Over the years, plant breeders have spent tremendous amounts of time and money trying to produce flowers that bloom in beautiful blue, but haven’t had much success. Mother Nature, however, easily hit a home run the first time at bat with chicory. Its pure sky-blue blooms line the gravelly edges of Wisconsin roadsides, abandoned railroads, [Continue]
Just twenty counties in central and northern Wisconsin produce more than 60% of our country’s total cranberry harvest. These cranberries grow on vines in bogs and peat marshes. It’s impractical for the home grower to attempt to grow cranberries and foragers definitely shouldn’t poach from commercial cranberry bogs. Fortunately, cranberry lovers can harvest from another [Continue]
The combination of hazelnuts with chocolate is almost as popular as the chocolate/peanut butter combo. Nutella, the chocolate/hazelnut spread, probably has as many fans as do peanut butter cups. You might be surprised to learn that hazelnuts grow throughout Wisconsin and are found along trails, roadsides, fence rows and woodland edges in dry or [Continue]
The root of the ginseng plant has been used around the world to cure a multitude of ills for hundreds of years. If you believe everything you read, it cures almost any physical, emotional or spiritual ailment: exhaustion, fatigue, infirmity, liver disease, stress, wasting from chronic disease, weakness, alcoholism, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, gastritis, high cholesterol, immune [Continue]
Lunch from the Lawn By Lawanda Jungwirth No need to run to the grocery store when you need something for lunch. If you haven’t poisoned every weed in your lawn in an effort to make it look like your own personal putting green, there’s a good chance you can find lunch right outside your back [Continue]
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]
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]
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]