You’ve probably heard of poison sumac, but it’s not likely that you’ve seen it in Wisconsin. It’s quite rare here. No, the sumac that grows in Wisconsin is not poisonous; in fact the young spring shoots and the red berries that ripen in fall are edible. And it’s from an entirely different plant family than [Continue]
Last summer I spent an hour a week walking around in circles on baseball diamonds, staring at the ground. People probably thought I was a crazy person. What I was really doing was biosurveillance. No, I wasn’t wearing a hazmat suit or carrying high-tech spy equipment. I needed only my eyes and a pencil and [Continue]
You’ll have a hard time finding hickory nuts on a grocery store shelf mostly because they are difficult to extract from their shells in large enough pieces to satisfy the picky shopper. But with a little work and cracking practice, you can harvest bushels of them yourself for free from your favorite shagbark hickory tree. [Continue]
Here’s what happened. When my husband and I moved to our current home twenty-three years ago, it was beautifully landscaped with many flowers, shrubs and trees, most of which I couldn’t identify. One pretty little purple flower that I eventually identified was called creeping bellflower. I thought it an odd name, since it didn’t appear [Continue]
These are the things I knew about red clover before I began research for this column: You can pluck the tiny tubular flowers from the flower head and suck on the inside end for a sweet surprise. Red clover is one of four ingredients in Essiac tea, developed by a Canadian Ojibwa Indian nurse in [Continue]
Getting poison ivy isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you. But if you do get it, for a month or so you’ll be hard pressed to imagine what any worse thing could be. The itching and blistery rash will consume your every thought. The best prevention, of course, is to learn how to [Continue]
Most foods foraged from the forest, prairie and marsh are carbohydrates – vegetables or fruits. In contrast, nuts are high in protein and will provide long-lasting energy. I’ll tell you right off that there’s a lot of work between harvesting black walnuts and eating them. So if you’re the lazy type, don’t even get started. [Continue]
People who are able to identify only a few wildflowers usually know Queen Anne’s Lace. The white, lacy umbrella-shaped flowers are easy to recognize. That is, until the past few years when several even more invasive very similar looking plants began their march along our roadsides. But Queen Anne’s Lace has a secret. In the [Continue]
Elderberry is a mostly forgotten shrub, often considered a weed along roads and trail sides, ditches and hedgerows. The abundance of other sweeter, larger berries in grocery stores and farmer’s markets has made them borderline obsolete. But that’s just why they are special. You won’t find fresh, frozen or canned elderberries for sale commercially. If [Continue]
Just about every Wisconsin kid is able to identify the milkweed plant with its soft, fluffy, white seeds exploding from its pods in fall. And most Midwest kids and adults can recognize the monarch butterfly. In second or third grade, schoolchildren learn that milkweed leaves are the one and only food that monarch butterfly larvae [Continue]