Wild greens are the part of foraging that genuinely earns its place in this app, and the reason is timing. They arrive in February and March, which is the start of the hungry gap, when stored food is at its worst and nothing in the garden is ready. See a year-round sowing plan.
They are also the easiest wild food to learn, because the useful ones are abundant, distinctive, and mostly grow in gardens and waste ground rather than needing a walk.
Read the rules and the law of foraging first, and note the key point for this page: picking leaves is lawful, digging up the plant is a criminal offence without permission.
Why wild greens matter in February
- They are the first fresh food of the year, weeks before anything sown in spring.
- They are nutritionally useful in a way stored food is not, particularly for vitamin C and minerals.
- They cost nothing and need no ground.
- They grow where you already are. Nettles, dandelion, chickweed and plantain are in most gardens, allotments and verges.
They are not calories. Like everything else in this domain, greens are vitamins and variety rather than energy. See grow for calories, not for salad.
Nettles
The most useful wild plant in Britain, and completely unmistakable.
- Pick the top four leaves of young plants, before they flower.
- Gloves. Or grasp firmly from below, which flattens the hairs, though gloves are simpler.
- Before flowering only. After flowering the leaves become coarse and develop gritty mineral deposits that are hard on the kidneys, so from about May onwards pick only new growth from plants that have been cut back.
- Cut a patch down in summer and it produces fresh young growth for weeks.
The sting is destroyed by cooking, completely and immediately. Also by drying, by thorough crushing, and by a brief blanch.
Use them as you would spinach: soup, added to anything, blanched and squeezed into a stew, dried for winter tea. Nettle soup is the classic and it is genuinely good.
Dry them for winter. Bunches hung in an airy place, then crumbled and stored in a jar. That is a green vegetable available in January from a plant that cost nothing. See drying food.
Nettles are also the fibre plant for cordage and the nitrogen source for a liquid feed. See soil and compost.
Wild garlic and its two lookalikes
Ramsons: broad soft green leaves, damp shady woodland, starburst heads of white flowers in spring, carpeting the ground in quantity.
Use the leaves raw in salad, wilted into anything, or made into a pesto that freezes well. The flowers are edible and pretty. The bulbs are not worth digging and digging them is an offence without permission.
Dandelion
Unmistakable, abundant, and useful in three parts.
- Leaves: bitter, best young, and much better blanched. Put a bucket or a pot over a plant for a week and the new leaves come up pale and mild.
- Flowers: made into a syrup or a wine, and the petals are pleasant scattered on food.
- Roots: roasted and ground as a coffee substitute. Digging is uprooting, so only with permission or on your own ground.
Pick from clean ground. Dandelions thrive on verges and lawns, which are the two places most likely to be sprayed or fouled.
Chickweed
A low sprawling plant with small oval leaves, tiny white star flowers, and one diagnostic feature: a single line of fine hairs running up one side of the stem, switching sides at each leaf pair.
- Mild and pleasant raw, unlike most wild greens. Genuinely good in a salad.
- Grows through winter in mild spells, which makes it one of the very few fresh greens available in January and February.
- Abundant on cultivated ground, so it is usually a weed you are already pulling.
Check the stem hair line, which separates it from scarlet pimpernel and the spurges, both of which are unpleasant or toxic.
Plantain
Two species, both common, both easy.
- Ribwort plantain: narrow ribbed leaves in a rosette, with a stalk carrying a short brown flower head.
- Greater plantain: broad oval ribbed leaves flat to the ground, with a long thin flower spike.
Young leaves are edible and become stringy with age; the ribs are tough and can be stripped out.
Its better use is topical. A crushed plantain leaf on a sting, a bite or a nettle rash is a genuine traditional remedy with a long history, and it is soothing. It is not a treatment for anything serious, and see wound care for anything that is.
Fat hen and ground elder
Fat hen is an upright plant with dull grey-green mealy diamond-shaped leaves, a weed of cultivated ground, and it was a staple food crop in Britain for thousands of years before spinach. Cook it like spinach. It is one of the most useful and most overlooked.
Ground elder is the gardener's curse and it is edible: young leaves, before flowering, cooked. It is an umbellifer, so learn it properly from somebody who knows, and note the warning on hedgerow foraging about the family. If you have it in the garden and cannot get rid of it, eating it is a small consolation.
Cooking them
Most wild greens want cooking, which reduces bitterness, destroys stings and irritants, and makes them digestible.
- Blanch and squeeze for anything strong or bitter, and discard the water for the bitterest.
- Wilt into soups, stews and eggs, which is how they were actually eaten historically.
- Mix wild and cultivated. Half nettles and half potato makes a soup; all nettles makes a statement.
- Do not overdo any one plant. Many wild greens are high in oxalates, which in quantity are hard on the kidneys. Variety and moderation, and this applies to sorrel, spinach and rhubarb leaves as much as to wild plants.
- Introduce new plants in small amounts and see how you get on.
What to avoid
Learn these before you learn any more edible ones. It is a shorter list, it is fixed, and it removes nearly all of the real risk.