G’day and welcome to all my subscribers, new and old!
My numbers are slowly ticking up and I suspect some of you may wonder about my activity levels. I am probably more active in Substack Notes at the moment as I am still working 45-50 hours per week in my day job, and my wife has been unwell and requiring significant amounts of time in personal care. Nevertheless, I am committed to improving our understanding of bush food foraging and this will include quiet times when I am busy with work and a foraging journey will be little more than a 2 hr meander on a Saturday morning while going out to vote in our recent failed referendum. Can you really contribute to your own sustenance by foraging local in a dirty city?
As with all things, urban foraging is multifactorial in its risks. In cities, primary dangers are pollution and poisons. In my local area, for example, I no longer harvest any wild produce growing within 100-200m of Homebush Bay, a site of massive dioxin contamination from 1920-1980 when the companies Timbrol and Union Carbide dumped tonnes of poisonous waste, used during the manufacture of Agent Orange for the Vietnam War and various other highly toxic pesticides and chemicals, directly into the bay. The booming suburb of Rhodes, Sydney, is built on the top of this allegedly ‘decontaminated’ wasteland. There also used to be a car racing track around the Olympic Park/Homebush Bay area, now decommissioned. This means that 40+ years of leaded petrol was expelled as exhaust, likely making the area within 30-50 metres of the old race track riddled with lead contamination. So I avoid harvesting wild plants in this area as well.
It is imperative for an urban forager to know their local area intimately. Look into the history of polluting industry, pollution spills and other man-made environmental catastrophes in your city. Avoid such areas; harvest away from old main roads (e.g. Parramatta Rd here in Sydney) where leaded petrol was used in the past.
One’s eye will naturally fall on local parks and nature reserves as ideal foraging locations. This can certainly be the case, but again with reservation. Local councils delight in spraying cancer-causing herbicides like Roundup (glyphosate) to eliminate pesky, but otherwise edible, weeds. Here in my local area there is a bank of gymea lilies which, though mulched, frequently springs up with an abundance of amaranth, dandelions and pigweed/purslane. Council is constantly hacking them back with a whipper-snipper, or else spraying everything to death with glyphosate. Some local parks are hardly ever touched with anti-weed sprays, however, being fields of clover, dandelion, even salsify. Such neglected parks are ones I tend to focus on.
In any case, there are many edible weed and local bush food plants that one can harvest even in urban areas. Here’s what I found growing in a local Sydney springtime!
Not photographed further but included in the header image (plant on the furthest left) was onion weed (Nothoscordum species). These are flowering in Sydney at the moment but it is important to smell the cut stems if you want to harvest. If its looks like an onion and smells like an onion, its an onion. If it lacks either the look or the smell, avoid!
To read further on some of the items listed here, please consider the following Bush Food Forager articles:
I still have a lot of work to do getting more in-depth articles written for your culinary enjoyment, like gymea lily, dock and peppercress. In any case, thank you for reading and subscribing to Bush Food Forager.
So much good info and love the pictures. Have most of those plants around here. I’ve never tried lomandra flower tea or the stems of dianella. I eat the berries -yum.
So much good info and love the pictures. Have most of those plants around here. I’ve never tried lomandra flower tea or the stems of dianella. I eat the berries -yum.
Here is a list of a few things I like to forage for in spring time in our neck of the woods (southern Ontario, Canada)
https://gavinmounsey.substack.com/p/embracing-the-abundance-of-spring