Now that I’m here in Alaska, I need to learn which plants I want to forage during the different times of the year. For this trip, I focused my search on fiddlehead ferns, fireweed, spruce tips, and alder leaves. There’s plenty of options here–both in terms of medicinal plants and edible food sources–but I still need to go through the process of discovering which plants I’m going to use.
Part of this process is learning the plants, their uses, and proper times to pick them, but there’s also room for personal preference. In Arizona, there were some edible plants that I didn’t really care for, so I stopped foraging them. There were other plants that I would gather and preserve for medicinal use, but after some experimentation over the years, I found which ones worked for me and which didn’t. This process of learning was not only educational and a helpful means of connecting me to the desert, but it also helped me better know what to gather, when, and how much.
I’m looking forward to experimenting with different recipes and methods of preservation now that I’m here in Alaska. There’s all kinds of nutrients and flavors growing here in this wild land!
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