Croton Aqueduct,
Saturday, April 10

This long trail used to be where water was brought to Manhattan from Westchester. Now it's a beautiful walking and biking path lined with all manner of edible weeds. Here are some of the autumn plants we can expect on this tour:

We'll certainly find plenty of field garlic, a member of the onion/garlic family that comes up in the spring and re-emerges in the fall. Use the leaves like chives, and the bulbs like onions.

Garlic mustard is a strong-flavored green, perfect in Garlic Mustard Pesto, that will add zing to any salad or cooked grain or vegetable dish. The pungent, horseradish-flavored roots are also in season at this time of the year.

Delicate chickweed, with a flavor like corn on the cob, comes up in sunny areas. Spicy poor man's pepper, mild-flavored shepherd's purse, and sour-flavored sheep sorrel and wood sorrel will be around too. So will stinging nettles, a delicious, healthful spring potherb you must handle with gloves until cooking destroys the stinging hairs. And if someone's kind enough to volunteer to accidentally demonstrate how to get stung by this plant, we'll apply jewelweed (also effective against other skin irritations and insect bites, and a preventative for poison ivy), always common here to cure the sting.

Burdock, with a hearty, potato-flavored taproot, grows everywhere, and we're certain to find one location with soft soil where we'll be able to be able to dig it out easily.

Other roots we're likely to find in overgrown areas include peppery-flavored common evening primrose, and white, chewy wild carrots, the same plant that produces the familiar Queen Anne's Lace flower in the summer. We'll even get to compare it with its deadly look-alike, poison hemlock, the plant that killed Socrates.