curious bite out of an acorn, you know how bitter they can be. They are terrible to eat raw. However, acorns can be boiled in water a few times and they become much more palatable. This removes a lot of the bitter tannins.
After each boil, you must change out the water. Keep this step in mind.
Some foragers eat them prepared just this way, but most people grind them down to use as flour or even a kind of mash to be mixed with other things.
Hazelnuts
Hazelnut is the case of a forgeable food that is often hidden in plain sight. It does not grow on a giant tree. I had hazelnuts growing in my own backyard, at the fence line, and it took me years to realize what they were.
Not till I saw the strange green “wrapper” that the nut grows in did I realize I was looking at a hazelnut!
Most of the time, these large shrubs grow near water sources and tend to come up in bunches. Once I found them in my own yard, I started finding them everywhere.
The strange green cover will dry up and turn brown. The shell of the hazelnut will protrude from there, and then you will know they are ready to be harvested.
This happens early in the fall season.
Butternuts or White Walnuts
You have probably seen dried butternuts strewn about the floor of the forest and never known what they were. Before they dry, they have a yellowish hull that has a bit of a velvety surface. The nuts are slightly egg-shaped.
The cool thing about butternut trees is that you don’t really need to know how to ID them if you can competently ID a walnut tree.
The reason the butternut is also known as the white walnut is because both trees are so similar. Butternut tree bark is more gnarly, but the leaves and growth of the nuts of the two trees are very similar.
You can eat butternuts right off the tree, but they will not be as good as if you let them dry for a couple of weeks. So, be patient and enjoy them.
Beechnuts
The beech tree is very special. The beech I visit most often is part of an outdoor running track in a park on the north side of town. This faithful beech is there year after year with its thick trunk.
By the late summer, I can see what will become the ripe beechnuts. They start off green and have those small hooks on their exterior. They are green too but the whole outer shell will be tan and brown by fall.
This is when you harvest beechnuts. They can be carried in everything, from a foraging bag to your own pockets! When you get them home, simply take a couple handfuls and put them into a hand towel.
Rub the towel vigorously to get the hulls off. This will leave behind the beechnuts. There will still be a small shell over the nut itself, like a sunflower seed. Crack that to reveal the nut.
Mulberries
We munched mulberries on summer days in the back of an industrial park outside of Philly, when I was a kid. What makes the mulberry such an incredible fruit to forage is how easy it is to find.
The leaves grow in four distinct shapes, which makes them stand out from other varieties of trees. Look for the mitten and then look for the ornate leaf. The mulberry itself has a very distinct smell. You can smell a mulberry tree before you see it when the berries are ripe.
When these fruits turn a deep dark red or even black, they are incredible to feast on. Mulberries are pretty robust, too, so you can forage lots of them in one foraging bag.
One problem you can run into is that not all mulberry trees produce fruit. Some of them require a pollinator. If these trees are not pollinated, then they will not produce fruit. In other words, there has to be at least one other mulberry tree nearby.
Blackberries
Quite different from the mulberry, these berries grow on large canes with thorns on them. However, you’d have to be crazy not to face the thorns to get a taste of those sumptuous blackberries at peak ripeness.
If you go anywhere near the edge of the woods from June to September, you will find some kind of blackberry thicket. You can seek these out long before the fruit appears. Blackberry plants put off a distinct five-leafed star-like foliage with sharp teeth on each of the leaves.
The plant will eventually produce a five-petaled flower with many stamens protruding in the center. You will easily be able to identify these thorny stalks once they flower.
Some stands of blackberries are enormous, and it can be impossible to forage even a small percentage of what is ripe. These are the kinds of spots you are looking for.
Blackberries are very soft when they are ripe. You will not be able to layer them deep or the bottom layers will all turn to blackberry pulp. One trick is to fill your foraging bag with 8oz ball jars and lids. Fill each jar and screw on the lid.
You can turn those jars into jam or just put them into the fridge to preserve the fruit for fresh eating.
Amaranth
When you walk into a field of amaranth, you have found something very special. This large and prolific plant tolerates many kinds of soils. It grows in many places around the world. It prefers lots of sun and in the right conditions can grow up to 6 feet tall. Look for amaranth in meadows and
The leaves of amaranth are a treat in the spring. They can be snipped away from the plant and sauteed with some garlic like spinach.
The seeds of amaranth are best harvested around mid to late summer. You will see the flowers of amaranth start to dry. Once they get papery, the seed heads can be cut away and foraged. The seeds will shake loose as you walk around.
Make sure you have a bag or container that will hold those loose seeds.
Cook these seeds like quinoa. They can be simmered in water or broth till the seeds are tender. I like them warm with olive oil or as the base of a cold salad.
American Lotus Seeds
The American lotus is a wild plant that most people walk by and don’t really notice it. It grows in shallow muddy ponds or shallow portions of lakes, ponds, and streams. It requires slow or non-moving water to stay anchored.
When I started looking for these on my fishing and foraging adventures, I was blown away at how strange they were but how I never noticed them. The seed pod begins as a brilliant yellow cylinder at the center of the flower. It looks man-made.
The flowers are white with many soft rounded petals. About 6 weeks after the flowers appear you can start looking to harvest the seeds. They can be eaten fresh or dried and enjoyed that way.
The dangerous lookalike of America water lotus is the water lily. The biggest difference is the water lily’s base looks like a pizza with a slice cut out of it. The American lotus does not have this notch in it.
If you see this “missing slice of pizza” then you know you have a water lily you will not have the delicious seeds or the lotus root to harvest from this plant and it’s best to avoid foraging it.
