Backyard Foraging

I'm a forager from way back. Food, medicine, ornamentation, crafting supplies. I love to go for a ramble and come back with a treasure, or munch on something along the path. But these days I live in the city. I don't like driving a long way to take a walk. And if I do, I am often in a park where foraging is prohibited and dogs are abundant. So I have gradually become a gardener.

I started with trees. Trees grown from seeds, then trees from the nursery. Fruit and nut trees. I planted my first tree, an Italian stone pine, about thirty years ago. Visions of pine nuts danced in my head. I ordered the seeds from a mail order seed catalog. About seven came. One seedling came up, and I planted it in the yard at my father's house where I was living at the time. I followed it with two apples from the local nursery.

The apples were killed by my then husband in a fit of rage.

The pine was five or six years old, getting to be about four feet tall, and lush, just beginning to look like a tree, when I had to move away. My brother remodeled the house and tried to transplant the tree, killing it.

Sad but not discouraged, I continued to plant at my next home. Apples again, from the nursery as the seed planting process was so slow. And a sugar maple. My husband got them again, with the weed wacker this time.

I was getting discouraged. I got rid of the husband. It was several years before I again lived in a house with a yard, and by the time I did, I was eager to make up for lost time. I also had a little more money, so a ten dollar investment in a tree no longer seemed prohibitive.

I did have, however, a yard full of weeds and concrete that needed clearing before I could plant.
I mulched the weedy part and put the kids to work tearing out the concrete with a pry bar from the tool library.

I had a three inch tall persimmon seedling from a seed I had found in a fruit and potted up. I put it in the ground, and planted some vegetables around it so I wouldn't step on it or forget to water it. It started to grow and eventually fruit. The fruit were inedible but lovely. My neighbor photographed them and gave me a print.

Encouraged by this success, I gradually planted all the trees I could fit into the yard. Lemons and pears, apples and feijoas, apricots and mulberries. In my imagination I was harvesting fruits of all sorts and all seasons. When I ran out of space for full sized trees I started to infill with smaller plants and vines; babaco, hardy kiwi, passionfruit, tree tomato. Grapes of all sorts, and hops. Roses for rose petal tea. I even brought in dandelion seeds so I could have greens without a trip to the store.

The roses and dandelions were usable the first year, the lemons the second, then apples and pears, passionfruit and tree tomatoes. Soon I was actually able to forage food in my own yard a good portion of the year. I kept planting seeds of all sorts just to see what might grow in our conditions. Some of them actually came up, and a few matured enough to harvest and use. I tried a few vegetables to very little avail, but established a few culinary and medicinal herbs.

A number of years later I moved to a new house. With the experience of my first garden under my belt, I have begun to establish a diverse ecosystem of plants that I enjoy using. Every week I have weeds and garden greens for my Sunday breakfast. Except for asparagus - which I keep planting and then killing - and onions, I have hardly bought a vegetable in months.

I continue to find nooks in which to plant one more perennial green or exotic vine. And the foraging is sustaining me.