Euell Gibbons: Author of Stalking the Wild Asparagus

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The pinon nut of New Mexico, for instance, is as fine a nut as has ever been eaten . . . but some folks consider the pinon so tedious to shell that—they say—you could starve to death trying to eat it. Once you get used to shelling the pinon, though, it's really a fine nut and—of course—it can be shelled by machine now.

The wild strawberry. I raised garden strawberries here and I completely abandoned it. Picking the big garden berries was easy . . . but I had to do all the work of spading, putting out plants, weeding and pinching runners for a year in order to get each crop. By the time I got through—when I added up all my time—I could've picked more wild berries.

Now the time you put into foraging comes all at once and it seems like a rather poor return. But if you figure out every minute you put in on an ordinary strawberry patch, it adds up to a lot of time for each pint too. I honestly believe I get more strawberries by gathering the wild ones . . . and I never do a thing for the volunteers except harvest them. I have wild strawberries in my freezer right now and there's just no comparison in quality.

You can even combine gardening and gathering quite literally since some of the pantropic weeds—like purslane and lamb's-quarters—grow well in disturbed soil. In other words you can gather wild vegetables by weeding your garden. I've got a letter from some people in Oregon who said they learned from one of my books that lamb's-quarters was what was coming up in their spinach. They tried eating it . . . and then pulled up the spinach and let the lamb's-quarters grow (laughter).

PLOWBOY: Do you think it's practical to transplant and cultivate some wild foods as part of a garden?

GIBBONS: Yes, but very few. Poke, for instance, works well in gardens. It's been domesticated in Spain, Portugal and North Africa . . . although it's an American plant. There are also horticultural varieties of purslane you can raise.

Some wild foods are even marketed. Lamb's-quarters are commonly sold in Denmark. In the American South and sometimes in Pennsylvania wild poke is seen in the markets, as are dandelions. The Pennsylvania Dutch don't think they can go through the year without eating dandelions in the spring, but they're getting estranged enough from nature to have someone else gather their dandelions for them.

PLOWBOY: It seems it takes a lot more time and skill to prepare wild foods than garden vegetables.

GIBBONS: Often there's not much more time involved than in preparing garden vegetables from the garden. When you buy produce in the supermarket, a lot of work has already been done on it. If you gather them from the garden, some vegetables are just as tedious to prepare as the wild ones. But on the whole, yes, I'd say wild vegetables are considerably more work than domestic ones.

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