New York
Foraging – Prospect Park
Cold Weather Greens Foraging.
Join us for a late-winter foraging adventure in Prospect Park, a beautifully designed Olmsted landscape teeming with edible treasures. As the seasons shift, the park reveals an abundance of wild foods, from nutrient-packed cold-weather greens to unique botanical surprises. Discover the little-known Kentucky coffee-tree, whose seeds make a fantastic caffeine-free coffee alternative, and gather garlic mustard greens, chickweed, bitter dock, and minty ground ivy for teas and flavorful dishes. We’ll also uncover the tender shoots and tubers of the daylily, a cold-weather delicacy. Come explore, taste, and learn the art of foraging in this urban oasis.
Ticket Type
When
03/29 - 04/12
Nights
15
Intensity
About
Steve Brill has been taking people on nature walks in New York's Central Park, and parks throughout the Greater NY area, since 1982. He gained notoriety in 1986, when he was arrested in New York City's Central Park for eating a dandelion. In 1994, Brill published his book: Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places which explains how to identify and forage for edible or medicinal plants. In 2001, Brill published The Wild Vegetarian Cookbook: A Forager's Culinary Guide; a 500 recipe wild and natural foods cookbook.
Itinerary
Prospect Park is a great place for foragers to explore at the end of the winter. Like Central Park, this Olmsted-designed landscape features a variety of habitats filled with delicious native and exotic plants.
Wild coffee grows alongside the sidewalk that runs along the park's east side. Unrelated to commercial coffee, you can collect the seeds of the little-known Kentucky coffee-tree, the world's best caffeine-free coffee substitute, all year. Use them to make a beverage, or as a seasoning that's terrific in chocolate recipes.
Cold weather greens abound throughout the park. We'll find garlic-flavored garlic mustard greens and sprouts, which taste like garlic, and their roots, which taste like horseradish. We'll look for chickweed, which tastes like corn, bitter dock, as delicious cooked as it's awful raw, and ground ivy, a mint-flavored herbal tea. Both sweet-sharp daylily shoots, plus the plant's potato-like tubers, will already be producing bumper crops in the cold weather.
