Oakland Lake in Alley Pond Park

You will learn how this large wetland park offers vast foraging opportunities, even as winter approaches. 

We begin with a small, young woodland. It contains large quantities of field garlic, with leaves like chives and bulbs like onions or garlic. There's also garlic mustard, a garlic-flavored mustard green with a taproot that tastes like horseradish. 

Nearby grows sassafras, with a root you can use for tea, as a sweet seasoning, or for making root beer. Then we circumnavigate Oakland Lake, checking out stands of sour-flavored curly (yellow) dock, bitter-savory dandelion greens, corn-flavored chickweed, and wintergreen-flavored black birch trees. Later, we'll find savory watercress, escaped from cultivation, in a small stream, and cabbage-flavored winter cress, never captured for culitvation — both members of the mustard family.

After lunch, we proceed to the marsh proper, where a stand of burdock root, normally very tenacious, yields with minimum effort because it grows in wet, composted soil. There are also sweet wild parsnips (outstanding in soups) nearby, growing hidden in the bushes.

Then we'll find crab apple trees with the most remarkably sour fruit.Farther on, we'll find more roots in quantity: white-colored wild carrots and immense, peppery-sweet common evening primrose. And with lots of rain and a little luck, the group may even find gourmet oyster mushrooms, brick tops, and enoki mushrooms emerging from trees and stumps.

Notes:

• Participants should be dressed for the weather, and be aware of very bad subway service. Trains are often cancelled 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.

The 4-hour walking tour begins at Springfield and Northern Blvds.