2024 was a fairly good foraging year for our family. We’ve been foraging for about 20 years now and some years we gather hundreds of pounds of wild foods and some years we gather far less. This year, our family members were very busy with a lot of projects, but foraging is still part of our life and we gathered lots of good things.
This year I also foraged a lot of plants for art making (dyes, inks, anthotypes, charcoal and homemade watercolors) like shaggy inkcap mushrooms, pokeberries and Asiatic dayflowers that the kids and I did lots of art with, but I am not including them in this list since not all of them are edible and I don’t want to cause confusion.
If you’re interested, I can write up a separate roundup of those.
Here’s a list of all of the wild edible foods and medicinal plants that we foraged as a family in 2024.
- Ramps
- Wild asparagus
- Violets
- Acorns
- Dandelion leaves
- Elder flowers
- Elderberries
- Nettles
- Black raspberries
- Chicken of the Woods mushrooms
- Pheasant Back mushrooms
- Morel mushrooms
- Garlic Mustard
- Lambsquarters
- Mulberries
- Apples
- Pears
- Wild Grapes
- Plantain
- Catmint
- Mullein
- Sumac
- Dock seeds
- Hops
- Hawthorn berries
I may have forgotten a few too!
This was a pretty mild year for foraging for us, but wild foods continue to make up a big part of our supplies and we also get so much out of the fun of foraging.
My goal for 2025 is for us to forage at least 50 kinds of wild foods. Stay tuned!
