Today we'll explore America's most famous hiking trail, which runs for hundreds of miles from Maine to Georgia. Don't think we'll cover the whole stretch in 1 day, but our portion, running through Pawling, NY, is loaded with wild foods.

This tour is preceeded by a free 60-minute wild foods talk and presentation at Native Landscapes, 991 Route 22, Pawling, NY, adjacent to the trail.

As we head off from the nursery, we'll encounter the huge leaves of burdock, with an edible root that tastes like potatoes. Nearby, we'll find loads of wild parsnips, garden escapees that taste even better than their commercial forerunners, plus lots of highly flavorful wild carrots.

Other common herbs and greens we can expect, as we cross a wetland, include water mint, wild mint, lamb's-quarters, yarrow, purslane, sheep sorrel, wood sorrel, poor man's pepper, sassafras, and black birch.

We'll also find lots of jewelweed, a major medicinal herb with juice that relieves a variety of skin irritations, from insect bites to preventing poison ivy rash. In addition to the common species, spotted jewelweed, which has an orange flower, this is one of only 2 tours where we'll also find pale jewelweed, with its yellow flower.

This is a great place for wild fruit. We'll be looking for elderberries, black cherries, spiceberries, and blackberries.

If it has rained beforehand, the mushrooming should be as great as it was in past years. We often find large quantities of delectable parasol mushrooms, gourmet boletes, brittle russulas, delicately flavored coral mushrooms, meaty hygrophorus milky mushrooms, meaty voluminous-latex milky mushrooms, and gigantic chicken mushrooms in the woods. Other unexpected species could easily surprise us.