Eat Your Wild Yard: Spring

Growing & Foraging for Wild Edibles in Your Own Backyard

by Theresa & Bear

Have you ever wondered if you could shop for groceries without spending money? In our tiny, shady yard, we can’t grow a lot of the usual garden vegetables, but we can grow and forage for free wild Spring edibles:  nettle, chickweed, fiddleheads, ramps, and violets. Wild edibles are not the normal ingredients you find in most cookbooks, but you too can bring the wild into your yard and let it nourish you. Our book shows you how.

Available on Amazon

Do you want to forage for nutritious wild edibles, but don’t have access to acres of land?
Are you trying to grow an easy-maintenance edible garden?
Are you an adventurous cook who wants to experiment with new foods
while eating locally & seasonally?
You can do all this by cultivating wild foods in your own back yard!
(You can’t get more local than that.)

When we moved into our tiny homestead, which was a fixer-upper on a tiny 60’ x 140’ lot, we began removing our lawn and trying to grow some of our own food. Along the way, we learned about permaculture, with its emphasis on easy to grow perennial vegetables, and we began foraging for wild edibles on the nearby bike path. Eventually, we combined these two approaches, when we found that wild edibles grew best near the two black walnut trees that tower over their back yard. Now, we have turned our whole yard into garden, creating an edible “yarden” in which we have learned to embrace wild and sometimes weedy plants and have fun experimenting with them in our kitchen.

We show you how to enjoy growing & eating some of our favorite wild Spring edibles:  Nettle, Chickweed, Fiddleheads, Ramps, Violet Leaves.  Each chapter includes an introduction to the plant, full color photos to help with identification, instructions on growing & harvesting, and easy to follow recipes with a photo for every step.

Bonus yardening recipes include:  Bear’s BioDiversity Salad (made from weeds), World’s Fastest Homemade Salad Dressing, How to Impress Your Father-in-Law (with edible flowers), Homemade Beverages: Rhubarb-ade.

From Theresa:

This project began as an e-book that we were invited to include in an e-bundle that was available for only a short time. I'm very excited that now we have turned it into an in-print book! I've finally completed an entire book that I can hold in my hands and maybe someday see on a library shelf!

Since we self-published, I got to make this book look just the way I wanted, and it was wonderful to use my graphic design skills from my day job for my own project instead.

The book pulls together many pages and a few blogs from this website into one easily accessible book, and includes new content that you won't find here. It's full of pictures from our tiny yard and has our usual detailed instructions with a photo illustrating every step. It shows you how to cultivate easy-to-grow wild edibles, how to harvest them, and how to enjoy eating them.

I hope you like it!

From Bear:

Anybody remember the phone book scene from Steve Martin's movie The Jerk ?

THE NEW BOOK'S HERE! The BOOK'S HERE! In our hands! We're somebody now, it's right there- our name's in print!

Yep, we actually published a book! Theresa got to fulfill her dream. (Have you ever seen a grown woman cuddle a book? It's weird... in a cute way. Just sayen...) I like to blog but it is a unique feeling to say I had a part in a book, something we can hold in our hands!  It feels good enough that we are going to write more books on other topics from our website, hopefully soon. 

Just like the website, this book has lots of info, pictures, insight from Theresa, and a little "ham" from me.

(Big smile) What she said...

Here's what's in our book: