Prospect Park
Sunday, June 8

Because Prospect Park includes so many varied habitats, it's loaded with shoots and greens in mid-spring, and many of these are edible and medicinal.

We'll begin with spicy hedge mustard greens, growing near the Grand Army Plaza entrance, proceed southeast to a vast stand of celery-flavored goutweed, stopping for violet leaves at the edge of the path.

In an overgrown field, we'll find an abundance of pokeweed, superb boiled in 2 changes of water but poisonous raw. It's especially good seasoned with soy sauce, plus garlic lightly browned in olive oil.

Later, we'll find vast stands of burdock, a despised "weed" with an edible and medicinal root. This time, we'll also find the immature flowerstalks, which taste like artichoke hearts, in season.

After lunch, we'll find spicy poor-man's-pepper and field pennycress, both members of the mustard family, growing near sweet-flavored red clover, corn-flavored chickweed, and spinach-flavored lamb's-quarters.