Forage for wild food safely

Due to the article you provided, I found a primitive skills meet-up group and some other wildcrafting contacts. My guess is that the foraging folks won’t get going too strongly until spring rolls around, but I hope to meet some like-minded people before then and do some tramping around in the woods.

They’ve ID’d and harvested at least 8 or 9 local species that I know of. Besides apprenticing with them, I’d like to work on identifying wild food sources in my immediate area, and preparing what I find if at all possible. One problem is that I don’t have much access to land for harvesting that’s not state park land (harvesting prohibited) or by the side of a road (salt and pollutants). So I guess that’s step one: start looking for safe places to forage.

I can already identify garlic mustard (which is invasive here, but all parts are edible!), dandelion, staghorn sumac, crab apple, chicory, purslane, yellow wood sorrel, and queen anne’s lace. I’ve only harvested and eaten garlic mustard and purslane, though.