Prospect Park (Teens/Adults)

A great abundance of edible and medicinal wild plants and mushrooms makes this park a great place for edible and medicinal plants and mushrooms in late summer.

Burdock, an expensive detoxifying herb sold in health food stores, abounds in cultivated areas throughout the park. You can also use this invasive species as a superb root vegetable, or even marinate and bake it, to make "Wildman's" Vegan Beef Jerky!

The root of sassafras, which makes tea and root beer, is also a great, if unknown, culinary seasoning. Common spicebush (which also has allspice-like berries), and ground ivy (a gentle herbal diuretic) provide still more beverages.

Everyone will also find plenty of leafy green vegetables, such as hedge mustard, yellow watercress, wood sorrel, goutweed, lamb’s-quarters (wild spinach), chickweed (which tastes like corn), poor man's pepper, Asiatic dayflower, and lady’s thumb. These renewable "weeds" readily regenerate whether they've been harvested or mowed.

Nuts are coming into season. Hickory nuts, delicious but never commercialized (mainly because the trees don't produce good crops every year), litter the sidewalk 1/4 mile south of the Picnic House. Hazelnut bushes drop their nuts along the edges of the Mall, just north of the skating rink, but we'll have to race the squirrels for these. Beech trees grow throughout the park, but whether this year's crop will be a boom or bust is anyone's guess. White oak acorns, scrumptious after leached of their bitter tannin, are also widespread.

We'll  also find the seeds of the Kentucky coffee-tree as well, good for making the world's best caffeine-free coffee substitute, and an excellent-if-unknown seasoning for chocolate.

Gourmet fruits are represented by native hawthorn berries, relatives of apples, used in herbal medicine as a heart tonic. There may also be a bumper crop of crab apples, plus Northern black haw berries, a.k.a wild raisins. These sweet fruits resemble raisins, but taste like a combination of bananas and prune butter.

Another sweet fruit is the paper mulberry, a reddish sphere covered with prongs. There could also be American hackberries, with a hard pit surrounded by a coating that tastes like the outer part of M & Ms.

Spectacular mushrooms will abound if there's been enough rain beforehand. Huge hen-of-the woods (sold in health food stores as maitake), gigantic chicken mushrooms (which taste better than chicken), golden-brown honey mushrooms, ringless honey mushrooms, and savory wine-cap stropharia mushrooms could pop up anywhere.

Meeting Place:

We will meet at the stone benches by the stone wall, at Prospect Park's Grand Army Plaza entrance, across the street from the library between the columns with the eagles, NOT under the traffic circle, and NOT in front of the library. 

Please Note:

• Participants should bring lunch, a pen, plastic bags, paper bags, containers, closed shoes (there’s always poison ivy around), clothing appropriate for the weather, and drinking water. Digging implements are suggested. Kids and well-behaved dogs are welcome.
• Participants should be dressed for the weather, and be aware of very bad subway service. Trains are often canceled due to track work. 
• No sandals (there are mosquitoes, thorns and poison ivy). 
• Everyone should have plastic bags for veggies and herbs, paper bags for mushrooms, which spoil in plastic, containers for berries from late spring through fall, water and lunch, and extra layers when it's cold. Digging implements and pocket knives are optional. 
• Dogs are permitted. Children are encouraged to attend.
• There's no smoking whatsoever at any time.