Foraging Minnesota

Foraging Minnesota

Gathering, Growing, and Wild Game in Minnesota

Do you want to learn how to garden, forage, or find and eat wild game? This lifestyle will bring the enjoyment of foods you can’t get anywhere else. Foraging, gardening, and finding wild game is all about eating fresh, fun, and cheap. Over the years, heading out to the woods to gather, fish, or hunt has become one of my families favorite ways of spending time together. We pick berries and other native plants, hunt, fish, and grow our own family garden. We enjoy great foods and quality time together all while we shrink our grocery bill.

Our native state of Minnesota ranges from Zone 3 to 5 and we would like to share some of our favorite parts of this lifestyle right from our own suburban backyard. I hope you find these articles helpful to get you started making and finding your own food as well!

Gardening For Food In Minnesota

Gardening is a great way to grow your own food. Fresh-from-the-garden ingredients are delicious and many of the things you can grow in your garden cannot be bought in the store.

Gardening Articles and Plants For Planning a Zone 4 Summer Garden:

Here’s a list of our posts below.

  • How to Straw Bale Garden
  • What is Straw Bale Gardening
  • How to Set Up An Automatic Watering System For Your Garden
  • How to Automatically Water Your Pots
  • Planning Tomato Yields
  • Caring for Rhubarb
  • Caring for Asparagus
  • Caring for Strawberries
  • Building a Potato Tower
  • Keeping Herbs in Pots to use them year round
  • How to Harvest Mustard Seed
  • Tomato
  • Zucchini
  • Asparagus
  • Rhubarb
  • Beans
  • Peas
  • Peppers
  • Strawberries
  • Corn
  • Cucumber
  • Lettuces
  • Herbs
  • Artichoke
  • Squash

Recipes For Using Your Garden:

I think one of the hardest things for new gardeners is really learning how to use your garden. These recipes are made for that exact reason. Here are some of our favorite recipes to help you move your garden to your plate.

Foraging Minnesota’s Wild Food

The correct way to look at foraging wild foods is to understand there are some things that can be eaten directly, and many others that can be used to derive foods from. For example, we can pick many wild berries and plants to eat, and yet there are many more that can be used to make jellies, jams, syrups, and sauces.

Wild Foods You Can Find Throughout Minnesota and Other Zone 3-5 Areas

These are common plants that can be easily found throughout the state. If you are looking for mushrooms, I have a whole section on that below.

  • Asparagus
  • Raspberries
  • Blueberries
  • Wild Grapes
  • Wild Strawberry
  • Apples
  • Wild Pears
  • Wild Plums
  • Chokecherry
  • Sumac
  • Crabapple
  • Maple Tree
  • Wild Rice

Wild Jelly and Jam’s

Ciders and Sauces

  • Apple Cider
  • Cherry BBQ Sauce

Tea’s

Wild Syrups

Simple syrups are very easy to make and are usually used in cocktails.

  • Plum Simple Syrup
  • Cherry Simple Syrup
  • Crabapple Simple Syrup
  • Rhubarb Simple Syrup

These Syrups are more a traditional type of syrup for pancakes.

Food Recipes Using Wild Foods

  • Carmel Apple Smores
  • Pork Loin with Cherry BBQ Sauce
  • Apple Crabapple Crustini

Cocktails Made With Wild Ingredients

Articles on Preserving and Putting Off Foods

  • Dry versus liquid pectin
  • How to sanitize jars
  • How to water bath jams and jellies
  • Good Resources for Preserving and Canning

Wild Mushrooms

Getting Started Finding Wild Mushrooms

  • Mushroom identification
  • Finding a helpful facebook page around you

Recipes using Wild Mushrooms

Hunting and Fishing Minnesota’s Wild Game

Minnesota has almost as many water activities as it has lakes. A shore lunch is as classic as it gets. Someone once told me they didn’t like fish. I said it was because I hadn’t cooked it for them yet. These articles are mostly about the recipes and eating well. We hunt and fish as a family but we don’t really get into that on this blog.

Fish

Wild Breasts 

Mammals

Beekeeping and Honey

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