Is there a Fundamental Difference between Gardening & Foraging?
They both are the same interaction/activity with Plants just on different sides of the spectrum.
I wonder where Y’all are on the spectrum, reply below!
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I fall smack in the middle as I do both Foraging & Gardening. For now mostly Foraging cuz I don’t own land to garden on, but I do plant seeds in wild places, so Wild Gardening?
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Is foraging lazy gardening?
You don’t have to work to grow the plants, you just go find what is already there.
Or is gardening lazy foraging?
You don’t have to go looking for anything, it’s all right there in the garden.
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I’ll bite. Foraging is harvesting wild (or semi wild) crops from an area. Gardening cultivating which plants you have in an area.
Basically the key difference I’m seeing is if the cultivation was natural eg wild, or human manipulated. You could choose which plants you garden in an area, until it’s full of diversity (and isn’t really wild anymore (human manipulted)) and basically forage from your ‘altered landscape’. I’m really imaging a kind or permaculture forest garden type thing here.
There are many forms of Gardening and I can indeed imagine a colourful spectrum between those two examples.
I’m realising now the implied definitions (at least in how I’ve used them and understood them (also can’t be bothered to actually check the real definitions)). Foraging is focussing on the action of harvesting and gardening is focussing on the action of cultivation.
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Hunter/gatherer societies get pretty desperate in temperate climates, so agriculture is the next logical step.
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That’s a great breakdown.
Personally I prefer the semi-wild food forest/permaculture garden with a smaller “traditional” garden for the majority of annual crops.
@cjs419 There was definitely an advantage to agriculture in those environments.
I think, maybe ironically, there is also an advantage to foraging (or at least retaining the knowledge of local wild edibles) in the events of those agricultural societies collapse, crop failures, or invasion/tyrannical governments.
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Maybe not desperate. Rob Greenfield did an experiment where he ate only what he could garden, hunt, and forage for an year. A lot of people said, “Well, you did that in Florida. It’s not possible in [insert temperate climate here].”
That was originally my thought when I watched his experiment. I thought, “Nice for you, doing it in Florida, but most of us aren’t living in zone 10, are we?”
He responded that in a tropical climate, there is year-round production, but in a temperate climate, the amount of abundance in autumn is absolutely spectacular. He said he spent a lot of that year in Wisconsin, including the winter months, and he did just fine – he just had to learn to preserve a lot of that abundant autumn food for the winter.
Personally, I have found that in my (zone 7) climate, winter is the easiest time to grow leaf crops, because that’s when we get most of our water. And our soil thaws during the day most days, so perennial and biennial root crops can be left to overwinter in the ground, and I can pull them out whenever I want to in winter. So it’s quite easy to see how foraging in this climate may have been equally viable year-round.
Now, very cold climates – anywhere zone 4 and below, for instance – are likely to be more of a challenge to grow plants, and that’s probably why so many indigenous people in very cold climates have relied on hunting for a significant amount of their food.
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For many Native Americans, what Europeans perceived to be foraging was in fact gardening. Indigenous peoples were just so efficient in their gardening efforts that Europeans didn’t recognize it as agriculture, because the European way of agriculture was so much more laborious.
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@JinTX Wow! That’s well put. Lazy Gardening & Lazy Foraging. Does this make Landrace Gardening, Lazy Plant Breeding too? 
So what happens if you start Gardening the wild places you forage & Foraging the cultivated areas you garden? 
I think both Gardeners & Foragers can benefit Greatly by Exchanging Knowledge & Perspectives. Every Gardener will benefit from foraging & every Forager will benefit from gardening.
Foraging is Crucial for Gardening because of Plant ID, especially if your growing Carrots, you need to ID it from Poison Hemlock & other poisonous Apiaceae relatives. Plus so many “weeds” you pull out are Nutritious & Delicious, literally grew Food without trying.
Gardening is Crucial for Foraging because tending the areas you forage for keeps the plants healthy thus ensuring a better harvest. Plus you can easily plant Garden Veggies/Herbs in wild areas & Improve your foraging area.
Indeed! So many types of gardening. Me being a Forager & a Gardener, I can understand both mindsets & ways of thinking. I like Regenerative Agriculture, Forrest Farming, Permaculture, Landrace Gardening, Wild Gardening, EcoCulture, Microgreens, but eventually all these styles blend into each other as I take a bit from each.
It’s a good thing our ancestors realized plants make seeds that can be planted to grow more plants. Still having wild tended Back up of Wild Edibles on your Property is fantastic Insurance. Landrace Gardening makes your Cultivated Plants adapt like wild edibles.
There’s no reason Squash Can’t grow wild (Well except for deer 
).
It truly is, Autumn is the GO Season for Foraging, it makes it one of my Favorite seasons.
Most of the wild edibles ripen around that time, so many fruits, Nuts, Root Tubers, other high calorie foods, ect all form around that time for a reason.
Also, I really want to make a Greenhouse/Eco-dome to basically bring the tropical climate up north. It’s harder to bring the winter down south.
Perhaps a bit of both . That’s silly of the Europeans, they had fantastic opportunities to take notes & learn.
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Contrary to what the department of education would have Americans believe, Native Americans were absolutely an agricultural society. You might could scratch out a hard scrabble existence for a few winters on foraging but you’re not going to have a thriving population able to expand in perpetuity.
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Since I’m lucky enough to have some land, I do both in the same area. In the garden there are a lot of cultivated , high maintenance items that succumb easily to pressures and beyond the garden, are those that are native or naturalized and can hold their own. I try to blur the line by tending and encouraging the plants I forage (bringing some into the garden too) and on the other hand, challenging vegetable that show some strength by spreading them beyond the garden.
Cultivated plants that I push beyond the garden: Asparagus, potatoes, lovage, sage, parsley, chives, horseradish and many medicinal and culinary herbs.
Naturalized plants that I encourage or bring into the garden: Ramps, self-heal, sheep-sorrel, hawthorn (for medicinal berries), yellow salsify, yarrow, Virginia waterleaf (cooks like spinach), and I’m sure there are more I am forgetting.
In the spring I forage more than harvest and in the fall It’s more harvesting (though there are more mushrooms then).
It would be interesting to consider the actual weight ratio of food I get from each but I’m just not the one to do that I barely keep up with the work as it is!
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I’m trying to replace my back yard grass (which grows nasty prickly seed heads, so I don’t want it anyway) with edible native prairie species that won’t need any care. That straddles the line between gardening and foraging, too – I want to have a semi-wild space that I can mostly ignore except to harvest from it, but I will probably spend a lot of time at first continually removing the perennial weeds I don’t like (such as bindweed and all the various prickly-seed-head grass species).
Dandelions kinda straddle the line between “weed” and “volunteer” for me. I don’t like the taste, so they’re kind of a weed, but they’re edible and perform some valuable soil services and act like good neighbors in a polyculture, so I tend to leave them.
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That means they left an impact on the wild edibles they domesticated. I’m thinking those “Wild” Pawpaws, “Wild” Mayapples & “Wild” Passionfruits could actually be semi-wild plants since Perennials take a longer time to revert back to wild/natural selection pressures as compared to Eastern Agriculture Complex Annual Crops.
Sadly lots of the Info & Landraces they’ve acquired had been lost (But thankfully some of it was preserved!).
That’s awesome! I want to encourage more of this kind of behaivor. How wild has your asparagus gone?
Hawthrone Medicinal Berries? I’ve just been eating them as food for trailside nibbles raw or Ate ~20 Mexican Hawthornes raw in one sitting… but I feel fine.
Anyways, a lot of those plants are things I want to grow myself. I’d love to trade seeds with you, I’ve also got lots of wild edibles & domesticated edibles too that I’m sure you’d like.
I feel you, I don’t like Dandelions bitter flavor for the very same reason I don’t Like Lettuce (I can still feel the after affects of the bitterness despite the mild flavor). However, Dandeion flowers taste much better & aparently Sam Thayer likes to use a spoon to stab at the tight flower buds at the bottom of the plant, I’ve haven’t tried these dandelion “hearts” yet. Plus haven’t tried dandelion root yet, supposedly a coffee subsitute without caffine.
The soild rebuilding qualities & the fact that it doesn’t compete much with other garden veggies (Short plant, doesn’t occupy much space or take up much light availbility) makes me want to sow them everywhere
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Well, the asparagus are holding their own but not self seeding as of yet… Hawthorn berries are a well researched medicinal fruit with vascular, particularly heart-vascular protective effects. Excellent daily supplement for our aging years. I believe all of the crataegus species are interchangeable in that respect.
I’ve made dandelion coffee substitute and indeed it is very nice! The leaves are kind of a super-food and I throw some in with salads and stir-fries, also dried in tea. When they jump up in the vegetable patch, I think of them as place-holders that I can replace any tim,e but meanwhile they are keeping the soil shaded and cycling nutrients.
Anyway… yes! We were going to swap and then I got caught up in our big move to the country. I don’t have my seed saving up and running as I’d like to, yet. I’ve only been saving a little from the obvious and the easy, such as sunflowers and brassicas some squash and the occasional tomato. I know you have an expansive collection and I will definitely want to trade down the line!
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Dandelion flowers still taste terrible for me, so . . . nope, not trying to eat it anymore. 
Especially when I have all that tasty blue mustard volunteering that I can munch on instead.
Neato! I love it when delicious food also has medicinal benefits. I tend to be uninterested in medicinal-only plants, precisely because there are often tasty food plants that can do similar things. 
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Perhaps, I just wonder why Hawthrones specifcally & not Pears, Apples, Amelanchier, Medlar & all other Pome Fruits also have this ability too. I’m thinking of crossing Hawthornes with Amelanchier & Pears to increase fruit size & diversify color/flavor!
ooh! I like that perspective, place holders that are easy to move out when needed, kind of like a cover crop that grows itself.
to the country? like still inside the U.S. just more rural or off grid?
Thank you, we can trade whenever is a good time for you. Maybe down the line I can get land to grow out my landrace experiements. I excited to see how other gardenrs play around with Cucumis melo x Cucumis metuliferus Hybirds or a 5 Squash species hybrid swarm/landrace.
Is this for the green underparts of the flower or the yellow petals also taste terrible? Is there any Taraxacum species that doesn’t taste this bad? I wonder if the Pink & White Dandelions are also just as terribly tasting.
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Well, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” right? Who says they don’t have medicinal properties?
In faaaaaaact . . .
Looks like they do! 
It’s as I suspected: those health benefits of apples sound very much like benefits of pectin . . . which apples are rich in, and hawthorns are extremely rich in. Maybe it’s that very, very high pectin content that makes hawthorns medicinally appealing!
(Of course, if you know my theory is incorrect, please correct me! )
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Ooh! I think your on to something! hmm… isn’t Citron Melon (Citrullus amarus) also rich in Pectin? Is Pectin why Hawthorne fruits are do Dense? What happend to Amelanchier fruits being so soft they you can melt them in your mouth easily? Do they still have Pectin but just in small amounts? It really is like a Rosaceae family Pome Fruit trying it’s hardest to become a Blueberry (& it does a good job too!).
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I’m reasonably sure hawthorns are so dense because of all that pectin. Why am I sure? Because I made hawthorn jam last year, and GOOD GRIEF – I had to keep on adding more water, more water, more water, more water, because it kept on solidifying into a completely solid gelled clump while I was using my blender. I wound up needing three times as much water as fruit in order to get it to become the consistency of very thick apple sauce.
Later on, I tried making some hawthorn fudge, using loads of butter and cocoa powder and just a little bit of hawthorn juice for flavor. It turned into jello!
Good fruits. Nice flavor. Sooooooooooooooooo much pectin. Which is humorous, but also cool, because that makes them way more filling than they look, which makes them very valuable for a survival situation.
Not only that, their flavor is pleasant but quite generic and mild, so it would blend well with most fruits and become unnoticeable. I’m pretty sure you could add a few hawthorn berries into any jam you’re making as a pectin source without changing the flavor. I’m thinking that would be particularly useful with strong-flavored fruits that have a lot of juice and no pectin, such as melons and watermelons.
I don’t know about Amelanchier fruits yet – I still have yet to try them. I really want to find a tree full of them!
Hawthorn is definitely a tree worth foraging from. There’s a lot of food value in a very small package, and they taste nice right off the tree. The flavor is very similar to an apple that is equally tart and sweet. The texture is a wee bit offputting because it’s so dense and chewy, but it’s not unpleasant, just odd.
I’m speaking about Crataegus crus-galli var. inermis specifically, by the way – that’s the only hawthorn I have experience with currently. There are three of those trees planted as public landscaping in my city. They’re thornless and the leaves look like apple leaves, so until I picked some fruit and noticed the seeds, I assumed they were crabapples!
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Oh! That’s a good idea & probably good to mix with other very water berries too. hmm… Could Hawthorn Tomato Jam work? Of course since some wild tomatoes have very fruity melon flavors, closer to Garden Huckleberries.
yea… nothing like a crisp apple. I like chewy fruits & I like Crips bites! I like em all that taste good! I hope you get to try Amelanchier fruits, they are DELICIOUS! If you like hawthornes & Blueberries, you will love Amelanchier!
The mexican hawthorn Crataegus mexicana is the largest Hawthorne fruit, it’s about the size of a really huge cherry. It’s also dense like all other Hawthorn fruits I’ve tried but much brighter! I’m thinking, surely we can get it to Big Apple size with new colors!
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