Today we held a very successful, upbeat, fun, and informative late fall/early winter foraging workshop and trail tour. We chose a trail we haven’t been on before, in a new regional park in the area. To my surprise, a fair bit of ground-based foraging was still to be found to some degree, whether still flowering, still 100% green, or going to sleep for the winter. We found many of the herbs we’ve come to expect around the Central Okanagan region, but we also found several herbs that we’ve repeatedly meant to look up and never did.
So today we did.
One that I routinely mistake for wild strawberry, has apparently been described down through the centuries as having a growth style and appearance very similar to strawberry! This is Sulphur Cinquefoil. It’s leaves and flowers make one do a double-take until you realize the leaves are thinner and longer than those of strawberry, and the flowers aren’t the right colour. However, it is considered a cousin to the wild strawberry. The BC Invasive Species website has it listed as an invasive noxius weed. It can be confused with Graceful Cinquefoil, which has silver on the underside of the leaves. The yellow flowers can sometimes mean a person may be picking buttercup, which is toxic, instead of Sulphur Cinquefoil. Apparently, before this plant flowers, marijuana users may think they’ve stumbled on wild marijuana plants due to the 5-fingered nature of the leaf arrangement.
Edible Wild Food shares a write-up on Sulphur Cinquefoil that mentions some of it’s edible and medicinal properties. It has been found to contain kaempherol and quercetin among 9 different flavonoids, is anti-inflammatory, contains phenolic compounds, and the fruit is described by this site as pleasant unripe or ripe, while others claim the fruit is bland.
We already harvest Shrubby Cinquefoil occasionally, but the new trail we were on today has Sulphur Cinquefoil growing in spades!!! It is everywhere!
Another plant we’ve meant to research and finally gave positive identification to, is Milk Vetch. It’s leaves describe it as a vetch right off the bat, but it’s flowers kept throwing me off, being still trumpet-like, but so tiny! As a member of the vetch family, it is part of the larger fabacea group and is know to act as both a nitrogen and potassium fixer in the soil. This is very useful for gardeners who might struggle with maintaining these nutrients around their plants. Milk Vetch is also good at keeping away harmful worms in the soil nearby. So it’s handy to have around.
Milk Vetch is also known as Astragulus, a subspecies of Fabacea and contains over 3,000 plants, many of which are known commonly as some variant of Milk Vetch. My database lists Astragulus as containing vitamin B6 or Choline, good for offsetting chemotherapy side effects, and helpful in dealing with alcoholism.
As with other vetch research we’ve done in the past, it is important to be sure you are picking pea pods from the right plant. Vetches that have purple flowers are generally considered safe, as well as those that have hairy stems. Hairless vetches should be avoided, as their peas and shoots are toxic.
Due to the plants affinity for pulling up selenium and the potential for it to contain a fair bit of this trace mineral, only eat this plant in moderation. While many North Americans are deficient in Selenium, overdosing isn’t wise either.
Wild Walks Southwest discusses vetches and their edible safety where they mention a very KEY point in eating this herb’s peas in large quantities. The key is in the preparation. Eaten raw, you should never have more than a few at a time, but if you boil the pods for 2 hours, they are safer to eat. Due to their cyanide content, the dried peas tend to taste much like almonds. This bears looking into further to know if this is the harmful hydro-cyanide, or the beneficial anthra-cyanide.
One plant that acts like a kind of ground cover in many areas around the Okanagan, often reminds me of either ground ivy or common mallow, but has a different growth pattern and while the leaves are roundly-lobed, they are not puffy like the other two plants, and can often be more oval than round, unlike the other two plants. It turns out, this plant is called Alumroot! It’s root has been used as a fixative for natural dyes
An author on blogspot discovered why the plant got it’s common name, not because it has any aluminum (alum is the short name for aluminum) in it, but because it acts like aluminum when used as a dye-fixer. This author found quite a long list of medicinal uses for this plant, ranging from astringent and antiseptic to closing wounds, bringing down fevers, acting as a styptic, and more. First Nations peoples have been known to eat the leaves and stems of this plant, dry them for later use, set dyes with them, and use it as a dark dye on it’s own.
One of the ladies in our workshop today found a leaf that reminded me very much of leaves I’ve seen from plants in the Borage family, namely, Hound’s Tongue and Bugloss. On looking up the image of the leaf in a reverse image search, we found out that Silverleaf Phacelia is indeed in the Borage family and sometimes called Scorpion Weed.
I held one of these leaves in my hand with no ill effects, but it can cause bad rashes for those who may be more sensitive to the borage family.
Most members of the Borage family are not considered edible due to high concentrations of pyrollizidine alkaloids that in high quantities (up to 5% of your body weight), can cause severe liver and kidney damage. The plant is helpful to pollinators, but not so much for human consumption.
In addition to the above plants that we’ve finally gotten around to identifying and have cursory understandings of, we found some very cute, tiny trees and I had to take photos of two of them. Another lady in our group found an adorable fully-grown but very tiny wild mustard plant. She picked it to take it home. A few Great Mullein plants were fully formed second-year plants, that were so small they were equally adorable! In our area, Great Mullein can grow more than 7 ft, sometimes 8 to 9 ft or even well over 10 ft tall (as the ones in this photo!) My daughter is 5’2″ for reference.
We found a couple small curly dock seed stalks of the tighter-packed red breed. We will be returning to this trail in the spring for sure! We walked in for 2 hours without discovering half the trail in it’s official length, so we look forward to exploring this area further.
If you live in the Central Okanagan, anywhere from West Kelowna to Vernon, or even out to Lumby and want to arrange for a foraging workshop/trail tour, please check my calendar for any Wednesdays, Saturdays or Sundays that are not booked, and claim your date by sending in your $30 registration fee. This fee covers your notebook, pen, workshop, and trail tour and lets me know you are committed to that date on your own calendar. I will notify the newsletter list of the date you chose, in case others want to join us, and then a trailhead will be announced closer to the date you chose.
I strongly encourage you to pick a date 2 to 3 weeks out from your date of booking, so that I have time to order in your notebook if I don’t have any on hand, as I sell them at craft and wellness fairs. If I have to order in more, I want to have yours ready for you on your foraging workshop date, so that 2 to 3 weeks allows for shipping time to get your book to my door before the workshop takes place.
You can pay for a date day-of, but doing so means your notebook risks having to be delivered to you at a later date. If paying day-of, please book no later than 3 days ahead of time so I can notify the newsletter, get your date claimed on my website calendar, and pick the trailhead, as we do the workshop at the truck tailgate before heading out on the trail.
Our Calendar heading into Christmas has most weekends booked with craft fairs now until mid-December. This coming weekend for example, we’ll be at the Dogwood Nursery’s 12th Annual AdventsMarket on Saturday and Sunday. Every season of the year has something you can forage for, as growing seasons and harvest seasons differ from herb to herb and tree to tree.
In addition, there is a growing number of people hoping I’ll start doing more advanced foraging workshops based around preparation of the wild herbs for food, medicine, hygiene and household cleaning. If you would like to attend such a workshop, please drop me a line at bnhc@naturalhealthgodsway.ca to let me know. I’ll add you to the newsletter and add you to the list of those wanting the advanced workshops. There will be a fee for those too, that I haven’t worked out yet as they will no doubt involve the renting of a kitchen, as mine is too small to host a group of people.
We seriously had so much fun on today’s trail tour following the workshop! It may have been a grey day weather-wise, but everyone left with smiles on their faces.
