Urban Bush Food Foraging

A local foraging expedition.

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?

A selection of local bush food items collected in a 2 hr walk. These will all be identified below.

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!

Salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius) is a tasty root vegetable just coming on now that spring is here in Sydney. These were growing in an area I had identified last year.

Blueberry lily (Dianella caerulea) is a very common east-coast native. Aboriginal women used to pound and roast the easily-harvested rhizomes in addition to eating the blue berries (which will be available from late November). This was my first time to try the roasted rhizome: I found them to be woody, fibrous and bitter. Perhaps I shall try again at another time of the year, and try pounding them raw before roasting. They were *very* easy to harvest, however; the rhizomes sit laterally, close to the surface.

Curled dock (Rumex crispus) can be used to add sour flavour to dishes, either raw or preferably cooked. This common weed of swampy areas was once popular in English cuisine before the popularity of the middle-eastern lemon.

Peppercress (Lepidium species, L. africanum pictured) was once an English hot herb widely used before the advent of black pepper (Piper nigrum). Seeds, easily collected by running one's hand over the seed pods, can be ground into hot mustard and the foliage can be added raw to dishes to add a hot mustard piquancy.

Lomandra (Lomandra longifolia) is currently flowering. The male flowers are tiny and emerge on long, spiky stems; their fragrants can often scent the air for hundreds of metres around if they are growing en-masse as they do in Sydney. It was my first time making lomandra flower tea and I was impressed by its sweet but nutty flavour, similar to the taste of the lomandra grain.

Slender celery (Apium leptophyllum) is a common weed which has a mild parsley-like flavour. I use it as a substitute for parsley in Italian dishes, actually!

Moth vine (Araujia sericifera) is a noxious weed found the length of Australia's eastern coast. Originaly from south America, this hated plant is railed against as horrendously poisonous and dangerous. While its acrid white sap is likely to cause blistering and rashes on skin contact, the choko-like fruits are edible, having been eaten by the Pajagua natives of Paraguay for centuries. One must be careful to remove the seeds after roasting the fruit (30 mins at 180 C). The skin was tough so I only ate the stringy white part, which was sweet and aromatic. It did leave a tingling sensation in my mouth in the hours afterward but I can confirm they are certainly not deadly if prepared by baking in a hot oven or fire.

The absolute highlight of my morning! A Sydney local, gymea lily/flame lily (Doryanthes excelsa) is a common ornamental lily used in landscaping around Australia (and probably the world). Unbeknownst to most, the young flower spikes are edible when about 6ft or less in length, and the roots can be eaten the same way. I also tried the fruit but it was a little bitter.

Before (left) and after (centre & right) preparing the parts of gymea lily (Doryanthes excelsa) by roasting in an oven for 30 minutes at 180 C. Top row: the young flower stem. It was sweet, slimy, crunchy and has a beautiful flavour of baked apple! They are also extremely filling because of all their natural starch, a very delicious vegetable I will definitely be harvesting again! Middle row: roots. These were slimy, fibrous/stringy and slightly bitter. Traditionally these were pounded thoroughly into cakes. Bottom row: fruit. White part around the seed seems to be edible but seed itself is quite bitter. I did not eat much of the fruit as a precaution (but I did not get sick at all). Probably best avoided!

Last of all, one of the locals - a royal spoonbill (Platalea regia).

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:

Salsify

Blueberry Lily

Lomandra

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.

Cheers,

JP.