Seventh Avenue, Park Slope

Coney Island

Foraging in Central Park

"So what? Are you going to eat out of garbage cans?" must be a common joke that forager Wildman Steve Brill must hear all the time because it was a joke more than one of my friends made when I told them about my foraging tour of Central Park.

Every two weeks, all summer long, Steve Brill leads tours of Central Park looking for food and encouraging folks to dig it up, pull it out and eat it. On our tour, we identified over 15 plants we could eat and a few we're never to even taste.

While the group was larger than I thought it would be, and the interaction much less, it did get me into parts of the park I'd never been: Belvedere Castle (wisteria for ice cream) and the Ramble (sassafras for tea).

It's not something I'd recommend to first time visitors to New York, but for folks who are familiar with the city, it's certainly an interesting and educational twist. This week we're staying in suite hotel so I was able to clean some Kentucky Coffee Tree pods (poison until cooked!) and just need to get brave enough to roast them for three hours in the oven. I'm also going to brew Vic some tea the next evening we're in early.

Looking for Food in Central Park

Darwin's Garden

Given the similarities between England and Seattle's climate, I don't know why I was surprised that our garden will look a lot like Darwin's when it's done.

Darwin's Garden: An Evolutionary Adventure at the New York Botanical Garden includes a recreation of his garden in the Conservatory, a small collection of period botanical guides and fascimilies of his work in the Library, and a walking tour highlighting his thinking about different plants on the grounds. At once both too large to take in on one lazy afternoon, and not actually deep enough to be informative, it exists in that middle region of making yourself feel good about doing something vaguely educational without having to integrate what you're seeing.

Stopping for a slice after, while waiting for the train, the fellows behind the counter stopped chatting with us once the ladies in their tight jeans and fancy nails came in. "Come on, why do you need that pizza to go...stay with me, you know I don't even like this guy..." Back into the city, eyeing the swimmer from Fordham, we got out too late in Grand Central to get the melon from France I wanted Vic to taste and that I'd recently mail ordered the seeds for.

My favorite part of the day was walking through the gardens and pointing out all the plants we're growing at home and showing Vic what they'll look like in a month or two.

The New York Botanical Garden

Train in Queens

Redmond 11:10 AM