 Yeah, I'm very happy to be here today and get to talk to you about Bay Area plants and foraging in the area. I like to actually start my talk, well actually before I say that, let me say that I am completely okay with questions and such, but I won't promise that I see them all. You already will help me see some, but if you have any questions to ask anything that you want to put in the chat, you are definitely welcome to. The questions make the talk more personalized. That's why it's not just a movie that you're watching, but actually something that you can participate in. So definitely feel free to bring the questions that help get what you were hoping for out of the talk. I'll also make some time for questions at the end. But before I get started too much further, I always like to start my talks and classes and events with just thinking about how much the natural world does for us with some gratitude for today, especially the plants that impact our lives every day, whether it is through beauty or through giving us healing or giving us food or oxygen, whatever it is that the amazing plants that surround us in most places, even in the city, there's more than you initially would think. So I would like to invite all of you to put in the chat, if you're comfortable, some of the plants that you have around you right now that are participating in your life somehow, whether they're bringing you beauty food, just our company for you, go ahead and just put some of those names of those plants in the chat. And while you're thinking about yours, I will tell you, well, the first plant I see here is my Christmas tree, which I used to not be kind of a tangential topic, but I used to never get a real tree, but these days I actually live in the Sierra Nevada mountains. And we have several spots here in Truckee that have had some kind of disturbance and a lot of the fir trees have grown very close together in such a way that they couldn't possibly become full trees. And so these days my family and I actually do go to the forest and get a permit from the Forest Service to go into an area that has way too many trees growing too close together and they actually need to be thinned. So we have a real Christmas tree in much the same way as when I was just a kid in Finland, we used to get actual trees. So yeah, grateful for trees and oxygen and beauty of the trees, the joy that they bring, especially at this dark time of year, and also feeling very grateful for medicinal plants at this time when there's lots of colds and flus going around. Somebody just brought me some wild harvested Graze Lovage, which is also called Oshala, which is very similar to the well-known or OSHA, and I've been feeling very grateful for that herb. Now I'm going to see what what plants you all are saying. Oh nice. Oh dwarf orange, cool. Grapes, yay, still grapes, eating grapes, lucky. Nice. Yeah, a lot of beauty plants, nice, lots of, oh, somebody asked, these are plants that we are feeling grateful for, for those of you who arrived late. Yes, Christmas tree too, ferns, oh gosh, yeah, ferns are the original early ancestor plants. Great. Well, I'm sure there's lots and lots more, but it is, it is always nice to notice that pretty much no matter where I do the talk, even if it's in a supposedly empty auditorium, if we look outside the window or just look at what people decorate things with, we will usually see a plant. So with utmost gratitude for all the plants, I will, with that gratitude, start this talk with you and please keep feeling gratitude and noticing all your plants while we're talking. All right, I'm going to share my screen and start. I have some photos to share with you. I won't call it an official slideshow because my official slideshow happened to disappear, but I do have photos to share with you and that is just fine. Just a second here, I wanted to, sorry, just a momentary thing because the zoom bar is covering my control bar for preview, so I can't click the slideshow button. Interesting, there, magically that disappeared, awesome. Okay, here we go. All right, does that look fine, Laurie? Yes, okay, great. All righty, unfortunately, I keep having these things pop up on top of it. I don't know if you all see those, but I have pop ups. I'm not sure if there's a way to stop that, Laurie, but if there is, great. All right, anyhow, my name is Mia and I am the author of two books on foraging. One of them is the Bay Area forager and then my most recent book is the Sierra forager for this area in the Truckee and all the way up to Yosemite, or down to Yosemite region in the Ceres, but since I'm presuming most of you are in the Bay Area, because this is a San Francisco library talk, I will focus mostly on Bay Area plants. I actually grew up in Finland where foraging is still a lot more common than it usually is in the US. That could possibly be because in Finland, the forest floor is actually covered with really yummy wild blueberries and it's really, really easy to just go into the forest and harvest big handfuls of blueberries, raspberries, wild strawberries, lingonberries, and there's all kinds of mushrooms. So mushroom hunting is also a lot kind of more easily just visible and all over the forest floor in the summer. So it makes sense that people would still be doing that with their families. So that's how I grew up as well. And then when I moved here, when I was about 15, I started wondering, well, there must be edible plants here too. There don't seem to be wild blueberries all over the forest floor, but I see berries and I see a lot of plants and so very slowly actually, I started finding out what was edible. And at that time, for some reason, there wasn't an easy foraging class to attend. And actually most of the foraging books were out of print. Then there was a new surge where a lot of the books actually became available again. And books came out. But when I was trying to find out what was forageable, really, there was just a You Will Give It book from the 60s. What is it called? I'm forgetting. I'm sure. Oh, Stocking the Wild Asparagus. Great book, really great book, but kind of lousy pictures. So not the most approachable if you don't already know what you're looking for sometimes, but great information, amazing forager. But so it actually took me quite a while to figure out what was edible. And I'm a very careful eater as well, which might be the reason I found out so much about plants is that I'm not the kind who just goes when somebody has said, oh, that might be edible and tries it. I know people like that, but that's not me. I'm very careful. So I did my research and always made sure that I know 150% sure that something is edible before I try it. So I accumulated a bunch of information and then suddenly people were asking me to share my information and do classes and it gained a lot of popularity. And then I met a fellow forager Kevin and we decided to collaborate and we write the Bay Area forager, which we intended to be a very local book, because a lot of the guides that were out covered a very broad region. And it was obvious from the books that those authors didn't actually have a very good knowledge of any local area. Like it might just say West Coast foraging, but gosh, the West Coast has so many different types of plant zones that it could be hard to really be able to specialize in one of them. And most of the time it showed that they had a local bias, but that wasn't declared in the title of the book. So when Kevin and I wrote the book Bay Area Forager, we really wanted it to be a truly Bay Area book, one that would be very easy to pick up and quickly learn just a few of the most common forageable plants in the Bay Area rather than be overwhelmed by the entire West Coast. So that's a little bit of my story. And now I'm going to focus on the plants. If it'll let me. There we go. Oh, well, that's me and Kevin there. So that's more of our story in the headlands picking some wild mustard and wild radishes looks like. So often, this is kind of you might be walking down a path and you're looking at the wall of green here and maybe you're wondering, well, how am I going to, I want to learn about wild edible plants. I might want to eat some things and this is, is there anything that I could eat around here? Where do I start? What's the way to really start on here? It looks like there's lots of plants for some of you. You might be plant experts and even from this photo with kind of small detail, you might already be identifying what these plants here are. And for others of you, you might be like, yeah, it just all looks like green and flowers. And I'm really not sure what's what. And how could I ever know what to eat? I mean, there could be dangerous plants out there. So how would you start foraging? My first recommendation is to get to know what the dangerous plants are or what the plants that could hurt you are. So for many of you, this plant is probably familiar. This, of course, is our friend poison oak, which actually is a very special plant in our area often protects zones that have been really damaged. In fact, with the kids groups, we've taken to calling it protector oak sometimes because it really does kind of say to us humans, hey, wait, stay away from this area. This isn't an area to trample in. And it's an interesting plant because it's called poison oak, but it's actually neither poisonous nor is it an oak. So very interesting that it is called poison oak. Poison oak, very strangely, is actually an edible plant. It is not poisonous. The definition of poisonous is that if you ingest it, it will hurt you in some way. Now, of course, poison oak actually does hurt us. But the reason for it is not because it's poisonous. It's because we are highly allergic to it. So there are people that are not allergic at all to poison oak, and they will not have a reaction even if they eat it. And I've actually witnessed somebody eating full grown sprigs of poison oak that got used to it. Don't try this at home. But they were not allergic to it, and they were fine. So poison oak actually has edible berries, edible leaves, but we are so allergic to it that we can't even touch it. So this is definitely one plant to know. Most places in the Bay Area have it, and some have it very abundantly. And if you're foraging around touching things, you definitely want to identify poison oak so that you don't get a very itchy rash. It is best identified by the leaves of three, as you probably know the rhyme. And sometimes it's viney. Sometimes it looks like a tree. It's a master of disguise, but definitely want to get to know thoroughly if you are interested in foraging. Well, why there is this delay, but it's okay. Oh, here's another picture of poison oak. It kind of shows you how different it can look. Where sometimes it's a big bush. Sometimes it's just a sprig. Now I wonder if you know this plant. This is another plant we definitely want to know before we go out there and forage, because often it's a good idea to get to know the most hazardous things before you try to find things that are non-hazardous. This right here is poison hemlock, which is one of the most poisonous plants in North America. All you need to do is ingest a little bit, like even just an entire leaf, a couple leaves, and you might actually die. And I do know people who've gotten seriously ill and one person who has actually died from ingesting this plant. And the reason why people even sometimes accidentally do eat it is because it looks a lot like a carrot. It looks like a wild carrot. It is in the carrot in the APACA family and carrot family plants are very hard to tell apart. So for beginning and even intermediate, honestly, even sometimes advanced foragers, I recommend a high degree of caution with any carrot family plant, making sure that you absolutely know it if you're going to be harvesting it, because there are several carrot family plants like poison hemlock and water hemlock, which is even more poisonous. That can be fairly easily mistaken for other things such as wild carrot or OSHA. And you can really get quite sick or possibly even die. In fact, this plant is the one that they used on purpose to kill Socrates, that some people say it still has his blood on it. If you look at the stems, you can see little teeny specks of red. And that is one identifying feature of poison hemlock. This plant also, when it dries, you can see some of the dry stalks in this picture too. When it dries, it just makes kind of a brittle and hollow long, long stem. And sometimes kids and sometimes people even will want to use it for firewood or something. So that's another good thing to know fully in the Bay area is what poison hemlock looks like. Can you see my chat on my screen if I have it open like this? Is it in the picture? No, we can see you. Okay, awesome. Great. Thank you. Just making sure. Yes, and poison hemlock does have white flowers. Thank you for pointing that out. That's really true. And here is another picture of it where you can kind of better see. You can see you can see the hollowness of the stem. There's actually a little spider that's crawled in there. You can see the red much more clearly. It doesn't have the flowers, but the flowers are umbels, so kind of like umbrellas of multitude of white and they are really pretty flowers. This plant is very common in the Bay area. And yes, somebody asked it is bad to use in fires. You don't want to inhale the smoke of any toxic point. Alrighty. Oh, well, and here's another hazard of fortune. You might not be expecting this, but this is real. There's also other dangers besides poison, poisonous plants. You also want to make sure that you're not eating plants from an area that that dogs or cows or whatever might have been peeing or pooping in. I mean, that's that is a real thing. If, however, that's fairly easy concern to fix, of course, any plant that you take home that you're not going to cook, you can definitely wash, you can even wash it with a little bit of hydrogen peroxide or vinegar to get rid of any germs. But still, it's kind of nicer not to forage right next to sidewalks or like the edges of trails where dogs are really likely to go. Another hazard of foraging is pesticides and also any kind of like any other kind of pollutants that might be put in put in an environment like next to power lines and telephone poles, things like that. You probably want to avoid foraging next to features like that or even sports fields sometimes have way more pesticides than other places. So that's just something to be aware of. And therefore, I like to ask myself before I forage anything, I ask myself, hmm, does this really seem right? Is this really a good place to forage before I actually pick something? Mia, there are two questions in the chat. Okay. Is hemlock poisonous to cats and dogs? Can you touch it? That's a great question. Hemlock poisonous to cats and dogs. That is a curious, I don't remember that for sure. I actually have looked it up. And I don't remember I think goats can handle it. I think it's probably not good for cats and dogs, but I'd suggest looking that one up on the internet just in case. And what was the other question? Can you touch it? Is it? Oh, yeah, touch it. Great question. Yeah, you can touch it. It's not like poison oak where it would give you a rash. However, we have had some rare cases where like a kid was rolling around in a big patch of it, like really rolling and got a reaction. So it's not great to, it's better to avoid touching it, but you're not going to get poisoned by brushing against it. The other thing is, of course, if you're going to rub it in your hands and then eat, that's not great, but you're not going to die from doing that. So basically, yes, you can touch it. Thank you. Yeah. Right, that was a picture of a factory for that. There's that kind of pollution as well. But that's in all of our food, unfortunately. Other than those hazards, once you have your basic hazards down, then there is an abundance of things to harvest in the Bay Area. We are actually really lucky in the Bay Area that almost every season is a foraging season. There's really basically no time of year that there isn't something to forage, because it's a mild climate and there's a lot of variety. I mean, one thing that's really fun about the Bay Area is that there is so much variety in the landscape. So for example, this picture reminds me of that in Golden Gate Park, there's nasturtiums and all kinds of plants that aren't in season other places in season. Like Golden Gate Park has its own season and there's that all over the Bay Area where there's these different zones of the Bay Area and you can find different plants in them in different seasons of different phases of their progression and that's kind of fun. And it's also, this picture is also a good reminder that there's so much abundance and you also do want to harvest with care. A lot of people ask me, well, how much should I forage if something, when is it okay to forage? And the general rule of thumb is, the general rule of thumb is don't harvest more than one third of a part of a plant. I tend to go for way less than that. And my first thing that I do is just look around and determine does this seem like a good place to forage? Is there only one of this type of plant or are there several? Does it seem like these plants are doing well and it's a good idea to forage them? The really good news is that most of the plants I'm going to talk about today and most of the plants in the Bay Area forager are actually plants that are either considered invasive or just very abundant and most people would be happy if you removed some from their yards. A lot of them are what a lot of people would call weeds. So there's that. I see a lot of things in the chat. Are there any questions? Yes, there's a question from Doug. What solution of hydrogen peroxide to clean forage leaves? 100% or what percentage diluted with water? Oh, yeah, no, not 100%. You mean what solution of hydrogen peroxide just depend that you can easily get in a pharmacy and just like even a teaspoon to your whole wash bucket is fine. And how to differentiate between poison hemlock and queen antlates? That is an advanced question and I would say my first answer to that question is if you don't really know, then avoid eating those. And my second answer would be to say what I would actually recommend is find a confirmed poison hemlock and find a confirmed queen antlates in the stages of their development. So when it's flowering or when it's seeding, the ones where it's really easy to identify them, you can even use an app like I seek to help you. I seek is usually pretty good. Not disclaimer. I would never use I seek to eat something edible. What I mean is find the plant that you think is most likely queen antlates in a flowering stage or a seeding stage where it's very easy to identify, confirm that it's that if I seek things so too and observe that plant through its stages. So from flower to seed to leaf and actually see that one plant that you go to every time. Same thing with the poison hemlock, go to it at different phases and that is your best way to identify those two types of plants fully. That's actually what's recommended if you're going to be harvesting APACA family plants for like medicine making or such is to really get to know the same patch of plants over time so that there's really no question about what it is. You could of course like get a general internet search answer but it's not going to, it's really best just to get to know the certain one that you know is it and observe it. Alrighty for some of our common plants might as well start with our bay tree which actually is named, it's in the bay area, it's a bay tree, it's the bay areas tree. I'm sure many of you have seen them. It's a wonderful plant because it's very easy to identify. The smell is pretty much unmistakable. It's an evergreen tree and it has these oval leaves and in the fall it makes these little fruits, these bay nuts. So you'll see in this picture there's a green one, they turn an olive purple color when they are older and they are actually relatives of the avocado which is really strange because they have a completely different smell but when you see the way that the bay nut, the seed is in there, it actually is very similar to an avocado. Now the whole thing is edible, the whole plant really is but it's very strong. So the leaves are great to use for seasoning just like Greek laurel leaves. This is a laurel tree so any recipe that calls for bay laurel leaves you can use an actual bay area bay leaf instead just be aware that the bay leaves are really a lot stronger so you use about a third of the amount that the recipe calls for. They're best if you dry them that also makes them a little bit milder. You can also eat bay nuts and right now you should still be able to actually find bay nuts even if they've just fallen to the ground and they're old, they preserve for a long time and they're very easy to harvest so you'll see them on the on the ground or on the tree when they're ripe and soft and you take off the fruit which is kind of orange just yellow on the inside it's very fragrant you can actually eat that part but it's really strong I don't know many people who actually enjoy the fruit of the bay but inside there is a little seed nut and you dry those and then you roast them in the oven at 350 for maybe like 20 minutes or something so depends a little bit on your oven you just look out for when they get lightish brown and then you crack them and inside the shell of the nut you'll find yet another little inside nut that will hopefully have roasted to kind of a coffee color and that nut actually is very similar to chocolate or coffee so very similar to a cacao bean so it's bitter and it's very caffeinated and you can use it just like you would chocolate you can even make truffles with it you can make a drink now it's very strong it's more like coffee and taste than chocolate but it is our local kind of chocolate and cacao bean so that's kind of fun and it's very easy to harvest and it's very hard to mistake because if it smells like a bay leaf it probably is a bay leaf I couldn't think of anything else that smells like a bay leaf so that's kind of a fun one here is a picture of the actual bay nuts when they're purple and somebody's bowl here these are very beautiful ones but even if they are further gone than this like even if they're rotting on the ground the nut is often still completely edible because these actually have preservative qualities and they bay leaves can be used as an insect repellent and also as a preservative so the nut stays good for a long time and if you want to find out more I know I shared that kind of quickly the bay nut recipe and such it is in my book my book has a lot of recipes and bay nut I think we have maybe bay nut truffles or something like that but definitely directions on how to work with bay nuts are in there in more specifics and oh right here's a picture of somebody actually opening the bay nut you can see the fruit and it's it's quite messy there but there's the bay nut coming through and this is that that picture there that went by a little bit fast was just the picture of some bay nut chocolate that somebody had made and there's actually these days a lot of bay nut chocolate for sale I've noticed it's kind of a new thing so this one hopefully many of you have seen too this is another great foraging plant because it is also very difficult to mistake for anything poisonous this one is called miner's lettuce and it looks almost like an upside down umbrella with a little flower in the middle and its texture is very leathery kind of thick almost like a succulent and so it's very easy to recognize in this way this is actually a native plant but it is very abundant when harvesting it it's just important to carefully pinch it rather than pulling because if you pull the whole thing with the roots comes out miner's lettuce is a really yummy salad it's high in vitamins which I think is why they named it miner's lettuce because it helped keep scurvy at bay it's very tasty very mild and a great plant to forage put in your salads and it usually grows in the in the spring time and its friend here is chickweed chickweed also grows in the spring they'll start coming up by spring I actually mean like very soon in February even they'll start even January they'll start coming up and it's a great time to start harvesting wild salads chickweed too is very mild very tasty in a salad it's also medicinal people make salves with it and you can fairly easily recognize it it's this is a little bit harder miners lettuce and bay are very easy this one there is a very simple key identifying feature but you have to get up close with the plant and really look and in this picture I think you can see it on the side there if you look very carefully you'll see little teeny hairs and it only has hair on one side of the stem which is very unusual most things that have hair have it all over but this plant only has it on one side of the stem so if you see that and you see the the opposite leaves and it's a little plant so it's it's just very low growing then you might have a chickweed and for I always of course recommend going out with somebody who already knows how to forage like going on a foraging walk if you can't do that if you don't have a foraging walk in person around you then just go ahead and cross reference so that you really can be 200 percent certain that it is the right plant and if there is a way to to eat plants that you are not familiar with as well that involves kind of very slowly upping the dose that you take but ideally that's not the way you go about it ideally you cross reference you ask people that know and that way you get to know the plant fully this is another popular popular or spring time a common green in the bay area especially in the early spring late winter the you know bay area seasons I don't even know whether to call them winter spring or what but the rainy season the start of the rainy season is when these little low growing salad greens start popping up this one is called cleavers and it is very easy to identify as it has the whirls of leaves around its stem and sometimes I call it the velcro plant or the cat's tongue plant because it is just like velcro you might even see it in this picture there's tiny little they're not really spikes they're they're just kind of this texture like a cat's tongue where if you put it on your shirt it'll actually stick and I think I confirm that it really is true that they use this very plant to design velcro that if you really zoom in on these little spiky things they have a unique hook like structure so they really cling to things so that's why it's called cleavers it cleaves to you and therefore is very easy to identify it is a tasty salad green it can also be cooked only thing is it does have that funny texture so it's best picked very young or you can crush it up in a blender something that kind of destroys that texture it is very good for you it's very tonifying rich in minerals so and also has a very nice mild taste so that's another fun one to know about Mia some question in chat I missed a question from a previous picture it's about chickweed the question is chickweed have flowers in picture white or orange flowers or purple oh great question because there's actually not really a super poisonous but non-edible lookalike which is called scarlet pimpurna which has gorgeous orangey purplish flowers like they're orange with purple details and that is not chickweed chickweed has a very plain very very tiny white flower but normally don't want to wait until these green plants flower to eat them because they get bitter when they flower so with these green low-growing salad greens you want to harvest them as young as possible which is where you really want to get to know them but again like I said earlier to some other question a good way to start is really to get to know a patch that comes back year after year and you can get to know it and all its cycles all its stages before you eat it that way you can really be sure that it's the plant so you can wait for it to flower maybe not harvest it that time because then it's bitter and too big by then but next year you know oh that's the patch where I saw the chickweed last year it's come back I can see that I've observed it through its stages and now I'm sure it's it it's not as quite necessary as with the BAC a plant family but it is a good technique especially if you don't have a guide was there another question yes in the book it says chickweed has opposite leaves what does that mean yeah um so opposite means that they so if this is the plants then the the I guess I don't have enough arms for that example actually I'll do it like this so opposite is like this they grow off the stem opposite each other the other option is alternate so they grow like steps are these stems also good to eat or just the leaves the stems are good to eat the whole plant in these low-growing greens these tender greens is good to eat Lolita asked a question please let her know if you're organizing a foraging group yes you know I do a little bit less walks I will tell you all that I am very receptive to receiving requests for talks and walks and because I tend to be very busy running my organization build up and with my children I don't as often anymore um declare one-off classes so please if if you have interest usually many people will join you could just contact me via my website which is miaandler.com or this feralfin.com which goes to the same place and just let me know you want to walk and your kind of initial love hey can you do a walk here around this time of year might be the kind of push for me to declare a walk there and I also gladly do custom walks I just often these days I don't tend to just come up with those walks myself because as I said I get unfortunately very busy but that doesn't mean I don't want to do them I love doing walks and I often in the spring I'll do a couple also and unfortunately Kevin moved to Tennessee I think so he doesn't do many walks here but I will gladly thank you Mia question from Doug does your book list the vitamins mineral content for the various forage splints we've been asked that before and we actually even tried to do that at some point but it actually isn't very easily available information and if it is it's not necessarily totally reliable there haven't been they probably have but there aren't that many accessible studies for all these plants food value right now so some of them I will just say when there's something particularly noteworthy like this plant is very high in iron or this plant is very high in vitamin C but we don't list like the particular ones thank you Mia yeah so this one is another very easy plant to use a lot of the flavors of forage plants are quite different some people like them and some people don't they can be a little bit more bitter than your usual store bought plant or just stronger in flavor and actually referring to the past question there they're also much higher in nutrition and minerals than other store bought plants so you might be surprised if you make a fully wild edible salad that you get full very quickly and can't actually have a salad of the same size as you would of your normal salad plants but this here is wild onion and it is very easy to find in the springtime with its white flowers and this one you can harvest once it's already flowering too and it has a very nice triangular leaf that smells of course like onion and it's easy to identify because it smells like onion and most plants that smell like onion and garlic are onion and garlic and that's kind of a nice thing to to know and forage so this one has a very leathery leaf that's kind of a triangular it has a ridge right here a triangular shape and grows often in patches like this with many wild onions around it and it has a little teeny onion bulb and that is edible but most of the time it's much better to use it like chives so use the leaves and the flowers in salad or cooking and it has a nice mild onion flavor and that will come up probably February or so and here's a big patch of it I think at the Berkeley marina possibly another spring plant that's going to come up very soon it actually stays around too longer than that but this one is sorrel this one is the non-native sorrel and kids also call it sour grass they like to eat the flower stems you can also eat the leaves and the Latin name is oxalis and that refers to that this plant is high in oxalic acid it's similar to rhubarb and the flavor is actually very similar to rhubarb too and there is a caution against eating too much oxalic acid but honestly I think you'd have to eat a lot of sour grass to reach those levels that inhibit calcium absorption so it's not really a true danger unless you're eating it every day otherwise it's just a really lovely plant to eat fresh as a green it tastes nice and sour or just to cook it actually makes a great cooked green like to have with eggs or something so that's a that's another one to easily look out for there's also redwood sorrel that has smaller leaves and teeny pink flowers and that one I kind of avoid picking because it's a more sensitive plant but it looks very similar and it is it is used the same way many people think this is clover clover is also edible but if you look closely you might see that this is this has really heart shaped leaves like very pronouncedly defined leaves and clover doesn't have quite these kind of heart shaped leaves but both are edible so it wouldn't really be a big mistake to make and here is one that many people are surprised to learn that would be edible because it looks so spiky but it's actually a very very flavorful plant this is a close cousin of the artichoke in fact artichokes are giant thistles but the one pictured here is a thistle and in artichokes we eat the flower and here you can see the flower now it's much tinier on a thistle you could eat it but it'd be very spiky and uncomfortable so on these wild thistles what we eat is usually the stem which is actually quite easy to harvest when it's first growing in the spring and it's fresh and nice the stem can just be peeled with a knife and all the spiky parts removed and then you can eat it fresh it's quite crunchy and nice or you can cook it like an asparagus you can also eat the leaves and just cut off the little prickles I think I already mentioned the wild mustards and radishes at the very beginning of the talk but this is another plant family that has a lot of edible members the brassicae family which has broccoli and cabbage and a lot of our favorite things to eat that are so good for us and this is a wild mustard and you can see also the purple ones the wild radishes and mustards are all edible and fairly easy to identify by their cruciferous flowers which are four petals in a cross shape that's a pretty good sign if you see a flower that has four petals in a cross shape you're probably looking at brassicae family plant and most of those are edible some of them are very strong tasting but and some of them are milder and nicer to eat one of my favorite plants to eat or parts to eat on these plants besides the flower is the little seed pod when it's fresh before it gets hard is like a little teeny radish and it has a very nice flavor here's another picture of a of a wild uh radish oh and then these this is another one that you can actually forage all around the world as we thought we started with Christmas trees um Christmas trees are edible turns out and they're particularly tasty when they have these young little uh buds on it this is a Douglas fir and fir tips are really really tasty really high in vitamin c you can eat them fresh make a tea out of them basically any pine or fir tree is edible there are some poisonous lookalikes but they're very uncommon and they do not smell like a Christmas tree so if it smells like a Christmas tree looks like a Christmas tree most likely is edible and that's pretty easy to identify I have eaten pines and furs from the Himalayas to different places in Europe so they're a very easy to identify edible family and I really like the taste it's kind of lemony that this is this is the one where people who are like very cautious to forage anything if they ask me I say well just go try a little piece of pine or first to start with it's easy to identify low risk it's off the ground and see if you like that yeah quick question does your book have a lot of pictures like these as and you as useful to bring in the field yes and this this here by the way just pictures of pines and furs here um yes my book has a lot of big pictures now whether it's useful to bring in the field um I tend to be one for not bringing books in the field and instead making my observations even taking a picture or making a drawing and then consulting my books and the internet later but I do know people like to take books in the field and I do know people take our book in the field so it does have we have really attempted to get very easily big and identifiable pictures we really focused on big color photographs yes this plant here is stinging nettle and it's another one that many might be surprised that is edible because it stings you but the stingers are actually little mechanical formic acid injectors so if you break them they can't sting you and it's fairly easy to break them stinging nettle is one of my favorite plants to harvest it's one of the few plants that I actually go out and forage big amounts of because it's so good for you it is really really high in minerals vitamins it it can be easily used instead of spinach and pretty much any recipe um it makes a great tea it's great to prevent allergies it's really a super food so I highly recommend stinging nettle do not know why my slide is not oh maybe this is the last slide that could be it but that is actually an appropriate last slide because it is it happened to be both me and Kevin's favorite plant to really go forage for because it is such a super food and tastes so good it really has a nice soft spinach like flavor um so that's just a few of the bay area plants in this little one hour time um there there are really so many wonderful plants to harvest in the bay area and our book tries to outline most of the common ones in a way that's very accessible and these were just a few to highlight today to hopefully get you curious to get out there and look for more plants and maybe try some of these ones but I know we have a few minutes left here so I'd love to open up for any questions that are remaining yes I just saw a question does stinging nettle have a lookalike that has no spines yes so stinging nettle for one has been bred also these days to have a non stinging variant so you can actually buy non stinging stinging nettle and grow it in fact stinging nettle is a great plant to grow in a container in your garden as well um and there is something called hedge nettle if you are wondering if that's what you've seen you could look up a picture of hedge nettle it is fuzzy not stinging and it smells kind of acidic strong it it is actually edible but it doesn't taste very good um and is very common in the bay area and is one of my most common commonly asked questions on my walks is what's this plant and it's usually hedge nettle there's a question related to stinging nettle can you please repeat how to avoid getting stung by the stinging nettle well how to avoid getting stung so well to avoid getting stung you can just wear clothing and gloves when you're harvesting gloves are the key or just use scissors to harvest but you can also harvest it with your bare hands you might get stung but there's a way to do it where you press it down firmly i think i actually have a video about that on my instagram on how to harvest stinging oh yeah because the california naturalist lady too shared it on instagram i think i have it through her channel on my instagram as well um which i'm this feral fin it's a public instagram account if you want to follow my videos um there is a way to harvest with bare hands as well um but but basically gloves is the way to not get stung it's not bad for you to get stung though some people do it on purpose it's it's an acupuncture technique it's not really yeah it's not bad for you okay um we have a question about uh oh walking route is there a walking route that you would recommend for someone trying to start foraging you mean an actual area to foraging um no the bay area is a very big place actually what i might recommend is starting not in the fully wild but rather in the suburban wild it's actually often easier to find these plants in the suburban wild so even just walking around your local park or well well watered neighborhood might be an easier place to start than going into the wilds and then otherwise it's also good to know that different parks have different rules about foraging so it's not always okay to harvest things on public lands either thank you have you noticed any health impacts since you started foraging well i grew up foraging so i've always eaten foraged food since i was a child but i do know that foraged foods are really high in in nutrients minerals vitamins so and i definitely experienced the impact of on purpose like stinging nettle for example i have seasonal allergies and it helps immensely if i start taking stinging nettles months ahead of when i know the allergies will hit it helps a lot so definitely have experienced the healing impact of many plants thank you uh what's the name of the plant of the last photo shown is it stinging nettle yes stinging okay got it and then uh what are the best and easiest plans for the beginner to go out and look for in the bay area now in this season so all of these plants that i've shown pictures of today are good ones to start with because they're easy to identify and they're also nice and flavor and practical to use uh right now let's see um well bay nuts are an easy one to if you can still find bay nuts those might be a good way to start again the furs and the pines are an easy way to start um there are also some places still probably madrone berries are usually in the season you can try a madrone berry madrones are really easy to identify because they have their red smooth bark and they're really colorful berries that's a seasonal one right now those are maybe the three that i might that probably would be available everywhere right now and easy to easy to find thank you does stinging nettle only grow near bodies of water ponds and streams no not always it does like water but i've seen it in drier places as well it needs some degree of water for sure but like in point rays it grows in the meadows it doesn't have to be constantly in water or near water but it is more common to find near like creeks more easily that's the last question we have in chat okay anyone knows a question please feel free to um type it in oh in the picture is that poison plant next to it oh great observation nice i'm i'm glad i was wondering if anybody would notice no i don't actually think that that is poison hemlock i'm not a percent sure what that is and i think it's this other flowering plant that has leaves similar to apacea family but it's not or it could be a type of wild parsley um and i will say i don't always identify apacea plants correctly myself in fact me and another naturalist friend have a current mystery about an apacea family plant in point rays that we just saw some weeks ago and we're not totally sure what it is it can be quite hard but this one might not even be an apacea family this one might be there's some other flowering plants with similar leaves but very good observation because it is very similar looking so that's that's great that you're noticing that question from david i'm not sure uh if i understand correctly i think he want to know if your book talks about mushroom uh yes that's a also very commonly asked question and i will say right now that i'm offering a beginner mushroom class in uh in fairfax and marine on this sunday and that class is available through my organization vilda v i l v a so if anybody's interested in an actual in-person mushroom mushrooms for beginners class i am teaching that this sunday actually so that that just happens to be the case um but no i am not a mushroom while i can while i do the beginner mushroom workshops mushrooms are a whole different category um and there is a great book on just mushrooms and it's called all the the rain promises and more by david aurora it's the best foraging book i know of anywhere it's got the greatest pictures it's an awesome awesome book it's the highest standard for i wish i wish i had the wealth of pictures that he has to make a book like that it's a great book and he also has a bigger one so there's no need to have a mushroom guide because there's already an amazing mushroom guide out there and mushrooms are essentially quite different from plants so it's a whole other area of of um of study really so we didn't want to we thought about it and we didn't want to just cover it in brief our book is apparently already too long with the pictures in it so no we do not cover mushrooms but i highly highly recommend all the rain promises and more uh mia did you um say apac apac what does that stand for apac yeah that's a latin name for the family that has poison hemlock um queen ansley's wild carrot it's the carrot family latin name got it let's see i think that's the last question let me read it oh uh david want to ask you to repeat the mushroom book author's name yeah i think i think i can put it in the chat here let's see yes i can all that the rain promises more and then here's my website for anybody interest or the for the mushroom class and here's my normal website for any other um any other requests and since i have such a large audience i promise myself that i would say if anybody knows anybody who would like to teach children in nature we are training and highly looking for more staff at my organization build up which is based in marin so if you know any could also be a great fit for any younger college kids wanting to just work a summer but really any age of person who enjoys being outdoors with kids and we will train you and we are looking for people so please please tell your friends um yes you can also volunteer um but yeah it's getting harder and harder for us to find staff because of the cost of living in the bay area so now we're having to really advertise it out but we need people to hang out with kids in nature and learn these skills um thank you so much everybody for for uh joining this talk i really do hope it inspired you to get out there and notice more plants thank you so much we really appreciate you taking the time to share with us the art and science of foraging in the bay area i also want to thank everyone for joining the program i hope you guys um enjoy the presentation find it informative and helpful to you i will send out an evaluation survey together with a link to today's recording please give us your feedback so we can continue to improve again thank you everyone have a wonderful rest of your day bye bye now bye thank you