In the garden with Felder: Take a ‘tasteful’ look around

My neighborhood hosts a largesse of edible stuff people don’t seem to appreciate.

There’s a small tree in a nearby churchyard with beautiful spring flowers that everyone appreciates. But in the autumn, it bends under the weight of hundreds of large, beautiful, crisp, sweet crabapples, which usually fall, untouched. Except by me. I walk by it often, and when they begin to ripen, I can forage them for about a month. Nobody notices or seems to care. There’s a lot around the corner whose owners demolished the old house, but they left four fig shrubs nobody seems to pick but me; I make preserves for rainy winter days. And I know of three pomegranate shrubs whose owners grow them just for the reddish orange flowers. Thank you, the flowers are lovely — and the fruits delicious. Nectar of the gods, and all that. Other ornamental trees and shrubs that produce delicious fruit scattered here and there around my little town include pecans, hickories, muscadines, rabbit-eye blueberries and the less-familiar mulberries, reddish-leaf Indian cling peach, quince, ginkgo, loquat, and jujube. Big orange Japanese persimmons are obvious, but I find commonly grown Eleagnus shrubs by their super fragrant late fall flowers and come back later for the small apple-like midwinter fruits.

By the way, I’ve written a little treatise on growing attractive, landscape-quality fruit plants for Mississippi, including many commonly grown shrubs with surprisingly good fruit. Glad to email you a free copy.

I got started with this as a youngster raised in a big, varied landscape with mixed fruit plants and honed it when Euell Gibbons came out with his famous “Stalking the Wild Asparagus” book.

That’s where I learned that the flowers of orange daylilies have the same nutrition as broccoli and can be eaten the same many ways. I’ve made tea with fresh pine needles, cooked bamboo shoots and eaten the tender new shoots of smilax raw and steamed just like asparagus.

I won’t get into all the cultivated and wild flowers that are edible, including weeds in the lawn. A partial list would include dandelions, chickweed, henbit, wild onions, clover, violets, dock, purslane, violets, clover and Florida betony tubers.

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But back to regular yard plants. Not many people realize that pyracantha fruits are mealy-tasting little apples, and the purple berries of beautyberry were used by Native Americans as a filler. The furry “wild lemons” on a thorny but fully hardy citrus plant named Poncirus are seedy and very acidic but make great lemonade or preservative, or my preserves. Ever taste the fruit of prickly pear cactus, or cook its flat round leaves?

As I drive around the state, I see countless colonies of native Chickasaw plums, ditch-bank elderberries, wild pears with their little fruits and blackberries. And every Boy Scout knows how to make a refreshing lemonade-like “bug juice” drink by steeping the burgundy summer berries of sumac.

Important point: Can you tell Queen Anne’s lace (wild carrots) from the somewhat similar-looking but deadly water hemlock? Need to know what you are doing because, in addition to harvesting only what is legal — not on private property or state parks — it’s crucial to know edible from poisonous, or how to treat it to make it safe to eat. Acorns have to be treated, and only young shoots of pokeberry are edible. And I never harvest wild mushrooms. Too risky except for those with training.

Food for thought: What if someone on every block in my ‘hood planted some of these by the street for neighbors to enjoy both flowers and fruit? It’d be a year-round edible forest feast!

Felder Rushing is a Mississippi author, columnist, and host of the “Gestalt Gardener” on MPB Think Radio. Email gardening questions to rushingfelder@yahoo.com.