When people call Gotham an urban jungle, they seldom mean anything about flora or fauna. But if you don’t think of this city as a living ecosystem, Marie Viljoen will change your perspective forever.
Tag: Urban Foraging
With warmer weather arriving, bits of watercress will be popping up everywhere around the city. But as urban forager extraordinarie Marie Viljoen warns, don’t pick it!
As the weather warms, Marie Viljoen laments the abundance of watercress in the city. Though she grew up harvesting the peppery plant where it grew wild near her home in Cape Town, South Africa, she knows that polluted city water makes urban watercress too risky to eat.
You can’t live here and not make them. It’s against The Rules.
On November 18th urban forager and Edible contributor Marie Viljoen will give an illustrated talk at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden about what to forage in the five boroughs and what to do with your finds once they are in the kitchen
From August to early November, autumn-olive trees around the city are loaded with red currant-like berries, easily identifiable by their silver-stippled skins. In our current issue, Marie Viljoen shares tips for where to find the trees, when to taste the berries and how to turn the sweetly tart fruit into luscious autumn-olive jam.
Foragers and fans of Prospect Park’s ravine know wet fall weather has led to a bumper crop of mushrooms, so much so that the New York Times City Room asked readers to send in photos of their finds. They tapped mycologist and New Yorker Gary Lincoff–he’s the author of the Audubon Society’s Field Guide to North American Mushrooms–to ID them, and the 19 photos from his first fascinating report are now up online right here.
