Prospect Park
Sunday, March 7

Prospect Park is a great place for foragers to explore at the end of the winter. Like Central Park, this Olmstead-designed landscape features a variety of habitats filled with delicious native and exotic plants.

Wild coffee grows within a few minutes walk of the Grand Army Plaza entrance. Unrelated to commercial coffee, we'll collect the seeds of the little-known Kentucky coffee-tree, the world's best caffeine-free coffee substitute. You can use them to make a beverage, or as a seasoning that's terrific in chocolate recipes.

Cold weather greens abound throughout the park. We'll find garlic-flavored garlic mustard greens and sprouts, which taste like garlic, and their roots, which taste like horseradish. We'll look for chickweed, which tastes like corn, and ground ivy, a mint-flavored herb tea.

Both sweet-sharp daylily shoots, and chive-like field garlic will already be producing bumper crops in the cold weather.

East of the boathouse, we'll examine a dense stand of chicory, growing along with the ubiquitous dandelions. Both greens have a savory-bitter flavor, and they're at their best right now, before they flower.

Throughout the park, we'll look for stands goutweed, an herb that tastes like parsley and celery. It does great in the cold weather.

The first tiny leaves of wild parsnips, growing just west of the skating rink, will clue us in to the location of the large, sweet roots. And the abundant, green, fragrant twigs of sassafras saplings, which grow in woods throughout, will let us find roots for making wild root beer.

And we'll be able to observe the first wildflowers of the season on witch hazel, common spicebush, and carnelian cherry bushes. These blossoms are tiny, since there are few insects to attract, but "Wildman’s" jeweler's loupes will make all the details clearly visible.