Summer is approaching very fast! (Well, depends where you live. Maybe where you are the summer has already arrived.) What summer means to me is foraging wild plants! I use a large variety of wild plants for food, seasoning and even medicine! But storing the herbs can get hard. Especially because we live in an apartment building! That means we just don’t have enough space in our freezer (even if we have a separate chest freezer). I have solved that problem by storing most of our herbs by drying them instead of freezing! Here’s a comic that shows you perfectly how my house is filled with herbs all summer long! (Psst, after the comic I’ll give you a list of my favorite wild plants that we go foraging for and what I use them for.)
I think now’s the time to give you a link to my Patreon.
The wild plants we forage the most!
Here’s a list! (Finnish name in brackets)
- Stinging nettle (nokkonen)
We use a lot of stinging nettle! It’s nutricious and can be used like spinach! We especially make salty pancakes (crepes?) with it. We eat those with lingonberry jam! It can be used for mutliple things, like tea, but because there’s a lot of plants that are basically only good for tea, we don’t really waste stinging nettle for tea. - Rosebay willowherb (Maitohorsma)
We collect the young leaves before the plant flowers and we prepare them by first withering the leaves and then rolling them and then fermenting them a bit before drying it. This technique is used for some of the best teas in the world and it works amazingly well with rosebay willowherb leaves! It’s called hiostaminen in Finnish. - Goutweed (vuohenputki)
We only collect this early in the spring, when basically nothing else grows yet. That also makes it easy to spot. It’s the only thing that grows! We either eat it fresh as a salad or we use the same preparing method as willowherb to make it into tea! - Common yarrow (siankärsämö)
We gather the young leaves and just dry them. They are a very good seasoning for casseroles! - Meadowsweet (mesiangervo)
We gather meadowsweet leaves for tea and ferment them the same way we did with willowherb, but there’s more to meadowsweet! We also collect the flowers and dry them. They have some pain relieving substances in them, so when I start getting a headache, I just make myself a meadowsweet tea. Despite it’s sweet name, the tea with the flowers tastes absolutely disgusting (the leaves taste better), but it heals my headache! I also use this as a flu remedy, though then I put in other things too… Some for getting it to taste better, some to make it more effective. - Dandelion (voikukka)
Dandelion roots are wonderful in a vegetable casserole! But they’re a pain in the ass to dig out and even more of a pain to clean, so we don’t use them often despite me loving their taste. But if you do gardening and you have to dig them out anyways, don’t throw them away! Eat them! (They work well in a blended vegetable soup too!)
I think that’s all the ones we use a lot… and dandelion that I’d love to use more, but I’m lazy. Besides these we use a variety of other plants too, but not as much. Here’s some more of them: rowan leaves (pihlaja), ground-ivy (maahumala), clover (apila), juniper (kataja) and spruce (kuusi). There was some more too, but the translating site I used didn’t have translations for them. Also this doesn’t include wild mushrooms or berries we pick when we go foraging.
Want to learn more about foraging? Or something else?
If you’re interested in learning more about foraging in Finland, just ask! I’m always open for new comic ideas. It’s way easier for me to know what kind of stuff you want to see if you just tell me directly. Also if you’re interested in reading more about the foods we prepare at home, here’s a link to my previous post about kombucha!
Ps. This comic was brought to you by my Patreon backers! Yes, they pay to get access to some exclusive materials on Patreon BUT they also make it possible for me to use less time to uphold capitalism and more time to do educational comics and posts like this for free! Big thank you to all my Patreon backers!
