A beginner’s guide to foraging for the culinary delights found in Calgary's gardens, parks and back lanes.
It’s the oldest trick in the book: man sees weed, berry or fruit, man eats weed, berry or fruit. Foraging is the reason those big molars hog the real estate in the back of our jaws. It’s the thread of commonality uniting cultures around the world. And here in the recently paved plains and foothills of Alberta, it’s hardly ancient history.
A slew of intrepid foodies and amateur ethno-botanists across the continent are channelling their roots to sniff out their next meal from nooks and crannies around the city. Some forage to save a few bucks, others to stick it to the corporate farming machine, while some simply love honing their skills for the hunt.
Unfortunately for Calgarians with adventurous palettes, the picking of fruits, weeds, berries or any other wildlife on City property is a prohibited activity. “No person shall damage, dig, cut, disturb or destroy any park vegetation, whether alive or dead,” says Urban Forestry coordinator Russell Freisen, citing Parks and Pathways Bylaw 20M2003.
But such rules don’t have to ruin our fun. Calgary’s edible landscape starts in our own (unsprayed) yards and spreads throughout our communities. As Dr. Dawn Johnston, co-teacher of the University of Calgary’s food culture communications course, points out, such a rule would create political outrage in her home province of Newfoundland, where berry picking is an important part of local culture and identity.
“There are rules for foragers: they’re supposed to only take as much as they need, not as much as there is,” she says. “It’s the idea that you would leave some for not just other people, but for animals and insects that might be feeding on the same things.”
With that philosophy in mind, if you happen to spot an especially hearty apple tree or a bush heavy with berries in your neighbourhood, try knocking on a stranger’s door — you never know who will open their garden to you. Just be wary of pesticides, pick lightly, share the fruits of your labour and, if you’re lucky, you may end up with surprising meal and some new friends on the block.
To get you started, here’s a guide to some of the top finds to look out for in Calgary’s lawns, lanes and byways.
Weeds and Greens
Aboriginals used pounded nettle leaves to clean wounds, encourage healing and soothe painful joints and muscles. A strong nettle tea reduces internal and external bleeding. And the Russians concocted a boiled nettle tonic to reduce hair loss and encourage growth.
But even if you have a full head of hair and you’re not, as far as you know, bleeding or arthritic, consider this: gnocchi in a nettle cream sauce. Now imagine it served at high-end restaurants across North America. OK, so nettles don’t have that cachet quite yet, but Wade Sirois thinks it’s not a bad idea.
“Nettles have a really nice flavour: really spinachy, without the irony grit,” says the chef and co-owner of Forage, a Calgary catering company serving meals-to-go made with locally sourced ingredients. “They’re not trendy yet, but I think it’s just a matter of time. I’ve seen them on menus outside of Calgary.”
An easy addition to mashed potatoes or stir-fries, the greens boast protein, vitamins A, C and D, and minerals including iron, potassium, calcium and phosphorus.
According to Sirois, who grows a patch in his own backyard, the nettles grew back five or six times during last year’s growing season alone. Nettles have jagged-edged leaves that grow in pairs along the stalk, and small pale-green flowers that droop from leaf stems like miniature garlands. Look for them growing an average of two to four feet tall in wooded areas, along waterways, in prairie grasses or near roadsides.
You can harvest them from April until October, but young spring leaves are the tastiest. Remember to wear long pants, a long-sleeved shirt and bring gloves: they’re called stinging nettles for a reason. But don’t worry — soaking the nettles in water or cooking them removes the stinging chemicals.
“Love them or hate them, one thing is for certain. Dandelions are at the heart of the pesticide use debate in Calgary.” So says the City’s website. It’s a melodramatic statement that encapsulates Calgary’s schizophrenic attitude toward wildlife protection.
According to the Alberta Weed Control Act, if weed inspectors decide your lawn has gone beyond a certain allowable threshold for “noxious weeds,” like dandelions, Canada thistle or lambs quarters — all edible plants — you can be fined up to $10,000.
And despite cries from the Coalition for a Healthy Calgary, things aren’t about to change. But here’s an alternative that could make everyone happy: if we can’t beat them — safely — then let’s eat them. Antioxidant-rich dandelion petals are a beautiful addition to salads or rice dishes, and dandelion greens aid in digestion, ease heartburn and increase appetite. Best picked in the spring before they become too bitter, the greens have almost six times more vitamin A than carrots or plain lettuce and are also a good source of vitamins B complex, C and D. If they’re too sharp for your palate, soak them in salt water for 30 minutes and serve them fresh in a salad, sautéed or in a stew.
The root, meanwhile, makes a delicious tea that also helps with digestion, is a mild laxative and may improve liver and gall bladder function. Like coffee, this concoction has bitter, earthy and nutty flavours and will infuse your kitchen with a chocolaty aroma as the roots bake in your oven.
The best time to dig for roots is in the early spring or late fall, when they’re at their nutritional peak. You’ll need some patience and a spade or weeding tool — thick dandelion taproots can grip down 10 inches to a foot into the soil.
When your garden is thoroughly polka-dotted with holes, soak and clean the roots before baking at 350°F for about an hour or until dry. You’ll need about one heaping teaspoon of ground roots per cup of tea.
Donna Balzer loves snacking on asparagus in late May or early June while she walks her dog.
“I usually eat them fresh right there,” says the professional horticulturalist, garden consultant, author and journalist. “There’s never enough to bother taking home, but it’s such a treat. It tastes almost like melon.”
Balzer usually finds small patches of the short, stalky stems along the Elbow River valley and areas surrounding the Reader Rock Garden, which she thinks is the original source of these juicy spouts. “I would call it feral asparagus rather than wild. It’s like feral horses — it escaped from domestication,” says Balzer.
Balzer’s theory of the source of Calgary’s feral asparagus developed a few years ago when she interviewed Betty Rose, the granddaughter of William Roland Reader, the one-time city park superintendent who established the garden in 1913. She recalled visiting her grandparents and coming home with bags full of asparagus, which Reader, who died in 1943, apparently grew in his private vegetable patch.
That would explain why Michelle Reid, conservation landscape architect and project manager for Calgary Parks Planning and Development, never found wild asparagus on Reader’s meticulously kept list of his plantings. “But, prior to restoration of the [Reader Rock] Garden a few years ago, the site was filled with the plant,” she says.
Today, Balzer says wild asparagus patches are never that lucrative — especially since one should only snap 10 to 20 percent of what they find to make sure the plants sprout again next year — but they’re around.
The easiest time to spot asparagus is in the fall, when unplucked stems become full-grown plants, reaching heights of three feet. They have long, twiggy green branches and, if they’re female, red berries — the same berries birds spread around the city like a parting gift from Reader.
Berries
Along with bison meat and chokecherries, these bluish purple fruits were a staple of local aboriginal populations, so much so the Blackfoot literally called the month of July “when saskatoons are ripe.”
The most abundant fruit of the prairies, saskatoons are also extremely nutritious: they’re comparable to blueberries, blackberries and grape-seed extract in terms of their level of antioxidants, and have four times more iron and copper than raisins.
Often found in bogs, gullies or near stream banks — and many yards and back alleys — these shrubs can reach up to 15 feet in height, have small oval leaves and bloom white, five petalled flowers from April to June. There are also a number of U-Pick saskatoon farms nearby including The Saskatoon Farm in Okotoks.
Though its reputation as a “super fruit” is recent in Canada, this deciduous shrub with small sword-shaped leaves has been all the rage in northwestern Europe, central Asia, China and Siberia for centuries.
Since ancient times, the berries, leaves and bark of the “Siberian Pineapple” have been used to treat ailments including coughs, colds, fevers, inflammation, skin problems and tumors. And Genghis Khan apparently fuelled his horses with the leaves and berries during his great conquest of Asia.
Ripening in clusters on thorny branches in the late summer and fall, these tiny bright orange oblong berries are impossible to miss — you’ll see some if you walk from the University of Calgary to the University C-Train station.
Eaten raw, the berries taste uncannily like Flintstones vitamins and are far more potent: they’re rich in vitamin E and, depending on the subspecies, contain seven to 50 times more vitamin C than a glass of orange juice.
Sea Buckthorn leaves make a nutritious tea and the berries a tart snack, but you’ll need lots of determination and time to pick enough to make jam, jellies or pie.
Fruit
During the fur trade, just one cedar box of preserved crabapples in water was worth as much as 10 Hudson’s Bay Company Point Blankets — the same blankets that, today, fetch upward of $275 each.
Now, we let the ripe red fruits soil the streets like constellations in the night sky while we pay an arm and a leg for gala apples from New Zealand. Go figure.
On the bright side, that leaves more for the ambitious fruit forager. Check out the free section of Calgary’s Craigslist this fall and you’ll find at least a handful of people offering their trees’ burden to the first picker. Invest one weekend afternoon and you’ll have buckets worth of free cider, jam and jelly.
In the meantime, during flowering season in May or June, pick a handful of apple blossoms and add the petals to salads or deserts. But use them sparingly — like apple pips, apple blossoms may be poisonous when eaten in large doses.
European explorers — even Marco Polo himself — crossed oceans and continents to the peaks of Mongolia, Siberia and Tibet in search of the mysterious plant now known as rhubarb whose medicinal spongy yellow roots fetched a handsome sum at the market.
Dubbed “Yellow Excellent,” the roots were used as a tonic for constipation, digestive ailments and poisonous animal bites as far back as 2700 BCE by the Chinese, who exported their bounty to the ancient Greeks, Arabs and eventually Europe in the 10th century.
Fast forward to 1836 when the plant became a prized garden crop in Europe. A writer in Edinburgh’s Quarterly Journal of Agriculture enthuses (perhaps after indulging in one fantastic rhubarb pie too many): “Anything more productive, salubrious, profitable and expressly suitable to the purposes of the cottager [than rhubarb], can scarcely be found in the entire list of vegetable productions.”
So it’s no wonder Calgary’s first settlers planted it en masse. Today, you’ll find the huge palm-shaped leaves reaching up from thick, hollow D-shaped stems in most historic neighbourhoods around town — think Kensington, Marda Loop, Inglewood and Bridgeland. If you don’t spot the large tufts of leaves in your own backyard, stroll down back alleys from May until August and you’re likely to spot it jutting out of the pavement near compost or a tract of dry earth.
Avoid green or spotted stems in favour of the bright scarlet ones, and cut at the base with a knife. Chop off the toxic leaves and discard them, or boil them to make a natural pesticide. Stew the stalks with some sugar, water, spices and perhaps a sweeter fruit like apples or strawberries.
Whether you pour your sweet compote in a crust for pie, or serve it drizzled over a heaping spoonful of vanilla ice cream, make sure you thank Marco Polo for trekking the hills of China to help you get your harvest.
Nuts
To beat the squirrels, first you’ve got to locate the hard to find bushes. If it weren’t for our Parks Bylaw and protections for wildlife under the provincial parks act, one might check the shady woodland areas of Fish Creek Park in August or September. The bushes grow up to nine feet tall and have serrated, spade-shaped leaves, about as large as the palm of your hand. Resembling fuzzy green duck heads growing alone, in pairs, or in threes, the nuts’ oddly shaped sheaths with long tubular beaks make for easy identification once a bush is in sight.
Remember to leave plenty for our furry friends and grab a humble stash. Once you’re home, hang your harvest in a paper bag or lay the nuts on a cloth in a cool dry place to dry.
If you’re impatient, try a quick roast over the barbecue before donning gloves and peeling their outer layer. When your hard-earned nuts are naked, drizzle them in olive oil, add a sprinkle of salt and roast in the oven at 360°F for about 10 to 15 minutes or until lightly brown.
If you’ve got the tenacity to follow this through, pat yourself on the back — aboriginals used to just rob squirrels’ nut caches to save themselves the trouble. However, that method is definitely not recommended.
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