We don’t have a lot of cultivated land. We’ve grown some herbs and concord grapes. We’ve used the herbs in cooking, and I use the grapes to make grape pie. I can usually get two out of the grapes I have at hand.
Update… 90 lbs of shallots to the church food pantry yesterday, and lesser amounts of tomatoes, cucumbers and green beans.
I’ve made honeysuckle sorbet (a la Crook’s Corner) from wild honeysuckle I harvested on my property. I’d say that counts.
My wife and I live on 23 acres that used to be part of my wife’s family’s farm. Her siblings and my father-in-law each live on their own chunk of the property. The lists below are not exhaustive. There are several things I am sure I have forgotten.
The cultivated items that we raised and harvested on our land:
Rhubarb, red raspberries, sweet corn, carrots (orange, red, purple, yellow),
basil, oregano, peas, green beans, lima beans, potatoes (russet, purple),
pumpkin, butternut squash, watermelon, cantaloupes, onions (white, yellow, red)
jalapeños, bell peppers, taro (colocasia elephant ear tubers), broccoli,
cauliflower (white, yellow), lettuce, cabbage, asparagus, strawberries,
garlic, hollyhock blossoms, tomatoes (Roma, cherry, Better Boy), blackberries,
American persimmons, pawpaws, apples, cherries, peaches, pears,
nectarines, grapes (Niagara, Concord, Valencia), turnips
The found items from the woods and fields:
Walnuts, black raspberries, wild strawberries, dewberries, gooseberries,
morels, puffballs, wild onion, linden leaves, maple sap icicles, elderberries
Things I tried unsuccessfully to grow:
Blueberries and kiwi
Things I am growing, but haven’t eaten yet:
Prickly pear fruit (I have some growing in a pot on the patio, currently blooming.)
The soil at my house isn’t great so most of my gardening is limited to containers on my patio. I got a raised bed for Christmas and have added a few more containers every year. I have tomatoes, strawberries, lettuce, carrots, poblano peppers, basil and mint. I’m thinking about getting a second raised bed as the strawberries are trying to take over the first one.
I’m not sure what the issue is with strawberries, but many people have problems with them if they stay in the same bed for more than a few years. If you transplant them periodically, they do OK. If you leave them in the same dirt, they often die out. If I started seeing dusty grey mold on them, I knew it was time to move them. In a planter or pot, you might need to replace the dirt every three or four years to reduce pathogen build-up, if they seem to be growing poorly.
The only specific things I remember eating from a garden are tomatoes and pumpkin seeds. The pumpkin seeds were mostly from a failed attempt at growing a lot of pumpkins as a cash crop one year. We grew other veggies too but I don’t remember them.
From the neighborhood I occasionally found feral strawberries, but rarely, because you had to know where to look, otherwise you wouldn’t be looking at the ground on purpose. We had a box of strawberries from the previous owners in our property proper that we got a few from too occasionally.
We had feral black raspberries both on our property and around the neighborhood. In fact, black raspberries are the only edible fruit that I see in significant numbers in the wild all along the eastern US that I am confident that I can correctly identify. Whenever I see them when walking in the wilderness and they are ripe, I always pop a few in my mouth.
For the ones on our property, we were able to pick lots and lots of them. My mom would occasionally create turnovers/tarts from them, and there was just something about making them with fresh raspberries that made them amazing. Either commercial ones/commercial paste cuts down on the amount of actual fruit, or the freshness somehow comes through in the baking. Only very rarely do I eat any other fruit-based bakery item that tastes so much like you are eating the real thing only sweetened and baked.
Wild strawberries (at first. Died out)
Raspberries
Dill
Tomatoes
Asparagus
Rhubarb
Potatoes
Bell peppers
Zucchini
Green beans
We had a garden, but stopped awhile ago.
That’s an impressive haul. I’d pass on the turtle and snake too, but those morels and ramps? Yes pls.
Hello @wiki21 and welcome to the Straight Dope!
I’m now trying to decide if I want to plant a mulberry and/or serviceberry on my (small) front lawn for future foraging. Definitely gonna have a spicebush in the back yard.
Mulberry is usually short, broad, casts sense shade, and the berries stain everything. There are only a few cultivars on the market. It’s mostly grown for the berries (and for silk worms).
Serviceberry can be a shrub or a smallish tree, but it has a more open habit, casts light shade, and in my experience, the birds will eat most of the crop. Serviceberry (under various names) grows wild across most of the US and Canada, and that’s enormous generic diversity across that range, affecting growth habit, size of plant, size of fruit, and flavor. It’s been bred both to be an ornamental and (largely by U Saskatchewan, i think) as a food crop. A lot of the U Sask plants are adapted to the Canadian plains, and often have issues with fungal diseases in places with damper summers. Despite appearances, it’s related to the apple, and they can share diseases. They look enough like blueberries that I’m sometimes disappointed by them not tasting like blueberries, but its a tasty fruit in its own right, you just have to expect it to taste like service berry.
Anyway, they are very different plants that will give your yard a different feel, as well as producing different fruit. Try to find some examples growing near you before you decide.
I hear you! I have deer, raccoons, bunnies, squirrels, and chipmunks. And they are all voracious. I also have birds, although they don’t chew through nets, so they are less of a problem. Fortunately, there are many fine farm stores near me.
I had mulberries in the yard at one place. It was not that short: I would describe it as a medium-sized tree? The berries were pretty good! (You definitely need a ladder or to be competent at climbing)
Just a note to say that I tried growing… well, what happened was this:I was eating a salad a while ago, which included sweet red peppers grown by the company “Isle Of Wight Tomatoes”. These peppers are delicious, I thought, I wonder…
So I used the seeds, and the crop has been ridiculous, and the peppers have actually been turning red. And they’re delicious.
Now, that’s my idea of gardening.
Oh, and this year I grew butter beans doe the first time. Cool.
.
j
The ones that I’ve seen have been about as tall as a standard apple tree, much shorter than, say, an oak or a beech, or even a tall serviceberry tree. 
Mulberries are usually somewhere between a large bush and a small, scrubby tree, but we had one in our back yard that was fully into Mighty Tree territory, taller than the house and too girthy for a person to hug. But yeah, you definitely don’t want one above a driveway, or anywhere else you’d care about stains.
And serviceberries are definitely delicious. The ones we harvest from were planted as ornamentals, but still delicious. The season is entirely contained within mulberry season, which seems to help with the birds, since there are so many mulberries for them that they leave most of the serviceberries alone.
And yeah, they’re in the apple family, but then, so are most fruits eaten by humans other than citrus and bananas. It’s a very large family.
I posted last year about my issues with strawberries. This spring I decided to repurpose the old fire pit on my patio as a strawberry planter. Not only does the lid keep the critters out, I’m still getting strawberries! Possibly the best idea I’ve had in a while.
I’ve had many of the same. As a child my dad had a very nice garden so we ate from it a lot.
My dad also “harvested” a lot of wild poke sallet (or polk salad). At certain times of the year it was a staple at our house. It’s not bad but I prefer turnip greens.
Qadgop_the_Mercotan:
crayfish - you missed out, these guys are quite yummy.
snake - eaten a few, the meat is so-so
rabbit - Eaten more than I can count. Not bad in Stew.
And squirrel - same as rabbit, I’ve had my share.
Pretty much every type of fish in North America except Carp and Gar - though I have harvested quite a few with bow and arrow.
Mulberries commonly develop a thick trunk.
I used to pick mint from the plants that grew behind my house.