Native Edibles for the Lazy Gardener

By Soňa Mason, posted March 2025

Continuing our amble down the garden path, it turns out that effort-free birdwatchers might also favor minimalist kitchen gardening. Now that the light is returning and we’re beginning to wonder if we’ll need to grow some tariff-free sustenance this year, it behooves us to incorporate some easy-to-reach wild forage for ourselves as well as for our bird friends.

On noticing the square weed plots scattered around suburbia, formerly Covid-era kitchen gardens, it is apparent that ceaseless weeding is not on anyone’s fun list. Particularly when the weather gets hot and sticky and coincides with peak weed season. Why not incorporate edible native perennials into the landscaping, that can be plucked at leisure when they’re ready. Sounds about right, I hear you say. So what are they?

If you live and garden in North America, no doubt you will have heard of the ‘Three Sisters’:
corn, beans and squash such as pumpkins and pattipans that native peoples used to grow together quite successfully. These are considered annuals and need sowing every year. But if you’re anything like me, “plant once, reap in perpetuity”, then this list is for you.

Shade-grown and early spring faves are Ramps, also known as wild leeks (Allium tricoccum). This specialty often sought after by chefs can be grown from seed or clump divisions. If your local farmers market sells them with roots intact, then by all means plant them and start your own colony under your forest edge. Harvest only the petal-soft leaves sparingly until you have a substantial patch growing. As onion family members, they should prove herbivore-resistant and basically carefree. That said, please view the disclaimer below. The pretty summer-flowering Nodding Onion (Allium ceruum) is also edible in its entirety.

Another shade-loving spring delicacy is the unfurled frond or ‘fiddlehead’ of the stately Ostrich Fern (Mattetuca struthiopteris). Also naturally deer resistant as ferns go, having survived more formidable foes such as dinosaurs in their ancestral history. Continuing the shade species theme is the diminutive Wood Violet (Viola sororia), probably already decorating your lawn. If you’ve never scattered the blossoms into a spring salad, then you’ve missed a significant wow-factor. Can you believe that this little plant is also a larval host for the Great Spangled Fritillary butterfly?

Indian Potato Vine (Apios americana), will climb trellises, fences and trees, producing gorgeous roccoco-purple edible flowers, and egg-shaped underground tubers that taste like nutty potatoes.

Did you know Strawberries (Fragaria virginiana) are an American original? Wild strawbs, albeit smaller than the commerically-grown hybrid variety, are nonetheless just as sweet, and will happily invade your lawn without taking over, punctuating it with white flowers and red fruits.

On that vein, need I mention blueberries, blackberries and raspberries? For those of you who have a road-salted dead zone around your street-fronting mailbox, Sand Cherry or Beach Plum (Prunus pumila) may be just for you: tough, sun-loving, and bountiful.

Shrubs and small trees you may like to introduce are the pollinator powerhouse Elderberry (Sambucus nigra ssp. canadensis), Hazelnut (Corylus americana), and the Pawpaw (Asimina triloba) – with a fruit that tastes like a custard apple (exactly as you imagine a custard-like apple would taste).

If you haven’t already read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s wonderful book The Serviceberry, then go get yourself one of these lovely, spring-blossoming and early fruiting shrub-trees (Amelanchier spp). Why it’s not already popular as a commercial crop, I really don’t know.

What makes growing your own native edibles so much better than foraging from the wild is that you’re enriching nature rather than taking away from it. Our present population is so enormous that imagine if everyone caught the foraging bug and decided to go ‘grocery shopping’ in the wild?** I include the botanical names so that you can specifically ask for the native varieties in preference to any Eurasian counterparts, which do not support our native insect and hence songbird populations.

* Disclaimer: Sometimes, plants we declare as herbivore-resistant become the targets of deer and groundhogs determined to prove us wrong, varying by location. Hence it is best to try out the species listed here with an open mind to the vagaries of nature.
** report from https://www.ecowatch.com/biomass-humans-animals-2571413930.html
Thank you to the US Forest Service and USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service on whom I rely constantly to check the native origins of plants and other details.
https://plants.usda.gov/
https://www.fs.usda.gov/wildflowers/plant-of-the-week/fragaria_vesca.shtml