Not Your Ordinary Market

Natural Foods Abound In the Outdoors

ACROSS MONTANA
PHOTOGRAPHY BY AMY GRISAK

As the snow recedes, nature offers a bounty of fresh food long before the garden has anything to harvest. Take advantage of the warming spring days to search out new additions to your seasonal dishes. Understanding the edibility of wild plants is a nearly lost art, but it doesn’t have to be.

Tom Elpel of Pray, Montana takes a particular joy in sharing the patterns and palatability of wild foods through his primitive living and wilderness focused classes, as well as his numerous books, including Foraging the Mountain West. As someone who’s spent his life honing primitive skills and understanding the natural world, he sees the springtime as a veritable feast.

“It’s just a matter of finding a sunny, south-facing bank,” he said

While leave-no-trace principles are often cited, the actual act of digging the corms is best done by mimicking nature. Elpel pointed out that when the grizzly bears dig up the plants, they use their long claws to rake up the sod.

“The act of tilling the ground can stimulate the growth of more,” he said. “Like a bear, don’t take every corm.”

Although so many plants are good and edible in our landscape, there are certain groups that are best avoided, even if there are edible varieties within them. Elpel pointed out that some of the deadliest plants in North America reside in Montana, including the water hemlock and poison hemlock. They are both related to carrots, the same as the edible cow parsnip, and to avoid confusion, he said, “It’s a good idea to stay away from that family entirely.”

“We also have a lot of death camas in Montana,” he said.

One of the varieties has a white flower with bulbs like an onion, but without the onion smell.

“The leaves are V-shaped on meadow death camas,” he said.

And while the blue camas is highly nutritious, and the plants are easy to distinguish when in bloom, it’s safer to err on the side of caution. Two bulbs of most death camas varieties are enough to kill a person.

Montana is a bountiful place. As the world awakens in the spring, take some time to stroll through the greening landscape to discover the delicious options out our backdoor.