Berlin: Bärlauch, or, cooking spring

As I’ve mentioned, spring has felt massively delayed to many Berliners this year. Maybe our expectations have been warped by global warming, but it feels like we’ve been waiting, shivering at near-zero temperatures, on the brink of spring for ages. We’ve watched reports on TV about Germany’s beloved spring crop, white asparagus, whose harvest has been delayed for more than four weeks by the cold rain. Same for my favorites, bright pink rhubarb and Bärlauch, the tender wild garlic greens that Berliners forage in city parks, which both have been nowhere to be seen… until this week!

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Berlin: Blackberry vine starting early

Much of the city is still leafless, but I caught this vine growing rapidly down a concrete wall separating the train station from the swimming center. Maybe there will be post-swim berries this summer?

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Berlin: Foraging season opens with edible wild plant walk

Can you feel it? The weather’s getting warmer and wetter. Winter’s on its last legs. Urban gardeners and foragers like myself are  itching to go planting and plucking plants all around the town. Since many readers come to this blog precisely for info on edible plants, a topic we’ve neglected this winter, I’m celebrating March and the approaching spring with a series on edible plant resources. Read on for more!

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Berlin: More tasty wild plants

The virtual tasting tour of Berlin’s wild plants continues! To get started, I’ll answer Sara’s question about the plants from this walk: which are native to Germany?

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Berlin: Edible plant walk

In a city with many wild-growing plants, you begin to wonder if some might be useful. When I weed my 10 square meters at the community garden, carting piles of unknown plants to the compost heap and leaving just a few lonely vegetables amidst bare dirt, it seems ridiculous to dismiss so many robust green plants just because they are weeds, i.e. just because I didn’t plant them. But beyond young dandelions, which I’ve started taking home and sautéeing, what other wild plants are good to eat?

Thanks to a tip from Berlin Reified, I got the chance to find out more. I signed up for a Kräuterwanderung (herb walk) led by the very knowleadgeable and enthusiastic Elizabeth Westphal of the Berlin Grüne Liga, an environmental non-profit. Last Friday, she led about thirty urban plant enthusiasts through the beds, fields and woods of the botanical park in Berlin-Blankenfelde. Here are some of the plants we tasted.

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