Ostrich Fern Fiddlehead Foraging

Identify, learn about look alikes, nutrition, sustainable foraging, how to forage, why they should be cooked

[WildNickAdventures]

The perfect fiddlehead foraging video! Thank you so much!

[marathongs]

thank you, I'll be looking soon!

[AlvinDean]

Here in MA, (Bedford) how long does the window of finding these last? Thanks for the info!!

[lornebruce]

Wow, I have been picking fiddleheads for over half a century. Most of what you said in this video about “sustainability” is simply and scientifically not true. Fiddlehead (ostrich) ferns grow with veracity and when you find them in the environment that they thrive in like lowland (entervale) areas along rivers it is almost impossible to over pick them from year to year. In our area in eastern Canada there are commercial pickers who will run the rivers in canoes and literally clean up. A week later the ferns are 6 inches high with just as many heads as before they picked. After they are all too tall to pick anymore they keep growing from the root ball. By mid summer ours on our own land grow over 5 feet tall and taller so thick we have to make a path through them to get to the river.
The university of Minnesota did a study some years ago on how to “safely” can them by pressure canning only. Cooking them in the bottles for 90 minutes. This would make the fiddleheads into something like a slime green gravy. Nonsense. I think the professor and the college kids were probably smoking some greens while doing that “research”. We have been canning for nearly 50 years and my parents, grandparents and my great grandparents before them canned them in a simply water bath canner using typical clean sterile procedures without one single sickness ever. Almost every person I know eats them and there are thousands of pounds of them sold commercially here. They can also be cultivated but why would anyone bother when the creator has done such a great job. Everyone should respect the world around us but sometimes there is so many government funded university studies done by people who have zero real world knowledge to start with and then they publish their foolishness and the government inevitably will make “regulations” to protect us. My Scottish ancestors survived because the ate fiddleheads and got more vitimin C than they could ever have crossed the ocean with. They warded off scurvy with them and by drinking pine needle tea. Again more vit C than oranges. Nonetheless I found your video interesting. :).
I hope I was able to inform and not insult. If you learned more about ostrich ferns, (fiddleheads) than before, ..great. If you were offended I am truly sorry. Above all keep foraging. :)

[Levi-henj]

There's are no out here i am. 😂there are just those hairy asf ones which is annoying 😭