Muttontown Preserve

Saturday, August 16

Muttontown Preserve is a wonderful place for wild edible and medicinal plants and mushrooms of late summer.

The preserve has a good share of wild fruit and berries. We'll be looking for staghorn and smooth sumac, which you can use for making pink lemonade, and to create a lemon juice analog. We may also find bushes laden with flavorful elderberries.

It's the beginning of the nut season, so we'll be on the lookout for the acorns of the white oak tree, and the nuts of the shagbark hickory tree, both very tasty and unavailable commercially.

Sassafras, which grows in woods and thickets throughout, provides a root that you can use for making tea or root beer, while the twigs of the black birch tree, which contains oil of wintergreen, taste like birch beer.

Wild greens always thrive in this nature preserve. We’ll find lamb’s-quarters (a wild spinach), wood sorrel, sheep sorrel (this is Muttontown Preserve after all), poor man's pepper, lady’s thumb, field garlic, and Asiatic dayflower, all delicious vegetables.

In addition, there will be culinary and medicinal herbs such as wild bay leaves, mullein, yarrow, and sarsaparilla in the fields and woods.

Spectacular mushrooms also abound at this time, especially if there have been recent heavy rains. Huge hen-of-the woods (sold in health food stores as maitake), gigantic chicken mushrooms (which really taste like chicken), golden-brown honey mushrooms, the prized aborted entoloma, various species of puffballs, oyster mushrooms that taste like seafood, and savory meadow mushrooms may pop up anywhere in the woods and along the trails.