-=> Quoting Dave Drum to Shawn Highfield <=-

 DD> My main "pick your own" are the puffballs [and] morels.

 SH> The only ones I 100% can identify are the morels

There are many species of puffballs. Giant puffballs are totally
unmistakable. Smaller ones can resemble poisonous young Sclerodermas
and Amanitas. It is easy to tell them apart though.

Puffballs are white inside and all one soft texture. Cut puffballs
from top to bottom and examine the inside. Young Sclerdomeras will
be round and can be white inside like a puffball but the flesh will
be hard. Puffballs are marshmallow soft.

Young Amanitas will show the outline of the yet unopened mushroom.
There are plenty of reliable photographs on-line.

So cut every one open vertically, top to bottom, and make sure it is
one solid soft white mass inside with no outline.  You should make
sure the inside is pure white, never dark, and that the outer skin
of the puffball is thin. If the inside is dark from the start and
the outer skin is thick you may have a Scleroderma.  

 SH> my spring goodies.  (morels, ramps, fiddleheads)

You can add asparagus to that list!

Very young dandelions can be tasty too but turn bitter just as soon
as the flowers begin to blossom. Second cuttings are excessively
bitter too.

 DD> Never et fiddleheads.

They are delicious and worth seeking out. Think asparagus
crossed with green beans plus a hint of broccoli but more tender.

Ostrich ferns are considered the tastiest of all of them but there
are ten kinds here, all edible, so I never bothered to learn to
differentiate between them. Ferns do have traces of a toxic chemical
in them which dissipates with cooking so they should not be eaten
raw. Bracken fern is the worst offender and has been tentatively
linked to an increased rate of stomach cancer in Japan and Korea
where they are eaten in large quantities. But I doubt very much that
a single helping a year does any harm. (Cattle shouldn't graze in
bracken fields though. If they eat enough of it, it can be
poisonous, raw, in very large quantities; it can even taint their
milk.)
 
 DD> I've done ramps a time or two

They are known as wild garlic or wild leeks in Canada. I remember
that Florence Henderson had patches of them in her bush lot the year
of the Montreal pig roast picnic. My friend from the Wild Edibles list
Melana, spotted them. She bet Florence that there were at least 50
edibles in her 50 acres and she was right. I wish now that I had
joined them in their walk; I would have learned a lot.

Ramps have become so popular and over-harvested in recent years that
they are an endangered species in a lot of places. The Quebec
government declared wild garlic an endangered species province wide
in 1995 and levies huge fines on foragers who are caught picking
them. The southern portion of Gatineau Park just outside of Ottawa
was basically picked clean before the province took steps. It's
critical that ramps be picked selectively. You have to leave at
least half of them. If you pick a patch clean it will never come
back. The urban internet foodies didn't get that and ruined it for
everyone else.

There are no ramps or in fact any alliums at all native to the NWT
but I once found a patch of Welsh bunching onions that had escaped
somebody's garden and established itself in the bush inside as city
park some distance away. I used to harvest some every spring and
then one year they had totally disappeared.





Cheers

Jim


... This was way before the internet started baconing everything.

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