Foraging for wild plants starts in your backyard with foraging for daylilies. These edible plants in the yard are an edible wild food. Today we talk about foraging the young shoots of the common Daylily, which are edible and great in salads. Daylilies are a non-native, and can be an edible invasive plant, especially the common orange daylily, which grows throughout the eastern U.S.
Harvest the young shoots of the daylily for one of the first foraged meals of the spring season. The plants leaves will grow back, just be sure not to whack too many of them if you want them to grow again. If you find the invasive plants in a natural area, like a forest or meadow, its ok to harvest with abandon, in my book. Daylilies belong in your yard, not natural areas. Here is some information on the invasive kinds of daylilies from the National Park Service.
You can eat other parts of the daylily, but for this foraging video, we will focus on the young leaves. We’ll talk about harvesting other daylily parts in upcoming videos.
On a tangent, there has been talk of terminology, and that we should not be forarging, but instead wildcrafting. Wildcrafting is fun word, it brings up all sorts of imagery in your head when you say it.
Also there are issues of what and how much of something one should harvest when foraging. On foraging for daylilies, I believe its OK to harvest what you want, as long as its in your yard or you have permission to be where you are, as these are non-native plants in the U.S.
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Full Disclosure: I am not the high priest expert on foraging or edible plants. Like most things, I know enough to be dangerous. But Alexa was nice enough to include me in her question.
Getting your bees ready for spring is talked about. Eric adds pollen patties in the spring to his hives, and he found two dead hives when he did a late winter bee inspection. Rick says sometimes honeybees to strange things. Several of Rick’s hives starved out. Rick reminds everyone when you are feeding honeybees sugar syrup in the late winter, put the sugar syrup at the top of the hive, not in a glass jar feeder in the front lower entrance. the bees will never find it.
The cookbook is 
Eric and Rick talk about Sarah’s talk about how to start a catering business on the previous GF Radio show and Rick’s laproscopic hernia surgery. The success of the GardenFork email with Henry’s photo in it yielded a bunch of pet photos.
Speaking of email groups and community websites, Sarah talks about creating a Yahoo group for parents with kids born in 2012 in her neighborhood.
