Florida has lots of useful, edible, and medicinal species – especially in areas with mixed hardwood forests.
I conducted a property consultation earlier this week and was amazed yet again by how many good things grow in North/Central Florida.
Dahoon holly, which can be made into a mildly caffeinated tea:
American persimmon:
Beautyberry, which repels mosquitoes and makes a bland fruit which can be turned into an excellent jelly:
Wild lettuce, bitter and nutrient-rich:
Elderberries:
Melothria pendula, a delicious and tiny wild cucumber:
Native passionfruit (Passiflora incarnata) with edible and medicinal leaves which host multiple butterfly species, as well as delicious edible fruit:
Cutleaf groundcherry, with tasty sweet-tart edible fruits inside hanging lanterns:
Smilax, the delicious wild shoots that taste like asparagus:
Native bay, with leaves great for cooking (though not that pretty at this time of year):
Saw palmetto with edible and medicinal fruit:
Spanish needles (Bidens alba) which is a great nectar and pollen source for bees, as well as possessing highly nutritious edible leaves:
And red mulberry, a wonderful tall species which fruits in the spring:
If you buy a new property – or wish to know what’s going on with the land you already own – it’s well-worth hiring an expert plant guy to come and look around before you clear or burn. You never know what good species might already be there, and plant ID apps don’t quite give you the full picture.
There is food everywhere! Just ask Green Deane…
You can also search the archives here for more info on most of these plants.
And I recommend getting this book:
And this book:
Have a wonderful weekend.
We should finish up our greenhouse today.
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Today’s musical accompaniment:
7 comments
I am always amazed at the fantastic edibles/medicinals most people pass by on a daily basis and have no inclination that they even exist.
However: I wanted to catch you while you were on. I’m the guy who’s been messing with you off and on about vole problems. We live in a 7b/8a zone of Georgia (the fall line…kinda’ near Augusta) and I can get away with grown quite a number of tropical tubers. I tried my hand at cassava this year (bought Pete Kanaris’ “mixed” deal last year). Well…I dug my first one this morning. It would have had a pretty good haul…if not for the voles!!! Those jokers ate the majority of the cassava roots!!! I’m at my wit’s end… At least they don’t bother the taro (I have three types: two Colocasia and one Xanthasoma). We don’t want to put out poison because there are too many cool snakes and raptors around that might be collateral damage, and I’m quite averse to getting a cat because they kill so many small reptiles and birds. I guess we’re just stuck eating elephant ears, haha!
To date the voles have munched: garlic, potatoes, sweet potatoes, bean roots, they nibbled toran (a type of Korean Colocasia), sunroots, bamboo roots, and now cassava. Maddening.
That is terrible! I really would be tempted to find some sort of poison that would get them, but not cause too much collateral damage.
I checked another plant in my one-year-old/100′ long grocery row garden (I have had an absolute blast with your method, Mr. Good!) and it seems that that plant did quite a bit better. Still an amazing amount of vole damage, but the plant managed to produce >3lbs of nice tubers! I’m anxious to dig the better plants and see how it goes! How do you store fresh cassava? Like…I don’t want to cook them tonight, so should I cut ’em up and toss ’em in the fridge for a couple of days? Anyway, I consider it a successful experiment and I will be trying to save some of the stems for planting again next year.
David, you’ve really reinvigorated my love for gardening over the last couple of years. I always look forward to your new videos (and I enjoy going back to some of the old ones, too). I’ve also begun to read through your “Survival Plant Profiles” and am enjoying that quite a bit. Anywho, I hope you and the Goods have a great weekend!
Thank you!
I would freeze them if you aren’t going to use them within a couple of days.
In Texas, I had Dr. Mark Vorderbrugen (99.99872% sure I misspelled that) come to my farm. He’s in the Houston area. I’m not so much.
He’s also known as Meriwether’s Foraging Texas. A very good site. He’s the guy who wrote Foraging for Dummies.
Anyway, I just wanted to let everyone know that in my neck of the woods. I’ve taken classes from him at the Houston arboretum, as well.
Smilax roots are supposed to be useful but when I tried to make candy from them it didn’t set. We had Brier syrup instead lol
This is great. We also have 3 acres in Flomaton, AL — untouched for decades, probably last lived on in 1960. Wonder what’s there. Heard the tale of an old chinquapin tree Mom used to enjoy in her childhood. One day, we may get the energy to chop through there and have a look around. Good advice to get a local guide. Thanks for the pics. We live on an acre on the FL/AL Stateline and 2 thirds was also untouched for years but I’ve found I’ve had to fight the invasives like the tallow, privat, Old world climbing vine, wisteria, etc. but adding in edibles as I go. I appreciate learning to ID plants and insects. The Google lens is helpful. The pics are also helpful as you are local and learning the land. I knew you’d like a greenhouse. Good for you! I cleaned mine and, it’s small but keeps a few things alive for the season. Just use a 100 watt incandescent bulb we still have for now. I will move things in it when it cools off. Oh, also thanks for sharing about your winter experience with no heat in an old home during a power outage last winter. It inspired us to work on alternate heat in case of power outage as we went all electric during a remodel of 1938 home years ago. Going with natural gas logs in an old coal burning fireplace. I hate to get rid of the old 1920 heater there, it’s a beauty…. May try to drag it up to the attic. The chimney isn’t safe, it’s actually under the roof, so we are trying a ventless log set. Just have to be careful with it. Appreciate you. I like to skim a blog, and get moving. Seize the day!.
In woodlots or those odd corners you get in a bit of land that you never seem to cut or do anything with there might be some use in cultivating wild foods.
In the Pacific Northwest (where I am ) the local Indians appear to have maintained forest gardens, which would have supplemented the cultivation and harvest of camas lilly, wapato (sagitifolia latifolia) cattails and berries which grow in wetlands, or in the oak savanna that dominated on the valley floor.
In a study out of British Columbia a group surveyed pre-(European) settlement archeological sites and found that there wre groves that all had ten specific species that were important food and resource species for the Northwest Indians, two of which, Hazelnut and Pacific Crabapple, were outside of their natural range and an indication that the groves were planted or cultivated intentionally. The groves have been untended for over 100 years and appear to be stable (unless clear cut of course)
Unlike the Douglas fir or Hemlock forests, these forest gardens are made up of “edge” species, shorter shrubby plants which apparently are able to suppress the growth of the dominant conifers when established. They are also more supportive of wildlife, the B.C. study names deer, elk and moose as being more abundant in these gardens than in the surrounding forest. (Closed canopy forests in the Northwest can be pretty drab in the under-story and deer prefer to hang out in thickets)
You are in southern Alabama, so the plants you list are very different from what we have here, there are, however, also similar studies of the Amazon that find higher diversity of food type trees near archeological sites indicated by tera preta, earthworks and similar evidence of habitation. Pre-contact the Gulf coast was pretty densely populated, and I would be surprised if some similar forest cultivation would not have been going on. I suspect forest gardens are a standard way of food production where the staple crops were not full-sun dependent, like maize or wheat, or where the landscape was dominated by heavy forest.
I have been a fan of landscaping with native plants, and I love the food forest concept. These articles deal with the trees and shrubs but not the under-story plants which are also important food plants and are, here at least, stimulated by burning and by late summer grazing by cattle clearing the lowest competing shrubs and the grass. I guess that these types of plants would further increase the productivity of a forest garden.
I have the link to the B.C. study
**Historical Indigenous Land-Use Explains Plant Functional Trait Diversity** – Ecology & Society Journal
https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol26/iss2/art6/